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For Erik, who knew almost as soon as he could speak that he would lose his vision in his early teens, excelling as an athlete was the result of accepting his disability rather than denying it. Growing up with two brothers in Hong Kong and then Weston, Conn., he was always an athletic kid, a tough gamer who developed a bump-and-grind one-on-one basketball game that allowed him to work his way close to the hoop. He was, his father Ed says, "a pretty normal kid. While bike riding, he might have run into a few more parked cars than other kids, but we didn't dwell on his going blind."
His blindness was a medical inevitability, like a court date with a hanging judge. "I saw blindness like this disease," he explains. "Like aids or something that was going to consume me." Think about that--being a kid, 10, 11 years old, and knowing that at some point in the near future your world is going to go dark. Certainly it builds character--that mental toughness his fellow climbers marvel at--but in a child, the natural psychological defense would be denial.
When he lost his vision, Erik at first refused to use a cane or learn Braille, insisting he could somehow muddle on as normal. "I was so afraid I would seem like a freak," he recalls. But after a few embarrassing stumbles--he couldn't even find the school rest rooms anymore--he admitted he needed help. For Erik, the key was acceptance--not to fight his disability but to learn to work within it; not to transcend it but to understand fully what he was capable of achieving within it; not to pretend he had sight but to build systems that allowed him to excel without it. "It's tragic--I know blind people who like to pass themselves off as being able to see," Erik says. "What's the point of that?"
He would never play basketball or catch a football again. But then he discovered wrestling. "I realized I could take sighted people and slam them into the mat," he says. Grappling was a sport where feel and touch mattered more than sight: if he could sense where his opponent had his weight or how to shift his own body to gain better leverage, he could excel using his natural upper-body strength. As a high school senior he went all the way to the National Junior Freestyle Wrestling Championship in Iowa.
Wrestling gave him the confidence to re-enter the teenage social fray. He began dating when he was 17; his first girlfriend was a sighted woman three years older than he. Erik jokes that he is not shy about using his blindness to pick up women. "They really go for the guide dog," he explains. "You go into a bar, put the guide dog out there, and the girls just come up to you." He and his friends devised a secret handshake to let Erik know if the girl he was talking to was attractive. "Just because you're blind doesn't make you any more selfless or deep or anything. You're just like most guys, but you look for different things," Erik says. "Smooth skin, nice body, muscles--that stuff becomes more important." And the voice becomes paramount. "My wife has the most beautiful voice in the world," Erik says. Married in 1997, he and his wife Ellie have a one-year-old daughter, Emma.