Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part I.5

Partin Reign May be Short-Lived

Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.

‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.

‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’

The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.

“Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.”

New Orleans State Times, 27 January 1968

I knew no history in 1989. I confused Bobby Kennedy with Johnny and Teddy, and President Kennedy’s murder was so old to me it could have been Lincoln. I hadn’t read Malcomn Gladwell’s Outliers yet, nor did I know about the Canadian hockey players being good because they were lucky. I was 16, and I was focused on wrestling, sex, and card tricks, in that order.

If I had anything in obvious abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity. Some people called it persistence, grit, or determination; my mom called it stubbornness, a trait she said I inherited from my dad. I had lost all 13 matches of my brief, three week stent of wrestling in the 10th grade, the year after my dad went to prison and I was floundering to adapt to school again. I began my junior year, the year of LSU’s earthquake game, not much better. But, by the end of the 1988-1989 season I was ahead 75 wins to 36 losses.

That’s twice the number of matches most kids have because of how tournaments run. You must loose twice to be eliminated, and the highest seeded wrestlers begin by competing against the lowest seeds to reduce the likelihood of an upset and increase the chances of the two best wrestlers meeting in finals and having more exciting matches for spectators. In a way, that’s a version of the Matthew Effect, because the better you are the easier your first few matches are at each tournament and the higher your ranking becomes. For those of us who populated the losers bracket, we began in the top bracket against the best but would start over anew in the bottom bracket, where we’d claw our way towards third-place finals.

A year of fighting in the loser’s bracket was like putting in 10,000 hours of work; all you had to do was show up and be persistent.

As a result of my tenacity, the team voted me as co-captain. Most other teams picked the most winning wrestler, and Belaire was unique in having the only co-captains in Louisiana. Our other co-captain was Jeremy Gann, our 140 pounder and a returning silver medalist in state; he, too, was a senior and this was both of our final seasons.

Belaire was the only school in Louisiana with co-captains. Not even Coach had heard of one nationally, and he wouldn’t see it again until LSU dusted off their wrestling program in 1994 as a club sport. They would use the same voting system Coach used with Belaire, a ranked choice system similar to how coach’s vote for Most Valuable Player and how, as of 2020, two states have tried implementing into their voting system. Most Valuable Players seem to please everyone, whereas binary, winner-take-all systems frustrate 49% of the voters. In Coach’s system, the team wrote down their top five choices. Regardless of the winner, no one felt slighted, and everyone had at least one of their top five choices as captain.

We voted for next year’s captain. At the end of the 1989 season, everyone except Jeremy and me ranked Jeremy and me as either #1 or #2; I ranked Jeremy #1 and didn’t rank myself, and Jeremy only voted for himself and no one else. A vote for first was five points, a vote for second was four, and so on. When added up, Jeremy and I were tied.

“Hmmph,” Coach said, staring at the results with his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose.

“What a minute,” he told us, and checked the math.

“Well,” he said. “It looks like a tie. Never seen that before.”

To put that in perspective, when Coach was voted USA Wrestling’s Man of the Year, one commentator, himself a revered collegiate coach, said of Belaire’s Coach: “Coach Dale Ketelsen has forgotten more than most of us will know about the sport of wrestling.” He said that lovingly, not knowing Coach would eventually pass from Alzheimer’s with his memory failing, but the point was that if there had been co-captains in the history of wrestling, Coach would have known about it.

“So be it,” he said. “Jeremy and Magik will be co-captains.”

Just like that, Belaire became an outlier.

Both Jeremy and I lived near Belaire High School, about twenty miles southeast of downtown. Other than wrestlers, no one I knew ventured near Capital High. Their gym wasn’t large enough to host a tournament, but they proudly dubbed their small nook the Lion’s Den and hosted around three or four dual meets every season. Over a few years, most Baton Rouge wrestlers would have stepped into the Lions Den at least once. I was there for the first time in November of 1989, and that was the first time I stepped on the mat to face Hillary Clinton.

Wrestling mats are split into three hefty segments that take a small team to unroll. Like a lot of schools, including Belaire, wrestlers shared a gym with the basketball team. Every day, small schools with shared gyms spent the beginning of practice unrolling the mats, taping the seams, and mopping them with fungicide; and the end of practice, teams cleaned and re-rolled the mats to clear the floor for the next day’s gym class. Capital’s mat stood out because their wrestling mat was a faded and duct-taped purple and gold mat donated after LSU’s team disbanded in 1979, when the Title IX law required equal numbers of males and females in collegiate sports, and about 100 wrestling teams nationally were rolled up and put away, never to be seen again.

Baton Rouge was different. Overnight, we had a surplus of expensive wrestling equipment and dedicated coaches. Capital and Belaire High were two lucky benefactors of Title IV, because both of our programs began in 1980. “One person’s loss is another person’s gain,” is probably an old saying for a reason.

The first I thing I saw when our team walked into the Capital High gym was a hand-painted sign above the doorway, large gold letters against a black scroll that said Welcome to the Lion’s Den. Inside, tufts of asbestos dangled from their rafters. The walls were painted maroon to match their singlets and warm-up hoodies, and students had painted over the maroon with gold and green murals of lions and kings with crowns. The maroon paint was so faded it was a close approximation of LSU’s deep purple mats, and the residual gold lettering somewhat matched Capital’s murals.

Like most wrestlers I knew, I first thought the Lions were paying tribute to the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade, because we had no exposure to Ethiopia and the Lion of Juddah before then. By the senior year and after much speculation, I thought they were modeling the lion’s den from the Book of Daniel. That made sense, because wrestlers, like Daniel, fasted before facing a pack of lions.

Hillary led the pack. The Lions trotted onto the mat to warm up in a line that began with their 103 pounder and ended with their 275 pound heavyweight, like a line of purple hooded Russian Matryoska dolls, but with their 145 pounder placed in front. He wore his maroon hoodie low over forehead, and his dark face was hidden in the shadow.

The Lions remained eerily silent as they trotted onto the old LSU mat and jogged in a circle while stomping their feet in unison. Every team had its own warm-up ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the contrast of their vocal silence against the musical echo of their feet echoing in the gym. Their foot pattern mimicked a funky rhythm in the style of popular performers from the 70’s and 80’s, like James Brown or George Clinton, and as they circled they stomped the mat harder with their left foot on every forth step, like the 1 of a 4 step beat: ONE two three four, ONE two three four… The echos reverberated in the small enclosed room and we could feel the beat in our chests while we waited our turn to warm up.

The Lion’s spectators filled their relatively small set of worn wooden bleachers and stomped their feet on the one beat with Hillary and his team. They were mostly parents and relatives who rented cheap houses once built for the middle class after WWII, or in eight-unit, two story, rectangular brick apartments built with dark red bricks after I-10 was built. Regardless of wher they lived, the murals spoke to them and they radiated more pride than any suburb school I knew.

The bleachers would shake and rattle every time they stomped on the one beat. Loose screws would squeak, and flakes of paint would fall from the bleachers and land on the gym floor. No one seemed to notice the derelict stands other than visiting teams, who were more used to modern gyms without asbestos and quiet spectators. Even Belaire, which pleaded for more state funding and filled math and science teaching positions with untrained Teach For America volunteers, was Eden in comparison to Capital High.

When the Lions finally stopped circling and sprawled into a tight circle, they landed with their faces close together on a silent cue none of us heard. The spectators calmed down and gave the team a moment of silence, and Hillary spoke so softly that I never heard what he told his team as they prepared for battle. For about two minutes, the den became a church; there’d be no stomping or squeaks from the stands, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat.

When it was Belaire’s turn, we pulled up our blue hoodies and trotted onto the mat silently and without being synced. Jermey led, I was second, and about 22 Bengals followed in whatever order worked out that day. Around six were Red Shirts, a program Coach adopted from football that let kids not eligible for wrestling because of grades or a disciplinary action agains them still practice and walk onto the mat with the active team; when a Red Shirt’s probation was lifted, they’d have to compete for whichever weight class they wanted.

We split into two groups like a flock of birds following two leaders. Jeremy yined and I yanged, and every time different Bengals followed us.

We warmed up by jogging onto the mats and circling for about two minutes, separating into groups of three to five, and practicing standard wrestling drills in slow and meticulous motions. That was partly Coach’s influence, who said that doing ten pushups in perfect form helped more than many more rushed and unfocused. We did single leg shots, doubles, stand ups, and sprawls; they were the building blocks of any great wrestler.

After warming up and sitting in our corners and in the bleachers behind our corners, both teams watched as I stepped onto the mat with Jeremy and we met Hillary in the center. The referee spoke softly to us and reminded us to wrestle fairly. Jeremy and Hillary slapped hands in a modified handshake to show the spectators we would take the message back to our teams.

Every individual warms up for their match however they prefer, and Hillary and I warmed up almost identically to each other. Both of us took longer than most wrestlers, walking away when the 136 pound match began. We began whipping our arms around our chests and stepping up and down as if we were climbing steps or hiking a steep Ozark mountain. Then we shook our heads and hands and feet faster, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly. Hillary did jumping jacks and swuat thrusts, I jumped a rope; both of us were trying to slowly built up a thin sheen of sweat. I had read about transitioning from burning glycogen to burning fat in one of Coach’s training books, but it was experience that led me to feel the difference and believe what I was doing helped me wrestling better; I never asked why Hillary did it.

When it came time to compete, he took off his sweatshirt and donned his light brown hockey mask, like the one worn by Jason in the 1980’s Friday the 13th slasher films. It wasn’t an actual hockey mask, it was an wrestling mask for kids who competed with a broken nose. A hockey mask is rigid and covered in holes, but a wrestling mask is padded to be soft on the outside and has only two holes for eyes and one for the mouth, but it looked so much like a hockey mask that we all called it one. The analogy with Jason the slasher was apt because, like Hillary, he also never spoke and showed no mercy. Only two other wrestlers in the state used it. His nose wasn’t broken like theirs was, but the mask protected him from crossfaces and, I suspect, added to his reputation as a silent killer on the mat.

The ref called us and we trotted over and stood in the center and slapped hands to begin our match. The referee blew his whistle, and Hillary pinned me 22 seconds later.

I had shot first, but he sprawled and crossfaced me and spun behind, then drove my face into the mat and threw in a half-nelson in one fluid motion. My shoulders touched the mat at the same time, and the referee slapped the mat beside my head. The applause was deafening as we stood in the center with the referee holding Hillary’s hand up in the air. I returned to our corner and supported my team.

I don’t recall the overall team score, but Capital won about 70% of the matches. Jeremy, who had won second in state the year before, pinned his opponent in the third round. The other two notable wins were, coincidentally, the only two African Americans on Belaire’s team, our 135 pounder hilariously named Michael Jackson, who had lost to Jeremy for 140 and cut a hard five pounds to make 135, and our 275 pounder named Dana Miles and nicknamed Big D (there was never a desire to nickname Michael Jackson), who had to sweat off around 10 pounds to make weight (he was in remarkable condition despite his bulk).

Coach drove us back to Belaire in the school’s old blue Chevy passenger van. Everyone joked with each other and talked about what they’d do differently next time. I sat silently, nursing a sore nose with the blood-stained hand towel Jeremy handed me after my match. It was supposed to be for wiping off sweat between rounds, if we lasted that long. I had sweat more warming up than in the 22 seconds it took Hillary to pin me; it had happened so fast that no one but me noticed that my nose was bleeding a little bit when I sat back down.

I ran my tongue across my front teeth and thought that at least I didn’t have to wear a mouth guard any more; that was one thing to be grateful for.

I pondered going up to 154, but that was Micheal Jackson’s weight and he had to cut down to make it, so it’s unlikely he’d fill my spot. Without someone at 145, we’d loose team points.

I considered dropping down to 140 and forcing Jeremy to compete at 145. But, I thought. It will be a while before I can beat Jeremy. I knew I would, eventually, because I put in more hours of practice than he did. But, I thought, if I were going to put in extra effort to defeat Jeremy, my own teammate, I might as well shoot for Hillary see how that goes.

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into; but, in hindsight, I’m happy how things turned out.

Like a lot of us, Hillary had to sweat off a few pounds before each match. He would drape a black plastic law bags over his torso and run up and down the 34 flights of steps inside Louisiana’s new state capital building, a downtown edifice that was Capital High’s namesake. It was, and is, the tallest building in Baton Rouge and an icon of our city, the tallest capital building in America when I was a kid and an architectural gem, toured by architecture students from other states who read about it in their books.

The new Louisiana built at the same time great-Grandpappy Grady left Grandma foster, when the depression made labor and materials cheap, It was the pet project of Governor Huey Long, Louisiana’s Kingfish, who had allocated the funding before the stock market crashed and therefore had unfathomable wealth to build his memorial, not unlike an Egyptian Pharaoh building a pyramid for people to bear witness for thousands of years.

The ornate phallus made the Washington monument look pale in comparrison. It’s the second tallest flight of stairs you could run up in all of Louisiana. The first is inside of LSU’s Tiger Stadium, which was, and is, more of an icon than the capital. Seeing our stadium from atop the towering obelisk that is our capital building was a highlight of tours.

Practically every kid in Baton Rouge toured the capital in middle school, where we’d learn about the Kingfish and how he built the new capital. It was on the original grounds of Louisiana State University, called “The old war school” because it trained southern officers to fight in the civil war. A few teachers called that war “The war of northern aggression,” some as a sarcastic joke and others as a lingering belief made stronger by the pockmarks on downtown buildings and tombstones from northern bullets, and from cannon balls on display that had been launched from northern warships on the Mighty Mississippi River, only a football field away from the old war school and the cannons that defended it, but had bounced off the iron clad ships with less damage than I inflicted on Hillary our first match.

They passed the old state capital on their way to Saint Francisville, which was named after the patron saint for kindness to animals by slave owners who didn’t see the irony. To this day, you can visit the graves of a few northern soldiers in Saint Francisville cemeteries, done during breaks in battles between officers who were Masons and more loyal to that than the blue and gray uniforms they wore. But the ships didn’t linger in Baton Rouge long enough to bury the dead. In my day, the most notable memorials were trinkets with the rebel flag for sale in nearby stores that said: “Heritage, not hate.”

Like most kids, we didn’t think much about what we saw other than having a day away from classrooms to enjoy being outdoors in springtime. I don’t know what Capital high kids thought. Most schools toured in Mardi Gras season, which lasted an entire month each spring and shifted dates depending on when Easter fell. Everyone wanted to get outside when the typically muggy southern Louisiana weather was still mild. The landscaped state capital grounds would be ablaze with red azaleas, and the air would be filled with the sweet sent of jasmines, and we’d walk past those fragrant gardens, poke fingers in bullet holes, peek at the old war school, and tromp up the 49 outside steps, one step for each state in the union when the capital was built. At the top, at least one kid would turn around and toss his hands up like Sylvester Stallone did on the steps of Philadelphia’s capital in the first Rocky film.

Once inside the tower, we’d split into groups of about eight kids and squueze into the ancient elevator and ride to the top. Those of us who waited stood by the mural of then U.S. Senator Huey Long being shot at point-blank range in front of the elevator, and of Long’s bodyguards shooting the alleged gunman, a Baton Rouge man named Carl Weiss upset about Long manipulating voting districts to shape democracy, a practice adhered to today called Gerrymandering. The killer’s corpse had almost 60 bullet holes, and some people believe Long, who only had one bullet hole, was shot not by Weiss, but by an overzealous bodyguard in the chaos.

Long died in 1935 at the beginning of his presidential bid against incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who incorporated many of Long’s ideas into The New Deal after winning his reelection. We were told that Huey Long was the first senator assassinated; the second was Bobby Kennedy, who was shot and killed in 1968. Coincidentally, Bobby was also at the beginning of his presidential bid. His assassin, the redundantly named Sirhan Sirhan, was captured alive, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. He’s still sits there to this day, his role in history long forgotten.

President John F. Kennedy, as everyone knew back then, was shot and killed on 22 November 1963, allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native who had trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee. Like The Kingfish’s alleged assassin, Oswald was shot and killed and never stood trial, and both cases were as riddled with flaws as Carl Weiss was riddled with bullets. In the only trial against someone for President Kennedy’s assassination, the one by New Orleans attorney general Jim Garrison against New Orleans businessman and CIA operative Clay Shaw, Garrison claimed to have a black and white photo from a few months before the murder of Big Daddy, Oswald, and Oswald’s assassin, former Teamster Jack Ruby. The witnesses and the photo vanished before the trial, and Big Daddy’s role was omitted from Garrison’s book and the 1992 Oliver Stone film based on it, JFK; that film was strategically released the summer of 1992 during the election between Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and incumbent president George Bush Junior, sparking voters to demand that if Clinton won he’d release the inexplicably still classified JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report.

Teachers didn’t know what the report would eventually say, but they’d tell us tidbits about the Kingfish and similar parts of history they did know while we waited for the elevator. I went on that tour with three different schools and teachers, so it stuck in my mind more than the lessons I mostly ignored in class, despite barely listening to the teachers ramble on while we waited for the elevator. Like most kids, I was more interested in the bullet holes. We couldn’t finger them because a plexiglass sheet protected them, but we’d stand beside them and the mural of Long’s last moments while we stood, bored, and waited for up to half an hour for our turn in the ancient and slowly creeping elevator. Had I known then what I know now, I would have taken the stairs.

From atop the capital we could see all of the world. We stood in a crow’s nest with six metal telescopes bolted to the edge that only cost a dime to use and were next to a sign pleading for people to not toss pennies over the edge. Even without them we could see for dozens of miles along the meandering Mississippi River and across the flat forests between us and New Orleans. About three miles upriver was Tiger stadium, nicknamed Death Valley, the fifth largest college stadium in the world and probably the most unique; the outside looks like apartment buildings because it is.

Huey Long loved the old war school and he drained the swamps near downtown to build the modern LSU campus and model it after a quaint Italian town, but with massive sprawling stately oak trees with undulating branches draped in grey Spanish moss, a signature tree of southern Louisiana that were planted like lines of soldiers around the main parade field. If you’ve heard politicians say they want to “drain the swamp,” some could be referring to Long’s push to make a new LSU worthy of his new state capital.

The Kingfish couldn’t get state legislators to fund a new football stadium, but he convinced them to fund dorms for athletes. The dorms he built happened to be in an oval shape, and the inside looked like a Roman colosseum with a football field lined with 80,000 stadium seats against the dorm buildings. One of Long’s brothers owned the construction company that built it, and no one else noticed the inside until it was completed.

Baton Rouge revolves around LSU football. On game day, Death Valley becomes one of the largest cities in Loiusiana. Almost 90,000 fans concentrate on the bleachers after additions were added, and up to thirty thousand tailgaters are outside, clustered around BBQ pits roasting whatever the opposing team’s mascot is, like pigs for the Arkansas Razorbacks and alligators for the Florida ‘Gators. You can smell an LSU home game from miles away.

People said you could see Death Valley from space, a glob of purple and gold specs concentrated in an area the size of a few football fields. It’s impossible to miss from atop the capital building, which, from our perspective, was as high as we could imagine being. Huey Long’s brother, the equally quirky Governor “Uncle Earl” Long, a man committed to an insane asylum while in office and therefore could pardon himself, was so enamored by our capital that when visited Manhattan he flamboyantly told reporters about how tall our capital was, as if the towering skyskrapers behind him didn’t exist. To him, they probably didn’t.

Tiger fans are known for their enthusiasm. Like in the Lion’s Den, fans often jump up and down in Death Valley’s bleachers, syncing with the Tiger marching band’s beat. On 08 October 1988, three days after my 15th birthday, when I skipped the game to prepare for my junior year wrestling season, LSU fans in a sold-out game celebrated a winning touchdown pass against Auburn with so much enthusiasm and for so long that the waves superposed and created a 3.8 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. It was captured by a LSU physics laboratory; the printout is on display in our Geophysics museum, and that game is called “The Earthquake Game” and listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the only human-generated earthquake ever recorded. For all of us as kids, seeing Tiger Stadium from atop the capital was a highlight of our youth. Collectively, we felt the pride for Death Valley that the Capital High fans felt for their Lion’s Den.

Twenty miles downriver from the capital were billowing smokestacks from a row of petrochemical plants at the end of I-110 deemed Chemical Alley. Companies like Exxon, Dow, DuPont, CoPolymer, and many others processed crude oil from our offshore oil rigs and shipped gas and plastics from Baton Rouge using Teamster 18 wheelers that would haul the goods along I-110 and connect with the raised I-10 that created the ceiling of Capital’s neighborhood.

My family was highlighted atop the new state capital in a multi-page focus for Life Magzine’s 15 May 1964 issue. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughter, Luci Baines Johnson, was on the cover, and the Johnson family shared the issue to show America how former they were handling their father’s appointment as president after Kennedy was assassinated. The photo of the Partins atop the state capital showed Big Daddy smiling atop the state capital with his five children: my dad, Uncle Kieth, and Aunts Shannon, Cynthia, and Theresa. He’s showing them Tiger Stadium, and all but my dad are smiling. He’s 10 in the photo; if you look at it and photos of me at that age, you’d think we were the same person, except that I inherited Big Daddy’s smile and he did not.

I-10 crossed the almost mile-wide Mississippi river using The Baton Rouge bridge, a steel truss arch rumored to be lower than federal waterway standards as an intentional act by Governor Long to prevent larger barges from passing upriver, forcing them to stop in the port of Baton Rouge. It was more than petrochemical products crossing the bridge; I-10 stretched from Florida through the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge and all the way to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, connecting international ports like Miami and New Orleans, second in size only to New York’s harbor, to the rest of the country.

I was told that every thing on every shelf in America had spent time in the back of a Teamster’s truck. Teachers told me my grandfather had run the Teamsters like Huey Long had the state, and they did it with the same smile as when they talked about how Tiger Stadium was built. The Teamsters always supported teachers union strikes, threatening to shut down Louisiana’s economy if state legislators didn’t do what Big Daddy asked.

Back in Hoffa’s day, the threat of a national Teamsters strike slamming the American economy to a halt scared senator and future president John F. Kennedy, chairman of the U.S. Labor Commission, so badly that he began focusing on ousting Jimmy Hoffa from power. After Kennedy became president, he appointed his little brother, Bobby Kennedy, a fresh Harvard law school graduate, to be the U.S. Attorney General with only one goal: get Hoffa.

To my teachers, and probably to most of Louisiana, my grandfather and Hoffa were versions of the Kingfish they knew and remembered. They were always excited to have a Partin along on field trips and would ask me about my grandfather. My response always got a chuckle: I pleaded the fifth amendment.

Sometimes, while waiting for the elevator beside Huey Long’s bullet holes to open, I’d see high school wrestlers from the downtown training camp bypassing the elevator and stepping into the stairwell. They’d be dressed in different colored sweats or draped in the big black plastic trash bags we used to collect pine needles in the fall, sweating and yet still running up and down the stairwell steps as if Rocky could have gone inside his state capital building. Unlike every school I knew, they didn’t seem to be part of a team and they were of all races imaginable in our small world: white, black, Creole, and a few Asian. In high school, I’d learn that they wore multi-colored hoodies because they were from different schools and part of the downtown all-city wrestling camp.

From camp, if you walked towards the capital you’d walk the route of northern soldiers during the civil war, and you’d pass churches and tombstones riddled with their bullets; that’s the route wrestlers would take to run the state capital steps. I followed the same route when I became one of those high school wrestlers. Invariably, Hillary would already be at the capital. It’s not cold in Louisiana, snowing only once every decade or so, but we’d all be dressed in layers as if running in Antartica. A few, like Hillary, would add a layer of plastic. The heat and trapped sweat saps your strength, but it’s a balancing game; extra sweat means fewer laps up and down the steps. Only the wrestler knows their balance between an extra layer in one hand versus an extra hour in the other.

Once, I saw Hillary running up and down the steps. His face was hidden in the shadows of his hoodie, and he was wearing plastic bags and spitting into an old 16 ounce Gatorade bottle. He was chewing gum salivate more, shaving off a persistent pound by not swallowing his spit. That probably saved him a few laps up the steps or gave him an extra half hour of sleep.

I never learned his  average weight, but I assume he was around 154 pounds most days. At tournaments, when all weight classes are grouped together so the referees don’t have to adjust the scales every time one of us stepped on, Hillary would toss his gum into a trash can, strip naked, wipe his body dry, and fully exhale before stepping on the scales. The needle would barely move up and down before settling on exactly 145.0 pounds. There wasn’t a gram of anything wasted on Hillary. Even his hair was cut as tightly as an army buzzcut, an uncharacteristic style back then. Never once in two years had he spoken a word in line.

I began my senior year as co-captain of the Belaire Bengals and with 124 matches behind me. After my 22 second loss to Hillary, I was 0-1 for my senior year. I began training even harder. 10,000 hours wasn’t enough to tame that beast, and I had four months until the Baton Rouge city meet to focus. I began the night of my loss, doing extra sets of pushups on the two punching knuckles of my hands, slow and methodical like Coach suggested, focusing on breathing through a swollen and sore nose.

Hillary would defeat me six more times before the city meet, and would bloody my nose every time I shot on him. Had I known then what I know now, I would have grown to tolerate wearing that hockey mask.

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