wrestlers became the first athletes to defect from the Islamic Republic.
Reza Abedi, 48, is a Spanish teacher and wrestling coach at Dana Hills High in Dana Point, a town in Orange County, California. It was a long and hard struggle for Abedi to finally end up where he is today, but he now feels at home.
Abedi, who received his degree from Cal State Fullerton, wasn’t born a teacher—despite his Teacher of the Year and Coach of the Year awards. Abedi was born a wrestler, and he has a gold medal from the 1982 Military World Championships in Venezuela to prove it. It was in Venezuela where he defeated an American in the 127-pound freestyle-wrestling final.
“The day that I stepped on that podium and they gave me the medal, my whole body was full of joy,” he told OC Weekly.
But that same medal also serves as a reminder of the day he left Iran for good. The night after the award ceremony, the last day of a six-day tournament, Abedi and three fellow Iranian wrestlers defected. They were the first Iranian athletes to do so.
Last month, Abedi’s personal story was published in a book titled: American Wings; Iranian Roots.
Abedi and his fellow wrestlers came to America in search of freedom, shortly after the Islamic regime took power. “In Iran, I couldn’t be who I wanted to be,” Abedi told the OC Register.
Abedi is the fifth of 10 brothers and sisters. His mother, Nimtaj, spent her days tending to the house and her children. His father, Abbas, worked for the local government in the family’s hometown of Kermanshah. Both parents were illiterate. His family led a simple life. “It was a good life,” Abedi recalled.
Abedi took up wrestling at a young age; by the time he was 11, he had committed himself to the sport. A month after he began wrestling, Abedi competed in a national tournament. He advanced to the finals, where he came up against a stronger and more experienced kid, Mashadi Aghaee. “He kicked my ass,” Abedi remembered. But that didn’t discourage him.
After the revolution of 1979, Abedi said his life changed. He said he was denied admission to college because he couldn’t sufficiently prove his commitment to and knowledge of Islam. Being denied admission dashed his hopes of becoming a teacher.
Since he was not a student, Abedi had to enlist in the military—he joined the Air Force during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. “Before the revolution, I went to mosque, I prayed, I did all the religious things you’re supposed to do,” Abedi said. “But after the revolution, I got turned off. I went completely the other way. I couldn’t deal with a bunch of zealots, a bunch of fanatics who tell you what to do. They try to make you act like sheep.”
While in the military, Abedi’s wrestling coach had him focused on training during the lead-up to the national wrestling tournament. One month later, at the national tournament in Tehran, Abedi advanced to the finals and won a spot on the team heading to the Military World Championships in Caracas, Venezuela. This was long before Hugo Chavez took power there and allied Venezuela with the Islamic Republic.
Days after his win at the nationals, a mullah who oversaw the wrestling team told Abedi that he had to wrestle another competitor. His competitor reportedly had connections in the government and was a member of the Pasdaran. His name was Mashadi Aghaee, Abedi’s old nemesis.
“I was shaking when they said his name,” Abedi said. “[Aghaee] knew a lot of people, and that’s one of the reasons they wanted to take him over me—because I was a nobody,” he said, adding that he was only given a week to prepare.
But Abedi ended up winning the match that was supposed to qualify him for the world championships. Instead, Abedi said the mullah ordered a rematch. One week later, the two wrestled at the same facility in front of the same crowd, and once again, Abedi won. But the mullah insisted on a third match, Abedi said, recalling his frustration.
A week after the second match, the wrestlers met again—and again Abedi came out the victor. Abedi said after he won the match, the mullah approached him and said: “Buddy, make sure you bring two pictures so we can get your passport.”
When he boarded the flight to Venezuela in early August 1982, Abedi said he had no plan to defect, just vague thoughts. Once in Venezuela, other teams were put up in nice hotels, but the Iranian team was forced to stay in a military barracks. Abedi was in a room with his brother’s best friend, Asgari. It was there that Abedi began sharing his thoughts about defection with a few teammates. Two other wrestlers, both named Abbas, and his friend Asgari—admitted that they were also thinking of defecting.
Despite his minimal knowledge of English, Abedi started talking with members of the American team, using one of his teammates as a translator. The Americans agreed to help the four Iranians.
During the national competition, Abedi took home the gold while his friend Asgari took silver. But that night, both men wrapped up their medals along with some clothing and dropped them outside the barred windows of their rooms. Wearing only their underwear, Abedi and Asgari approached the guard at the stairs and said they were going down to the kitchen.
When the guard let them go, Abedi and Asgari found their clothes and made their way to the American team’s bus. The men waited for the two other wrestlers, and then the four lay on the floor in the back of the bus. Abedi remembers those several tense minutes as the bus drove toward the gate. “I just closed my eyes and asked God to get us out,” he said, adding that he was relieved when the guards waved them through.
For the next six months, the men found places to stay in Venezuela courtesy of an Iranian businessman and then a Japanese expatriate. Abedi recalled that some nights, when the locals weren’t around to feed them, they would search through trashcans outside restaurants for food.
“We couldn’t speak the language, we had no money, and we had no real place to stay,” Asgari told the OC Register. “We were surviving day-by-day, night-by-night.”
Finally, in December 1982, Abedi, Asgari and the heavyweight Abbas turned themselves in to the Iranian embassy, claiming they were “young and stupid” and that they made a mistake. The other Abbas decided to stay in Venezuela.
“I knew they would never let us just take back what we had done,” Asgari recalled. “We knew there would be a public execution. We learned later that was exactly what they had planned—they were going to prosecute us and hang us in the plaza in Tehran. They announced that on TV; my mother saw that. They were going to use us to teach a lesson to others. We were the first [athletes] in the history of our country to defect.”
That day, Abedi called his family in Iran. When he heard his mother’s voice, he was overcome with emotion. “I got choked up; I couldn’t find words,” he remembered, adding that he never got to see his mother before she died in the winter of 1986.
Before boarding the first leg of the flight back to Iran, Abedi and his fellow wrestlers decided their only chance for escape was during the layover in Madrid. The flight made an unexpected stop in the Canary Islands, which are part of Spain, so when they continued on to Madrid, the plane was directed to the national terminal instead of the international terminal—where Iranian officials were waiting to take the men. The men deplaned separately, so as not to draw attention in case Iranian officials were waiting. “It was a bad feeling,” Abedi remembered, “We knew that if we got on that [second] plane, we were dead.”
When Abedi finally made his way to the exit, he saw a man selling an Iranian opposition newspaper. Abedi told the man his name, that he was also Iranian and that he was one of the wrestlers who defected. The man ordered a van to come pick up the men.
Abedi soon found out that the newspaper seller and his friends were members of a revolutionary group that advocated the overthrow of Iran’s government. “If you support us, we will support you,” the man told Abedi. The wrestlers agreed and a press conference was organized where the men shared their stories of why they defected.
The wrestlers were set up in a private house outside Madrid. The Spanish government granted the men political asylum and provided financial support, as did the opposition group. But three years later, the Spanish government decided it did not want the Iranian wrestlers to stay.
Abedi began looking for a new home. He managed to track down sponsors in Vancouver, British Columbia, and San Jose, California. Abedi ultimately chose California. In December 1985, he boarded a flight bound for San Francisco. Several months later, Abedi enrolled at San Jose State University.
Before wrestling season began in the winter, Abedi and Asgari—who had made his way from Madrid to Missouri to San Jose—followed a coach to Cal State Bakersfield, where they were both given scholarships. As freshmen, they placed well at the Division II tournament and were recognized on the All-American team.
The pair transferred again before the next school year, enrolling at Cal State Fullerton. But during the transfer process, the NCAA realized Abedi didn’t have his high-school diploma—he had left it in Iran. Abedi lost his remaining athletic eligibility and his chance for scholarships.
To pay for his tuition, Abedi worked 16-hour days. “I didn’t sleep much,” he said.
Despite losing his collegiate eligibility, he continued to train. In 1988, when he was 25, he won his weight class in a regional tournament, which qualified him for the US Olympic Trials. But since he wasn’t yet a US citizen, he was not able to compete. Abedi turned his focus back to school.
One evening in late spring of 1988, he got a call from one of his sisters. She, two of his other sisters and his father were all stuck in Istanbul, Turkey, after they had left Iran. Abedi promised his family he would help get them from Istanbul to Frankfurt, Germany, where the family had contacts. But Abedi and his family were arrested while trying to cross the border into Germany.
Abedi befriended with one of the officers, who Abedi found out was also a wrestler. The officer looked over Abedi’s file and then released him. He returned to Austria. At a gas station one evening, he started chatting with the attendant about how he was trying to smuggle his family across the border to Germany. The attendant introduced Abedi to some friends, who mapped out a route where Abedi and his family could evade border police.
Abedi made his way to Salzburg, Austria, where he managed to sneak into the detention center where his family was detained. He drove his family across the border, put them on a Frankfurt-bound train and made his way back to Los Angeles.
In 1992, Abedi accepted his first teaching job at Ayala High in Chino Hills, where he taught Spanish and helped with the wrestling team. Two years later, while visiting his then-wife’s parents, who had just bought a house in Dana Point, he passed by Dana Hills High and saw a sign for a job fair.
The school’s principal liked Abedi, but said they didn’t have any openings that fit his credentials. But a month later, the principal called with an offer: two periods of Spanish, two periods of physical education and the opportunity to take over the struggling wrestling program. He accepted the job and has been with the school ever since.