His story
Much of what follows is in Tony’s own words, from the account he gave to the Ciales community site Diáspora Cialeña in 2001, and from three decades of newspaper interviews.
A boy in Jaguas
Cruz Antonio Meléndez Arroyo was born on May 3, 1941 — the Day of the Cross, which gave him his first name — at the Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, and was registered ten days later in Ciales, where his family came from. His father, Víctor Meléndez, cut cane and coffee on the Lopategui estate in Barrio Jaguas; his mother, Carmen María Arroyo, was already losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa, the hereditary disease Tony would inherit.
“I took my father his lunch in the cane field in a tin pail,” Tony remembers. After twelve hours in the field, Víctor planted corn and burned charcoal to pay for his wife’s treatment in San Juan. Tony, asthmatic from the smoke of the charcoal pits, bounced between school and the hospital. He sat in the front row because he could not read the blackboard, and the baseball hit him in the head because he could not see it coming. He never finished school.
Cement weights in El Fanguito
In 1956 the family moved to El Fanguito, the shantytown on the mangroves of Santurce, where the house kept sinking and the black water made his asthma worse. One day, after a bad attack, he dragged himself to a pharmacy on Avenida Ponce de León — and next to the asthma pills he saw a Charles Atlas booklet with pictures of Steve Reeves. He hid it from his mother and bought every one he could find.
The gym of Robert Santana, a former Mr. Puerto Rico, turned him away at the door for being too skinny. So Tony and the neighbor’s sons built their own: Sultana cake tins filled with cement around a pipe for a barbell, Denia and Kresto milk tins on broomsticks for dumbbells, benches and racks nailed together from scrap wood. They trained every day from one to three. Six months later the asthma had eased and, in his words, “I felt like Superman.” He went back to Santana’s gym, took off his thick glasses before walking in, and this time they let him pay the five dollars a month.
New York, and the darkness closing in
In 1961 his brother Adalberto wrote from New York, and Tony went: West 36th Street in the Garment District, then East 112th Street in El Barrio, where the family followed. He worked at the YMCA on Seventh Avenue, in the garment factories, and finally the night shift waxing floors at a Food Parade supermarket in Queens. He married, and two daughters were born. Both would inherit his eyes.
On the night shift he quietly taught himself to price, stock and run a section of the store, until a security guard caught him working out of turn — and management, impressed, moved him to days. By 1972 he was manager of the Key Food on 110th Street, earning enough to take his family to Europe and Mexico. He was also, by then, nearly blind, hiding it behind thick lenses and paying an assistant out of his own pocket to read the paperwork.
The night at Key Food
In 1976 the company sent him to rescue a struggling store on West 20th Street in Chelsea. One evening a man walked in, put a pistol to the back of Tony’s neck and ordered him to open the safe. Tony could not see the dial. The man screamed that he would kill him. Then Tony heard the click behind his head: the gun had jammed. A moment later, by feel, the safe opened; the robber took the money and left. Tony knelt beside the safe and cried. “God was with me that night,” he told the Daily News years later.
He retired on disability in 1977. “At 37, I left behind my sighted life,” he said. “I closed that book and opened another, the life of darkness.” By 1980 he could see nothing at all. He jogged in Central Park until he kept colliding with people, then climbed the stairs of his building from the basement to the roof, over and over, because it was the one thing he could do alone.
The gym at 1199 Plaza
In 1981 Tony moved into the 1199 Plaza cooperative at 2110 First Avenue, on the corner of 108th Street. “When I moved to 1199, I was depressed,” he said. “Then they opened a gym here. That was like a blessing to me.” He trained five hours a day. There he met a lifter named Troy Ford, who told him something he had never heard: there were powerlifting competitions for the blind.
A counselor at the Lighthouse pointed him to the United States Association of Blind Athletes. In 1985, at Montclair State University in New Jersey, with Troy beside him, Tony entered his first meet and came home with his first medal. He was 44. The next year in Long Beach, California, he won gold and set four national records. “I was still a rookie,” he said, “but I made those numbers.”
Champion of the world
In 1987 he competed internationally for the first time, in Canada, and won the open division against sighted and blind lifters alike. Then the world titles came: Ottawa in 1988, Riverside in 1990, Perth in 1992, Marbella in 1994, Colorado Springs in 1995. In the 148-pound class, past the age of fifty, asthmatic and totally blind, he squatted 400 pounds, benched 285 and pulled 402 — more than a thousand pounds in a meet. In 1991 he lifted that thousand with Vice President Dan Quayle watching, and was handed two gold medals.
“The word stop doesn’t enter his vocabulary,” said Matt Wahlig, the USABA powerlifting coach. Tony trained four times a week, three hours at a stretch, skipped rope, climbed 32 flights of stairs, and routinely out-lifted men half his age who could see the bar. He has won every national championship he ever entered.
“She’s my eyes”
In 1987 a friend from the gym took Tony to meet a couple in Brooklyn — she from Ecuador, he from Ponce. Her sister, a teacher in Ecuador, was coming to New York for the holidays. Her name was Grecia Zobeida Ronquillo. They married before a judge in 1988 and in the Catholic Church on April 15, 2001.
Zobeida became his trainer. She has stood beside the bar at every competition since, read him the scoreboard, walked him through strange cities on five continents, and translated the official blind powerlifting coaching manual into Spanish so that Cuba could start a program. “I know my wife is beautiful,” Tony says, “not because I see her with my eyes, but by the way she treats people.” And, more simply: “She’s my eyes.”
Ciales calls him Immortal
After every winning lift, Tony shouted the same two words from the platform: “¡Viva Ciales!” On November 25, 2001, the town answered. At the Lions Club in Ciales he was inducted into the Salón de la Fama del Deporte Cialeño, draped in the sash of an Inmortal, and handed a plaque from the Secretary of Sports of Puerto Rico and a resolution of the Senate of Puerto Rico. He now shares that Hall with the basketball great Pachín Vicéns and Yankees pitcher Ed Figueroa.
He has carried his story to schools, hospitals, prisons, radio stations and churches across the United States and the world; to the Pope’s Masses in Havana and Santa Clara in 1998; to Jerusalem, to Hawaii, to his family in Río Piedras. For more than thirty years he served on the board of the 1199 Plaza Housing Corporation — the longest-serving board member in its history — and on the community advisory board of Metropolitan Hospital.
Still lifting
Tony is 85. He still trains most mornings in the apartment on First Avenue, under a wall of medals and a curtain of ribbons, with Zobeida nearby. He still plays the guitar he taught himself after going blind, and still sings to her.
“My life is a book with two parts,” he wrote: “the one when I could see, and the one in the world of darkness. If you ask me which of those two lives I prefer, I could not answer you. I have been happy in both.”
