Meet the 6-year-old Iowa wrestler battling cancer who will live out his dream at the wrestling World Cup

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Ia. — The 6-year-old here in western Iowa has a small wrestling mat in his basement. Whenever Sebastiano Fidone gets the itch, he races downstairs to practice his takedowns. It is a scene that might only make sense in this wrestling-rich state.

On this day, Sebastiano opens his workout with his favorite takedown, a high-crotch to a double-leg. Sebastiano steps into his 22-pound practice dummy with his head on the outside hip, then immediately moves his hands to wrap around both legs and drives the dummy across the mat with the kind of technique that suggests he’s done this millions of times before.

“Pretty crisp, ain’t it?” says Keith Massey, Sebastiano’s coach at Power House Wrestling Club and the head coach at Lewis Central High School. 

There’s inspiration in this moment. For the last two years, Sebastiano has battled B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a cancer where immature white blood cells are found in bone marrow and blood.

But it has not slowed his passion for wrestling.

Sebastiano’s story has captured the attention of the wrestling community, both in Iowa and beyond. This coming weekend, he will be one of the Team USA’s Ambassadors at the UWW Freestyle World Cup in Iowa City. He will lead the United States onto the mat inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena before every dual.

“He’s overly excited for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Melissa Fidone, Sebastiano’s mom. “He watches so much video of these guys that it’s like he already knows them. The other day, he was like, ‘Is Kyle Dake going to be there, too?’ It’s like, 'Yes, buddy. He’ll be there.'

“It’s going to be an awesome, awesome thing for him.”

Wrestling was always going to be part of Sebastiano’s life. His father, Mark, wrestled at Missouri Valley in high school, and when he and Melissa found out their firstborn would be a boy, the idea of raising a wrestler played out in his head. His grandmother fed that dream by stitching a homemade wrestling dummy that Sebastiano played with before he could walk.

A few months after his fourth birthday, Sebastiano joined Power House, where he worked with Massey on wrestling basics — his penetration step, hand control and simple takedowns and turns. Massey recalls Sebastiano being excited about each practice because he loved learning.

But in November 2015, Sebastiano complained of leg pain. He woke up crying in the middle of the night and walked with a limp during the day. Melissa’s guess was growing pains. It took multiple trips to different doctors before the cancer diagnosis came on Dec. 7 that year. 

Immediately, Sebastiano was admitted into treatment. The doctor’s installed a port on the right side of his chest so they could inject medicine straight into his blood. But a month later, a day after New Year's, Melissa found that Sebastiano wasn’t responding when they talked to him and couldn’t move part of his body.

An emergency trip to the doctor found a massive clot in his brain. He had had a stroke and a seizure. He had stopped breathing.

Melissa tears up at the recollection.

“They cut his clothes off, rolled him out of the room and I kissed him goodbye,” she says. “They went and did some scans and found out how bad it was. Later that day, or maybe the next day, he woke up, but he wasn’t able to sit up by himself. He couldn’t stand or walk or anything. It had affected his brain that much.”

Sebastiano’s recovery from his blood clot took a few months, but his cancer battle is ongoing. Melissa gives him oral chemo every morning. He goes to the hospital once a month for injections through his port. Every three months, he goes in for a spinal tap. After each hospital visit, he takes steroids for a week — and he does it all with a smile.

“He makes it look easy,” Melissa says. “Sometimes, we’ll hear kids crying at the clinic because they’re scared. I look at him and I’m so thankful that he makes it so easy. I’d be a totally different person if this was hard on him. It would be a really crappy time.”

Since Sebastiano couldn’t wrestle during his initial treatment, he made up for it by watching lots of videos on his Kindle. He kept tabs on Iowa and Penn State and Nebraska, his favorite teams, and watched some of the international stars that will be competing this weekend, such as Kyle Snyder and Jordan Burroughs.

Melissa started a social media pages on Facebook and Twitter — both are titled “Smash Leukemia” — to help chronicle Sebastiano’s fight. They also opened an account on Pin Cancer, a website that helps raise money for cancer research. They’ve raised more than $10,000 as of this week.

Word quickly spread, and the wrestling community enveloped Sebastiano and his family within days of his diagnosis.

The Fort Calhoun High School wrestling team came to visit. Iowa State sent a signed singlet. McGwire Midkiff, a 2017 state champion for Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson who now wrestles at North Dakota State, met him and gave him a poster. Melissa posted a picture of Sebastiano watching the Iowa-Penn State dual this past season. Both responded with gifts.

“Penn State sent him a box or sweatshirts and hats and shirts and shorts, then Iowa sent him like 20 DVDs of wrestling highlight videos, and it was awesome,” Melissa says. “He puts one in after another and tries new moves."

On Sept. 7, 2016, nine months after the cancer diagnosis and eight months after the blood clot, Sebastiano went back to wrestling practice. Massey wrapped him in a hug when he first arrived, and was impressed with how much information Sebastiano had retained despite not being on the mat. 

“His penetration step was the biggest thing,” Massey recalls. “When you’re 4 and 5 years old, that’s one of the hardest things for them to get down. He just jumped right in as if he hadn’t ever lost a step.”

After four months of practice, Sebastiano entered his first tournament. He wore a tight shirt with a sewn-in pad that protected his port. He got pinned in his first match, but won his next two to take second place. He won each of his next two tournaments — the first coming just two days after a spinal tap appointment where he was under anesthesia. He went 18-3 in his first season.

This past year, Sebastiano again found success on the mat, finishing third at the pee-wee state tournament. During an earlier competition, Massey asked Sebastiano to perform a move while on bottom. He wasn’t sure what it was, so Massey showed him. Later that day, Mark came to find Massey and showed him video of Sebastiano hitting that move in a match.

“His dad came over and said, ‘He wanted me to show you this,’” Massey recalls “The coolest thing is he continues to learn and he’s getting better and he loves doing it. He’s pretty energetic, so you get all of that energy and you channel it a certain way, and it’s been awesome to see.”

Before the season began, Melissa went to a local prosthetics company and helped them fashion a brace with a cup that protected Sebastiano’s port. It looks like the shoulder brace Cory Clark wore when the former Iowa wrestler won an NCAA Championship.

Clark became one of Sebastiano’s favorite wrestlers, and the two have connected over social media. Clark sent Sebastiano signed posters and shirts. Sebastiano has sent him a “Smash Leukemia” shirt and a picture of himself wrestling. He hopes to meet Clark this week in Iowa City, and Clark has tweeted back that he can’t wait to meet Sebastiano.

“He’s got those types of friendships,” Melissa says. “Every year, he links onto one college wrestler that he cheers for and is really excited for.”

This season, Sebastiano found yet another Hawkeye to root for in Spencer Lee, Iowa’s true freshman national champion. Melissa posted a video of Sebastiano watching Lee defeat Rutgers’ Nick Suriano in the NCAA finals on March 17. He jumped up and down as the clock hit zero.

His favorite part about watching Lee wrestle? “The chicken wing to a tile move,” Sebastiano says. (He’s yet to do it on any of his opponents, though.)

Sebastiano hopes to meet Lee this week in Iowa City, along with the rest of Team USA. He’s watched many videos of Burroughs and Dake and Thomas Gilman, a fellow Council Bluffs native and former Iowa wrestler who won a silver medal at the 2017 world championships last year. 

For a young kid with a wrestling mat in his basement and a closet full of wrestling hardware, it will be a dream come true.

“It’s pretty cool how these guys are just college kids,” Melissa says, “but to our boy, they’re the world.” 

Cody Goodwin covers wrestling and high school sports for the Des Moines Register. Follow him on Twitter at @codygoodwin.