Coach, Part II
“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
– Louisiana governor John J. McKeithen
The day after Big Daddy was released from prison in 1986, I followed Big Head Ben into Coach’s office and met him for the first time. Ben introduced me as Magik.
“Magic?” Coach said with that grin.
“Look over there,” he said pointing somewhere else above my head and to my right.
I feinted like I looked, but made it obvious I was watching, like two kids would do with each other. He smiled that mischievous smile, and reached on the pile papers on his desk, picked up his business card, and did a horrible back palm; you could easily see the corners poking through his fingers.
He pulled his hand back up, his grin widened, and he said: “magic.” Coach whipped that business card into existence, and it told everyone who saw it that he was Dale Ketlesen: driver’s education teacher.
It was the same stock as every other teacher, and he either hadn’t gotten around to adding wrestling coach yet, or it was an old business card on his cluttered desk. Whatever it was, he had done a magic trick for me, and he did a good job. It turns out that he knew my grandfather, from when Big Daddy walked around LSU in the 60’s and 70’s with an entourage of big, famous, former LSU Tigers mixed in with his Teamster bodyguards; and, because Big Daddy was back home after six years in prison, he was on the news every day and teachers had pestered me to know more about him, which is why it felt so good to have a teacher call me Magik and talk about what I wanted to talk about for a change.
I laughed and without knowing why asked to join the team. He said sure, and he reached on his desk and pulled up a parent’s waiver, doctor’s physical form with a list of doctors and clinics, and a proof of health insurance form.
“Ok then,” he said. “Well, you have to have your parents sign all of these. And get a physical. That’s important.”
And you’ll need shoes, he said. He looked down at my feet, nodded, then reached down and pulled a pair of threadbare size 10 Asics Tiger wrestling shoes and handed them to me.
“These should fit you. Keep them until your parents can buy you a new pair. Come talk to me if that takes too long.”
“And here,” he said, handing me a pair of off-white headgear. “You’ll need these, to protect you from cauliflower ear.”
He touched the top of my ear to show me what cauliflower ear looked liked.
“Don’t want that to happen,” he said with a smile.
A month later, during Belaire’s annual one-day Thanksgiving tournament, I had lost twice and was therefore eliminated and wouldn’t wrestle again. I was wearing my blue wrestling hoodie, and my front lip was puffy from having been cut on the inside by my braces; I viewed it as tough, like Rocky walking around with a black eye. Lea and I were watching it from half-way up the bleachers, I was showing off that I was on the wrestling team, mimicking Rocky’s mumbling howl for “Adrian!” by saying “Lea” with my swollen lip that muffled my voice. Coach waddled up to say hello, his short legs heaving up the oversized steps.
“Hello, Magik,” he said with a mischievous smile. “Who’s this lovely lady?”
“Lea,” she said with her typical welcoming smile.
“Watch out for this guy,” he said, nodding towards me. When he had my attention, his right hand came up and his palm faced Lea; I saw the edges of his business card tucked between his tightly clasped but small and stubby fingers.
“He knows magic!” Coach said as he flicked the business card into existence.
We laughed and he said he was going to go down and support the team. Belaire’s fledgling, half-sized team was being brutalized by a team I don’t remember. About twenty minutes later, he waddled back up, but he wasn’t smiling.
“Why are you here?” he asked me.
Surprised, I sat upright and said, “To support my team, Coach.”
“No you’re not,” he said. He pointed a finger at me, and then towards Lea, somehow in a way that let her know this was about me, and that she was a lovely young lady. “You’re here with this lovely young lady.”
He paused, then pointed to the mat and said, “If you want to support your team, go down there.”
Lea looked at me and nodded, but I didn’t need her to do that; I had looked at her to tell her I was going down to the first row bleacher.
She joined me, and sat in the bleacher behind me. I rotated my baseball cap to face backwards, leaned forward, and supported my team.
When the team voted me co-captain a year and a half later, Coach put on his reading glasses and retailed the voting slips twice.
He had given us slips and asked us to rank our top five choices for next year’s team captain. It was similar to a bunch of competing schools or districts vote for Wrestler of the Year, Most Remarkable Player, or any non-binary competition. In decades of coaching, he had not seen the math work out that way. He may have redone his system later, but it gave him Jeremy and me that year, because most of the team ranked him as one, but enough ranked me one or two that we were close to the same score; what caused the tie was that I ranked Jeremy first and did not rank myself in the top five, and Jeremy ranked himself one and left the rest blank.
When Coach recalculated the math a second time, he let his reading glasses fall to his chest and dangle from the cord, looked towards the mat rather than us, as if talking to the god of wrestling himself, and said, “Well, so be it.”