One of the most popular student-athletes at Fairmont High School, Ahmad Doucet is known for his “old soul” kindness as his stepdad put it, his Twitter fame and “Saturday Night Live” wit — again Kamal’s description — and especially a real life Rocky story that saw him go from a chubby wrestling mat patsy a few years back to an Adonis-like state qualifier a few months ago.
But on this morning two Sundays ago — Father’s Day — Ahmad suffered what his high school coach called a “freakish” injury at the Prodigy Fitness Center in Springboro while training for a national tournament a few days later in Tulsa, Okla.
Initially he was thought to have suffered a concussion, but later — after being moved from the Atrium Medical Center in Middletown to Dayton Children’s — he was found to have suffered a stroke.
Still, Kamal and Angela had talked to him as he lay there at Atrium.
“He seemed like a kid who had just woke up in the morning and probably wouldn’t remember what you were saying,” Kamal said. “The doctor came in and had him count backwards from 100 by sevens and he could do that, but he seemed agitated and real fidgety. You knew something wasn’t right.
“We know now that at the time he was having the stroke. An artery was pinched and blood was being cut off to the brain.”
Later at Children’s, Kamal said Ahmad still talked some and told him he was cold.
Soon after Kamal had left, but just a couple of hours later, Angela was on the phone telling him to get back to the hospital immediately.
As he stumbled around for his clothes, Kamal said his wife called again. This time she was frantic:
“She just said ‘Code Blue!’ “
“Right then there was so much swirling around that I called my mom, she works at the VA, and she explained what it meant. Ahmad had coded. He had quit breathing. She said, ‘You need to get out there now.’
“And the next thing I know, there’s Ahmad. He’s got the wires and tubes all over and it’s been that way ever since.”
Little has changed in the past two weeks. Ahmad is unresponsive and on a ventilator.
Fairmont wrestling coach Frank Baxter — who Kamal said is like family to him and Angela and especially Ahmad — said the stroke has led to “a catastrophic injury of his brain stem and severe brain damage.”
“This is as bad as it gets. You couldn’t imagine this in your wildest nightmare,” Baxter said as he fought off tears while sitting in his office the other day. “We’re holding out hope and praying for the family and Ahmad. I know him. I know there’s still fight in him, but we need a miracle.”
Meanwhile, Angela Fisher does not leave her son’s bedside. She’s doing all she can to will him back to consciousness and at the same time she wrestles with what lies ahead.
Both her family and Kamal’s have faced similar heartbreaks before.
“Angela’s brother died when he was just 16,” Kamal said. “And we lost my sister the day after she graduated from medical school at Ohio State. We had gone to the ceremony, the Hippocratic oath, everything. The next day she was driving with my parents down to Tulane to start her residency and she must have fallen asleep at the wheel.
“But this is Angela’s journey now and she has to drown out all that noise from everybody else and what they went through. She has to just sit with Ahmad and make her own decisions.”
While that is a burden no parent can fathom, Angela is carrying it in a way that is making others marvel, Baxter said:
“In spite of all of this, Angela may be the most loving and caring person you can possibly imagine. Sure she is emotional and distraught at times, you expect that, but she cares about how our (Fairmont) kids and our community are doing. She’s been thankful and appreciative and she keeps showing so much love.”
Baxter’s eyes brimmed over and his voice wavered: “As one of our parents described it … they literally have witnessed amazing grace being with Angela.
“And that does not surprise me after knowing what I do about her son. He is proof that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”
‘Unbelievable’ change
Angela was raising Ahmad and younger son, Dasan, on her own when she met Kamal, who had two boys of his own.
Kamal had played several sports at Chaminade Julienne High, especially football, and he said his two sons are natural athletes, as well.
As a middle-school kid, though, Ahmad was not. He was chubby and not especially coordinated and he struggled on the football field.
“I’d call him a gentle giant,” Kamal said.
Ahmad first tried wrestling as an eighth-grader and in the beginning the results were disheartening.
“He may have lost every match that year,” Kamal said. “Many a night he came home and cried. He may have cried on the mat, too.
“The whole ordeal was tough for him. I remember when he first put on his singlet, he hated it because of his weight. He wanted to be like the older guys who were all muscular.”
As a freshman, Ahmad went 4-13 on the JV team and 3-5 with the ninth graders.
“Sophomore year he had a pivotal moment,” Baxter said. “He had wrestled a few varsity matches, but in January he lost the varsity wrestle-off and that was pretty much the last chance to make the varsity. The team was set.
“This week I found out from that he went home that night (after the wrestle-off) and got very emotional with his mother. He told her, ‘Mom, I don’t want to be average anymore.’
“And you know what? He never was.
“That summer he was consistently strength training and he actually wrestled 48 matches, the second-most on the team. In most other years that would have been No. 1.”
He finished second in the state in both Cadet (ages 15 and 16) Greco Roman and freestyle wrestling and went 2-2 in the national tournament in Fargo, N.D.
“The transformation was unbelievable,” Baxter said.
Kamal smiles as he remembers last summer: “One of the movies Ahmad likes is Rocky IV because of the training Rocky did for that Russian high-tech guy, Ivan Drago. He got ready out in the woods and in the mountains. He did it the hard way.
“And Ahmad would get up early in the morning to train and he listened to that Rocky theme song. We would sit and watch the movie, too, and he just loved it. And then he went out and did it just like Rocky did.”
Last season, relying especially on his vise-like cradle hold, Ahmad “just crushed it,” Baxter gushed.
The 195-pound junior placed in every tournament he went to, won Fairmont’s Firebird Classic, qualified for state and finished the season 33-12.
“And that success showed itself in more than just his wrestling,” Baxter said. “It showed in his confidence with people, in the classroom and when he walked around the halls, He was becoming the young man we all knew he would be.”
Kamal laughed about the ugly duckling-to-swan transformation of his son.
“Now he loved wearing that singlet,” Kamal laughed. “Man, I got tired of him walking around the house almost naked in that thing.”
‘Kind and respectful’
Amy Rollins and her husband Ron live next door to Kamal and Angela and their kids.
Over the past few years — with her own children now grown and gone — Amy said she developed a real and “quite unexpected” kinship with Ahmad, who she laughingly described as having “those big ears that stick out from his head like Will Smith” and, more importantly, “that huge smile and even bigger heart.”
“Ahmad is my friend,” said Amy, who is the Wheels editor at the Dayton Daily News and a reporter for the Skywrighter newspaper at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. “He is just so kind and respectful. And though he’s seemingly quiet, behind that he was hilarious.”
She talked about the way he always got his mother balloons or flowers for Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day:
“He always took care of her and other people, too, and that increased my respect of him.”
Kamal, who works at LexisNexis as does Angela, told of the time Ahmad called his mom and wanted to know what to do because he was making an apple pie and they were out of sugar:
“Amy and Ron weren’t home, so she told him to check with some other neighbors. He literally went door to door and finally a couple down the street gave him some sugar and jokingly told him, ‘Hey, bring us a slice.’
“Well, he made his pie, but before we could have any he made sure to take a slice down to the lady who gave him the sugar.”
While cutting up apples and rolling out pie dough was one thing, making a “promposal” was a tougher challenge for him.
He wanted to take Olivia Davis to the Fairmont prom. She’s a year older, a senior athlete now headed to Virginia on a field hockey scholarship who he once spotted in the weight room at school.
“I remember we walked in to begin lifting and she was already in there working out,” Baxter said with a smile. “He comes over to me and says quietly, ‘Hey coach, I think I’m gonna have to add some plates to my weights today.’ He wanted to impress her.”
He wanted to do the same with his promposal, so he sought Amy for some help.
“He asked if I had poster board and was any good at lettering,” she laughed. “Kids go to elaborate lengths in their promposals, but that wasn’t Ahmad. He’s a modest person.
“He and Olivia used to run five miles together when they weren’t lifting, so he had saved his money and bought her some running shoes. And he wrote a little proposal that was very sweet. It said, ‘This question has been running through my mind: Will you go to the prom with me?’ He had me underline running. He added some crepe paper and balloons and it was absolutely adorable.”
Olivia accepted, and with the tuxedoed Ahmad at her side, they made a stunning couple as she was named prom queen.
“#PrayersforAhmad Prom was the best night of my life and I couldn’t have asked for a better guy to spend it with,” Davis posted in a tweet 12 days ago.
“I tell you the stars just seemed to align for that boy this past year,” Kamal said. “And now, with his senior year still ahead of him, you thought this could be a real fairy tale year for him.”
Fund to help family
Kamal said he and Angela don’t blame wrestling for their son’s injury. Neither does Baxter.
“I keep hearing people say it was a choke hold, a head lock, but from what I’m told it wasn’t even full contact,” Kamal said. “They were just doing a walk-through.
“This is just one of those freak things when his neck might have gotten turned the wrong way, Even he could have done it himself by turning.
“Wrestling is something Ahmad loves to do and honestly it did transform him. His body, his mind, his spirit — wrestling made him a different person.”
Baxter, who just finished his 17th season as Fairmont’s head coach, said he believes in his sport as much as ever:
“Anyone who knows me knows I think it’s the best sport mankind has ever seen. This doesn’t change that view. It’s a sport we’ve used to help kids year after year and, besides his family, it was the driving force that made Ahmad blossom. It made him the man he is today.”
Kamal said the one thing this incident does stress is that an injured wrestler needs a second CT scan:
“They say this happens rarely, but it does happen. You get an initial CT scan and you can’t tell a concussion and a stroke apart. But if you wait awhile, you can see it right away. When they did the second one at Children’s they knew he had a stroke and blood wasn’t flowing to the brain.”
Since Ahmad’s injury, the Fairmont community has rallied around him and his family. Athletes have come to the hospital, messages have been sent via Facebook and Twitter and last Sunday there was a prayer rally held at Roush Stadium in support him.
A fund to help the family with expenses has been set up in Ahmad’s name at all branches of the Wright Patt Credit Union.
“As coaches we use the cliché ‘we are family,’ but right here, right now with Fairmont wrestling and the community, this is not a cliché,” Baxter said. “People are going out of their way to help each other.
“It has to do with the kind of person Ahmad is. You won’t find anyone with a negative thing to say about him. He truly is kind and he’s funny and everyone knows his story and the way he made himself into something special as a wrestler.”
Baxter began to tear up again: “The only thing positive I can see coming from this is the outpouring of love and support. And if you truly want to honor Ahmad, be kind to each other and uplift each other. That’s what he did.
“And just as importantly, expect more of yourself, do more and be more because that’s how Ahmad Doucet has lived his life.”
Kamal said that on the wrestling mat Ahmad was known for his late-match, come-from-behind victories:
“He was unbelievable. People loved to watch him do that.”
That’s just what folks are hoping to see once more and Amy Rollins articulated that for everyone the other day:
“This is in my heart every day now. You just keep wishing he would wake up and show improvement and get back to doing his thing. But it just keeps going on, so we’re hoping for a miracle.
“Right now, I feel like the world is being robbed of a wonderful soul, just a wonderful, wonderful young man.”
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