Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part IV

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

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 the lives of my teammates 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 him with the force of God.

Hillary head turned and he was off overstretched. His arms were useless and his grip was weakened. I planted my chest and did a high-leg low-leg, temporarily turning my back to the mat as I swung my right leg high over myself and planted it behind Hillary, then swinging I my left leg low, under my body, flipping my chest back down and ending up on top and behind him. Instantly and automatically, 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 for the briefest of moments I wasn’t wrestling, I was realizing that I had taken down Hillary Clinton in one of the finest moves in wrestling I had ever accomplished.

Like a boy named Sue’s dad when Sue finally fought him as an adult, Hillary “kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile.” He didn’t actually bite, but he definitely kicked like a mule: hard and in rapid secession. He kicked and he kicked again; if I had sprawled with everything I had, Hillary was kicking with everything he had, and he had more muscle than any opponent I had ever faced. He kicked so frequently that my grip took the brunt of every kick, and he would kick again before I could move my hands away and hobble his leg close to his face. He had a sense of urgency, and with the dicipline to withdraw his leg just enough to be effective and to put all of his quad strength into each kick, again and again and again.

In less than a year, I’d realize that those few seconds on the mat felt like he was kicking 48 times a minute, the rate of a large weapon called a MK-19 (pronounced Mark 19), a grenade launching machine gun so big it sits atop a HUMVEE and fired fist-sized grenades more than a mile away at a maximum rate of 48 grenades per minute. They were old merchant marine weapons, the type John F. Kennedy used in Vietnam, and they’d be shipping to the 82nd to adapt to desert warfare. Each high-explosive dual-purpose grenade could melt through two inches of steel on an armored personnel carrier and explode with a five meter kill radius, and each one launched from atop a heavy HUMVEE filled with three soldiers and weeks worth of food, water, and ammunition would rattle the vehicle and everyone inside of it 48 times a minute. A MK-19’s butterfly handles need two firm hands gripping them, and the only stance that keeps the beast on target when you’re firing is a pig-lop stance, standing through the roof hole of a HUMVEE and leaning into the grips and planting one foot on the floorboard. When faced against a fleet of tanks with more than a foot of armor each and racing towards your vehicle, you hold on to the grips with both hands and let your body absorb the shock of each round, and try to stay focused and and on target as if the lives of your teammates depends on you doing so. That’s what it felt like trying to hold Hillary in a cradle.

At first, Hillary’s kicks were what happens when an unstoppable force hits and unmovable object; but, kick by kick, my sweaty hands began to slip apart. Soon my right hand was clasped only my left ring and pinky finger. He kicked again, and my left thumb slid too far away from my grip to do any good. I clamped down as if someone would die if I let go. All of my mental energy went to my right hand and the muscles it had from six months of crumbling newspapers into tight balls and squeezing handgrips until my fingers trembled. He kicked again, and I felt my ring finger snap; but I held on with my right hand, and he kicked again and broke free and stood up and turned to face me with the speed I had grown to respect. I dropped into a pig slop stance and kept wrestling.

We were face to face again, his strongest position, and his bushy eyebrows furrowed with anger. I had never seen him angry on the mat before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. The referee awarded me two points for a takedown him one point for an escape point. The ref pointed us to our corners. I had lost a chance: people make mistakes when they’re angry.

 I was up 2-1.  I had never be ahead of Hillary before. Someone had to win, and it might as well be me.

Jeremy was beside Coach and ready with a fresh hand towel. I accepted it with my right hand. My left finger was swelling and was a useless plank. I wiped my face and arms; the towel smelled of fungicide, like everything carried in the back of Coach’s truck. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, only to have more pour down my forehead, pool in my eyes, and drip off my nose and chin and splash on the mat by my shoes. I alternated between shaking my limbs to stay limber and dabbing sweat off my face. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. He nodded his acorn-shaped head, briefly showing the bald poking through his whispy grey hair, and stepped back. I kept my focus on Hillary: I wanted to face him while he was still riled and I was calm.

“Vince Lambarti said fatigue will make a coward out of anyone,” Coach told the team a few times a year. It’s why I was in good shape. Coach suggested running cross-country track before wrestling season, which I did, and lifting weights with the football players, which I did. I had won many matches in the third round against better wrestlers because I was in better shape and warmed up before stepping on the mat and controlled my breathing. Some wrestlers would stall by tieing their shoes or checking for a nosebleed, but I always tried to keep going as quickly as possible because it was to my advantage. Teammates learned to stand clear and let me breath.

My breath whooshed in and out through pursed lips while I stared at Capital’s corner, hoping for a glimpse of the strategy he’d apply in our next round. Two of the maroon hooded Lions dried each of Hillary’s arms while he bounced and shook his limbs like a mirror image of me.

I focused on the Lion’s coach. He was a spherical mountain of an African American man who couldn’t squeeze into even the largest of sweatsuits. He had never wrestled, but he had stepped forward and started a team when no one else would. He accepted Coach’s old LSU mats and borrowed some of Coach’s books and magazines, but he didn’t socialize with other coaches and I never learned how the Lions grew so fierce, or how he sparked their self-motivation. I tried to decipher his hand gestures as if listening a foreign language for the first time.

Because The Mountain had never wrestled and the Lions never participated in all-city practices, many of their hand signs were different than any other school I knew. Hillary nodded after every one of The Mountain’s gestures. Coach and Jeremy let me be. My cradle was useless, but there was nothing I could do about it. All that mattered was that my breath stabilized and my heartbeat calmed down. I bounced and shook my arms gently to keep them warm and to maintain a sheen of slippery sweat on my legs, a tiny advantage that no one would consider cheating. The Mountain kept lowering his hand, as if telling Hillary to calm down and focus; or, telling him to shoot lower next time; or, telling him to not shoot. In a few seconds it wouldn’t matter and the possibilities would clutter my mind, so I focused on letting my breaths stabilize by doing nothing and keeping my limbs limber by wiggling them and wiping off sweat though it was like trying to stop a flow of blood with a small bandage.

The referee called to us a few brief seconds later, and I trotted back to the center of the mat. Hillary won the coin toss, and he gave two thumbs up to indicate he wanted us both standing in neutral position. We put one foot forward and faced off. The referee stood poised, whistle in mouth, and raised his hand. I focused on Hillary’s hips.

The whistle blew and we collided again.

He was unfaltered, but I was hesitant to engage with my broken finger, and instead of stepping into his taunts I backed away when I regained stance. We were inching towards the edge of the mat, pummeling hands into each other to gain inside control or defend against an attempt to control us. We were near the edge of the mat, dangerously close to the hard floor and wooden bleachers. I was at risk for stalling.

Hillary hurled himself at my hips and I sprawled, but he was ready and already off to one side and was behind me. He popped into my hips and I felt my feet begin to lift off the mat; I 

Hillary’s bear hug caught me on exhale, when my lungs almost empty, and he instantly threw me in a perfect throw that would have earned five full points in summer freestyle, where Hillary beat even the Jesuit varsity wrestler year after year. A five point throw is the holy grail, a perfect 360 degree arc with the opponents feet off the mat, and I was trapped in mid-air, off my stance, weakened like Antaeus lifted from Mother Earth by Hercules.

Those Russians were right: I was in Hillary’s control, and there was nothing I could do about it until I was on the ground again. The ceiling appeared in my view, and above the bleachers I could see the giant Baton Rouge High scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant neon monster with dozens of small orange lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented, and with a massive countdown timer so that people as far away as Texas could see how many seconds were left in each round. I watched my size 12 Asics Tiger wrestling shoes, old and frayed and worn into a dull and dusty grey color, that once belonged to Craig when he was a 171 pounder and Belaire’s first state champion, lent to me by Coach when my already disproportionately large feet grew a bit more over Christmas.

I watched those shoes fly through the air above my head and in slow motion and creep past the orange neon lights. Hillary and my names and the names of the schools we represented came into view again. They slowly arced back down, inertia keeping them a bit behind my shoulders and hips. I saw faces of fans staring wide-eyed in awe: it was a beautiful throw. Some people, probably those experienced with wrestling, cringed empathetically, because they knew I was about to hit the mat like a meteor crashing into Earth.

Hillary slammed my shoulders to the mat with a thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like. Almost exactly a year later, on 04 March 1991, I would sit behind a MK-19 and watch two C-130’s drop the Volkswagen-sized bombs onto Khamisiya Airport, close enough for shock waves to rattle our Humvees and cover us in dust and sand and debris. It would send a mushroom cloud into the sky that eclipsed the sun, but I would smile, making my platoon think I was calm in the storm when I was actually grateful that I wasn’t wrestling Hillary Clinton again: nothing would ever shock me more than being slammed onto the mat by that beast.

The impact sent a shock wave that reverberated back from the bleachers, and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out. Everything went dark, but my body acted on its own and bridged so quickly that Hillary didn’t get the pin. My feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Tigers flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light after the shockwave dissipated, stared to the trellised roof high above the gym floor. I tried to breathe but could not.

Hillary went onto his toes and put almost all of his 147 pounds onto my chest, though it felt like all of the football team had piled on, too. Not even Yoda could have moved him. Hillary squeezed his massive hairy arms with the patience of a boa constrictor, bit by bit, waiting for the slightest exhale to squeeze a bit more. His tightening was controlled, calm, and deadly, a disciplined and dispassionate sniper who took calculated shots at the peak or valley of breaths. I tried force my right hand between our chests, making a tight fist so that its gnarly knuckles would rasp across his rib cage and cause enough pain for him to loosen his hold, but he only exhaled and pulled himself closer to my spine, compressing my ribs even more. I was burning precious fuel and my bridge began to buckle, so I stopped fighting and focused on saving energy.

I couldn’t move. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock. There was almost a minute left. I could see Coach and Jeremy watching me in silence. Behind them I saw Paige and a gaggle of blue-hooded Bengals violating rules by leaving the bleachers and inching close behind our corner. I didn’t pray. Like I said, I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling, even if wrestling motionlessly and fighting an internal battle. I put everything I had into bridging and waited.

I could feel and see, but no air was coming into my nose for me to smell anything. I couldn’t smell the fungicide, which would have been fresh after the gym was rearranged and cleaned for finals, nor could I smell Hillary. He had held me down seven times that year, and I knew his smell intimately from having been held in a headlock by him several times, especially when he caught me in a head throw at the Robert E. Lee High School Invitational, where his bushy armpit covered my nose and I took in deep breaths for almost thirty seconds before I heard the referee slap the mat and call my pin. His body odor was astringent, like burnt roux at the bottom of a cast iron skillet or black tea burnt on an electric stove. It’s a smell you never forget, and the absence Hillary’s familiar pungency was just as a poignant in my mind.

In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, about half of Belaire’s team gathered to watch, a few of them knowing me since elementary school, when they picked on me and called me Dolly, like the big bosomed country singer Dolly Parton, an inevitable nickname for a kid named Jason Partin. Andy and Timmy were there; they were the burly twins at 189 and 171 pounds who had called me Dolly ever since Big Daddy went to prison, but had nominated me for captain and most improved the year before. They showed up for finals even though they had graduated the year before, which surprised me enough to register despite my fight against being pinned.

But what was most remarkable were the all-city wrestlers from the previous summer freestyle camp, the same ones who wrestled on the all-Louisiana team during summer junior olympics and called me Magik, with a “k” to differentiate it from Magic Johnson or the newly formed Orlando Magic basketball team, which had just stolen Shaquelle O’Neal from LSU. He was seen around town in a custom Mercedes, cut and re-welded six inches longer and taller to host his long legs and torso; it was rumored he wore a size 22 shoe, and Shaq and his shoe size and the Orlando Magic were the talk of Baton Rouge in 1989 and 1990. The all-city wrestlers all wore different colored hoodies to represent their teams, but they were aligned with the sport of wrestling more than any arbitrary school color. None of them had ever called me Dolly.

About six of the all-city wrestlers gathered behind the Belaire guys, all wearing the same white t-shirt over their different colored hoodies. Only Chris Forest, heavyweight for the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, wasn’t wearing one; he couldn’t squeeze his broad torso into an XXL. Next to Chris and two feet shorter was Clothodian Tate, the Bulldog’s captain and 136 pound champion. The summer before, Clodi’s dad, a minister, found the t-shirts in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU, just were it branches off of I-10 and where a few small shops sprouted up under the rumble of Teamster trucks overhead. The shirts were simple white shirts printed with Ephsians 6:12 in an unremarkable font, but the message wasn’t about religion for most of us, it was about wrestling because it said:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

My flesh was out of oxygen, but my body somehow kept wrestling with whatever fuel was left for it to fight against darkness. I began to hear the beginning of “Lunatic Fringe” in my mind, but I was too focused on wrestling to wonder how. The guys in my corner began to fade into one dark grey blur, and the clock became a single spot of fuzzy orange light at the end of my tunneled vision.

In my mind’s ear, Lunatic Fringe transitioned from the opening riff into the slow opening lyrics:

Lunatic fringe
I know you’re out there…

The song at that line, like my energy at that moment, drifted away silently. The acne on my back protruded further than my tight singlet and I could feel the bumps contact the mat and push against my skin. The orange light dimmed and then vanished, but I saw the referee’s blurry face when he slid beside my head with his whistle pinched between his lips, and I felt my skin contact the rubber mat. I heard a whistle and the slap of a hand against the mat, and my vision quest was over. Hillary Clinton had won.

We stood up and the referee raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook the gym more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It was a beautiful throw, and Hillary earned his win. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me at 3:40, twenty seconds to go in the second round, and those records persist in LHSAA.org archives for the world to know that Hillary won the gold, and that Clodi won most outstanding wrestler, which no one argued; had Clodi been fifteen pounds heavier and a couple of years older, he may have beaten Hillary; in two years of practice with Clodi, I never once scored on him.

I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand reached up and clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance now permanent part of how he stood, and he said: “Good job, Magik.”

Jeremy offered me a fresh hand towel. He was a man of few words but of kind actions who never agreed with the team’s decision to make me co-captain, but he stood up and offered the chair next to Coach. Surprised, I accepted the towel and sat down. He had nothing to prove with his gesture; he was the champion, not I. Jeremy stepped behind me and into the corner that was now empty; a quick glance let me see our team back in the bleachers with their parents, and I turned around and sat beside Coach. Another wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.

Later that day, a few of us were helping the Bulldogs clean up their gym. I couldn’t help much, because my finger had a splint from the medic and I had kept a bag of ice from the concession stand on it for an hour or so. Instead, I stared at the blank clock, powered off but still foreboding if only because of it’s bulk handing over our heads. I heard laugher I recognized, and in my periphery I saw Pat, a former Bulldog heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches and Andy and Timmy, who had known Pat from when they all trained at the all-city camp before my time as a wrestler. They were laughing with a small group of other old-timers with Pat, who volunteered at the downtown camp and who, like Chris Forest, couldn’t squeeze into an XXL shirt.

“Hillary stuck Magik so hard,” Pat said in a playful tone, “the only thing he could wiggle was his eyeballs.”

Pat wiggled his eyeballs and everyone laughed; he set up that joke every time someone was pinned. I had seen him do it a million times. I would have laughed again, too, had I not been so focused on the timer. I was thinking about how it faded from my vision, and wondering how I was unable to remember the exact moment I stopped being able to see it. What happened in the ten or so seconds I couldn’t recall? I acted according to my conditioning, but where was I while it was happening?

What do I do now that it’s over?

The laughter dissipated and the gaggle of wresters and coaches parted. In my periphery, I saw Pat’s smile go away. He leaned down and softly asked Coach: “What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all season. It looked like he gave up. Is he okay?”

Coach replied that I had a lot on my mind, and that my grandfather was sick. Coach was a man of few words; Jeremy was loquacious compared to him. He put the reading glasses he kept draped around his neck onto the tip of his nose, glanced down at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to help someone do something.

After he left, Pat glanced towards me. Everyone had seen the news: Edward Grady Partin was released from prison early because of declining health, diabetes and an ambiguous heart condition, and he wasn’t expected to live long. It had been in the paper almost weekly all season, but Pat was caught up in the tournament and had forgotten. He looked away and hustled off to see if he could help Coach.

My grandfather died a week later. I would attend his funeral with my two left middle fingers buddy-taped and Hillary Clinton fresh on my mind, and that’s where I would find the answer to what do I do now that it’s over.

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