A Part in History, Part I

But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.

Edward Grady Partin.

And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.

Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”

– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 1975¹

I’m Jason Partin.

Hillary Clinton broke my left ring finger on 03 March 1990; it healed askew, and to this day my two middle fingers have a gap above the middle finger that looks like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute on Star Trek.

My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, the rough-edged ex-con who became a public defense attorney listed in the Baton Rouge phone book as Edward G. Partin, Attorney at Law. His 1985 conviction was based on 2.1 pounds of marijuana scraped from the cracks of his attic during a legal search and seizure. At the time, having more than two pounds of marijuana was a felony, and he served his sentence before earning a General Equivalency Diploma in lieu of high school, earning a college degree in history and political science, and then passing law school and successfully suing the states of Arkansa and Louisiana to change their laws to allow convicted felons to practice law, vote in elections, and own firearms.

My dad, just like every law student in America, studied my grandfather; he was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous as the surprise witness whose testimony convicted International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa of jury tampering in 1964, ten months after President Kennedy was shot and killed. At the time, his two year infiltration into Hoffa’s kingdom was illegal search and seizure.

Before my grandfather’s testimony, U.S. constitution’s 4th Amendment unambiguously stated that a warrant was necessary for our government to search or seize private property, and that the warrant must specify what, where, and why something was being searched or seized. U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover Hoffa had freed my grandfather from a Baton Rouge jail and asked him to monitor Hoffa’s inner circle for “something” or “anything” that could convict Hoffa Jimmy Hoffa. Two years later, and though it was only Big Daddy’s word against Hoffa’s, a jury took only four hours to believe Big Daddy when he said Hoffa implied he rig a previous jury.

Hoffa tasked an army of attorney’s to fight his conviction. They challenged the government’s abuse of both the 4th Amendment and the 6th, which, among many things, guarantees a person charged with a crime the right to confront witnesses. Hoffa lost his final appeal in 1966’s Hoffa versus the United States, and began serving eight years in prison based solely on my grandfather’s word.

Everyone called my grandfather Big Daddy. In his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot in 1975, Jimmy Hoffa described him concisely: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.” Big Daddy was what people called classically handsome: tall, broad shoulders, narrow waist, strawberry-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, a charming smile, and a soothing southern accent.

In 1983, Big Daddy was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s “Blood Feud.” He was more famous than Dennehy back then, but the young actor looked so much like Big Daddy that producers cast him and America got their first glimpse at what would be Dennehy’s trademark style: rugged good looks and a charming smile. Practically everyone in America watched Blood Feud, but by then they had seen Big Daddy plastered across media by Bobby and Hoover so much that they knew what to expect. The iconic actor Robert Blake, whose intense and square-jawed face looked like Hoffa’s, won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” Some daytime soap opera heartthrob whose name I can’t recall portrayed Bobby Kennedy, and Ernest Borgnine portrayed J. Edgar Hoover.

In once scene, Blake, as Hoffa, is standing in a room with Dennehy, as Big Daddy, and Blake stares into space and slowly mimics tossing a bomb into Bobby Kennedy’s home. He describes using plastic explosives to kill Bobby and his family, and asks Big Daddy to get some from his contacts in the New Orleans mafia. Big Daddy refused, saying he wouldn’t kill kids; but, in real life and soon after that 1962 meeting, Big Daddy was arrested for kidnapping two small children on behalf of fellow Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson, who had lost them in custody court.

That kidnapping charge was the “minor domestic problem” that Hoffa sarcastically used “bunny ears” to describe how Bobby Kennedy and the FBI whitewashed my family’s history to protect their only witness keeping Hoffa in prison. It wouldn’t be until 1992 that President Bill Clinton released the first part of the classified 1976 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior assassination report that Big Daddy also traded arms with Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, and was a probably a person behind the scenes of President Kennedy’s assassination; by then, Hoffa’s puns about Big Daddy being an “all-American” hero were lost on people who didn’t remember history.

In 2019, sixty years after Kennedy’s death, Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s opus about Hoffa, “The Irishman,” based on a 2004 memoir called “I heard you paint houses,” by Charles Brandt and Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a mafia hitman, Teamsters leader, and colleague of Big Daddy’s who claims to killed Hoffa in a suburban Detroit home in 1975.

To paint houses was mafia lingo for coloring a wall red with splattered blood, and Hoffa’s Teamster story is intertwined with America’s mafia stories. Scorsese had raised $257 Million to make his film for entertainment, and hired all the best name actors, like Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and around a dozen more veteran actors known for bringing in audiences. Craig Vincent was chosen for a small role portraying Big Daddy; Craig is a 6’6″ Italian-American with a barrel chest, dark complexion. and northeastern tough-guy accent who had worked with Scorsese, Pacino, and Pesi in 1995’s Los Vegas mafia classic, Casio. To adapt to Craig’s accent and darker complexion, Scorsese changed Big Daddy to be “Big Eddie,” and, because the film was centered around “The Irishman,” around two chapters of Big Daddy’s role in “I heard you paint houses” was simplified or omitted.

Craig and I spoke when he was researching his role, because he wanted to know what personality traits allowed Big Daddy to fool Hoffa, the mafia, the supreme court, the Warren Commission, and probably all of the FBI; more specifically, what made a jury of peers believe Big Daddy over Jimmy Hoffa after only four hours of deliberation? I couldn’t answer concisely, but Craig and I chatted for an hour or two again over the next year, and I learned that his filmed 20 minutes would be edited down to only five minutes, because no one knew how to squeeze Big Daddy into an already whopping three hour and twenty nine minute epic packed with more known characters people wanted to see.

The Irishman sold out theaters the summer of 2019, but Covid-19 shuttered public spaces worldwide soon after. Netflix bought the rights and streamed The Irishman globally, and it set streaming records as almost a Billion people saw a simplified version of my grandfather’s part in history.

I spent the two years of Covid-19’s shutdown pondering Craig’s question. In all my years of FBI and investigative journalists asking for facts about Big Daddy, Craig was the first to ask what it was about Big Daddy’s character that allowed him to infiltrate the Teamsters and intimidate the mafia for at least two years. And, Craig was the first person other than myself who had read all of the books, FBI reports, and interviews from the 1964 Warren Report and 1976 JFK and MLK Assassination Report focused solely on Edward Grady Partin’s role in history.

Craig’s question planted a seed in my mind that led to this memoir. After many years of looking back through history with older eyes, I see the bigger story every time I look at my finger and remember how Hillary broke it.

The Hillary who broke my finger was not Hillary Rodham Clinton, who became a household name when Arkansas governor William “Bill” Clinton became president in 1992; the Hillary that broke my finger was the returning three-time undefeated Louisiana state champion wrestler, captain of the revered Baton Rouge inner city Capital High School Lions, and winner of the 1990 Baton Rouge city tournament on 03 March 1990. He broke my finger in the first round and pinned me one minute and forty seconds into the second round, and the Louisiana High School Athletic Association website lists me as winning the silver medal.

My grandfather died a week later. I attended his funeral on 11 March 1990 with my two middle fingers still buddy-taped; the New York Times and Los Angeles Times listed me as one of his surviving grandchildren. I would leave for the army a few months later, and though I moved away from Louisiana for the rest of my life, to this day I look back on my senior year and Big Daddy’s funeral and all I see is Hillary Clinton.

I saw Hillary for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-November of 1989, when the Baton Rouge air was becoming less muggy and the days were short. Immediately after school let out at around 2:30 in the afternoon, 15 wrestlers from the Belaire High School Bengals piled into the sliding side door of Belaire’s big blue Chevy van.

I had just turned 17 years old, a senior at Belaire, and co-captain of the Bengals. It was our first dual meet of the 1989-1990 wrestling season, and herding 15 excited teenagers into a van was like encouraging crawfish to scuttle as team into a pot of boiling water. I stood outside the van with my hand on the sliding door and coaxed them inside.

Seven other Bengals piled in an Astro minivan besides us. It was the family van of one of our wrestlers, who had borrowed it to help Coach shuttle us to the dual meet. The driver was Big-Head Ben Abrams, an 18 year old, third-year 189 pounder, a Bengal baseball star and enthusiastic but only average wrestler who, to this day, insists his nickname was just Big Ben, like the clock in London; but, we all know the truth.

Ben’s little brother, Todd “Mace” Abrams, was in the passenger seat. He was a 16 year old, first-year 164 pounder who was the state martial arts champion specializing in Ku Kempo, but who was only a mediocre wrestler who suffered from asthma. They were joined by their neighbor and oldest friend, Steve Long, the great-nephew of Louisiana governors Huey Long and Earl K. Long, Belaire’s 171 pounder, and what people called a “corn fed country boy,” strong enough to win most matches by brute force. A few freshmen whose names I don’t recall sat in the surprisingly spacious Astrovan; it had been the Abrams’s family van since middle school, and most of us had ridden in it to a few events around town.

I was standing beside Belaire’s Chevy with my hand on the handle, signaling to a few boisterous Bengals that we were waiting for them to get inside.

Michael, our 135 pounder, a junior, and Belaire’s Junior ROTC captain hopped into the front bucket seat. Dana “Big D” Miles, our big-bellied 275 heavyweight and a senior who was also the football team’s linebacker, squeezed in beside Michael. He didn’t call himself Big D: he said his hiphop name was Lil’ Fila Ice-D T, pronounced as a rhythmic rhyme and spelled as if he had swallowed every popular rapper’s name, chewed them up, and spit them out. He started his name with Lil’ despite looking like The Fat Boys’s long lost quadruplet. Miasha was in the back of the van. He was a perpetually positive and cheerful third year wrester and our 151 pounder. He lived within walking distance of Belaire, and he was always early to practice and would always jump in the van first; he said that was because Big D couldn’t fit past the middle bucket seat, so the smartest wrestlers would get in first.

Miasha, D, and Michael were the only African Americans on our team, which was remarkable only because no one remarked during the two years we wrestled together.

I’m one of the whitest people you could imagine. I’m easily sunburned, and today I have grey hair and a big bald spot, but back then I had freckles from a long summer of sunshine, and thick auburn-red hair I kept as a mullet that ended at collar-level, which was a USA Wrestling requirement. I weighed 141 pounds, but was our 145 pounder and was an above-average but unremarkable wrestler. I sat next to Big D, who pushed Michael against his window. Michael and I were each the size of one of Big D’s legs, and there wasn’t much we could do about being crammed against the windows.

Coach, a 54 year old white man about Michael’s size, was in the driver’s seat with his head towards us and his seat pulled all the way forward to accommodate D. He chuckled at our banter but didn’t say a word. Coach called Dana Mr. D, Michael Michael, and me Magik; if we never noticed our racial differences, it was probably because Coach didn’t; he had wrestled on diverse teams during America’s worse race riots in the 50’s and 60’s, but he probably never noticed that, either.

Big D patted his bulging belly and laughed loudly as he squeezed in and pushed Michael against the driver’s side window. D had jogged in a trash bag that morning and not eaten yet that day, and he kept asking why he chose to wrestle with us when the football team encouraged him to gain weight all season. In his backpack, he carried his homework and a Tupperware container full of chips and sandwiches for after weigh-in. Michael’s backpack was full of school books, and though he didn’t have space to open one on the drive, he usually studied in the bleachers while the rest of us watched each other wrestle.

The Bengal’s co-captain was in the front passenger seat with a stoic countenance that bordered on an annoyed scowl. He was Jeremy Gann, a terse 140 pounder and returning 135 pound state silver medalist who concentrated before a match and relaxed after. His long lanky legs folded atop the glovebox so that he could lean his backrest forward. He never carried a backpack, and was used to feeling hungry for one to two days before a match.

Coach rotated his his squat, acorn-shaped head towards the back of our van. His lips moved subtly as he silently counted us to make sure there were 15 Bengals inside. Perhaps because of his military training, he counted us like a platoon sergeant would count soldiers before and after a battle, in a way that didn’t imply he was counting both before and after battle to ensure, as the Ranger creed says, that we left no one behind.

Coach knew how to lead a team. He had been a marine reservist during the 1950’s Korean conflict, though he never went overseas until he wrestled in the 1960 Rome Olympics. He was an alternate at 126 pounds, a backup wrestler under the U.S. Army wrestler and American gold winner Doug Blubauh, who, after the Olympics, named World Wrestler of the Year. He won the gold by defeating a three-time world champion from Iran whose name I could never pronounce.

In olympic trials, Doug had barely defeated Coach in sudden-death overtime, and that was back when matches were an Herculean nine minutes of relentless three minute rounds instead of three two minute rounds like in my day. In sudden-death, the first point scored won, and you could forfeit a point for stalling if you weren’t giving your best effort every second. It had taken Doug almost another three minutes of sudden-death to finally take Coach down and win the match. When he won the gold medal a year later, Doug would become world-renowned for pinning all four opponents in the olympics, including the Iranian who had, I heard, never been pinned before. Coach would start a wrestling program at an impoverished rural high school, then accept a role as assistant coach for Iowa State under Dr. Harold Nichols, the legendary coach of Iowa State Cyclones who ran their program for 32 years and brought them to six national championships. In 1968, Louisiana State University recruited Coach to start a program at LSU, and he brought the Tigers to being ranked 4th in the nation, defeating even the Cyclones in dual meets, and produced a handful of national champions and all-American wrestlers. In USA wrestling, Coach Dale Ketelsen was a living legend.

At Belaire, Coach wore many hats. He was head coach of wrestling, one of five assistant football coaches, and Belaire’s only driver’s education instructor.

Coach was a humble man; no one but Jeremy, Ben, Todd, Michael, and I knew his history. And we had not learned it from Coach; we learned it when I happened to stumble across a copy of USA Wrestling magazine from when Coach was voted Wrestler of The Year, similar to how coaches vote for the most valuable player in a city tournament filled with competitors who were all remarkable.

I glanced past Coach to Big Head Ben, and he gave me a thumbs-up from the driver’s seat of Mr. Abrams’s Astro Van, which Todd had nicknamed The Millennium Falcon because it had so much storage space and there was a knack to starting it that only he and Ben knew.

Todd smirked like Han Solo and saluted. I smirked back and nodded back at Ben and Todd. I did not salute; that was an old joke Todd made and was based on some Vietnam conflict movie, where soldiers saluted in the field of combat as a “sniper check,” a way to get the person being saluted shot, which was a practical way to replace ineffective platoon leaders who were leading young men to their deaths.

The Abrams brothers and Michael were the only ones who knew that I had joined the U.S. army’s delayed entry program and requested the 82nd Airborne division. It was probably the most commonly known of what we oversimplified as Special Forces or Special Operations; Sylvester Stallone wore a special forces green beret in Rambo: First Blood; John Wayne wore an Airborne maroon beret in The Longest Day. To us, they were the same. Todd said he was training me behind the scenes, which is why he always did a sniper check when I was leading the Bengals into battle.

I turned and crammed my canvas Jansport backpack on the floorboard, then squeezed beside Big D and twisted my shoulder so I could slam the door shut.

As soon as the door clicked closed, Jeremy pulled his Belaire-blue hoodie over his head, reclined his backrest, and stared into the front windshield. I folded my knees onto the back of his seat like he had folded his legs against the glovebox. My seat wouldn’t recline. I set my oversized feet atop my small backpack, and told Coach we were ready.

Coach pulled out of Belaire’s gym parking lot and Ben followed. We turned onto Tams Drive towards the Little Saigon shopping mall, and turned right along Florida Boulevard.

The boulevard was long road was jammed with traffic lights, strip malls, and po’boy shops. Jeremy remained silent. The other Bengals cheerfully bantered about how hard it was to skip breakfast and lunch, and veterans told war stories of last seasons tournaments. Big D’s voice was as big as his belly, and he’d interject with improv hip-hop beats and encourage people to enjoy the ride.

“Come on, Magik,” he said. “Let’s do it!”

I was horrified to rap in front of people, but I couldn’t resist Big D’s gravity. I took a deep breath, and leaned in.

In four clear syllables, I said: “I do magic!”

In the same four-beat, Big D said: “I bust a rap,”

I paused slightly to make sure I said the clean version: “I amaze the Belaire Bengals!”

Big D said: “And I make them clap.”

We slapped hands and bumped fists and the Bengals hooted and hollered and clapped.

(In private, I and Big D would have rapped, “I amaze the mother fuckers; and I make them clap!” But, I had gotten suspended in the 10th grade for mindlessly cursing in school, which is why I was ineligible to wrestle that year and was only a second year wrestler in my 12th and final year of high school. Coach had never mentioned, even when I sometimes slipped and cursed in the chaos of a tournament or road trip, but I still didn’t want to curse around him.)

Miasha said Michael laughed and made jokes about how bad D and I sounded, but we all knew they had less rhythm than I did; that was saying a lot, because, as I mentioned, I’m one of the whitest people you can imagine and some stereotypes are statistically true.

Eight and a half miles later we saw the 39 story new state capital building, an art deco gem built by Louisiana governor Huey Long during the Great Depression; had I been in Ben’s Astrovan, I’m sure the guys were making jokes with Steve about his great-uncle’s role in history. The towering edifice to Louisiana’s Kingfish – which is what we all called Huey Long – was perched on a slight rise above the Mississippi River levee and surrounded by manicured gardens and a few museums honoring the civil war leaders who trained there and tried to preserve their way of life during the war, which had ended only 120 years earlier.

Capital High was in Capital neighborhood on the other side of the elevated I-110 and I-10 interstates, separated by towering concrete columns that shivered as Big Daddy’s fleet of 18 wheelers rumbled overhead on their way over the half-mile wide Mississippi River Bridge on their way into the concrete veins and arteries of America. Like a lot of cities back then, when the interstates were built in the 50’s and 60’s, they sliced through downtowns and created pockets of poverty. Homeless camps took advantage of the overhead interstates to shield their tents and cardboard huts from rain, and they openly used the cheap addictive drug of choice back then, crack; gun shots were frequent; as a combat veteran, I don’t feel the analogy of a combat zone is hyperbole for the two-mile strip under Baton Rouge’s elevated interstates. Not even Big D ventured there, and he stopped making jokes and peered through the windows.

We passed a new Martin Luther King Junior community center, and Big D woke up and he and Miasha told the same joke that comedians like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy had made on television specials: whenever they drove by a street named after Martin Luther King, even they locked their doors. Jeremy remained silent, I twisted away from Big D to allow some breathing room on the left side of my body.

Coach turned onto North Street and passed the North Street Church, which had a cemetery pot-marked with bullet holes from northern soldiers who reached Baton Rouge after winning battles in Mississippi. A few blocks later, he turned on 23rd Street and parked parallel on the road alongside Capital High, which didn’t have a dedicated gym parking lot like Belaire did. I flung the door open the moment Coach put the van in park. Jeremy opened the side door, and I squirted out. D finagled himself out the door, and everyone else followed.

I stuck my head in to make sure the van was empty, slammed the door shut, and strapped on my backpack. Coach and Jeremy led us into Capital’s gym. I followed the squad of Bengals, and we walked towards their double doors.

The first thing I noticed was a hand-painted sign above the doors, crisp yellow letters against a black scroll and spelled out: “Welcome to the Lion’s Den.” Inside, the Den was a small windowless building shared with wrestling and basketball. The Lions had spent their afternoon rolling out and taping together three hefty segments of a faded purple and gold LSU wrestling mat. It was centered between their two basketball goals, and framed on either side by worn wooden bleachers.

The mats had been donated to Capital after the LSU Tiger wrestling team disbanded in 1979, one of around 100 collegiate wrestling teams were eliminated after the controversial Title IX law passed; it required equal numbers of male and female athletes in collegiate sports, and the quick solution was to drop unprofitable male-dominated sports with negligible spectators. LSU had donated their mats to schools that wanted to start teams, and that’s how Capital became seeded as the youngest team in Baton Rouge. Our dual meet was always the first of the year, a way for both young teams to warm up for the season without being brutalized by established programs like the Catholic High Bears or Baton Rouge High Bulldogs.

The Lion’s Den walls were painted maroon to match their singlets and warm-up hoodies, but the paint was so faded that the maroon was a close approximation of the faded purple, and the yellow on their murals matched the worn gold. Tufts of gray asbestos dangled from the rafters like the Spanish moss that hung from Baton Rouge’s stately oak trees. The Capital High coach, a mountain of an African American man, was so tall he seemed to brush the asbestos with his mostly bald head.

The Mountain had never wrestled, but he stepped up and took on the daily effort of running a public school team. He lumbered over and smiled and looked down at Coach and extended his right hand. Coach reached his right hand up and grasped The Mountain’s beefy hand, and simultaneously reached his left hand up and clasped The Mountain’s stout forearm above his wrist with a grip that crush boulders if it wanted to.

Coach said, “Good to see you, Coach.”

The Mountain beamed and said he was looking forward to our match.

The Mountain, like all Louisiana coaches, knew Coach well. In 1968, Coach was recruited by LSU to form the Tiger Wrestling program; by 1979, he had led the LSU Tigers to be ranked 4th in the nation, defeating even the Iowa State Cyclones in dual meets. But there was no funding to keep the team together after Title IV. Out of work and without a team, in 1980 Coach donated LSU’s mats to schools around town, took a job as Belaire’s driver’s education teacher and assistant football coach, launched USA into Louisiana. To be a wrestler under Coach was to be welcomed anywhere.

The Lions lined up from 103 pounds to Heavyweight, like a row of purple-hooded Russian nesting Matryeska dolls. All appearing somewhat similar to me compared to the ostensibly more diverse Bengals, especially with those dark maroon hoodies, which I’d later realize were the same maroon as an Airborne beret. Belaire, with our simple bright blue hoodies, lined up in order, too, but without consistency in our uniforms.

I ended up standing next to Hillary; he was a hairy beast who scowled so loudly I couldn’t hear anything else in the weigh-in room.

The joke about Hillary that year, though never to his face, was that he was tough because he was like Sue in Johny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue,” That kid’s dad abandoned his son after naming his son, saying that having a girl’s name would make Sue defend himself against bullies and grow up tough and mean and able to stand up against a harsh world.

But Hillary wasn’t mean. He was terse and scowled all the time – at least when I saw him, and given where he grew up that could be expected – but he was never mean.

Hillary was 18 and the oldest wrestler I knew, though I’m sure there must have been a few 19 year olds who had repeated a year or two in school at some point in their lives. Hillary was 18 years old at the beginning of his senior year, able to vote in presidential elections and legally buy beer (which still possible in Louisiana because it was the last of the United States to raise the drinking age to 21, and that wouldn’t happen for another three to eight years, depending on how you define it, because state legislators changed the drinking age to 21 but intentionally kept the purchasing age at 18).

He was born in mid-October of 1971, a few days shy of being one year before I was born, and he began kindergarten at age 5 and turned 6 a month later. He had always the oldest kid in class, though not always the biggest. He was a few fingers shorter than I was, so maybe 5’2.″ But his burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, and his thighs bulged with muscles.

He had been shaving since the 10th grade. Everyone in the same weight class would stand side by side to weigh in at tournaments, where referees checked for clean-shaven faces and to ensure no one had shaved their legs or arms a few days earlier to make them abrasive. Hillary’s clean shaven face scowled when he stood in line.

Hillary looked like a black Wolverine in purple tights instead of the yellow costume of comic books, which was the same yellow of the singlets worn by the Robert E. Lee High Rebels in their oversized school near the gates of LSU. Like Hillary, Wolverine was a hairy little beast who always scowled, so the analogy was apt, and if Hillary had been a Bengal I’m sure Big D would have called him Lil’ Black Wolverine; the rest of us would have called him whatever he wanted, or just left him alone.

I was the opposite. 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.

My smile was part of my genetic features, but I was also a genuinely cheerful kid who relished practicing and performing sleight of hand magic, and I kept a deck of cards and a coin purse full of 1970’s Kennedy half dollars in my backpack to play with while sitting in class wishing I were outside or on a wrestling mat. My nickname was Magik, with a k, to differentiate it from the LA Laker’s basketball player Magic Johnson, and the newly formed professional team, The Orlando Magic; The Magic was fresh in our minds, because they had just stolen the LSU Tiger’s star player, a towering giant with size 22 basketball shoe named Shaquille Oneal, and no one wanted to confuse me with those guys.

I was the youngest senior wrestler in Louisiana. I was born on 05 October 1972, and I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, at four years old and barely speaking full sentences. Had I been born a few days later, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and held back a year to ripen before starting school. That would have led to me beginning my senior year at 17, and by wrestling season I’d be like Hillary and able to vote and buy beer.

Instead, I had turned 17 only a month before I stood facing him the first time, and I walked into The Lions Den as a 5’5″ tall, mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands, long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet.

My toes were bulbous monstrosities hidden inside of size 11 wrestling shoes bulging like a stuffed boudin sausage skin. My blue singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso, and the sleeveless top allowed people to know that I had negligible underarm hair. My pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet, and my auburn colored hair against my white skin and red pimples made me look whiter than I was.

My mullet wasn’t for fashion; it hid a few small scars on the back of my head, and one curved 8-inch scar shaped like a backwards letter C; it was, and is, about a finger width thick and bumpy from when the stitches pulled my scalp back on. I had been embarrassed by it since I was a little kid, so I always wore the back of my hair as long as possible; it was a convenient coincidence that mullets were fashionable back then.

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 voice had already changed. I had stopped squeaking when I talked, but I still didn’t talk much out of habit; it took D or Todd to pull me into their banter. I was taller than Coach but shorter than Jeremy.

After weigh in, the Bengals put our hoodies back on and went into the gymnasium and watched the Lions warm up first. I stood beside Coach and Jeremy with my mouth closed and my hoodie lowered so that I could see more clearly and assess our competition.

I watched the Lions trot onto the faded LSU mats to warm up. Hillary led the pack. They trotted onto the mat to warm up in a line that began with their 103 pounder and ended with their 275 pound heavyweight, like during weigh in, but this time with Hillary in front. He wore his oversized maroon hoodie low over forehead, and his dark face was hidden in the shadow.

The Lions remained eerily silent as they trotted across the wooden gym floor in single file, like a disciplined military unit efficiently moving a double-time. The small windowless gym echoed with every stomp of their feet, but softened once they trotted onto the faded LSU mats. They jogged in a circle and stomped extra hard on every fourth step to create an intentional rhythm that reverberated in rhythm popular with musicians like George Clinton and James Brown, who said funk is alwys on the one of a four beat: ONE two three four, ONE two three four… The echos reverberated in the small enclosed room and you could feel each one-beat in your chest.

I usually called people in the bleachers spectators, but at Capital they were participants. They stomped in unison with the Lions, and their ramshackle bleachers shook and rattled on every one-beat and added to the overall mystique of being in the Lions Den.

Every team had its own warm-up ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the contrast of the musical echo of their feet echoing in the gym against their eery silence; no one uttered a word or glanced at us, they just stomped and circled in a gradually diminishing radius. When they finally stopped stomping, they sprawled into a tight circle and landed with their faces close together.

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 was be no stomping or squeaks from the stands, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat. Hillary looked each soldier in the eye and spoke a few words. Each one nodded back. I had never seen a team so focused on what their captain was saying.

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 all the other Bengals randomly split into two flocks following two leaders, and each half split again into smaller groups.

We naturally fell into zones of proximal development, small groups of three to five wrestlers who could all learn something from each other. The zone of proximal development is a concept that came from the Soviet Union after WWII, when 30 Million Russians died and left millions of orphans to fend for themselves in massive gymnasiums, without supervision but with researches carrying clipboards recording how kids evolve unconditioned. Toddlers, I later read in education theory books, naturally form small groups where every kid learns a bit from each other; that’s the zone of proximal development, and it changes as people learn and evolve. Because of constant change, Belaire’s warm-up routine was never the same twice.

I don’t know how or why the we naturally evolved into warming up like we did. It probably had to do with Coach having a master’s degree in education theory, and because he told us history of the Russians and how they learned to dominate global wrestling in the 1950’s. When Coach wrestled in the 1960 Olympics, it was the height of the cold war and all the world watched; to put that time into perspective, the American Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the US and Russia to the brink of nuclear war, was in 1962. Coach had learned all kinds of things about Russia while training with the U.S. olympic wrestling team and their army of advisors. I’d dabble in education theory later in life, part of graduate studies when I would become a faculty of engineering, but Coach had learned hands-on and probably understood the theory better than anyone could from books.

Coach, a man of few words, had mentioned the zone of proximal development once, using fewer words than I just did. The Bengals fell into the habit organically.

Weight classes were an obvious influence on our groups, but so were interpersonal dynamics. Ben was in my zone, and so was Big D; they stayed together because only Ben was big enough for D to toss around without inflicting friendly-fire damage. So was Michael; he and I were similar in styles, yet different enough to continuously learn from each other, which a hallmark of the zone of proximal development. And, he, Ben, and I had realized we could topple Big D if all three of us banded together.

All groups methodically drilled single leg shots, doubles, stand ups, and sprawls; those are the foundation blocks of any great wrestler, and that’s what Coach focused on practically every day at practice. Our zones of development kept us focused on the fundamentals, but at different levels of intensity in each group, and with more nuances in whichever group had Jeremy or Miasha.

We finished warming up when Jeremy said so, and gathered beside Coach in Belaire’s corner of Capital’s mat. The referee stepped into the center of the mat and called the captains to join him.

Belaire was the only team in Louisiana with co-captains, and no one had seen two wrestlers step onto the mat when a captain was called. Hillary cocked his head and stared at both of us with stoic indifference, more like he processing new information rather than pondering why there were two of us on his mat.

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. I held out my hand, but Hillary turned before slapping it and I don’t know if he had noticed. I glanced around, and Jeremy was already half way back to Belair’e corner.

I jogged to catch up. Jeremy sat beside Coach and I stood by the team, because state rules restricted the number of people on the mat corner to two.

Matches began at 103 pounds and proceeded up each weight class. I began warming up when the 129 pounders shook hands, because you never know how quickly matches can end and there was only the 135 and 140 pound match before mine.

Most wrestlers began warming up only when the weight before them began, but, Hillary warmed up at the same time that I did. He slipped a set of large headphones under his hoodie and stepped into a corner away from spectators. I put on my small foam headset and pushed play on my Walkman’s wrestling mix tape, a collage of 1980’s mid-paced heavy metal you could skip to, like Metal Health by Quiet Riot, and the more mellow and melodic Lunatic Fringe by Red Ryder, a song from the soundtrack of 1985’s wrestling film, Vision Quest.

Hillary and I warmed up the same way, though I don’t know what he listed to on his Walkman. We began whipping our arms around our chests and slowly pumping our legs up and down with oversized steps. Then we shook our heads and hands and feet faster, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly. Hillary’s gaze was locked on the mat, and he never glanced my way; it was effective at telling me that I wasn’t a threat, and I instantly learned from him and therefore glanced at him during the lulls of matches.

Hillary began doing jumping jacks and squat thrusts. I skipped a rope to raise my heartbeat and break a thin sheen of sweat that meant I’d be tapped into fat energy. Jeremy pinned his Lion, which triggered Hillary to move towards the mat. I tossed my jump rope towards our corner and donned the state mandated headgear over my ears.

I struggled for a few seconds to adjust the vinyl straps, which were still a bit stiff after being left motionless in Belaire’s supply closet all summer. I barely understood the muffled sound of the ref calling us, but I knew the routine and what to expect and I trotted over and stood in the center and leaned forward to face Hillary. We squatted into our stances and slapped our right hands as a modified handshake to acknowledge we were ready.

The referee blew his whistle and I instantly shot a low single.

Hillary sprawled, cross-faced the hell out of me, spun behind, and drove my face into the mat.

I didn’t have time to process what happened before he threw in a half-nelson and turned me to my back.

Hillary rose up on his toes and thrust all of his weight onto my chest, and he cranked up on my head with his burly arm; my nose pressed into his hairy armpit, and my eyes were wide open and staring at the asbestos dangling from the roof rafters.

I could feel blood gathering in my nostrils, but there was enough air flowing to smell his dank underarm odor. My mind was whirling and overwhelmed with pain in my nose, strain in my neck, and pressure on my chest; his Brillo-pad chest hair rubbed my bald and pimply chest raw. I remember his dank odor, but not feeling my shoulders touch the mat. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t snap out of it until I heard the referee slap the mat next to my shoulders and blow his whistle in our ears to signal a pin.

We stood back up in the center, and the referee held Hillary’s hand up in the air. Even with my headgear on, the applause from Capital’s bleachers was deafening. I could feel the reverberations in my chest as they stomped their feet and hollered; a year and a half later, I’d be one of three people standing in front of two 15,000 pound bombs destroying an airport in Iraq and ending the first Gulf war, and that’s what it felt like to feel the force of Capital’s celebration of Hillary’s decisive victory.

I was dazed. I glanced at the basketball scoreboard used as a timer. Hillary had pinned me in 22 seconds; it had taken me longer to adjust my headgear. I didn’t understand how that had happened.

Hillary would make more sense in my mind after 2008, when Malcomn Gladwell published a book that summarized what happened. In “Outliers: The Hidden Secrets of Success,” Gladwell began with an obscure Canadian research study that looked into why professional hockey players were overwhelmingly likely to be in January to March. It wasn’t astrology. Like with Hillary and me, an arbitrary age cutoff allowed those kids to begin competing in hockey almost a full year sooner than their peers; for a four to five year old, that’s a 20% linear time jump on an exponential scale for strength and mental experiences curve. Over time, those differences accumulate with all skills; those who began with an advantage are usually given more, and those who begin with a relative disadvantage are given less.

Gladwell said it was an example of The Matthew Effect, a term coined by a criminal sociologist who predated Gladwell and used The Matthew Effect to explain why crime-ridden areas deepen poverty and wealthier areas springboard success, taking the term from the New Testament Book of Matthew, 13:12, where Matthew quoted Jesus as saying something like:

“Whoever has shall receive more, and whoever has not shall have even that taken away from him.”

The only thing Malcomn Gladwell identified as being within one’s control was determination and perseverance, and even that was influenced by people like our parents, teachers, peers, and coaches.

If I had anything besides Coach to balance Hillary’s birthdate advantage, it was what my teammates called tenacity. I may have been dazed and confused by Hillary’s quick victory, but I knew I’d recover. I had lost all 13 matches in the tenth grade, my first year and when I was only on the team for a month (in a sense of irony, I was suspended from school because I used the word “nigger” when agreeing with Miasha and Micheal in the hallway, who had just called me “a little white nigger” because I spoke like a coon-ass redneck; Miasha said our trailer parks were like the New Orleans projects on wheels, and I said I was happy to be an honorary nigger and that they were honorary coon-asses; amusingly, coon-ass has always been socially acceptable in Baton Rouge.) Despite being ineligible to compete, Coach let me train with the team as what he called a Red Shirt, a term from football that lets kids wear red shirts and practice with the team until they’re big enough to be on the varsity team.

I ended my junior year with a winning record of 54-38, more than twice the number of matches Jeremy and other good wrestlers because of seeding brackets that strive to prevent the top two wrestlers from facing off until finals, stacking the tournament like The Matthew Effect and resulting in the lowest seeds bumping down to the looser’s bracket and having to claw their way up again. I had simply out-wrestled better wrestlers by persisting through many, many losses.

I returned to our corner. Coach grasped my right hand in his and squeezed my left tricep in a vice-like grip with his left hand, looked up into my eyes, and sincerely said, “Good job, Magik,” just like he had 105 times in the past year and a half.

I had more sweat from warming up than wrestling, but I still accepted the hand towel Jeremy handed me. I stepped behind him and Coach and wiped it across my mostly dry forehead and subtly drug the towel under my nose and noticed drops of blood. Rules only allowed two people on the corner of the mat, so I sat on the front row bleachers and in a spot the other Bengals had saved for me. I leaned forward to watch the next match and dabbed my nostrils.

Hillary strolled walked back to Capital’s corner and began prepping their 152 pounder for battle; that wrestler pinned Miasha early in the second round with the same half-nelson Hillary had used on me; Coach told him, “Good job, Miasha,” and I didn’t feel I had anything to offer so I remained silent.

I don’t recall the 158 pound match.

Todd panicked when the 165 pound Lion smothered his mouth and nose with a headlock towards the end of his first round; still gasping when he sat in the bleachers, he fumbled through his backpack for an inhaler, and through wheezing voice told me it was his final match. I slipped into Jesse The Body Ventura’s voice from Arnold Swartzenigger and him playing special forces soldiers against an alien in “Predator,” and called Todd a “slack jawed faggot.” Todd’s father was a closet homosexual, so calling Todd a slack jawed faggot was a private joke, just like Todd’s sniper check on me.

Steve and his wrestler went into overtime, and Steve, though gasping for breath, manhandled his Lion into a takedown; Coach told him “Good job, Steve,” and I agreed.

Big Head Ben fizzled out and was manhandled towards the end of the second round and pinned with only six seconds remaining; he seemed upset at himself, and I left him alone.

Big D was pinned in the third round; both teams felt it was a good match, and a fine way to end the day. We lined up and walked beside each other, slapping hands to congratulate each other. It was a full-circle from when team-captains shook an hour earlier and promised fair matches.

I don’t recall the overall team score, but Capital won about 70% of the matches. From Coach’s perspective, it was a victory for Belaire. He reminded us that this was the first time in our history that we had a full squad, and said that momentum carries teams forward.

15 of us loaded back into Coach’s van, and the other wrestles filled the Abrams’s Astrovan. It was November, so days were short and the ride back along Florida Boulevard was illuminated by street lights and traffic signals and strip mall parking lights that strobed through our van’s windows. All of the windows were cracked open to allow air flow and to flush away the stench of our sweaty post-match uniforms.

Everyone except me was laughing and chatting with each other and talked about what they’d do differently next time. Big D quipped that he couldn’t help me because he blinked and missed my match; I said he was probably too busy eating a sandwich to see anythings without mayonnaise on it. Michael studied; he had been pinned in the second round by a returning city champion, he said he had a test the next day, and that he was probably going to quit the team and focus on his ROTC scholarship. He wanted to go to West Point and into special forces, like his dad had during Vietnam. The conflict had ended only 14 years before, so many teenagers had dad’s who had been in Vietnam and it was common to see people following in their father’s footsteps. No one by Ben and Todd knew my dad had been a drug dealer, and I preferred to keep it that way, because America was still in the middle of Reagan and Bush’s war on drugs.

The Bengals bantered and I slid into deep thought. Absentmindedly, my right hand reached up along the van’s window and to the back of my head, where my fingers traced the biggest scar across the back my scalp, a habit I’ve had since I was at least five years old. The scar’s skin is slippery, and my fingers fit its width and slide along the backwards C shape and over the bumps from where stitches bunched the skin and ridges formed. My two first fingers followed the scar up and down until I caught myself doing it and brought my hand back along the window and into my lap.

I grasped the towel and rolled it to hid the dabs of dried blood that had become darker than Capital’s hoodies. I stared at the lights flickering past us at 45 miles per hour.

A thought popped up. The first time my nose bled in a match was my first match in the 10th grade, at Belaire’s Thanksgiving tournament. It was a tradition Coach brought from Iowa that was a way for new wrestlers to get practice with a small, one-day tournament that was sparsely attended due to family obligations; though he never said so. I was 121 pounds wrestling at 123 and had shot first, just like against Hillary, and that kid, who was also African American and whose armpit smelled similar, sprawled and crossfaced me and threw in a half just like Hillary had. The difference between Hillary and that wrestler was that he was only marginally better than I was, and he didn’t know how to pin someone with the half; but, I choked on my blood and panicked when I couldn’t breathe, and I forced my left shoulder to the mat to end our match. I had quit.

The referee raised his hand and I walked off the mat and Coach shook my hand and said, “Good job, Magik,” but I knew better. He handed me a towel and taught me to hold pressure on my nose without looking at the towel for at least the length of a full six minute match, and I spent the entire time trying to convince myself that I was pinned. But I finally admitted that I had quit and committed hari-kari. I would lose the next 12 matches before telling Michael and Miasha that I was glad to be an honorary nigger. I had lost, but I had not quit, and when I began wrestling again my 11th grade year I told myself I would never quit again.

Coach turned away from Florida Bulevard by the strip mall filled with bright lights from the Vietnamese business district, it had hand-written signs illuminated by flood lights and advertised things like: “Bon-Mi, a Vietnamese po-boy.” We were almost home. I stopped thinking about my match and began getting ready to exit the van’s door like I was jumping from the side doors of a C-130 aircraft with 63 airsick and heavily armed paratroopers anxious for me to get out of the way; the analogy was so perfect that I’d tell guys on C-130’s and C-141’s that every mission felt like our wrestling team’s field trips.

The van pulled into our gym’s parking empty parking lot. Parents were parked under the lights and waiting to take their soldiers home. Everyone piled out, Big Head Ben Abrams let a few guys out and said he’d take the rest home. Jeremy, Michael, and Miasha walked home. Big D’s equally large parents picked him up in a van almost as big as Belaire’s; I never learned what they did for their livelihood to need such a monster of a van, or why we couldn’t use it for dual meets.

I waited until all the Bengals left, strapped on my backpack, straddled my motorcycle, donned my helmet, turned the key, and pushed the ignition. The light illuminated Belaire’s two-story dark red brick wall of our relatively large gym.

Coach waved from beside the big Ford F150 he used to haul mats between schools for tournaments. I waved back and rode out of the parking lot and onto Tams and towards home. Coach stayed; he was like the army’s pathfinders in Vietnam, the guys who parachuted into dense jungles with extra padded combat gear and cleared trees for others to follow, then guarded the area when helicopters picked the others up and took them home. Coach was always the first one to arrive, and the last one to leave.

I was focused on riding and I didn’t glance back to see when Coach left for his home; I knew he’d be there when I showed up the next morning.

Go to the Table of Contents

1. From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975 ↩︎