Introduction, 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
As of 09 January 2025, this is mostly true; I’ll come back to that after two intertwined stories that continue to shape history.
I’m Jason Partin. Thirty four years ago, on 03 March 1990, Hillary Clinton pinned me in the second round of the 145-pound finals match of the Baton Rouge city high school wrestling tournament. I almost won in the first round, but he escaped my cradle by kicking so hard that he broke my left ring finger, just below the middle knuckle. The finger healed awkwardly, and calcium buildup created a bend in the middle; my two middle fingers point away from each other and look like Dr. Spock’s “live long and prosper” salute from Star Trek. I’m a part-time close-up magician, and for thirty years I’ve been asked about that hand; most people laugh when I say Hillary Clinton broke it, because they assume it’s part of the act. But it’s not. Wrestling Hillary Clinton is the proudest three minutes and forty seconds of my life.
Hillary was captain of the Capital High Lions and a three time undefeated state champion. The joke among other wrestlers was that he was like Sue in Johnny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue,” a kid who grew up tough and mean because of his name. But Hillary wasn’t mean; he was terse and focused, but he was not mean. He played by the rules, and he trained harder than almost any other athlete I knew.
Hillary was 18 years old by the beginning of our senior year, but I was only 16, a quirk of our birthdays being a few days apart. I was born on 05 October 1972; had I been born a day later, I would have been too young to start kindergarten, and I, too, would have turned 18 at the beginning of my senior year. Instead, I began kindergarten at four years old, and my senior year at 16. A research study in Candada showed that professional hockey players were all born around the same time of the year, all starting the youngest grades ten to twelve months older than other kids, which is a massive advantage when a year represents 20% of your life. They were always the biggest, strongest, and fastest kids in their classes, and therefore they had more opportunities to play harder sooner, and over time those small advantages added up. So the joke about Hillary was mistaken: he didn’t grow up to be strong, he was born the strongest kid in his class.
By our senior year, Hillary weighed around 152 pounds and cut weight to make 145 the day of matches. Like most of us, he fasted a day or two before weigh in, and spent the day before weigh in wrapped in black plastic bags, the type used for leaves in the fall, sweating off a few extra pounds. I’d see him running up and down the 34 flights of stairs of the Baton Rouge state capital building next to Capital High, the ridiculously tall art-deco building that was, at the time, the tallest state capital in America and an obvious training destination for everyone living in the flat river city that barely broke sea level. In the 1980’s, the national wrestling rules committee allocated two pounds to account for growing spurts, so by March of 1990, Hillary Clinton was a burly, muscular, hairy, 147 pound terror who would run up and down 34 flights of steps every Tuesday and Friday before weigh-in for Wednesday dual meets and weekend tournaments.
I was the exact opposite. I was emancipated the summer of 1989, and immediately joined the army’s delayed entry program as an adult on paper, therefore not needing my parent’s permission. I weighed in at the recruiter’s office and was 142 pounds in August. I didn’t tell anyone I was emancipated, so I began my senior year just like any other 16 year old kid, and turned 17 just before wrestling season began. I was lanky, relatively weak, with negligible underarm hair and a face dotted with pimples. But my teammates said I was “tenacious,” and it made sense that I would focus all year on one thing: wrestling Hillary Clinton.
By the time March approached, I was 151 pounds and fasting and sweating to make weight before each match. To make life easier, and because I had a bit of pride at the discipline it took to cut weight, I had splurged on Christmas presents for myself: a fancy full rubber jump suit that trapped heat like a portable sweat lodge, and a pair of extra-strong hand grips to use while running up and down the state capital stairs. Though I was of average strength for a 17 year old, therefore weaker than most 18 to 19 year olds, my teammates said I had a kung-fu grip. It was true. I could clamp down on an opponent with vice-like strength, and overcome my weaker body as long as I stayed in a good stance and used leverage rather than strength.
By the time I stepped onto the mat to face Hillary, I had pinned 36 opponents that season. I pinned a few with the half-nelson, but most of them succumbed to my cradle, my arm locked around their neck and behind their knee, and their knee pressed to their face. In semi-finals, I defeated Frank Jackson, a guy almost as strong as Hillary, by holding him in a cradle and preventing him from scoring an escape, which would have sent us into overtime. Though I didn’t pin him, he was unable to break my grip. I won 3-2 and advanced to the finals for the first time in my life. If I caught Hillary in my cradle, I believed I could hold him down. Someone had win, and I had no reason to doubt that it could be me.
The cradle wasn’t a move Coach used himself, probably because he had stubby arms that wouldn’t easily reach around an opponent’s head and leg. His signature move was the half-nelson, but he had coached for more than forty years and knew how to train all types of wrestlers. When Coach was inducted into the USA Wrestling hall of fame, one commentator, not knowing Coach would pass away from Alzheimer’s in 2014, reverently said, “Coach Dale Ketelsen has forgotten more about wrestling than most of us will ever know.” He didn’t tell you what worked for him, he focused on what would work for each unique wrestler.
Coach showed me how use my relatively large hands and spindly arms to have the strongest cradle in all of Baton Rouge, maybe even in all of southern Louisiana. The trick was to not hold both hands together like a handshake, but to lock them with thumbs flat against the first fingers (“A wrestler looses 15% of his strength if he thumb if out”), and, instead of squeezing harder, move your hands away from your body, bringing your elbows together like pivot points of a bolt cutter (“An opponent’s legs are stronger than your arms”). I began pinning people with Coach’s trick the same day he showed me, and I didn’t stop all year. To get even stronger, I took Coach’s advice and began crumpling the Baton Rouge Advocate one page at a time, forming tight balls and dropping them on the floor until there was a hill of paper balls and my forearms were screaming for me to stop; the bulky Sunday edition was dedicated to the end of tournaments, when I’d have a few days to recover before Wednesday’s dual meet. When I bought my rubber suit at a big sporting good store, I also bought the extra-strong hand grips. I carried them wherever I went, alternating crushing them and holding them tightly, and I oiled the springs so I could exercise under my desk in classes without attracting attention. At practice, I’d ask the biggest football players to try breaking my cradle; none could, not even the linebackers twice my weight.
Armed with physics and with Coach in my corner, I clawed my way from loosing all 13 matches my sophomore year to being seeded third in the Baton Rouge city tournament my senior year, with an impressive record of 56-12. Two days and three matches later, I was 59-12 and about to face Hillary, who was something like 45-0; it had been three years since he dropped to the loser’s bracket and had to claw up to third place like Frank and I had all season long.
I took a year worth of effort to the edge of the mat, but left it behind me when the referee beckoned us to the center, because too much thought slows your reflexes. Hillary and I put our lead feet on the line, and faced off. The ref asked us to slap hands, a handshake of sorts to encourage fair play, and we fell back into stance without giving him a glance. He stood back with his whistle in his mouth and his hand raised, and suddenly dropped his hand and blew his whistle, and the gym rafters rattled from the force of Hillary and me colliding.
About a minute and a half later, we were drenched in sweat and he was up 3-1. We were near the center, an arm’s reach apart, and he shot a low single. I sprawled and spun behind him; my right arm shot around his neck, my left arm slid under his leg, and I clasped my hands and had a cradle on Hillary Clinton for the first time in my life.
He instantly kicked against my hands with the cadence and urgency of a MK-19 grenade launcher trying to stop a charging tank, but with much, much more force. With MK-19, I could remain in stance and lean my chest in to soften kickbacks that rattle off at around 45 kicks a minute, but with Hillary my hands took the full brunt. His cadence really was like a MK-19, not quite 60 Hertz, but close enough to where it felt like my arms were rattling like the rafters had. He didn’t take a breath, he didn’t relax to build up strength, and he didn’t waste energy by straining against my grip like less experience wrestlers did; he kicked relentlessly like a wild animal overwhelmed with fight or flight and trying to free itself from a coil spring trap. I couldn’t find leverage, and I felt my sweaty hands slipping apart with every kick. My right hand only clasped my left pinky and ring finger, and my left thumb had a weak hold around my right hand. Hillary kicked and kicked, my left thumb slid too far away from my grip to do any good, and I clamped on to my two left fingers with the force of a hundred days of effort put into that fancy hand grip gadget.
When I felt my left ring finger snap, it felt less like physical pain and more like the pain of lost hope, though I’m sure it would have hurt like hell had I not been so focused. With my kung-fu grip broken, Hillary broke free, stood up, and turned to face me with the speed I had grown to respect. We were face to face again, Hillary’s strongest position, and his eyebrows furrowed with anger. I had never seen him angry before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. I had lost my chance: people make mistakes when they’re angry. The referee awarded him an escape point, me a takedown, and no back points. He pointed us to our corners. I was down 4-3.
Jeremy, our 140 pounder and co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, handed me a fresh hand towel. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, only to have more pour down my forehead, pool in my eyes, and drip off my nose and chin and splash on the mat by my shoes. I alternated between shaking my limbs to stay limber and dabbing sweat off my face, mindful of the break; the knuckle was a swollen, and my ring finger was a useless rigid plank. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. He nodded and stepped back. I wanted to face Hillary while he was still riled.
My breath whooshed in and out through pursed lips, and I stared at Capital’s corner, hoping for a glimpse of the strategy he’d apply in our next round. Two of the maroon hooded Lions dried each of Hillary’s arms while he bounced and shook his limbs like a mirror image of me. I focused on his coach, a spherical mountain of an African American man, and tried to decipher his hand gestures. He had never wrestled, and the Lions never participated in all-city practices, so many of their signs were different than any other school I knew.
Capital High never trained with the all-city team. They remained in their dilapidated gym near the state capital, and ran the steps probably every day after school. Their gym had maroon paint peeling off the walls, an asbestos lined roof, and an old purple and gold mat Coach had given them after LSU disbanded their wrestling program in 1979 (the unpopular 1979 Title IV law required equal numbers of male and female college athletes, and led to male-dominated sports being slashed across the country). The faded mat was patched with duct tape, but it was clean and had its own section of the gym for year-round practice. Capital’s mountain of a coach started a high school program in 1980 with the LSU mats and some old gear Coach donated, and Coach started Belaire’s team in 1981, with only his son, Craig Ketelsen, showing up for their first practice. All Baton Rouge public school wrestling programs were nascent, and only the big Catholic schools had teams before, which is why they dominated the sport when I was growing up. Rising waters raise all ships, and the only way to compete with Catholic, Jesuit, Brother Martin, and Saint Martin’s teams was to help each other; we met in off season to train in the downtown all-city camp, which was in an old auto garage that also had an old LSU mat, cut to fit around the derelict hydraulic lifts and roof support columns. Capital was the exception to the all-city approach. We never asked why, especially because it worked; Capital had started beating the Catholic schools, and Hillary was placing even in national summer freestyle tournaments against kids from Iowa and Pennsylvania.
Hillary ignored me and nodded after every one of his coach’s gestures. I watched their dynamic and felt a bit of pride; I was worth the mountain getting Hillary to focus, which meant I had done well. Coach and Jeremy let me be. My cradle was useless; my intention to use it, and my swollen finger, were, like my year of training, forgotten. None of that mattered now. All that mattered now was that my breath stabilized and my heartbeat calmed down. The referee called to us a few brief seconds later, and I trotted back to the center of the mat. Hillary won the coin toss, and he gave two thumbs up to indicate he wanted us both standing in neutral position. We put one foot forward and faced off. The referee stood poised, whistle in mouth, with one hand raised. I left my thoughts and the memory of my finger behind me.
I focused on Hillary’s hips. Coach only gave a handful of nuggets of wrestling advice in the three years I had known him, and one was to watch an opponents hips, not their eyes or hands, because where their hips went, they went. That was advice from an Iowa coach when Coach was an alternate on the olympic team, at a time in history when Russians were dominating the sport because they focused on taking an opponent off their feet, like Hercules defeating Antaeus by lifting him above Mother Earth to severe his source of strength. He told the same story once a year, at the beginning of practice.
“But to do that,” Coach explained, “they need to get their hips close to yours. Get you to overreach, so they can step in close.”
He would pause to let that sink in, then raise a stubby finger to make a point, and say, “The Russians realized that if you break a man’s stance, you can do what you want to him.” He’d put down his finger, and say: “Don’t break your stance.”
“Here!” he’d say, jumping into a gravediggers stance.
“It’s like shoveling dirt all day. Or pig slop,” he’d say. He’d slowly look around the room, getting eye contact with each of us, one at a time.
“Here!” he’d say, and sprawl onto the mat and landing face down but still in that gravedigger stance, one leg brought up closer to his hips than the other.
He’d get the heavyweights from the football team, where he was an assistant coach, and ask them to pile onto his tiny frame. One of them I saw my first year was Marcus Spears, Belaire’s star football player, before he’d go to another school for his senior year. Marcus was so big that in another two years he’d be playing for Southern, become an All American and ranked the #1 draft pick nationally. He’d play for the LSU Tigers, and then go on to play a defensive end for the Dallas Cowboys. He was always a very big dude, and just him alone would have been impressive against the diminutive Coach.2
But more guys piled on. There was Clint Osbourne, the mohawk-sporting lineman who once proved his neck was so strong that he could crash his helmeted head through a wooden fence. There was Dana “Big D” Miles, Belaire’s linebacker and the wrestling team’s perpetually smiling and beat-boxing wrestling heavyweight, who had to cut down from around 290 pounds to 275 pounds for heavyweight weigh-in. There was Big Head Ben Abrams, my friend who got me into wrestling and our 189 pounder, and who to this day says his nickname was Big Ben, not Big Head Ben, despite knowing that your nickname is given by other people without you having much say in it. There must have been 1,000 pounds on Coach’s back, but he effortlessly pushed onto his leading foot, the one close to his center, and all four guys slid off as if they were simple one middleweight. Coach wasn’t breathing hard, and he came to his feet in a perfect pig-slopping stance. He could do that all day, though he was too humble to admit it; he was an old-school farm boy who grew up having to work all day shoveling pig slop and then go to a few hours of wrestling practice, football practice, or baseball practice.
“Vince Lambarti said that fatigue will make a coward out of anyone,” Coach would remind us two or three times a year.
Armed with that knowledge, a few of us wrestlers ran cross-country track or swam, just for extra exercise. A few hit the football team’s weight room after wrestling practice. A couple of us did all of the above. I was in such good shape that, a few months later, I’d be disappointed by the U.S. army’s basic training, advanced infantry training, and Airborne school, all of which were a pale shadow in the light of wrestling; that sentiment as shared by every other wrestler I knew in seven years of official military service, including a brief stent on Fort Bragg’s post wrestling team in 1993. But in 1990, on the mat against Hillary Clinton, all of that year’s training did not matter, because Hillary was older, hairier, stronger, determined, and in just as good if not better shape than I was. And my kung-fu grip was broken. There was nothing else I could do but get onto the mat again and wrestle.
Coach’s most persistent piece of advice, two simple words sprinkled generously across three years of practice and countless tournaments: “Just Wrestle.” No matter what happened the previous round or that morning or the weekend before, just wrestle. With everything you have left in you, just wrestle. He never elaborated, he only said: “Just Wrestle.” His words had roots a gold-medal olympian, the most celebrated of a generation; that guy pinned all four opponents in the 1960 olympics, but had barely beaten Coach 4:3 in overtime during olympic trials. Before Coach’s next match for third place, held only minutes after his loss in semi-finals and back when rounds were three minutes each, that legend approached Coach catching his breath in the locker room and said, “Someone will win. It might as well be you.”
Someone will win. For the next two minutes, it doesn’t mater who. Just Wrestle.
I focused on Hillary’s hips. In my periphery, I was aware of the referee’s chest and cheeks: sometimes, they telegraph blowing the whistle, giving a fraction of a second advantage before wrestling. I saw the referee blow his whistle and drop his hand, and I began wrestling before spectators the bleachers heard the whistle end.
Hillary was faster and shot a high double that caught both my legs. I sprawled, kicking both feet into the air like a bucking bronco, and slammed my chest onto his shoulders. He resisted my weight with the patience of Atlas, and he pulled my legs with the strength of Hercules. I sprawled again and again, and he held my thighs and tried to push his hips under mine and tried to look towards the sky, to get his gravedigger stance under me so he could lift me off the mat. But my lanky legs gave me an advantage, a fulcrum that I leveraged to push the weight of the whole world onto Hillary’s broad hairy shoulders. Sprawl by sprawl, Hillary’s arms crept further from his body, and his head began to bow under the force of my sprawl. He was no longer in a good stance, and that’s when I cross-faced him with the force of God.
Hillary’s head turned and he released his grip. My right hand continued moving into a cradle, my body acting from a core with no concept of pain. I began to spin behind Hillary, my left hand targeting his raised left leg, ring finger stuck straight out, but he sprung backwards, towards the mat’s edge, and popped up into a perfect stance.
We kept eye contact and crab-walked back towards the center, a truce-of-sorts wrestlers fall into without discussing it. We were almost to the center when Hillary’s forearm shot to my neck like a rattlesnake snagging prey. He yanked my head forward, wanting me to plant all my weight on my leading foot. Hillary had a lethal head-heal pick, but Coach had told me how to stop him: “Don’t be a headhunter,” he said. He was given that advice from the US Olympic coach, because the Russians used the same head-heel setup at Capital High.
I used the forward momentum generated by Hillary’s yank and swung my hips under his, and flowed into a a high single that took him to the mat; but he sprung back up and faced me so quickly that no points were scored either way. We stood face to face again for the briefest of moments, then he moved so quickly that I don’t recall how I ended up in a bear-hug: I may have blinked.
Hillary caught me on exhale, my lungs almost empty, and he instantly threw me in a beautiful, perfect throw. I watched the ceiling appear in my view, and I watched my size 11 Asics Tiger wrestling shoes, an older style and frayed, rise above my head. They once belonged to Craig Ketelsen, a 171 pound wrestler and Belaire’s first state champion just before I began high school; I wasn’t superstitious, those old shoes just fit me more snugly than my newer shoes in the locker room. Without wiggle room around my toes, I felt I moved faster. I watched those snug-fitting shoes fly through the air above my head; today, in my mind’s eye, I see them in slow motion. They slowly moved to block my view of the basketball scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant orange neon monster with dozens of small lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented. It had a massive countdown timer so everyone in southern Louisiana could see how many seconds were left in each round. Craig’s shoes crept past the orange lights of the scoreboard above Baton Rouge High’s bleachers, and our names came into view again. The shoes began to arc back down, forming a perfect 360 degree circle, and momentum keeping them a tad bit behind my shoulders and hips. I saw the faces of a few hundred fans who paid to see finals on a single mat placed in the center of the gym floor. Our stands were filled mostly parents and teachers who didn’t know the sport well, but almost had looks of awe on their faces. It was a beautiful throw. Some faces were cringing at the inevitable: I was about to hit the mat like a meteor crashing into Earth.
Hillary slammed my shoulders to the mat with a thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like. Exactly one year later, on 03 March 1991, the allied forces would drop two 15,000 pound bombs onto Khamisiya airport; I felt both shake the ground, and when the dust settled I thought they felt like when Hillary slammed me to the mat. The initial shock wave reverberated back from the bleachers and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out. I don’t know if my eyes were open or closed, but my memory is of the same pitch blackness you’d see deep under Earth, in a bunker and in the middle of night, fighting to capture Khamisiya. Time returned to normal, and I wrestled.
My body bridged so quickly that Hillary didn’t get the pin. My feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Asics flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light, stared to the trellised roof high above Baton Rouge High’s gym floor, and I realized I had to get my shoulders up, quickly. I heaved with neck muscles strengthened by nine months of weight training, and pivoted onto the top of my head. I had promised myself I’d never get pinned again, and I would die before I broke that promise.
I bridged and Hillary squeezed my chest with the patience of a boa constrictor, bit by bit, waiting for the slightest exhale to squeeze a bit more. His tightening was controlled, calm, and deadly, like when a disciplined sniper takes precise shots at the peak or valley of each breath, focused on his target more than himself. My bridge began to collapse, and I stared at the bright orange clock – upside down then but somehow right side up in my memory today, as if my mind righted it over time – and I saw that I had almost a minute left.
I tried force my right hand between Hillary and me, making a tight fist so that its gnarly knuckles would rasp across his rib cage and cause enough pain for him to loosen his hold, but he only exhaled and pulled himself closer to my spine, compressing my ribs even more. I was burning precious fuel and my bridge buckled a bit, so I focused on saving energy instead.
I couldn’t move. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock, hoping for time to speed up. I could see Coach and Jeremy watching me in silence. I didn’t pray. I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling. Instead, I tried to relax and drift closer to my core, that part of me that needed less oxygen, less food, and less validation, the part that I’d learn to recognize as that which can see over the edge of life, and stare into the depths of the unknown without wasting energy on either fight or flight.
In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, I saw Little Paige, the 13 year old freshman and our 103 pounder. By his senior year, he would win state at 138 pounds, earn an athletic scholarship and place nationally, and join the air force in 1994; and, while stationed in Korea and after the shocking win of Royce Gracie’s style of jujitsu in 1983 that focused on ground fighting, Paige would go on to win South Korea’s middleweight Mixed Martial Arts national championship as Paige “The Rage” Russel. His mom knew my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior in high school, and she told Paige that I was a good influence, that I turned out well even with a dad like Ed Partin who was not around because he was in prison. A lot of freshmen’s parents told them something similar; my dad dropped out to have me, and in a town where people start having kids at 18 or 19 most people who knew him had kids younger than I was. In a town as small as Baton Rouge, it seemed all freshmen’s parents knew my dad the drug dealer, which tells you as much about their parents as it does about mine. Paige’s mom was Juanita, and she was in the bleachers, supporting her son.
Towering over Little Paige was Big Rodney, aka “Hulk,” our freshman heavyweight who was lean and fast and ran in oversized black plastic bags to cut from 280-something to 275 (Big D had quit the team that year). Big Rodney would wrestle for two years in college, and keep insisting he be called Hulk when he became head coach of Catholic. His parents were in the bleachers, and never heard of my dad.
Next to Big Rodney were a few older Belaire wrestlers who were standing next Andy and Cory, the18 year old twins who used to be Belaire’s best wrestlers, and were the previous year’s 172 and 165 classes (weight classes changed every year). They dropped out of high school the year before and passed their equivalency exam, but they paid the $2 each just to see finals. Their dad worked my grandfather (half of Baton Rouge had at some point) and I had known them since 1983, when my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin Senior, was portrayed by Bryan Dennedy in the film “Blood Feud,” and because of the movie’s promotions. Andy and Cory would pin me and other little kids against the gym wall and practice high-fly wrestling moves onto our smaller bodies, and they called me Dolly, like country singer Dolly Parton, an inevitable nickname for a small kid named Jason Partin. They matured, and they were the ones who first suggested that I be made co-captain at the end my junior year. Because, they said in unison, he has “tenacity.” That was one of the words they were studying for the equivalency exam; they would practice vocabulary like they practiced wrestling moves, looking for reasons to say the difference between “tenacious” and “tenacity” (I had tenacity; my grip was tenacious), and using big words like “delapitataed” for the all-city gym, and “loquacious” for me. They said if I talked less and practiced more, I’d get better, and they were right. Though they no longer made fun of my name, they still called me Dolly, saying that was motivation, just like it was for Hillary and a Boy Named Sue.
What was most remarkable wasn’t my Belaire teammates, it was the all-city wrestlers from the previous summer freestyle camp. About six gathered behind the Belaire guys. All had different colored hoodies, but all were wearing the same white t-shirt from camp. Only Chris Forest, heavyweight for the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, wasn’t wearing one; he couldn’t squeeze his broad torso into an XXL. Next to Chris and two feet shorter was the Bulldog’s team captain, Clodi Tate, the 136 pound city champion as of two matches ago and in a few hours would be named “most outstanding wrestler” for the city tournament – no one would argue that. Chris would pin his opponent in the first round, win city, and go on to win state and then place in nationals on Iowa’s coveted team. The summer before, Clodi’s dad, a minister, had found the shirts in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU, just were it branches off of I-10. The shirts were simple white shirts printed with Ephsians 6:12 in an unremarkable font; but the message wasn’t about religion for most of us, it was about wrestling.
Depending on which translation of the bible you reference, Ephesians 6:12 says: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
The words on my buddies shirts were upside down, but I knew them by heart. Regardless of the translation, the words speak to a metaphor for doing work for a higher cause, to find strength where you thought you had none, because The Universe needs you to keep fighting. It’s not about you, and it’s not about your body, no matter how fatigued you may feel.
I’m not a coward. On my back and out of air, I bridged with all I had, and then a bit more because something needed me to keep fighting. But though my spirit was willing, my flesh was out of oxygen. The guys in my corner began to fade into one dark grey blur, and the clock became a single spot of fuzzy orange light. I see that light in my mind’s eye, and I see myself becoming more and more fatigued, bit by bit, no amount of will power stopping it. Sometimes hope isn’t enough, and the other wrestler wins. Promises break despite our intentions. Fatigue is relative. A lot of good people die fighting, and they are not cowards, either.
My attention narrowed down to what was happening with my body. Our wrestling singlets were skin-tight and exposed our shoulders so there could be no doubt of a pin. The acne on my back protruded further than the singlet, and I felt the bumps contact the mat and push against my skin. My vision blurred, and I could no longer see the orange light, but I saw the referee’s face when he slide beside us with his whistle pinched between his lips. I felt skin contact rubber: he blew the whistle and slapped the mat. It was over. Hillary Clinton had won.
We stood up and the referee raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook the gym more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It really was a beautiful throw, and Hillary earned his pin. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me with twenty seconds to go in the second round, and I couldn’t argue with that. Hillary Clinton would go on to win a gold in city and regionals, and then state, still undefeated. I’d never hear from him again.
I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance a permanent part of him, and he said: “Good job, Magik.”
I nodded. He had shaken my hand and clasped my tricep the same way and said words to the same effect almost 152 times. He only missed a few matches at big tournaments that had eight mats and multiple wresters on deck at once. When he wasn’t there, Jeremy sat in Coach’s chair, and at least one other wrestler was temporary co-captain. Even when he was riled up, flinging his reading glasses away with reckless abandon, and sliding across the mat when Frank Jackson shot on me and almost took me down, shouting shout: “Sprawl! Sprawl, Magik! Sprawl!” Coach’s job was to get me on the mat in front of Hillary, and then to let me go from there. For almost three years, he got me to where I needed to be, and no matter what happened on the mat, win or lose, he’d great me at the edge and shake my hand and tell me, “Good job, Magik.” He meant it every time.
We never mimicked Coach’s handshake, it was from a place deeper than we could grasp. Jeremy, a man of few words but of kind actions, and who never agreed with the team’s decision to make me co-captain, stood up and offered the chair next to Coach. Surprised, I sat down and accepted the fresh towel in his hand. He had nothing to prove with his gesture; he had dropped to 140 earlier that year to avoid wrestling Hillary and had won his city finals match when I was warming up on deck. Jeremy was the champion, not I. But he stepped behind me, in the corner that was now empty. A quick glance let me see a lot of our team in the bleachers with their parents, less interested in the next match. I sat beside Coach. Another wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.
Later that day, I saw Pat, a former Baton Rouge High heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches, laughing. He had assisted the all-Louisiana team, but, like Chris Forest, Pat couldn’t fit into the XXL shirt (Chris could beat Pat, but Pat was, like the mountain, a good coach). Pat always laughed loudly enough to shake the bleachers, and at the end of long days in summer camp his laughter kept us practicing longer than Vince Lambarti’s words ever could. I overheard him loudly telling the group how Hillary held me so hard the only thing I could wiggle were my eyeballs; Pat could wiggle his eyeballs, and whenever someone was pinned he told that joke and everyone laughed. I heard the group laughing, but I didn’t look in their direction, because I had seen Pat do that a million times. I was focused on the clock again, unable to remember when I stopped being able to see it.
I thought I was pinned with thirty or so seconds left to go, and I wondered what had happened in those final ten seconds. I wanted to know what my body did when my mind stopped remembering. What does it mean to give it everything you have, or to “be all you can be,” that hokey army recruiting slogan, when you’re out of air, trapped, and your body slides closer and closer to some primal thing that existed before we had thoughts. Somewhere between what you know and who you are, there’s something that nurtures your core and shapes it into an unchanging, permanent, ineffable pinpoint of force stronger than muscles or memories. Belaire Bengals or Capital Lions, Baton Rouge team or New Orleans team, Louisiana or Iowa, north or south, black or white, us or them: what made your body move when your mind was blank? How are men enemies one moment, then allies the next?
In essence, I was contemplating nature vs. nurture. It had been on my mind a lot that year, ever since a judge looked at my family history and granted me emancipation from the Partin family. My dad was in an Arkansas federal prison for growing a few marijuana plants – a casualty of Reagan’s war on drugs – and my grandfather was recently released from Texas federal penitentiary; he was a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, lier, bearer of false witness, racketeer (I wasn’t sure what that meant), embezzler, drug addict, betrayer of teammates, and a man who, according to Mamma Jean, crossed the line when he stopped going to church on Sundays. But for all of Mamma Jean’s talk about church and family, she had never seen me wearing that t-shirt with Ephesians 6:12, and none of my family had seen me wrestle. Nature vs. nurture, to me, could be explained that shirt, Coach and my teammates, and in the ten seconds missing from my memory.
The group of coaches parted, and Pat’s smile went away. He leaned down and softly asked Coach: What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all season. But it looked like he gave up. Is he okay?
Coach replied that I had a lot on my mind, and that my grandfather was sick. Coach was a man of few words; Jeremy was loquacious compared to him. He put on the reading glasses he kept draped around his neck, glanced down at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to help someone do something. Everyone nodded. All of Baton Rouge had seen the news; Edward Partin was released early because of declining health, and wasn’t expected to live long. My teammates were kind enough to let me be. They were my family, of sorts. And it was over now. I’d have to heal my finger and miss regionals. My next job would be in the army.
Hillary was a beast, but I almost defeated him. Forty years later, I’m still more proud of that than anything I’ve done since. To a 17 year old high school senior with a family I didn’t want to discuss, almost defeating Hillary Clinton in the Baton Rouge city tournament was bigger news than when my grandfather died a few weeks later.
On 16 March 1990, I rode a Honda Ascot 500cc shaft-drive motorcycle to my grandfather’s funeral, a small and low-maintenance machine that got around 60 miles per gallon and let me get to and from downtown’s all-city practices. I was wearing a white helmet airbrushed with blue letters that said “c/o 1990?,” a jab at overzealous seniors who wore shirts that said, “Class of 1990!” I sported my cherished but gaudy fuzzy orange letterman jacket with blue sleeves a big letter B on the left chest, and I had meticulously adorned it with 36 small gold safety pins, grouped in clusters of five for easy counting; one pin was stood out by itself and made the others more remarkable.
The jacket had an admittedly awkward looking wrestling letterman pin with one man down and the other grasping him from behind, Mercury’s winged feet for cross-country track, and the comedy and tragedy faces of theater (because I was a magician who helped build interactive sets, I lettered as a thespian; because I was a poor swimmer, I didn’t letter in swimming). The safety pins tinkled in the wind when I slowed the motorcycle down and rode along the shoulder of Airline Highway, the small engine barely audible over the traffic jam of cars and idling 18 wheel trucks headed towards Greenwood Funeral Home.
My right hand was on the gas side, my left hand was on the clutch side with its middle fingers buddy-taped. For the occasion, I applied two fresh strips of bright white cloth tape that morning; in truth, I didn’t need the buddy tape, but I liked the way it looked and how it made me feel. It was a badge of honor that meant more to me than anything on my jacket. I slowly braked onto the grass beside a paved parking spot and as close as police would allow, turned off the bike, and draped my helmet on the handlebars.
My face shone from lingering pride at media coverage and a small award from Coach and the team that they presented in front of all 380 Belaire seniors. Most athletic. Coach’s award. A few others. There was a color photo spotlight about me in the newspaper about performing magic at Baton Rouge General’s childrens hospital as part of David Copperfield’s Project Magic, a rare instance of a Partin other than my grandfather in the news. The full page color photo showed me holding a wand and about to make something disappear in my left hand, which was unbandanged for the photo shoot. My finger had healed, but was very stiff and sore, and it was my dealing hand and it relied on the ring finger to side-steal a card; I didn’t tell the reporter that, though, because I was good at keeping how magic worked a secret.
After all of that attention, I was unimpressed by the crowds of people and reporters clustered outside of the funeral home. I walked up to Aunt Janice, she bent down to hug me, and we went inside. I was always the runt of my family.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the president of Baton Rouge Teamsters Local #5, famous for testifying against International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and sending him to prison. Everyone in the family called my grandfather Big Daddy. Hoffa had famously vanished in 1975 and was pronounced dead in 1985, and most people assumed Big Daddy was a part in his demise. Not that they cared; as Walter Sheridan wrote, Louisiana has it’s own view of what’s right and wrong, and everyone in the state loved Ed Partin and all the work he brought to our economy. Even with a long list of crimes, newspapers said that if he had a college degree he’d become governor, and his picture was in the newspaper so much that practically everyone knew his name and therefore mine. Big Daddy was a big, rough man who was devastatingly handsome and charming; everyone always assumed I’d eventually grow into Partin-sized wrestling shoes, but it hand’t happened.
Besides the big Partin family, the former Baton Rouge mayor was there, and so was the entire Baton Rouge police department, reporters from every major newspaper, a hell of a lot of huge Teamsters, a gaggle of FBI agents, and Walter Sheridan, former director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force and a respected NBC news correspondent in the 1980’s, and a surprisingly long lineup of aging brutes from the 1954 LSU football national champion team. Billy Cannon3, our first Heismann Trophy winner, former pro for the Houston Oilers, and the biggest celebrity on the biggest float in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade, was one of the pallbearers; his handsome face was on billboards all along I-110, on the way to and from his home in Saint Francisville, his bright white smile advertising his dental business on their way to and from work in the chemical plants north of downtown. He was so popular, that even after he was convicted of running a counterfeiting ring, people still flocked to see him in parades, and LSU still had him speak at ceremonies.
Everyone in Baton Rouge wanted to see Billy and all the celebrities who stopped by. No wonder no one asked about my letterman jacket or buddy-tapped fingers, not even the reporters and television crews supposedly focusing on things like that. The New York Times simply listed me as one Edward Grady Partin Senior’s grandchildren; they mistakenly said “and great-grandchildren,” but I was the second oldest and knew all of my cousins from both Big Daddy’s marriages, proving that even the NY Times makes mistakes. And so did I, because I thought half of Baton Rouge worked for Big Daddy, but they worked for all the companies and private trucking lines, and were only members of the Teamster union that Big Daddy had led for thirty years. I didn’t quite see that then, which is why I thought half of Baton Rouge worked for Big Daddy; regardless of who signed the paycheck, everyone in the state knew Edward Partin. And so did most people in America.
Big Daddy was plastered across national media in the 1960s’, and was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s four hour epic movie, “Blood Feud,” the one where Robert Blake won an acadaemy for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” Earnest Bornige portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, and a tall daytime soap opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby Kennedy. That was at a time in America when so many people knew Hoffa, my grandfather, Hoover, and Bobby, that producers had to find actors who looked like them. And because it was such big news, they could pay for big-name actors to bring eyeballs to the screen. Walter Sheridan had a small role in the film, too, as the head of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force, but it was uncredited and no one knew what he looked like, anyway. He looks remarkably like Jimmy Hoffa; the cover of his 1972 opus, “The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa,” added to the impression, because Hoffa’s photo was on the cover Walter’s was on the back in an almost mirror image, forever confusing the two in my mind.
Only Walter asked about my fingers. He noticed details, and was good at his job. That’s probably why J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy hand-picked him to rejoin the force with one job: get Hoffa.4 For twenty years, he focused on nothing else, and he was a friend – of sorts – to Mamma Jean and Grandma Foster. I barely knew him, but I knew that year he was focused on Big Daddy and his final words.
The mayor and the football players said a lot of words, and so did a few of my younger cousins. Tiffany, Janice’s daughter and the only cousin older than I was, spoke. She was almost six feet tall, with eyes like mine from Mamma Jean, and the homecoming queen her senior year. Her hometown was Houston, so she didn’t pay much attention to the LSU players and she focused on telling what a sweet grandfather Big Daddy was; she and I were the only two grandkids who knew him well before he went to prison in 1980, and he really was what most people consider a good grandfather. Tiffany told stories, and everyone was already in tears when Jennifer took her turn, Cynthia’s oldest daughter and only a sophmore, but who was still taller than I was. She spoke from what she learned in media and from my aunts, that Big Daddy was an all-American hero who saved Bobby Kennedy’s life and who led the state of Louisiana to prosperity. Though only 14, she was a talented orator who had hand-written her speech in the weeks leading up to Big Daddy’s inevitable death. Everyone was bawling. They were the only two of about a dozen of my cousins to speak, and most of the time was allocated to the mayor and of course Billy Papas. I did not speak, because no one asked me to, and neither did my cousin, also named Jason Partin, a football star for the Zachary Broncos who was already over six feet and around 200 pounds.
After the funeral, when most people got up and flocked around Billy and the aging Tigers, I leaned over and told Walter – who didn’t seem to care about football – that Edward Partin’s final words were: “No one will ever know my part in history.” He agreed that it sounded funny when said out loud, and that Big Daddy was probably right. Walter would pass away six years later; I believe he was a good person, with a lot to share in his book and life’s work.
Big Daddy’s final words stuck with me, and for the next thirty years I pondered what he meant. Practically every book and film has it wrong, and a lot of the information wouldn’t trickle out until the 1979 JFK Assassination Report was made partially public in 1993. But then an avalanche of memoirs by everyone who was once a Teamster or had theories about Kennedy’s assassination came out, and the truth was muddled by the torrent of partially informed perspectives and overt opinions from those who gain knowledge from other people’s books, but didn’t know the people involved. It would take me thirty years to hack through the jungle of misinformation and make a clear path for others to follow.
But a clear path does not mean the right one; I’m biased, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. This may take a few iterations to get it right and ready for publishing.
Go to A Part in History
Go to the Table of Contents
- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975:
“But there’s another Edward Grady Partin, one the jury never got to hear about.
This Edward Grady Partin is mentioned in criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943, when he was convicted on a breaking and entering charge, to late 1962, when he was indicted for first-degree manslaughter. During that twenty-year period Partin had been in almost constant touch with the law. He had had a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. He had been indicted for kidnapping. He had been charged with raping a young Negro girl. He had been indicted for embezzlement and for falsifying records. He had been indicted for forgery. He had been charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
Big Daddy fills a big part in both of Jimmy Hoffa’s autobiographies, the first which was written in prison and sounded much, much angrier. I assume six years of beating the stuffing in prison mattresses calmed him down and let him focus on his words more than his anger; Hillary’s coach would be proud.
↩︎ - Marcus became a famous sports commentator after his impressive pro career. Though he doesn’t recall the moment with Clint and Big Head Ben, he remembered them and of course Coach. He said my version was feasible. Leaving it in the story points to Coach being remarkable to many people, and it emphasizes that memories form from varying degress of importance on what led up to those moments and what happens after. It’s likely that Marcus simply doesn’t recall the time he, Clint, and Big Ben were all there together, or even noticed the little 126 pound me staring in awe. Similarly, Hillary Clinton may not know me by my name or nickname; I may have been nothing more than his 46th official victory that season, a speed bump on the way to the state championship. I never learned his story, or Marcus’s. ↩︎
- Incidentally, this is an excerpt of Billy Cannon from Wikipedia on 30 January 2025, showing that not all hometown heroes are admirable people:
Despite a successful practice, by 1983 he was in financial difficulties from bad real estate investments and gambling debts.[91] Becoming involved in a counterfeiting scheme, he printed $6 million in U.S. 100-dollar bills, some of which he stored in ice chests buried in the back yard of a house he owned and rented out.[55][92][93] Charged along with five others, he served two-and-a-half years of a five-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Texarkana.[54] Upon his release in 1986, he regained his dentistry license but struggled to rebuild his practice.[39] In 1995, he was hired as a dentist at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, initially as a contractor. At the time, the dental clinic in the prison was in chaos; many dentists refused to work there and inmates were often unable to make appointments.[39] Cannon reorganized the dental program with great success and was soon hired as a full-time employee.[94]Warden Burl Cain, impressed with Cannon’s work with the dental program, put him in charge of the prison’s entire medical system.[39] Cannon remained the resident dentist at the penitentiary, where inmates typically call him “Legend”.[39][95]
Cannon resided in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife. In February 2013, Cannon suffered a strokeand was hospitalized in Baton Rouge.[96] He was released two days later, returned to work the following Monday, and made a full recovery.[97][98] Cannon died in his sleep on May 20, 2018, at his home in St. Francisville, at the age of 80.[99]
↩︎ - Walter Sheridan, in his 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” coincidentally published the month I was born, he had to address the reputation of his star witness. Of the hundreds of names detailed in the appendix, Big Daddy takes up space second only to Hoffa. I trust Walter. He wrote:
“Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
Walter noticed details, but he didn’t always elaborate. I never learned what it meant for Big Daddy and Hoffa to “forcibly install” Chuck Winters, but I doubt it was a pleasant story. No one in New Orleans lived to tell the tale, and Big Daddy was better than a magician at keeping secrets. ↩︎