Max Tafoya sat in the empty Pepsi Center before Thursday’s state tournament with a glint in his eye. The Denver North heavyweight, his hair bleached and wearing his well-adorned purple and gold letterman jacket, took in the quiet and humbly explained everything he’d overcome to be in the arena.
The loss of both his parents in middle school. The windy, bumpy and accelerated path to manhood that followed, when the 18-year-old was tested by homelessness and an overall instability that Vikings wrestling coach Gabe Aguilera said would have thrown most kids into a much different, darker situation.
That Pepsi Center moment in itself was enough — an achievement in simply being there — even before Tafoya won his opening-round Class 4A match with a gritty third-period pin later that night.
“I had barely turned 13 and I lost my mother, and a couple days after that I lost my father, both to drugs and to gangs,” Tafoya said. “I had to live without parents in the most important parts of my life going into high school. I had to start understanding things about myself, and become my own man, while at the same time I was bouncing around from house to house.”
After Tayofa’s mom died of cirrhosis when he was in seventh grade and his father was incarcerated shortly after that, the newly minted teenager found himself living in the homes of various relatives, never one for very long, without any constructive outlets for his emotion.
“I was still struggling with how to live life right,” Tafoya said. “I was going down the wrong path, doing my own negative thing, but then one of my old coaches came up to me and offered to pay for my fee for (youth football) in eighth grade. From then on, I started getting into sports.”
Tafoya started on the Vikings’ varsity offensive line as a freshman, the same year he picked up wrestling. But he still lacked a focus, and admits it took him a while to realize that “I couldn’t be a knucklehead anymore in the classroom, getting in fights, all that.”
The impetus for Tafoya’s progressive maturation into a three-sport star at Denver North — he also throws in track and is headed to Adams State on a football scholarship — is when he finally found stability on the home front. One of the staff members at his middle school that he had grown close with took him into her family, and Tafoya’s been accelerating ever since.
“I started changing things around and got more focused, and (my foster mom) was a huge part of that,” Tafoya said. “She helped me out, got me stabilized, and from there, everything was tunnel vision. Grades started going up, I started doing good in football, I started getting recruited more.”
Tafoya’s progression on the football field was mirrored on the mat, where over the past couple seasons he learned how to truly start being coachable. The result’s been a 22-4 campaign this winter that saw him crowned city champion and named the Denver Prep League’s most outstanding senior wrestler.
“He obviously has had some trust issues, so the first year I was in the room last year, he had a hard time buying into the technique we were teaching him,” Aguilera said. “But once he started buying into the process, he started having more confidence in himself, and the wins against ranked guys started piling up. He has no problem sweating for what he wants, and that’s how he’s found success out of everything he’s been through.”
Tafoya will wrestle in the quarterfinals against Thomas Jefferson junior Thomas Garnica on Friday afternoon.
