Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part III
“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
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“I won’t let Edward Partin and his gangster Teamsters run this state!”
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“[We’re going to arrest Partin] as soon as we get the evidence against him.”
Louisiana governor John J. McKeithen in a series of statements to the New Orleans State Times, circa late 1960’s
I won my first and only gold medal at the Belaire Christmas tournament, a tiny and barely attended event that was an Iowa tradition geared towards kids who viewed their teams as family. After we cleaned our mat and rolled it back up and everyone went home to their families, I snuck back to school and used my key to open the gym and partially unroll one of the mat segments. School and the camp were on a two week break, which gave me two weeks of uninterrupted practice. “The Russians believed that if you took a man off his feet,” Coach told us once. “You controlled him.”
He shrugged because that was obvious, and in a way it is. As usual, there was more to that story. The idea of taking an opponent off their feet was analogous to something I heard in literature class about Hercules wrestling Antaeus, a giant and son of the sea god and Mother Earth, who won by lifting Antaeus off his feet, breaking his contact with the source of strength, and crushing him in a bear hug. In the 1950’s the Soviet Union dominated international wrestling tournaments, and, like Hercules, they focused on deep doubles so they could lift an opponent instead of fighting on the ground with a low single. At one point in wrestling, men just planted their feet and pushed; it took the Russians dominating international competitions to change that.
Coach’s all-American team was in the national spotlight, because it was the height of the cold war. The 1960 Rome olympics were only a year before Barbed Wire Day trapped people in East Germany and the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall, the same year Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs fiasco in an attempt to stop communist influence in Cuba, and two years before the world watched the Cuban missile crisis with fear, expecting the Soviets and the United States to erupt into nuclear war (it was the opposite of rising waters raising all ships, because the two Titans would bring everyone on Earth down with them). The olympics aimed to rise above politics, and Coach and his teammates trained with anyone from any country willing to improve and challenge each other, just like the Baton Rouge all-city camp did.
The dummy only weighted 75 pounds, but after an hour of taking it off its feet again and again I was drenched in sweat and panting. I decided it was time to quit. I dropped face down and did a few sets of pushups, resting only when my arms were wobbly. I probably did around 100 total. We didn’t lift weights during summer to reduce the likelihood of injuries and to not gain any weight, even if it was muscle; instead, we focused on low-weight, high-repetition exercises like pushups.
I rolled over and did around fifty crunches with my legs atop the dummy, then rotated around and used the dummy as a backrest while I sat and let my breath calm down.
I, like most wresters doing well that year, was in remarkable physical condition. A few months later, I’d view the army’s basic training, advanced infantry school, and Airborne school as trivial by comparison to wrestling camp, a sentiment shared by practically every wrestler I met in service. Before the army changed policies in 2025, for an 18 year old to maximize the army’s physical fitness test, you only had to do 71 pushups in two minutes, 78 sit ups in two minutes, and run two miles in under 13 minutes (that’s only a 6 and a half minute mile, much slower than we trained in cross-country track practice). In a two week wrestling camp, we probably did 200 pushups a day, more than any day in eight weeks of basic training, five weeks of advanced infantry school, or three weeks of Airborne school. Being told to “be all you can be” never made much sense to us.
When you’re in good shape, your breath quickly returns to normal, and a few minutes after plopping down on the dummy, I grabbed a mop and bucket of fungicide and wiped my sweat off the mat and used a towel to clean and dry the dummy.
When the mat dried, I rolled up the partially-unrolled mat back up against the other two sections and walked to the office shared by football coaches. I used my keys to open it and go inside, took a shower and changed into dry clothes. I weighed myself on the scale, nudging the balances until the needle centered. I was 144.5 pounds at the end of a long and sweaty day, so even with the two pound allocation I would still have to diet the next three months and probably fast the day before weigh in. I gulped water from the fountain and plopped down in Coach’s chair with a satisfied sigh.
Coach’s desk was littered with USA Wrestling magazines, pamphelts from national teams on the science behind training methods, and framed black and white photos of famous olympians from Coach’s era; one is still famous among wrestlers, and you can search the internet to see the world’s heaviest heavyweight, a 450 pound Russian, with his feet high in the air and being thrown in a perfect 360 degree arc by the world’s lightest heavyweight, a 195 pound midwesterner Coach knew. You see the little guy’s face under the big guys, and his eyes are a unique combination of determination, commitment, and “Oh, no… this is going to hurt.”
He won the match, but was so badly injured that international laws changed to limit heavyweights to what is now 275 pounds. A few other photos were framed here and there, including one with Coach and his Iowa teammates.
I picked it up and looked at a young version of Coach. He hadn’t changed. His head had always shaped like an acorn, flat on top and rounded around the cheeks, and his countenance always radiated calmness. He looked happy, and always had. I put the photo back and opened one of the USA Wrestling magazines talking about new rules, like the one about the relatively new policy of adding two pounds after Christmas so growing kids didn’t have to starve themselves to stay in the same weight class.
I flipped through a few magazines but was still too riled up to read. I rotated around in Coach’s chair and flipped on the television. There were only three televsion stations and one public station back then, and I knew the old black and white school television only picked up two stations, but one of them was bound to have a Christmas special like Rudolf or Frosty. Instead, I turned on the television and was greated by the 82nd Airborne.
The 82nd was and is America’s Guard of Honor, the president’s quick-reaction force and on call 24 hours a day to begin leaving within two hours of being summoned to duty. On 20 December 1989, President George Bush Senior, the vice president under Ronald Reagan and a decorated combat pilot and former director of the CIA, continued Reagan’s war on drugs by calling the 82nd Airborne to parachute into Panama and overthrow President Noriega. Bush’s advisors said Noriega was using his government to funnel drugs into America. In response, a fleet of C-141 Starlifters, C-130 Hercules, and C-5 Galaxies left Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and flew almost 18 hours to Panama. Thousands of paratroopers jumped from the sky into 3am darkness from a mere 600 feet in the air, being shot at as they fell but hitting the ground and overtaking Panama’s air force base within a few hours. A coalition of forces followed and landed at the airport, including Special Forces from the Kennedy Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, navy SEALS from San Diego, and a few Delta Force anti-terrorism commandos, a unit that was rumored to exist after Chuck Norris made a cheesy movie about them called The Delta Force and really did exist in the shadows of Fort Bragg. Worldwide news teams followed, and every television station was focused on President Noriega’s compound and the army of 82nd paratroopers surrounding him and his presidential guard soldiers.
I became riveted, and for the next two weeks I alternated tossing around the dummy and watching news. The 82nd’s goal was to capture Noriega alive, and they were trying to to that by keeping him in his compound and depriving him and his guards of sleep; they did that by flying in giant speakers like you’d see at a rock concert and blaring heavy metal music at the compound 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The soldiers, most of whom were barely adults and would have been unable to buy beer in any state other than Louisiana, chose the tapes, and that’s how I knew I was destined to join the 82nd; they were funny about it, and the two songs reporters kept showing were also the songs played the most, Van Halen’s “Jump!” and “Panama” from their 1985 album aptly titled “1985.”
For 24 hours a day, Noriega had 120 decibels of David Lee Roth’s voice singing Jump! and Panama, louder than a Van Halen concert and like trying to sleep under the roaring engine of a C-141, which, no matter how tired you are, never happens. Of course I didn’t know that yet, nor would I know that I’d soon meet those guys, and they’d tell me that in their aircraft, the rear double doors opened 600 feet over the jungle canopy and hot muggy air wooshed inside and bullets pelted the thin aluminum walls, 74 paratroopers stood with parachutes hooked to a static line and someone slipped Appetite For Destruction into the intercom system and blared Axl Rose screaming “Welcome to the Jungle” as they lept into the night sky; they could hear it over the roar of the engines as they tumbled in air, waiting and praying for their parachutes to open. That never made the news, so all I knew was that I was scheduled to join the 82nd and they were on every channel and I liked their taste in music.
In typical Baton Rouge fashion, the news would switch from international affairs and focus on local events, and in between news about Panama reporters said Big Daddy’s health had plummeted, and they held interviews with Doug and Keith at Local #5 headquarters on Airline Bulevard about the future of Teamsters in Louisiana.
I would turn off the television when my family came on and ponder my delayed-entry contract. I was on track to graduate, and I had even earned all A’s and one B on my midterm report card. But I had broken a few laws. I stole a few snack bars from convenience stores, an old habit I had from when I first started practicing sleight of hand and was making friends by being able to easily steal things no matter how closely convenience store attendants watched. But that was a mindless habit, not really intending to be malicious, unlike when I stole a motorcycle headlight just before season began.
It was an impulse. I had laid down my Ascot in the Little Saigon parking lot, a common accident for new riders who don’t realize that without momentum it’s easy to lay a bike down going slowly and trying to turn too sharply. I picked up the small bike as effortlessly as rolling someone over in the cradle and saw that the light was cracked and the bulb broken, which meant I wouldn’t be able to ride back from wrestling camp at night.
It would have taken me too long to seek and find magic shows, especially now that school was in session for everyone. I remembered seeing an Ascot like mine in the Abrams’s neighborhood, and I made my way there, not planning anything but mindless and wondering what to do about mine. As if preordained, the motorcycle was in their driveway and partially disassembled. Without thinking, I disconnected the light assembly and rode off with it in my lap.
The owner saw my license plate as I drove off, and later that evening police showed up at my mom’s house. I returned the light and the owner chose not to press charges; had he not shown mercy, I would have been charged as an adult and probably gone to jail. Judge Bob had warned me about that, saying that if I did anything like my grandfather or father I’d be tried as an adult, and not even he could help me from his perch in family court. My mom didn’t say much about the police showing up, but she bought me a new headlight and I went back to my routines without thinking much about what happened.
It all came back to me while I was sitting in Coach’s chair over Christmas, watching the 82nd on that old TV. I had almost thrown away my future. But what bothered me the most was not almost going to jail, it was that I’d make the newspaper as a thief who was Belaire’s co-captain. Seeing the 82nd guys interviewed on television sparked that, because they weren’t cited by name they were cited as representatives of The United States armed forces. I thought about how ashamed I felt about being a Partin when my father went to prison and when Big Daddy went to prison, and the first hints of empathy for others crept into my young mind: the Belaire Bengals would have seen their co-captain arrested for stealing. I vowed to better than that hooky army slogan, I vowed to be the type of person who would never embarrass Coach or my team.
But I didn’t start right away. I had already copied his key and broken into the school, and as Coach would say, the horse was already out of the barn. I finished watching the news and came back the next day and the next.
The saga in Panama was covered on both channels daily, interrupting popular shows whenever something remarkable happened. Two Delta Force commandoes and a few SEALS died; the international community commented, some supporting and others condemning; the 82nd kept blaring Van Halen; legal experts argued that the U.S. constitution forbade targeting one person; politicians said the horse was already out of the barn so Noriega should surrender; more legal experts pointed out that the president could only order soldiers away for 30 days without congressional approval; and so on.
At the beginning of 1990 and near the end of 30 days without congressional approval, Noriega finally surrendered and the 82nd returned to Fort Bragg, home of the Airborne and Special Forces command. I learned things like that watching news specials created to capitalize on what was happening. One showed President Kennedy when he was an unknown merchant marine in Vietnam, and it talked about how he tried to keep the number of soldiers in Vietnam down under 55,000 and mostly special forces units that trained other teams, leading to the Kennedy Special Forces Warfare Center, and that it was the Johnson administration that escalated the conflict to more than half a million drafted soldiers. The news commented that after the draft was disbanded in the late 70’s, the college fund increased to try and recruit more soldiers into an all-volunteer force.
I grew to see what I had done in a bigger picture, and I couldn’t imagine not using the 82nd to step into a role with Special Forces or Delta Force. But I didn’t tell anyone my plans; no one knows what the future holds. Instead, I quipped to friends that Noriega was probably the only person who knew the lyrics to Panama better than me and David Lee Roth, but none of them got the joke. Most teenagers were aware of what was happening in the news, but no one I knew watched the news every day over Christas break or had committed to joining the 82nd after high school; it was my first introduction to seeing the world differently than my peers based on our plans for the future and what we watched on television.
School began a few days after New Years and I stopped using the school television. I bent my copies of Coach’s keys with a pair of needle nose pliers, crumbled a few sheets of newspaper around them, and threw the camouflaged keys into a trash can.
I showed up at the first day of practice after the break and helped my team unroll the mat segments. Three of us grabbed an end and rippled the mat to get air underneath and slid it across the floor to near one of the basketball goals. Three other guys brought a segment and laid it beside ours, and another three brought the final segment. Jeremy pulled out a role of clear tape to join the edges, and we all lined up along opposite sides of the edges, planted our feet, clasped hands, and leaned back as hard as we could to bring the edges close together, like how you’d clamp wood together before gluing it. Jeremey crawled between us, laying down tape, and someone grabbed a mop and bucket and wiped fungicide across the mat.
We waited a few minutes for the mat to dry and chatted and laughed and caught up about the holidays; as usual, I avoided personal updates and made jokes instead. We warmed up and I led the team in drills. Usually Jeremy did that, but he was surprised that my throw and double leg had improved so much since the Christmas tournament that I took him down three times in a row, something I had never done before. Everyone wanted to practice, and I walked around the small groups and gave tips. In my mind, I saw the dummy leaning against the football cage, and I thought he looked happy to finally have a break.
Coach walked in after his coach’s meeting, saw what was happening, and smiled and told us to keep doing what we were doing. He walked around and gave tips when appropriate. From that point on, Jeremy and I led practice while Coach gently guided us along the way.
Two months later, I stepped on the mat to face Hillary Clinton.
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