A Part in History, Part VIII

“[Jimmy Hoffa’s] mention of legal problems in New Orleans translated into his insistence that Carlos Marcello arrange another meeting with Partin, despite my warning that dealing with Partin was fruitless and dangerous.”

“He wanted me to get cracking on the interview with Partin. In June, Carlos sent word that a meeting with Partin was imminent and I should come to New Orleans. As [my wife] watched me pack in the bedroom of our Coral Gables home, she began crying, imploring me not to see Partin. She feared that it was a trap and that I would be murdered or arrested.”

– Frank Ragano, J.D., attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafacante Jr., in “Lawyer for the Mob,” 1994

I won my first gold medal at the 1989 Christmas Invitational wrestling tournament; at the time, I didn’t understand what an invitational tournament meant.

Coach had only invited a handful of schools from around Baton Rouge and along the River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and they were all small teams and with only one or two having coaches who had wrestled before becoming coaches. Those schools would, because of awkward zoning around the swamps and all along the River Road, compete against all Baton Rouge schools in the Baton Rouge City Invitational, but we would all part begnning with the Regional tournaments that were based on size, too; Belaire was at the bottom of the biggest region, but was a powerhouse compared to the smaller schools. The Thanksgiving tournament was only one-day long and sparsely attended, and the competition was weak.

The Bengals had taken first place for the first time in Belaire’s history, though it was a bittersweet because half of the team wouldn’t be coming back after Christmas vacation. This was Michael’s final tournament, because his dad wanted him to focus on academics so he could get a scholarship to West Point. Ben and Todd’s dad was diagnosed as terminal, so they would be quitting to help Mrs. Abrams care for him at home. Steve got mono, lost too much weight to be healthy, and could barely make it to class much less wrestling practice. A sophomore was suspended for something I don’t recall, so he was ineligible to compete and was uninterested in becoming a Red Shirt. About half of the freshmen had quit for reasons I don’t recall, but were mostly them being honest and saying wrestling wasn’t for them. I won all three of my matches by pin, with only one match going into the second round. When you pin someone, your team gets more points than a technical pin, which is getting 15 points ahead and the match ending out of mercy. A victory by points counts less.

In dual meets, another type of win was when the other team didn’t have a wrestler in that weight, and to allow everyone a workout the etiquite was to send a similarly-weighing wrestler to the mat for an exhibition round that was off-record; the year before, I wrestled plenty of 135 and 145 pound matches in addition to the hundred or so on record. Without a full squad, we would loose points in dual meets and other teams would get more practice wrestling us as exhibitions.

The team would be weak on upper weights when season picked up, but all of us who were staying consistently placed in the top four of open tournaments; there was still a strong chance we would place in City, and that made me feel good despite the diminished size of our team.

We rolled Belaire’s mat, then drug each hefty tree-sized roll into the small gym. Big D and the Abrams’s doing the heavy lifting, the We cleaned and rolled Capital’s mat, then loaded it into the back of Coach’s big Ford 150; the Lions had gone to their den to get it ready, and Coach would meet them there and they would unload it. Jeremy, Miasha, D, and Michael walked home, a few parents drove their kids home, and the Abrams boys took an Astrovan full to their homes.

I had barely gotten any exercise that day, and I had pent-up energy. I patiently sat on my motorcycle and watched Coach lock the gym. I waved goodbye to Coach and rode to Little Saigon for a Vietnamese po’boy.

I had gone on a growth spurt and was consistently weighing around 147 to 149 the day before tournaments and dual meets, so I was cutting calories all week and fasting the day before a morning weigh-in. I had been so busy helping Coach run the tournament that I didn’t find time to eat, even though Mrs. K and Penny, Coach’s daughter, were there selling pizza slices to help pay for things like fungicide for the mats.

I had, though, learned from Penny that I was telegraphing my shots. She had grown up with Coach and her two older brothers wrestling, and she had probably watched 1,000 matches from the sidelines. She was right, though only a video camera or some other fancy gadget would have let me see that for herself. I had taken everyone down with whatever I was doing, but that was only because I was a better wrestler; my take-down rate at bigger tournaments was around 50%, and never once against Hillary Clinton. Penny had given a few tips, and I was anxious to work on them.

I hadn’t eaten in three days, and I wolfed down the po’boy in a few large gulps and was still chewing the last bite when I got back on my motorcycle and donned my helmet. I rode back to Belaire.

I pulled back into the gym parking lot, and drove over the grass and around the corner and parked between two of the annex sheds, close enough to one side that the motorcycle wouldn’t be visible. I locked my helmet to the seat, strapped on my backpack, and strolled up to the gym door and took out the key had made and walked inside. Two minutes later, I was standing on one half-way unrolled section of Belaire’s mat.

I focused on my breath and drilled shot after shot. I had been holding my breath before a shot, tail-telling that I was building up to doing something. As soon as Penny told me that, it made sense; Lea had told me the same thing about how I tensed up before doing a sleight-of-hand move with a deck of cards, and like with how I learned to do an invisible pass, I would learn how to stop telegraphing my shots now that I knew that was the main problem.

The other problem was follow-through. To work on that, I picked up the wrestling team’s 50 pound throw dummy and shot again and again with the intention of hitting it hard and then standing up in one fluid motion, seamlessly flowing through and into the next sequence instead of an awkward pause at the end of a shot; though I had taken each opponent down and quickly threw in a cradle and pinned them, Penny was right. I didn’t have an analogy from magic, but I assumed some lessons from Todd’s Kempo class about intending to punch through something, and I recalled something similar in concept Big Daddy had mentioned about how to do end a fight with one punch; the best I could imagine was shooting through someone’s hips, but with an intention of standing up on the other side and keeping my hips swinging under the throw-dummies center of gravity.

Again and again I shot on that dummy. Then, though I rarely threw, I tried throwing it around; again and again, I’d step across with one foot and swing my hips low and in an arc. But I never could quite get under the dummy’s center of gravity, and I stopped practicing throws after only ten or fifteen minutes.

I was lanky; there was no way I could throw Hillary Clinton. But, I could probably take him down with a low single, if only I could learn to stand up faster than the last two times I tried. I stood the dummy back up, and began doing shot drills again.

Hillary had pinned me twice again since our first match in November. I made it to the second round both times, and was really close to holding out until the third round at the Robert E. Lee Invitational two weeks before. That tournament was a multi-state invitational, and Hillary won gold against even New Orleans’s Jesuit High School’s top 145 pounder and two powerhouse schools from Texas and Oklahoma that sent their second strings to compete. I had won my first match in the looser’s bracket for third, then lost in sudden death overtime; two losses means elimination, and I was eliminated from the Robert E. Lee Invitational on Saturday afternoon.

I watched Hillary wrestle all day Sunday and believed I could stop from getting pinned, but I needed to learn how to take him down and get him in my cradle. Penny had told me I was telegraphing, and if I solved that my long arms would become an advantage over Hillary’s stout body, and if I got him in my cradle I had a chance of winning.

I finished drilling shots and mopped the mat with fungicide. I collapsed against the rolled part and waited a few minutes for the mat to dry, then heaved and ho’ed the mat back into a roll but with a bed-width piece still flat.

Just like baling hay, I thought to myself with a smirk.

I walked into the coaches’s office and plopped in Coach’s chair.

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