From the Brink of Defeat
August Burns Red's "Ties That Bind" and come-from-behind moments in sport.
TL;DR 1: Listen to August Burns Red’s “Ties That Bind” and read the lyrics. Or nick two birds with one stone.
TL;DR 2: Watch the epic sporting moments that inspired this post: Cole Hocker’s 1500m Olympic gold in Paris; Quincy Hall’s 400m gold in the same competition; Watford’s last-second goal against Leicester City in the 2013 English Championship playoff semifinals; and Wyatt Hendrickson’s incalculable upset victory over Gable Steveson at the 2025 NCAA Wrestling championships.
Back of the pack /
With the wind in our face /
Control and dictate our own pace.We figured out how much we can take /
This is our chance to break out.August Burns Red, “Ties That Bind”
I am a sucker for come-from-behind victories. I love redemption stories and hero’s journeys where losers become kings.
I also love music.
And my favorite tune at the moment is a banger of a track from August Burns Red, a metal band from Amish Country whose lyrics reference a truth we’ve all been forced to reckon with: that we won’t make it through life unscathed. In life and sport, we will stumble. To savor the sweet taste of victory, we must first swallow the bitter pill of defeat.1
Listening to “Ties That Bind,” I’ve been flung forward in time to 2035, the year of Enzo’s devastating loss in the Tennessee State Wrestling finals to the eventual champion from Dobyns-Bennett—but also his redemption, a year later, against the same boy (“We will gain strength / from our failures”). I’ve post the clip of Alba’s missed penalty kick in the semifinals of the TSSA Div. II State Cup that spring, the teary-eyed dejection of a girl who refuses to be comforted, and beside it the hat trick she scores as team captain in 2036 to win the whole enchilada (“Surround yourself with others / who won’t let you fall / don’t pull away / with no shoulder to lean on / you’ve got nothing at all”).
But I don’t even have to look that far ahead to be crazy.
Last week, Alba participated in her first swim meet, an intra-club event at Beaver Brook Country Club. At 5, her genetic inheritance is apparent: as fit as her mother, as inside her own head as her father. In the freestyle, she made a mistake that would've disqualified her in a real competition. And she wasn’t oblivious to it, as a child with normal parents might’ve been.2 Immediately, she intuited her failure and masked tears behind an excuse for why she’d made it.
I did my best to keep my mouth shut before her next event, the backstroke, reminding myself what I’d written in my notebook a hundred times that morning: Youth sports is about fun not winning. Youth sports is about fun not winning. Youth sports is about glory fun.
When she touched the wall—ahead of at least four of the bigger kids, I’ll add—her smile was as big as heaven.
What I pictured when I decided to scribble out this post was of Cole Hocker racing from seventh to win an unexpected gold medal in the men’s 1500 meters at the Paris Olympics last summer.
Here are three other legendary from-the-brink-of-defeat moments you will enjoy.
Watford defeats Leicester City 3-1 (3-2 aggregate) in the 2013 English Championship playoff semifinals
If Ted Lasso got its inspiration for dramatic moments from anywhere, it was this unimaginable sequence from the 2013 Championship playoff semifinals.
Unlike in American leagues, which are socialist operations run by billionaires, in England, every season, the three worst clubs in each division drop down, while the three best ascend. In May 2013, at their home stadium on Vicarage Road, Watford were playing for a chance to be promoted into the richest soccer league in the world, which they’d been absent from since 2007. But then a devastatingly poor call from referee Michael Oliver gifted their opponents, Leicester City, a penalty that should’ve been the final dagger in the chest if God were not watching that afternoon.
A save, another save, a break, an Argentinian cross, an English header back, and the ball fell to the right boot of Troy Deeney, who launched himself into the Guinness Book of Most Extraordinary Soccer Moments in World History with an absolute missile before ripping his shirt off and running into the arms of the club’s adoring fans.
Watford lost the playoff final and remained in the second division one more season before being promoted to the Premier League in 2015, where they remained for four seasons despite a yearly budget equivalent to one week’s salary for the starting 11 of Manchester City.
Quincy Hall releases the dog to win the 400m at the Paris Olympics
Perhaps every casual’s favorite memory for three reasons:
The familiar grimace of a man in anguish from Quincy Hall as he gritted his way across the finish line, technique be damned;
The legendary call from commentator Leigh Diffey moments after his partner, retired Olympic gold medalist 400m runner Sanya Richards-Ross, said, “Quincy Hall is fading badly…”;
And the post-race interview in which, among other things, Hall said, “You can’t outrun a dog. A dog will chase you forever,” and claimed the only thing he thought about after having the medal placed around his neck was how quickly he could get back to his South Carolina farm to go fishing and ride horses.
Wyatt Hendrickson breaks Gable Steveson’s 73-match win streak to win gold in the men’s last college competition
Oklahoma State’s heavyweight transfer Wyatt Hendrickson spent four years at the Air Force Academy, a school that had only ever trained one national champion (Don Henderson, 1967) and ranks outside the Top 20 of collegiate wrestling. After being allowed to delay his military service through extraordinary circumstances, he cashed in on his COVID-19 year and took one final crack at wrestling gold after finishing third in 2023 and 2024.
Awaiting him in the 2025 final was Gable Steveson, a man pre-destined to be among the greatest freestyle wrestlers ever3. They had faced each other before, in 2021, when the 17th-seeded Hendrickson was steamrolled by Steveson, who went on to claim the first of two NCAA heavyweight titles and gold at the Tokyo Olympics that summer.
Why do I tell you this?
Because when the already way-more-famous Steveson cashed in his COVID year to return to college wrestling after his WWE and NFL contracts were not extended, the oddsmakers had him listed as -1000000000 favorite to be king. And yet, with 30 seconds left, desperately needing a takedown against a dude who hadn’t lost a college match since 2019, Hendrickson did it.
“In times like this, when there's 18,000 people trying to watch you wrestle, you are going up against an Olympic champion, a two-time national champion, even the semifinals, the national champion—the match is won before you step out on the mat,” Hendrickson said in his post-match interview. “He who thinks he can and he (who) thinks he can't, they're both usually right.”
I’m not sure it makes sense. But, as with most great things, like cheesecake and the virgin birth, it doesn’t have to.
If you have other epic sporting moments you turn to for inspiration, share them with me in the comments.
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ABR’s lyrics use racing in the same way early Jewish Christians used the metaphor in the ninth chapter of the First Corinthians letter the twelfth chapter of Hebrews. For further context, the idiom “tie that binds” originated with the hymn “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” by John Fawcett, an orphaned Brit who was taken in as a tailor’s apprentice before converting to Christianity and becoming a preacher. In 1772, he was invited to leave his small West Yorkshire congregation to join the equivalent of a TV megachurch in London. After his people pleaded with him to stay, collecting £25 as his yearly salary—the equivalent of £3,292.87 in today’s currency—he rejected fame to remain broke and wrote the hymn after a Sunday barbecue with his friends.
My definition here pertains to the fact that Haley and I met on a soccer field, where she was often found arguing with referees, Mexicans, and other adult men, then spent hours before our children’s conception plotting their future sporting domination instead of making Pinterest boards for how we’d decorate the nursery.
Gable Dan Steveson is named for Dan Gable, one of the most famous wrestlers and coaches in American history, and the subject of an epic profile by Wright Thompson in 2013.