Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part III

McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin

“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”

“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.

The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”

“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisianan and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”

New Orleans State Times, 08 March 1968

By March of 1990 I was 17 years old and a few months away from basic training. I weighed around 149 pounds and fasted for two days before weigh in, and I had splurged on a fancy rubber workout suit to replace the trash bags that most wrestlers still used; it had long sleeves and pant legs with elastic ends that trapped heat and sweat and helped me squeeze out the last few drops of weight to make 147.

The Baton Rouge city tournament was one of the largest in Louisiana because, unlike regionals and state, which try to be fair by separating big schools from small ones for titles, the city tournament hosted schools in all regions of southern Louisiana regardless of size. It was the final open tournament of the season, the last chance for some wrestlers face off against foes from the previous four months. Because so many schools attended, only the largest city schools took turns hosting. 

City was hosted by the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs that year. Baton Rouge High is on Government Street only three miles from the state capital, but it was an old and respected public school from before forced segregation. It had become a magnet school for college prep with a focus on pre-medicine, part of a state program to encourage parents to send kids there instead of moving away as forced integration picked up in the 70’s. Their college placement rate was the highest of any public school, and they had a large campus and were one of the few Baton Rouge high schools with gymnasiums large enough to hold eight mats and hundreds of spectators.

Their grounds were landscaped immaculately, and in springtime red azeleas and white jasmines contrasted against the green stately oak tree leaves and the dark grey Spanish moss dangling from the long brown branches; it was a beautiful campus, and everyone in Baton Rouge was proud to have visiting schools see our eponymous high school.

The only public school with a gym larger than Baton Rouge High was Robert E. Lee High School, a massive school near the LSU lakes with a gym that looked like one of LSU’s smaller dome stadiums; instead of jogging the capital, those kids jogged around the lakes in the fancy neighborhood that paid for their school. Their grounds were unremarkable, but their gym was so big and the invitational was so prestigious that it sometimes brought in teams from Texas and Florida, and they would have eight mats going on at once. The city tournament wasn’t that big, but it was a close second. I came in fifth at the Robert E. Lee Invitational a few weeks before, not high enough to get a medal but high enough to end up seeded third for city, the highest I had ever been seeded.

I won my first two matches Saturday, and on Sunday morning I barely beat the second seed, a senior from the Region II school Brusly High named Frank Jackson. I held him in a cradle all of the third round but was unable to roll him to his back for almost a full minute until the buzzer sounded and the ref called the match; we weren’t stopped for stalling because every second was an obvious battle between us that was being fought one subtle muscle movement at a time. Our match was unexciting and I won 3-2, but no one doubted that I won fairly.

The referee raised my hand and only then did I realized that I was headed to finals for the first time. I’d face Hillary again, but I would be guaranteed at least a silver medal and our match would be reported in the newspaper on Monday. It wasn’t like I’d be a soldier on international television, but I’d be a wrestler who was the co-captain of the Belaire Bengals under Coach Dale Ketelsen, and I would be either the silver or gold medal winner at city.

I scanned the crowd and saw a couple of hundred people in the bleachers, but their attention was split across all four mats and the semifinal matches on each. More would show up for finals and focus on the single mat in the center, where I would stand for the first time. Despite panting hard, I smiled and breath wooshed in an out of my toothy smile, finally free from the braces that had sliced my lips and distracted my attention last season.

The ref dropped my hand and I walked off the mat and accepted a towel from Jeremy, who had won his 140 pound semifinal match only minutes before mine began. Coach was there beside him, as always, and he stuck out his right hand and I clasped it. He looked up into my eyes, grabbed my left tricep in a vice-like grip with his thumb alongside his fingers, and said, “Good job, Magik.”

Coach Dale Ketelsen was a  man of few words. He had told me those same three words more than 150 times regardless of if I won or lost, yet they were never insincere; only the wrestler knows what happens in their mind on the mat. He raised his voice a few times, but that was only to be heard over the din of gymnasiums and to break a wrestler out of whatever his mind was locked upon; invariably, he would toss off his reading glasses and fling aside his clipboard, and slide across the mat to get at the wrestler’s level and holler, “Sprawl! Sprawl!” or “Stand up! Stand up!” As soon as the match ended, he find his glasses and clipboard – or one of us would hand them to him – and his face would quickly loose the red hue from being riled up and he’d be back to the same mellow Coach.

He almost never offered advice or repeated himself. The only advice I heard him tell the team and say it more than once was, “Just Wrestle.”

Once or twice a year, he’d stand in front of the team and hold up a stubby forefinger and point towards our mat and say, “Just get out there and wrestle.”

I once asked Coach to elaborate, and he said was that his words had roots with Doug Blubaugh, the gold medalist who had barely defeated him.

Back then, matches were a staggering nine minutes instead of the measly six minutes of my generation. The bible says there’s no rest for the weary and that was true for Coach that day; after nine minutes he and Doug went into sudden death overtime. The first one to score a point for any reason would win, and the referee could award someone a point if the other wrestler stalled. Doug scored, but I never learned how, and Coach’s version of this story was shorter than mine, but the thought of nine minutes on the mat and then sudden death is what led me to lean in and listen to what Doug would say that influenced Coach thirty years later. After losing, he dropped to the third place bracket. Logistics weren’t good back then, and his next match was scheduled only minutes after his loss in semifinals. He knew that if he won third he would only be an alternate in Rome in case Doug got sick or injured. Coach sat in the locker room, fatigued and distracted by his loss, trying to catch his breath and refocus, and Doug walked in and approached him. That’s where Coach started his story.

“I was sitting in the locker room,” Coach said. “And Doug walked over.”

He paused and held eye contact for a moment, then continued: “He said, ‘Someone will win, and it might as well be you.’ Right then I saw things differently.”

He shrugged and said, “So I went out there and wrestled.”

That was the end of his story. He won third and traveled with the 1960 olympic team to Rome as an alternate and returned to coach a few schools, be an assistant at Iowa, then start LSU’s team in 1968; and there we were.

Just Wrestle.

His other advice was not well thought out, offhand comments on the rare moments when his mind was elsewhere, but they stick with me as much as Just Wrestle.

Once, during my senior year, Coach was in an exceptionally cheerful mood and he had an extra twinkle in his eye. It was the week of his wedding anniversary, and he was on his way home early while Jeremy and I finished leading practice. He stopped and held up his forfinger to the entire team and said, “Gentlemen: the secret to a happy marriage is no matter what kind of day you have, when you get home give your wife a kiss on the cheek and ask her how her day was.”

He lowered his finger, but he and his broad smile lingered a few moments and then he practically skipped out of the gym on his way to the parking lot.

Another time, just after report cards came out and a few wrestlers were either dismayed or would be off varsity until their grades improved. Two said their parents were making them quit the team, because their parents wanted them to focus on grades and getting into college more than sports. After they left, Coach, who bore no ill will of anyone and never offered advice on what other people should or should not do, held up his finger and said, “Pig farming.”

He paused as if that explained everything.

He lowered his finger and said, “If you treat the pigs well, you’ll earn your living and be happy.”

With so few bits of advice offered over the years, those stood out as much as any wrestling technique.

After semifinals the gym cleared and I, like the other team captains, stayed to help the Bulldogs roll up three of the mats while they moved their new, bright green mat to the center. Their team taped it together tightly the same way Belaire did, and they applied the same fungicide that we all knew well, the one that smelled like something you’d use to clean a public toilet and that stung mat burn as if a stinging caterpillar had fallen from an oak tree and landed on your cheek.

The doors opened again and spectators began coming in. They paid $2 each to see finals, and proceeds went to the hosting team to improve their facilities or buy better fungicide or headgear. People kept coming through the open doors and filling the stands, and the smell of jasmines from the Bulldog’s landscaped gardens wafted inside and mingled with the smells of cheese pizza and hot dogs from the concession stand. It was a Sunday afternoon, and some people were dressed in suits as if they had come from church or they were proud of their kids or grandkids.

The chatter was cheerful and bounced between the hard courts and the metal ceiling rafters high above. Some time around 2pm a buzzer sounded and echoed loudly enough to stop all chatter. All of the captains walked onto the single mat in front of around a thousand spectators.

I stood beside Jeremy and ostensibly listened to the referee talk about fair play, but I scanned the bleachers and looked for people I knew. Big Head Ben Abrams was there (his head was hard to miss among the crowd) with his little brother, Todd. Ben had wrestled at 189 but quit to care for his dad, and Todd was the state martial arts champion who tried out for the team but quit after he kept getting beaten badly by Timmy, our varsity 171 pounder.

Lea was beside them and waved, but I was too stoic and pretending to be focused on the ref to wave back. He was just talking about fair play and rules, and I knew all of the rules by heart and had read the latest magazines with all of the case studies explaining why; I felt just like I did in class, listening to a teacher while my mind thought about other things (and Lea as usually one of those things).

I pondered how Lea and the Abrams knew I was in finals; this was before the internet or cell phones, yet somehow they knew. Then I saw the twins, Andy and Timmy, walk up the bleachers with concession stand drinks in their hands and I realized they must have driven home and told them I was in finals. They were last year’s 154 and 171 pounder, and Timmy was the one who could pummel the state martial arts champion. This was before the Royce Gracie dominated international mixed martial arts in 1993, so the idea that wrestling and grappling could defeat someone who punched was new then. The twins were brutal and treated a freshmen on their first day the same as their rival in a finals match, unperturbed by unexpected moves or techniques. Timmy made such a point of beating Todd that Todd never came back and never added a wrestling medal to karate trophies.

The twins had graduated, but they, like a lot of wrestlers who graduate, would show up at practice and help push us to wrestler harder. And because they were still in town and not off to college or working on an oil rig like a lot of young men their age, they showed up at city to see old friends and support their former team, more like a habit than love, but we still enjoyed having them there.

Andy and Timmy’s dad used to work for my grandfather. So did Lea’s dad. Practically half of Baton Rouge had at some point, because our economy centered around agriculture, petrochemicals, and the burgeoning film industry. Teamsters shipped all products to and from Louisiana that weren’t put on a train or barge, just like they shipped all products across America. When Hoffa was president and he had 3 million loyal Teamsters following his every word, the Kennedys knew that if he wanted, Hoffa could slam America’s economy to a halt by calling a strike. Big Daddy never threatened, he used his position to build our economy and the Louisiana Teamsters were as loyal to him as the International Teamsters were to Hoffa.

The Hollywood films were an extra perk in the 1980’s. Teamster trucks shipped all filming equipment and set props, and Teamster trailers housed famous actors and were paid to wait around and either act like bodyguards or simply repose and get paid to relax for a few months.

The industry began with some John Wayne films in the 1970’s during a stent of civil war films being popular; they used the plantations around Baton Rouge and Natchez Mississippi for most scenes. But most of my friends remembered a few like The Toy staring Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason, and Everybody’s All American staring Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lane; it was about The Grey Ghost, a college football star in the 1950’s, and everyone in town was invited to dress up like the 1950’s and cheer for the actors recreating football scenes. If you rented the VCR tape in the 1990’s or streamed Everybody’s All American today, you could squint and see a middle school aged Lea, Andy, and Timmy mixed in the with the crowd of around 10,000 people and dressed in 1950’s garb to like the stars of television’s Happy Days, with poofy poodle skirts and their parent’s old letterman jackets.

Everybody’s All American filmed in fall of 1986, and on a rare cold day people showed up for a scene by the steps of the new state capital for an important final scene, an award ceremony for the football star. It snowed that day, something no one saw coming, and though everyone thought it was a magical experience, the director thought it was to fantastic for a drama film set in the south and they reshot a few days later. Local news covered the entire filming and made the obvious connections to Billy Papas, LSU’s star player from 1954, a two-time all American, and Big Daddy, who was still known as an all-American hero from when Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover made him seem that way during Hoffa’s two years of appealing Big Daddy’s testimony.

Lea’s dad worked on the crew that built the Baton Rouge International Speedway, a NASCAR racetrack renamed the Pelican Speedway just before Big Daddy sold it in the late 70’s. The materials to build the track were free, skimmed from construction sites all over the southeast and trucked to Baton Rouge by Local #5 Teamsters who felt they were part of a team, like Lea’s dad. He adored my grandfather so much that he kept trying to help me with things like a motorcycle and encouraging Lea to get back with me (though she had moved on and said that would never happen.) He was hurt on a job, and Big Daddy represented him for compensation from the company and his family thanks the Partins to this day.

Andy and Timmy’s dad worked for Big Daddy but had the opposite experience. Big Daddy was known as a brute, and anyone who spoke against him or his policies was beaten so badly they never spoke out again. One of the best known examples was plastered across the news when Big Daddy was charged with stealing $450,000 in cash from the Local #5 safe; the safe was found empty at the bottom of the murky Comite River near one of his houses where my dad and I were living at the time, and the two Teamsters who reported him to authorities were discovered bloody and beaten a few days later; the survivor refused to testify, but a jury still found Big Daddy guilty of embezlement; and though the bloody witness didn’t press charges, prosecutors charged Big Daddy with obstructing justice by influencing a witness. That was soon after Hoffa vanished, and Bobby Kennedy had long since been shot and killed by the redundantly named Siran Siran, so the Partin protection was gone and prosecutors dusted off old grievances. Other charges rolled in, and that’s when Big Daddy was finally convicted and sent to federal prison in 1980 for a range of charges that included embezzlement, racketeering, and obstructing justice.

Baton Rouge was a small city of around 150,000 people and only a handful of public schools, and I had known Andy and Timmy since before Big Daddy went to prison and then throughout middle school. They never told me why they seemed to hate me so badly, and I never asked, but they spent two years in the early 80’s tormenting me. Both were older and bigger and fans of television’s professional wrestling, and they’d grab me and practice moves on me in gym class. Their accent was less Cajun and more generic southern, so they pronounced my last name like the country singer Dolly Parton, not the French way of pronouncing i’s like a’s and skiping r’s, Pah’tan. After they snuck into a theater to see Dolly and Burt Reynolds star in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” a rated R film that wouldn’t have allowed them in even if they were emancipated, they realized that I had the same last name as Dolly Parton and they began calling me Dolly. It stuck and then spread, and most kids called me Dolly until Ben and Todd introduced me to the wresting team as Magik in 1986. Being friends with Ben and Todd, plus being related to the man who brought us Everybody’s All American, led to me no longer being picked on by anyone; though the twins kept calling me Dolly.

At first Andy and Timmy mocked me when I started wrestling, especially after I lost all of my matches in 10th grade and did nothing for the team. But when I came out again my junior year they changed their minds and became something like mentors, helping me with technique and encouraging me to lift weights to be less scrawny. At the end of my junior yer nominated me for Most Improved Wrestler – which I would end up winning – and suggested to the team that I’d make a fine captain, which led me to being co-captain.

They said calling me Dolly was like a Boy Named Sue and Hillary Clinton, it made me stronger. I doubted that was true, and wished they’d stop hollering “Dolly!” whenever I stepped on the mat.

Ben and Todd’s dad didn’t work for Big Daddy, but their mother knew him. She, like most teachers, looked up to him and relied on his support of the teacher’s union. In the 1964 Life magazine spotlight on my family, they chose photos of Big Daddy walking along a teacher’s picket line, telling the governor to support them or the Teamsters would join, and state newspapers cited how he handed out cash to teachers who were loosing pay but didn’t have cash reserves in their union like he did. Every one of my teachers since kindergarten knew who I was or at least that I was somehow related to Edward Partin, which was feasible in the 150,000 or so people in Baton Rouge and fewer than a dozen Partins in the phone book, and because my great-uncle, Joe Partin, was the principal of Zachary by then and the Broncos were at every city tournament. Even though I didn’t look like my grandfather or Joe or the other Jason Partin, after Big Daddy went to prison the rumor spread that I was related to him as quickly as the moniker Dolly spread after The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas came to town.

The referee probably new none of that, and he probably didn’t notice the shouts of Dolly! as he spoke. He finished talking and we left the mat, and about fifteen minutes later the 103 pound finals began. I walked away to warm up when the 121 pound match to warm up.

I always warmed up for ten to fifteen minutes if practical. I had read in one of Coach’s magazines that warming up for ten to twenty minutes  ransistioned your body to burning fat, which was more efficient for a long day than using muscle glycogen. In my experience that was true, so I tried to get my heartbeat up and a develop a thin bit of sweat on my arms. After the 121 pound match would be a 129 match between people I didn’t know well, so it could go anywhere between a quick pin and sudden-death overtime for a maximum of eight minutes. Clothodian Tate would be next 136 pounds, and Clodi was undefeated that year pinned his finals opponent in the first round at the Robert E. Lee Invitational, so it was realistic to assume he’d do it again. Jeremey would be up at 142. He had defeated his opponent before and they usually went all six rounds, but you never know for sure what the future will hold.

I wore headphones and skipped rope while listening to a mixtape that included songs from the 1985 Vision Quest soundtrack. I didn’t add Madona’s slow song, “Crazy for You,” because it didn’t help me with motivation or rhythm, but I picked songs like the slow but deeply moving “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider and the perky “Hungry for Heaven” by Rio, songs that played in when Lauden skipped rope or ran.

I added hard rock songs from my limited cassette collection or the local radio station’s Heavy Metal Hour played late at night, where they played entire albums without commercials so kids could record it. A few were from bootleg tapes bought in Little Saigon. My playlist included “Panama” from Van Halen (it was on the tape before I saw the 82nd play it in Panama for President Noriega), “Battery” from Metallica’s Master of Puppets album, “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister, “Bang Your Head” by Quiet Riot, and enough other songs to fill a 60 minute cassette.

Big D, our heavyweight and a cheerful beat boxer in the spirit of The Fat Boys, helped me make a new version at the beginning of season that included new electronic jams that I had never heard before but helped me skip rope more quickly, like “Don’t Stop the Rock” by Freestyle, “Supersonic” by JJ Fad, and “Push It” by Salt ‘n Peppa. Big D laughed about me not having rhythm, and would do better against schools like Capital if I learned, the same way Sylvester Stalone learned from Apollo Creed’s trainers in Rocky III. He contributed a new, 90 minute extended play cassette and I had been using that tape since the Belaire Christmas tournament. With Big D’s additions and input, the tape alternated songs to with a pattern that I used to change how I skipped rope, speeding up or slowing down, crossing hands or bouncing on one foot, or whatever seemed to fit the beat.

Clodi won by pin in the first round. Jeremy’s match began. Lunatic Fringe began during his second round, and late in the third round my Walkman began playing “Don’t Stop the Rock.” I sped up my pace the fastest of all songs and I criss-crossed my hands and alternated bouncing on each foot to the rhythm:

Freestyle’s kickin’ in the house tonight

Move your body from left to right

To all you freaks don’t stop the rock

That’s freestyle speakin’ and you know I’m right.

da, da, da-tada-da-ta

da, da, da-tada-da-ta

da, da… tada-da-ta

At the final tada-da-ta of each chorus, I crisscrossed the rope double-time to pass under my feet twice on each jump, just like Lauden in Vision Quest. I kept one eye on Jeremy’s match and one on my heartbeat and breath; I was silent when I warmed up, but I kept my breath slow so that I could have held a conversation while skipping rope, another technique I learned from the magazines on Coach’s desk.

Jeremy won by three points. I pushed the stop button on the Walkman before the ref raised his hand and trotted to the empty chair beside Coach. I took off my hoodie and handed the Walkman and jump rope to Little Paige, our 103 pounder who had lost both matches on Saturday but showed up on Sunday to support his team, just like I had my first year. Jeremy took his seat next to Coach. A handful of Bengals in blue hoodies gathered about ten feet behind them, between our corner and the first row of bleachers. The Abrams brothers and Lea and the twins were behind them, a few rows up. Mixed in with the crowd’s applause for Jeremy I heard cheers for Magik and Dolly.

I put on my headgear and turned to the mat. Paige handed Jeremy a towel and stepped aside so he could sit next to coach. The scoreboard above the bleachers chimed and the bright orange neon letters spelled out my name and Belaire, and Hillary’s name and Capital. The timer reset to zero, and the ref motioned us to the mat.

I trotted to the center and stood there shaking my arms and moving my legs to stay warm. I was so surprised to see Hillary trot onto the mat without his facemask that I stood up straight and looked up to see if this were really our match. I shook my head to detach from the scoreboard and got back into stance to face him; it was a brief loss of focus, but understandable because of the shock of seeing Hillary’s face. I had seen his face many times at captain’s meetings and at the state capital, but had only seen him wrestle with the mask. He had worn it for all matches that weekend and it didn’t matter why he wasn’t then; I quickly returned to stance and prepared to wrestle.

I had once pondered if Hillary had an easily bloodied nose and didn’t want a match called and break his undefeated record, or if he simply wanted to intimidate people. I never learned, but I tried wearing a hockey mask to wrestle once, after Hillary crossfaced me so hard in November that my nose bled profusely and I was forced to forfeit the match. It was just like Lauden’s only loss in Vision Quest, and I guessed Hillary wore the mask because his nose bled. I borrowed a hockey mask from one of the other two wrestlers who wore one and sed it in one match; it was horrible in ways I couldn’t describe back then, and I never did wore one again. I had a few more nosebleeds, but nothing that shoving cotton up wouldn’t stop well enough that I could keep wrestling.

Later that year, I’d learn more why a mask bothered me so badly. In basic training, we wore a full face mask and were gassed with it on and then made to take it off in a room obscured by clouds of tear gas, just to to see us cry and vomit and develop conviction that it worked, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as when I’d be with the 82nd in the first Gulf War, coincidentally serving with the guys who had jumped into Panama. We were  deep in the desert and on the front line facing Saddam Hussein’s 400,000 soldiers and their arsenal of mid-range SCUD missels armed with chemical weapons, and every day before dawn and leading up to dusk we donned a full face mask with chemical protection filters and a full body suit despite the 117 degree heat. There’s a lull in wind before the sun rises and heats up the desert, and another lull when it sets and the desert rapidly cools off; that lull is when chemical agents are usually used, because that’s when they linger and do the most damage and set up a tank attack the way snapping a wrestler’s head sets up a shot.

We fought some of the first battles in those suits and dripped sweat as badly as when I wore plastic bags to run up and down the capital steps, but it wasn’t the heat that bothered me, it was the restricted field of view, the challenge of breathing slowly, and the same sense of panic I felt wearing a hockey mask to wrestle. It turns out that I’m slightly claustophobic; the ineffable feeling I felt in high school was mild panic, an inability to focus and a strong desire to rip off the mask and gasp for air.

I learned to focus despite the mask, but I never felt comfortable wearing one and I never learned why Hillary wore his all season, or why he decided to stop wearing it that match and wouldn’t don it again that season; like I mentioned, it didn’t matter at that moment, and in a few months I’d have things more important to ponder, and even my match against Hillary would fade into an old memory. But on that day, 03 March 1990, nothing mattered other than allowing my breath to settle and focusing on wrestling whomever was in front of me.

The referee stood beside us as we put our lead feet on the line and faced off. He asked us to slap hands, a handshake of sorts but without tempting someone to grasp a hand and try to cheat, start wrestling too soon, or grasp firmly and try to intimidate an opponent. He stood back with his whistle in his mouth and his hand raised. He paused; in the corner of my eye I watched his chest, looking for telltale signs of him compressing his lungs to exhale and giving me a fraction of a second advantage, but mostly I just watched Hillary’s hips; that was more advice from Coach, who said that the Russians were masters of setting up shots and throws by tapping your forehead or yanking your head, getting you to focus on their hands or faces rather than their bodies.

“Where someone’s hips go, they go,” Coach said.

Focus on their hips and don’t get distracted by their hands or face; it’s hard to do, which is why it took practice until it became as much of a habit as any move. I relaxed as best I could and focused on Hillary’s hips while my gaze absorbed everything around me; that was a tip from Todd, who said his Ku Kempo sensai taught him that and called it “lazy eyes,” meaning you see things but don’t focus on them. The example he used was from Aikido, a physical form of Buddhism, and the Zen masters who would catch students so focused on meditating that the maters could sneak up on them and whack them with a stick and tell them to develop lazy eyes; though Todd had left the team, he never stopped being my teammate. I kept lazy eyes but focused relentlessly on Hillary’s hips.

The referee dropped his hand and blew his whistle without any hint of it coming, and both Hillary and I were in motion before the whistle’s sound waves reached the top bleachers. We collided so hard that the Baton Rouge High gym rafters rattled; Lea would tell me that she gasped so loudly at the force of our impact that she was surprised I didn’t hear her.

Hillary and I fought for control, chest to chest and so close our breath hit each other’s faces. We kept our arms tight by our sides to reduce gaps for throws, and tried to snake hands between the other person’s bicep and ribs to gain an advantage. Every muscle was firing on full throttle, and we were quickly drenched with sweat and sucking air in and out in deep breaths.

Hillary kept a tight stance and got in closer to me, using his shorter height to stay low and keep his center of gravity below mine. His hand shot up and behind my head, yanking hard and trying to set me up for a throw; but Coach had taught me how to defend against that.

“Don’t be a headhunter,” he said.

“Use that moment to your advantage,” he continued, “just don’t grab their head because you don’t know what else to do.”

He never told us what to do – that was unique to each person and each moment in a match – he just wanted us to not act mindlessly. You can’t wrestle your best if you’re locked in useless habits, and Coach knew that loosing bad habits was harder than gaining new ones, so he simply told us to not be headhunters and focus on what we could do. I didn’t know what I would do, but I had been defending throws enough to subconsciously not react to Hillary’s effort to lock heads, where his strength and lower center of gravity would easily throw me.

Hillary yanked down and forwards and I allowed my head to go, but I simultaneously swooped my hips lower and closer to Hillary, dropping below his center of gravity while his hand was stretched towards my head and swinging my hand into his crotch for a perfect high single. I followed through with my whole body and turned my gaze to the sky, ready to step up and take Hillary off his feet. I felt the weight of his leg in my arms and knew it had broken contact with the mat.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. Hillary was faster than I was and was seeded first because he was the best wrestler in Louisiana; it wasn’t just brute strength that got him there, he knew his technique and probably practiced as long and hard as I had, if not harder. I don’t know what motivated him, but I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up in a disadvantaged school surrounded by bullet holes from the war that put him there and the people who wanted him to stay there with their segregation rhetoric. Whatever his motivation, his habits were imbedded deep inside and he acted on the same instinct that kept me from being a headhunter. His hand moved seamlessly from my neck to over my arm and into my arm pit, locking my arm in place, and he yanked my arm upwards and slammed his foot down, freeing it from my hold and planting it back onto the mat.

He was free and I was hooked by his arm, about to be thrown. I acted as quickly as he had and squatted back down into what Coach called the pig-slopping stance, a stance you’d use to shovel all day without tiring, one foot forwards and your back straight so that the thighs took all the load. My center of gravity was lower than Hillary’s so I couldn’t be thrown. My arm was still trapped, but it was on the inside like we had been fighting to achieve moment before, so Hillary let go and dropped back into his equivalent of a pig-slopping stance and we circled, panting so hard spittle flew from our lips and landing on the mat between us.

We circled by sliding our feet, keeping both on the mat and never planting all our weight on one. Hillary slowly spiraled closer and I didn’t back away. He tapped towards my head again and I thought I was watching his hips but maybe he moved too quickly, because the next thing I saw was his lower back and I felt my right ankle get snatched by a low single.

I sprawled like my life depended on it. I kicked my legs away from us and forced my chest onto Hillary’s back, but he pulled my ankle closer and closer. My right leg was folded under me and he was bringing his hips closer so that he could finish the takedown. I sprawled and I sprawled again, and then I sprawled again, and Hillary’s head began to lower from the repeated blows against his back and the force of my legs against his strong hands. I sprawled again and his head extended over his hips and his nose poked above my right foot, and that’s when my right hand made a tight fist and I crossfaced Hillary Clinton with the force of God.

His head turned and he was off balance and his grip became useless. I planted my chest on his back and spun my body behind his and my left hand automatically snaked under his left leg and my right hand wrapped around his neck. I clasped my hands with the thumbs held tightly beside the fingers and scored a two-point takedown.

Hillary kicked like… (TO BE CONTINUED)

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