Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part I

“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.

“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“

Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966; Warren was the only one of nine justices to vote against using Edward Partin’s sworn testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa.

I heard that Hillary was born in mid-October of 1971, and that he began kindergarten at age 5. He turned 6 a month later, and was seven by the end of his kindergarten year. By the time we were seniors in high school, was a legal adult, able to vote in elections and to buy beer (possible because Louisiana was the last state to raise the legal age to 21).

He was 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller since the tenth grade. His burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, and his body didn’t waste precious pounds on an otherwise useless extra inch of arms or legs. His thighs bulged with muscles and his lats were wide. To fit into Capital High’s skin-tight maroon wrestling singlet, he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed. His uniform looked like a second skin stretched tautly across his dark chest and thighs, but it hung in loose folds around his stomach unless he was bridging in his signature move, a brutal bear-hug throw worth a full five points in summer Freestyle tournaments, one that would almost always end in a pin for Hillary. He could clamp a bear hug and arc backwards 360 degrees without his feet leaving the ground; at that moment, with his opponent’s feet flying through the air above him, Hillary’s maroon singlet was pulled tautly across his stomach.

Hillary had been shaving since the 10th grade. At tournaments, everyone in the same weight class would stand side by side to weigh in, and referees checked for clean-shaven faces because a few wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive, like course sandpaper. But Hillary shaved his face smooth each morning before competing.

He kept his arm and leg hair natural, and he had Brillo pads for forearm hair and thorny spines for chest hair, but the reason most of us turned our heads when he crossfaced us was not because of the abrasion, but because of the sheer strength of his arms and the intensity and commitment of his actions. If you wore braces, like I did my junior year, his crossface would shred your lips and you’d choke on your own blood while he pinned you.

He defeated me seven times our senior year. At every tournament, I watched him compete against other wrestlers, hoping to learn weaknesses I could use to my advantage. There were none. He was undefeated, and the closest thing Hillary’s body ever came to staring at the ceiling was when he grasped wrestlers with his bear hug and arched his back to throw them over his body and to the mat. He was the best there was at the bear hug, and flocks of wrestlers from other teams would gather to watch him compete. At the Robert E. Lee Invintational, schools from as far away as Texas, Florida, and Oaklahoma came to Baton Rouge to compete in Lee High’s annual tournament. Mostly, those schools were there to face the Jesuit High Bluejays, a New Orleans institution with three levels of teams, a dedicated wrestling room with two mats, and banners laced around their ceiling with state title championships dating back to what seemed like Napolean’s days in Louisiana. But Hillary dominated even the Bluejay 145 pounder.

Every school wore it’s own color and gathered in groups to watch the finals matches, where we could all learn something. No one noticed, or at least no one commented on, the obvious effects of segregation that led to teams that were either mostly caucasian or mostly African Americans competing at Robert E. Lee High, one of many schools in the south named after the confederate army’s celebrated general. Hillary and his team wore dark maroon hoodies, and they stood in silent solidarity during every tournament.

For three years, Hillary had been captain of the Capital High Lions, a 100% African American school located near the downtown state capital building. The surrounding homes were Capital neighborhood, once a nicer area near downtown and the port of Baton Rouge. Like a lot of downtowns back then, interstate cut through and over Capital and a center of perpetual poverty that didn’t look much different than small towns had looked 100 years before.

It’s no wonder he scowled.

I was the opposite. I was born on 05 October 1972. I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, when I was only four years old. I was always the youngest, smallest kid in class. Had I been born a few days later, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and would have been pushed back a year. If that had happened, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16. I would have been 18 my senior year, and able to vote and buy beer like Hillary; and, knowing what I know now, I would have been 5’11” and weighed around 190 lean pounds. Instead, I began my senior year as a 16 year old, 145 pound, 5’5″ tall, mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands, long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet. I usually wore a sly grin, though that’s more of a facial feature I inherited from Big Daddy; our cheekbones are high and pull up on the corners of our mouths, making it look like we’re smiling even when we’re not. I was a happy teenager, and my smile was usually genuine.

I had yet to hit my final growth spurt, and I epitomized the gangly years of a growing teenager. My toes were bulbous monstrosities best kept hidden inside of tightly fitting size 11 wrestling shoes that, on my feet, looked like two torpedos strapped to the bottoms of my legs. My blue Belaire singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso. I had negligible underarm hair, and my pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet. I had auburn hair that seemed to turn red with the increased sunlight of spring, and I kept it cut like a mullet, stopping just before my collar so I was still within state wrestling rules. I had never shaved and didn’t need to. The hair on my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scraggly black hairs hidden by my underwear.

My Achilles Heel, the weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was my lack of upper body strength when standing. I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary. My saving grace was that I had quads thick with muscle from hiking the Ozark Mountains with my dad most summers in the early and mid ’80’s, carrying hefty backpacks full of horse and chicken manneur to his marijuana fields hidden far from roads. I augmented my leg strength by running laps up and down the steps of the new state capital, a 34 story tower that was the country’s tallest state capital back then. And my cross-face was strong. Not because I had upper body strength, but because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face my bulbous thumb knuckle caught and opponents nose. I was rarely taken down by a shot because my crossface would deflect their face and halt their momentum. It’s a legal move; a good crossface is essential if you don’t have strong arms yet.

I went to Belaire High School from the 10th grade until I graduated in 1990, and I wrestled for the Bengals a few times in the 10th grade but dedicated myself beginning in the 11th grade. At the end of the 1988-1989 season, the Bengals voted me co-captain for the next year. Schools alternated hosting each other, and it worked out that the first and only time I visited Capital was for my first match of the 1989-1990 wresting season, and that was the first time I wrestled Hillary Clinton.

After school on a Wednesday in early November, we crammed into the Belaire Bengal’s old blue Chevy passenger van used for field trips. Our other co-captain, a 140 pounder named Jeremy Gann, a senior and returning silver medal winner at state who dropped down from 145 to avoid Hillary, was in the passenger seat next to Coach. I was the last one to load into the van, so I sat by the sliding side door and slammed it shut after confirming everyone was inside.

We left 12121 Tams Drive, Belaire’s address in Belaire subdivision, and Coach drove us along Florida Boulevard towards Government Street and the new and old capital buildings. It was only 8 miles, about how far I’d run after school during cross-country track practice each fall, but because of afternoon traffic and stoplights it took us around 20 minutes reach Capital High at 1000 North 23rd Street, just around the corner from the North Street church and a cemetery that still had tombstones riddled with bullet holes from when the north reached the state capital. Jeremy jumped out, I opened the door, and the Bengals followed Jeremy and me in an informal and quiet herd. Coach, a former marine from the Korean war who had wrestled with the 1960 olympic team at 126 pounds, followed to ensure no one was left behind.

The first I thing I saw when I approached Capital High’s 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, 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. Tufts of gray asbestos dangled from their rafters, and the smell of mold was only barely hidden by the stench of sweat in a gym that mercilessly had no air conditioner.

No one there seemed to notice the odors; judging by the colors spectators wore in the bleachers, their focus was aligned with the collage of murals. I first thought the Lions were paying tribute to the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade, because I didn’t yet know about Ethiopia’s Lion of Juddah. Eventually, I grew to think that the Lions were modeling the lion’s den from the Book of Daniel; many wrestlers, myself included, had to shave off a pound or two before each match, and, like Daniel, we 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. About six Bengals 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. I was one of them in the 10th grade. When a Red Shirt’s probation is lifted, they can challenge whichever weight class they wanted and fight for the right to wrestle first string. Until then, they warmed up with us just like any other Bengal. 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 in a pattern that would make sense if you knew us: we naturally fell into zones of proximal development.

After WWII, when 30 million people from the Soviet Union had died and millions of orphans overwhelmed their social services, Soviet researchers monitored what happened when infants and toddlers grow up in massive warehouses with negligible supervision or guidance. They grouped according to mutual benefit, learning from each other things as simple as language and as complex as how to negotiate or obtain food from other groups. The groups evolved based on each kid’s development, as if they sought kids they could both learn from and teach. If the gap were too great or too small, there was no learning. The term “zone of proximal development” was coined to explain mutual benefit from team members, and different teams overlapped when kids got older and some members sought benefit or collaboration from other teams. Belaire was like that, naturally, and our warm ups evolved as we did.

We warmed up in the Lion’s Den 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, but it was mostly because that’s how Jeremy and I led that day’s warm up. We methodically drilled single leg shots, doubles, stand ups, and sprawls, 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; not used to two co-captains facing him, Hillary stared at me with stoic indifference.

We returned to our teams, and matches began at 103 pounds and proceeded up each weight class. I began warming up when the 126 pounders shook hands.

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. 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 squat thrusts, I jumped a rope. Both of us were trying to slowly built up a thin sheen of sweat.

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 only reason no one joked about me, whose name was Jason, facing Jason in a hockey mask was that everyone had called me Magik since the 10th grade and my real name was never used; even the tournament score boards would say Magik. I donned the state mandated headgear and adjusted the straps to keep them pressed tightly against my ears and protect against coliflower ear, that wrestling disease that comes from tight headlocks that destroys cartilage.

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. Our match was over faster than it had taken me to adjust my headgear. We stood back up in the center, and the referee held Hillary’s hand up in the air. The applause from Capital’s bleachers was deafening, even with my padded headgear. I could feel the reverbations in my chest as they stomped their feet and hollered “Go Lions!”

I returned to our corner and supported my team. Jeremy handed me a hand towel to wipe off sweat, mostly out of habit, though I still had a sheen from warming up.

I don’t recall the overall team score, but Capital won about 70% of the matches. Jeremy 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, a football linebacker who had to sweat off around 10 pounds to make weight after football season ended and wrestling season began.

It was November, so days were short and we rode back to Belaire illuminated by street lights and traffic signals along Florida Boulevard. Everyone joked with each other and talked about what they’d do differently next time. Unlike our drives to matches, the Bengals were chatty on the rides back. We usually talked about what happened on the mat and how we could improve; a year later, I’d call that an After Action Review, an AAR, an acronym I’d pick up with small teams in the army’s 82nd Airborne. Unlike the military, the zones of proximal development of a well-run wrestling team evolve after every battle.

But I sat silently that evening, nursing a sore nose with the blood-stained hand towel Jeremy had handed me after I lost. I was pinned so quickly that no one but me noticed that my nose was bleeding a little bit when I sat back down. There was no feedback to get from anyone else; even Jeremy was brutalized by Hillary. I was on my own, or so I thought then.

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.

The difference between Hillary and me is obvious in hindsight. Coincidentally, in the mid 1980’s a research scientist noticed that professional hockey players in Canada were statistically likely to be born in spring. At first it seemed like astrology, but then researches realized that Canadian laws required being five years old by January 1st to begin practice; kids born the first few months of the year had an entire year advantage over kids born in the final few months.

Every year after, the kids who started sooner outperformed the ones who didn’t, and they placed higher and were therefore promoted faster and received better coaching, similar to how Hillary began kindergarten as the oldest kid in class and I began as the youngest. A year at four to five years old is a lifetime on an exponential growth scale, and the differences between two kids in the same class but eleven months apart grow and multiply each year.

That research study was practically unknown until brought to the world’s attention in 2008 by a book: “Outliers, the Story of Success.” It was written by Malcom Gladwell, a Canadian by birth who became a journalist for The Washington Post, writer for the New Yorker Magazine, author of several bestselling books, and popular TED speaker. He combined other research studies to paint a bigger picture in Outliers, and he pointed out that America didn’t have the sports laws as Canada, but the age cutoff for kindergarten creates a similar academic disparity: older kids in kindergarten begin with a 17% advantage on aptitude tests. Like how older hockey players are placed in more competitive groups and therefore grow stronger in a self-fulfilling prophesy, many older American students are grouped academically and their initial advantages grow over time, which, by definition, creates a class with disadvantages.

Gladwell quoted a social justice expert and called the phenomenon of advantages from birth and circumstance “The Mathew Effect,” after the New Testament’s book of Matthew, where Matthew wrote something like:

Whoever has, will be given more, and they will have an abundance; whoever does not have, even that will be taken from them.

Most of Gladwell’s books focused on topics about how little companies outmaneuver big ones, detailed in his book David and Goliath (named for the biblical and David who defeated a much larger foe, Goliath, using only a slingshot), and how individuals have brief moments of intuition that outperform teams of experts, detailed in his book Blink, as in the blink of an eye. In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to the unseen trends that shape success, like which month you were born; but, though dozens of interviews and case studies and research reports he showed how constant, persistent determination and practice seems to help anyone succeed. He interviewed people like Bill Gates and cited famous bands like The Beatles, and pointed to the 10,000 hour phenomenon that implies 10,000 hours of effort is necessary to overcome obstacles.

Most outliers, by Gladwell’s definition, are lucky. Even though putting in 10,000 hours of work is admirable, Bill Gates still had access to one of the world’s first computers to practice with, and before The Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” as they said, they played their first 10,000 hours in the windows of a redlight district as background noise while men shopped. Luck is the first and often most unseen way, he concluded, but it’s not the only way. Others create their abundance, but they are so rare that they wouldn’t fill a paragraph in his book.

If I had one thing in abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity. I had lost all 13 matches of my 10th grade year before becoming a Red Shirt. My junior record was something like 75 wins to 50 losses, almost twice the number of matches most kids have because I kept getting beaten in semifinals and dropped down to the loser bracket to claw my way to third place finals; usually loosing there and getting an unrecognized fourth place. It was like having 10,000 hours of practice.

I augmented that with summer freestyle and training with the Jesuit Bluejays, thanks to Coach. After all of that, it only took 22 seconds to be knocked back down to the same feeling I had in 10th grade, one of almost insurmountable odds so far from my zone of development that it seemed unobtainable. I knew I’d be going into the army after high school, where battles led to real bloodshed, not the small red dabs on my hand towel that no one noticed.

We arrived back at Belaire, where parents and carpools were waiting. I said goodbye and straddled my 1981 Honda Ascot, a 500cc machine with a shaft drive that wouldn’t need maintenance for the rest of the season. I, on the other hand, was 0-1 and would need a lot of work. I watched everyone leave, put on my full face helmet, and sat there for a moment, remembering Hillary in his mask. I pondered how I could stand up against that beast with only four months left of season. I took a deep breath, started the bike, and rode home.

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