"WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A MAN":

Powell stares at the bar, disbelieving. His entire life he's been the strongest guy in the room. Growing up in nearby Forest Park, he was doing pull-ups at age three. By four he could do handstand push-ups and had earned the nickname Mikey Powerful. In eighth grade he set a school mark for pull-ups; at Indiana he set multiple weight-room records. Angry, he tries again but doesn't make it past three pull-ups. Again the boys laugh, only this time nervously. Is Powell playing a joke on us? If not, this is weird.

This is, after all, Coach Powell. No one attacks coaching, or life, as he does. This is the man who signs his e-mails in relentless pursuit, who works 18-hour days and is the first one back in the gym, smiling and hopping around. "We may not be the most talented," Powell tells his wrestlers, "but no one in the state of Illinois will outwork us." During the regular season he ran the boys through torturous exercises, timing them as they pushed weighted sleds through the rough grass of the school outfield, the boys so drenched in sweat that they took their soggy workout clothes home in knotted plastic bags. He tacked a poster board labeled MANLINESS on the training room wall so he could track each wrestler's personal bests: how many times he could flip a 100-pound tire in two minutes, how many times he could clean-and-press half his body weight in four minutes, how many dips and pull-ups he could rip off in 10 minutes.

The boys might have bristled at the demands if they'd come from a different coach. But not from Powell, for he was right there beside them. He pushed the sled and heaved the tire and did the dips and kept going after the boys faltered. He wrestled them all, relying on his quickness against 103-pounders and his power against heavyweights. He challenged them to push-up contests. He dared them to be true warriors--to become, as he put it, "not just good but great men."

That was a theme he brought up almost every day, because Powell believed that the idea of masculinity had become twisted in modern society, that it had become derogatory to call someone macho or manly. "Try to be a different kind of man," he told them. "One who's true to his word, who's respectful to women and his family."

"Macho men can also be sissies!" he'd shout in his booming, raspy voice. "You can grind it out in a grudge match and then go read Shakespeare. You can read The New York Times and lift weights."

Once kids joined the team, they became part of Powell's family. He arranged tutors for boys who struggled in school. He drove one recently graduated wrestler 300 miles to college and helped him move into his dorm. Every summer he took the entire team on a backpacking trip, one year to Glacier National Park in Montana, the next to Zion National Park in Utah, paying for the kids who couldn't afford it. He took the ungainly boys aside and talked to them about girls; he took the cocky ones aside and talked to them about the value of finding mentors. Always he gave them love. Before every match he kissed the forehead of Ellis Coleman, one of the roughest of the rough, whose father and stepfather had both spent time in prison. Before every meet Powell said, "Character, boys, that's all it's ever been about, all it will ever be about and all it's about tonight."

The boys idolized him. They walked like Powell, as if carrying imaginary holsters on their hips. They talked like him, referring to anything subpar as jayvee, as in, "There are two options for lunch: the good sandwich place and the jayvee one around the corner." The older boys cultivated cauliflower ears, lighting up at the first bruising. Several wrestlers started a Facebook page called WWMPD, for What Would Mike Powell Do. "Whatever Powell said held 100 times the weight of a parent, teacher, anyone," says Michele Weldon, whose three sons wrestled for him. "The boys craved his approval. They would do anything they could for him."

That's why that afternoon in the workout room was so unsettling. As Brooks puts it, "We'd never seen him like that before, so weak."

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