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
I’m Jason Partin. Thirty four years ago, on Sunday, 03 March 1990, when I was a 17 year old senior at Belaire High School in Baton Rouge, Hillary Clinton broke my left ring finger just below the middle knuckle. It healed askew, creating a gap between my ring and middle fingers that looks like the split-finger salute Dr. Spock used in Star Trek when he said, “Live long, and prosper.” I’m a close-up magician, so for more than thirty years people have stared at my hands, and many ask about the skewed finger. When I say Hillary Clinton broke it, or quip that I’m the most dedicated Star Trek fan on Earth, most laugh and assume it’s part of the act. I never saw the need to tell them the whole story, especially as a magician who is good at keeping secrets.
At the time, I didn’t know Bill Clinton was president of Arkansas, much less that his wife’s name was Hillary. I wouldn’t learn her name until the 1992 presidential campaign. The Hillary Clinton that broke my finger was the three time undefeated Louisiana state wrestling champion at 145 pounds, and captain of the revered Capital High Lions.
The joke back then 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, putting his energy towards training harder than any wrestler I knew, but he was not mean. He was born in March of 1971, and by the beginning of the 1989 wrestling season he was an 18 year old senior, about to turn 19, a legal adult in high school. He had fully matured, and had been shaving since at least the 11th grade. Referees checked older kids like him for abrasive stubble on their chins, and made them shave before competing. Some wrestlers shaved their arms a few days before tournaments to make their cross-face feel like sandpaper agains your cheeks, so referees checked that, too, but Hillary let his hairy arms and legs stay bushy. His cross-face was so brutal that he didn’t need to cheat to get an opponent to move their head so that he could get behind them and score.
USA Wrestling rules added two pounds to each weight class to account for growth, so by March of 1990, Hillary Clinton was a hairy 147 pound terror. He wasn’t growing, so he used the extra two pounds to add muscle. His burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, so his body didn’t waste precious pounds on an otherwise useless extra inch on to his arms and legs. His thighs bulged with muscles, and to fit into his skin-tight wrestling singlet he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed, leading his maroon singlet to have a few loose folds around the waist. But the elastic singlet was skin tight again around his bulging lats, and seemed to be poured over his thick thighs like a second skin.
Like a lot of us, Hillary had to sweat off a few pounds before each match. Capital High was next to the downtown 34-story art deco state capital building, the tallest in America back then, and I’d see him wrapped in big black plastic bags, running up and down all flights of steps the evening before weigh-in. Capital was in what most people called a bad part of town, an overwhelmingly African American community under the I-10 and I-110 interstate overpasses that criss-crossed around our capital building, part of the urban poverty islands created by America’s interstate system in the 1950’s and 60’s. I never learned his weight, but he was probably around 155 pounds every Friday, but 147 pounds by weigh-in on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
I was the opposite. My birthday was 05 October 1972; had I been born a few days later, I would not have been old enough to start kindergarten, and I would have been pushed back and began kindergarten a year later. Instead, I began school at 4 years old, the youngest kid in class, and I began my senior year at 16 years old. I was 17 by March – when Hillary would turn 19 – and I was a lanky kid with disproportionately long arms, big hands with long fingers, and scuba fins for feet. I had negligible underarm hair, and my face and shoulders were dotted with pimples. I had never needed to shave, and the hair on my arms and legs was soft, like the down feathers on a chirping baby chic. My red hair was cut short; not military short, but short for the 1980’s, mostly because I cut it for swim practice earlier in the year, and it was easier to wrestle keeping it like that. My crossface was decent, if only because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face, my knobby thumb knuckle hurt more than forearm stubble on older wrestlers who intentionally cheated.
I knew I was outgunned by Hillary, but I couldn’t do much more about it, other than to begin training for it, with season beginning in November and ending in March; the summer after that, when I would look back on that realization with reverence, I would be standing on a training field near aging WWII-era bararacks in Fort Benning’s advanced infantry training field, just around the corner from the Iron Mike statue, that spoke to me and summarized my senior year well:
More sweat in training means less blood in combat
After I committed to training my best, Hillary pinned me in the first round of the Belaire-Capital dual meet; but I got a little better every day, and quickly I began to lose to Hillary a little less brutally every time me met in a tournament. It was David and Goliath, but without the Hollywood ending.
Twenty years later, in a 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers: The Story of Success,” I’d read about a Canadian research study investigating why, statistically, professional Canadian hockey players were likely to be born in March, and like Hillary, they started each year of school as the oldest kids in class. In kindergarten, that’s 20% older than other kids, but with unquantifiable leaps ahead in physical and mental development. Those advantages that carry all the way up to high school and college, giving professional an unseen advantage that began with nothing more than luck of when they were conceived. Malcolm Gladell called that advantage The Matthew Effect, after the New Testament’s Matthew 13:12, where Matthew wrote something like:
Whoever has, will be given more, and they will have an abundance; whoever does not have, even that will be taken from them.
When I first read Outliers and put Matthew 13:12 in context, I instantly thought of Hillary shaving when I was getting my first pimples, a kid wrestling against an adult who happened to be in the same grade. Scholars say Matthew meant knowledge, spiritual presence, or some other esoteric feeling; those who give a bit more in training to compete against people like Hillary see a more practical meaning in those words. Wrestling teams advance by the accumulated scores of each member, so we’re motivated to help each other; when Coach paired us in groups during practice he, had a knack for grouping us so we could learn from each other, so in a way, in practice, everyone had an abundance of some skill, and could simultaneously share and gain more skills. But although wrestlers train as a team, everyone competes as an individual. That’s terrifying to many, especially when you are new to the sport and your first match is in a dual meet against the captain of Capital High, and many quit; or, in a relatively poor school like Belaire, and probably many wealthy ones, too, some kids simply can’t get rides to and from practice and dual meets. Regardless of the reasons, many young wrestlers quit, making the prophetic words of Matthew seem unjust to them, regardless of what scholars say.
I was only 16 at the beginning of wrestling season in 1989, but because of a quirk in the law, I was also a legal adult. I was emancipated by a court of law in August of 1989, a week after Uncle Bob’s funeral. The justice system of Louisiana is unique compared to all other other 49 United States, because it’s based on the Napoleonic Code from when France occupied land surrounding the Mississippi River. They named after King Louis and Queen Anna, then named Baton Rouge for the big red stick that marked the boundary of two Native American tribes, and gave everyone a modified version of their legal system. It persisted through the Louisiana purchase and the civil war, and to this day it gives judges more leeway than in other states, because it has less dependence on predicate cases than the rest of America. I grew up in and out of the Louisiana foster system, so I knew legal codes surprisingly well for a kid, and as Uncle Bob lay dying I petitioned the East Baton Rouge Parish Judicial District #19 to become emancipated from both sides of my family. Judge Robert Downing knew the Partins well, met my mom, and signed the paperwork. I carried that piece of paper with his signature and the raised seal of Louisiana, a Pelican nesting her nest of babies, with me to the army recruiter’s office and used it to join the army’s delayed entry program, contingent on me graduating high school, passing the ASVAB test, and not being found guilty of a crime; if I were, I’d be charged as an adult.
My contract guaranteed that if I graduated Airborne school, I’d be assigned to the 82nd Airborne, the most elite force you could join at the time. They were on the news a lot in 1989, especially over Christmas, when a few thousand of them jumped from a fleet of C-130’s and C-141’s into Panama, overtaking the country in a few short days. They surrounded President Noriega’s compound for two weeks, bringing in giant speakers and blaring 1980’s heavy metal 24 hours a day until the sleep-deprived forces surrendered. Of course, because of the time period, Van Halen’s 1984 album and the songs “Jump!” and “Panama!” were favorites of the young paratroopers, and television news kept showing them in their jungle fatigues and face paint, smiling and pointing to Noriega’s compound and making jokes about their choice of music. Several months after Hillary broke my finger, in the early stages of the first Gulf war – still called Desert Shield back then – I’d chat with some of the guys I saw on television and learn that when the doors opened at 4am and 600 feet over the Panamanian air field, the hot humid jungle air hit them in the face, a sharp change from the cold dry winter air of Fort Bragg in December, and the air force pilots of their C-141 blared the new Guns and Roses’s song “Welcome to the Jungle.” Kids the same age as Hillary but armed with M-16’s, M203 grenade launchers, and M-60 machine guns, knew the song and felt a boost of adrenaline as they jumped out of the double doors while under fire from Panamanian ground forces, but without reporters there to capture the moment like they were when someone popped Van Halen’s 1984 album into their stereo and ensured every member of Noriega’s private guard would forever remember David Lee Roth’s voice, and the lyrics to “Panama,” which, ironically, had nothing to do with the country of Panama.
I chose the 82nd for a few reasons, mostly because of the news. Before they were plastered across the news for a month in Panama, they were constantly in the news as America shifted focus from Vietnam to Latin America. Without needing congressional approval, presidents ordered them to either parachute or land in Grenada (1985), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Honduras (1979), possible because the 82nd was – and is – the president’s quick-reaction force, 12,000 paratroopers and light tanks on recall 365 days a year, packed and ready to arrive at or jump into any country on Earth within 18 hours, usually to capture an airport or military base and set the stage for airplanes or ships to arrive, or to evacuate American embassies during military coups. Wrestling Hillary Clinton was a pre-test of what I expected a few months later, and I probably trained above and beyond what was typical for wrestlers, in part, because I believed I would graduate and go on to bigger challenges.
Though I was of average strength for a 17 year old and therefore weaker than most 18 to 19 year olds, I was persistent. A few of my teammates were studying for college entrance exams, and they simultaneously grew their vocabulary and practiced the difference between adjectives and nouns by saying my grip was “tenacious,” and that I had “tenacity.” They were right: 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.
When he noticed me training so hard, Coach showed me how to be more efficient by using my relatively large hands and spindly arms to my advantage. I grew to have the strongest cradle in all of Baton Rouge, maybe even in all of southern Louisiana. The trick with the cradle was to not hold both hands together like a handshake, but to lock them with thumbs flat against the first fingers (Coach said: “A wrestler looses 15% of his grip strength if his thumb is out”), and, instead of squeezing harder, to move my hands away from my body, bringing my 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. By the time I stepped on the mat with Hillary, I had recorded 36 pins, most with the cradle.
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.” Coach probably knew more than I realize to this day, though at the time I was happy to work on one move at a time. If I had one thing to balance to The Matthew Effect, it was Coach.
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. I’d save the comics for last, when the pile of crumbled paper balls would fill the floorboard of Coach’s truck as I rode with him to deliver mops, buckets, and fungicide to rural and inner city schools on the long and serpentine River Road that followed the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, passing the old slave plantations like Oak Alley and Houmas House, and small Cajun and Catholic towns like St. Gabriel and St. James, all schools that would compete in the Baton Rouge city tournament. The drive was about an hour and a half each way, enough for at least one newspaper to be transformed into a pile of compacted paper balls the size of plums.
Also because of Coach’s recommendation, I swam on the swim team and ran cross-country track before the fall wrestling season, and trained with the football team in their weight room after school. When I saw the 82nd on news every day for all of Christmas in 1989, I splurged and bought hand grips, the kind Lauden Swain used in the 1985 wrestling film, Vision Quest, the ones with two handles and a spring in the middle. I chose the box labeled “extra strong,” and I carried them wherever I went, alternating between rapid sets and holding them closed. Coach suggested that: one was to develop a crushing grip, the other a vice-like hold that could last all two minutes of a round of wrestling. I oiled the springs so I could exercise under my desk in classes without them squeaking and attracting attention, and soon my grip was so strong that I would not tire after two minutes. By January, I was training with the two extra strong grips duct taped together.
I was in remarkable physical condition. A few months later, I’d complete basic training, advanced infantry training, and Airborne school so easily that I would forever say wrestling was more challenging than anything the army through at me, a sentiment shared by every other competitive wrestler I met in the service, including during a brief stent on the Fort Bragg wrestling team in 1993. I was young, gangly, and pimply, but I was a decent wrestler who put in extra time and effort to compensate for my youth, and I had Coach giving me customized bits of advice all along the way.
Armed with physics and with Coach in my corner, I clawed my way from loosing all 13 matches my sophomore year to finishing my junior year 76-35. By the city tournament my senior year I was ranked third, with an impressive record of 56-12. When you never have to drop to the loser’s bracket and fight for third place, you wrestle fewer matches, and the rankings are stacked so that the best wrestlers wrestle fewer times, saving their energy for finals and facilitating the two best wrestlers to meet in the exciting matches that make finals worth paying admission to see.
Hillary had been captain for almost three years, and his senior record 1990 was something like 45-0. Seven of those wins were against me, but we had never spoken. As co-captain, I stood with Hillary at every pre-tournament meeting and shook hands with him in front of crowds at dual meets, representing our teams and promising fair play, but he was a terse and focused leader. I was the opposite, a chatty person who liked to perform magic in public and cross-train with other teams. That may have been an effect of being around Coach for three years and seeing his generosity with other schools, especially when I rode with him to deliver fungicide. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Coach donated mats and gear to high schools all over southern Louisiana, and is attributed to starting Louisiana Wrestling. I trained with other 145 pounders who also kept loosing to Hillary. Even the Jesuit 145 pounder lost to Hillary, and Jesuit had Coach Sam, three layers of teams that competed nationally, and an entire gym with multiple wrestling mats and walls lined with Jesuit state titles dating back to when Napoleon himself could have watched them dominate the sport.
Coach would visit Jesuit on his runs around southern Louisiana, not to donate gear they could already afford, but so that he could visit his son, Craig, who was Coaching St. Paul’s middle school team nearby, and so that I could train with Jesuit’s second-string team over the summer, when their first-string was competing in national freestyle tournaments. He’d chat with Coach Sam, a Japanese wrestler about the same size as Coach who was also a judo champion, while the second-string Jesuit guys took turns pounding my face into their fancy mat that smelled like a new car seat and some kind of expensive fungicide that didn’t burn my eyes. About an hour later, I’d sit in Coach’s passenger seat and he’d drive his truck back up the River Road, dropping off gear at smaller schools, like Papa Noel delivering Christmas gifts from his pero pulled by eight tiny alligators, but with a harsh smell that lingered long after all fungus had succumbed to his inexpensive but effective chemical warfare. Back in Baton Rouge, a few older Bengals with cars would drive me to and from the downtown wrestling camp, a derelict garage that was packed with old LSU mats cut into sections and squished between padded columns supporting an asbestos covered ceiling.
The camp was founded by Kyle Grunwald and a few other former LSU wrestlers who wrestled for Coach in the 1970’s, soon after he created the team and brought LSU to be ranked 4th in the nation. The camp was staffed by former high school wrestlers who volunteered because they loved the sport, and they trained anyone from any school for free. When no kids were driving to the camp, a friend who didn’t wrestle sold me his motorcycle for practically nothing, and I began driving there myself, the 500cc engine requiring only a quarter’s worth of gas for the round trip, back when gas was around a dollar a gallon, especially around oil refining region around Baton Rouge, where companies like Exxon and Chevron had massive smoke-billowing plants near old plantation fields.
Rising waters raise all ships, and by the time we approached the city tournament, even Baton Rouge wrestlers were holding their own against New Orleans teams. And because regionals and state were divided according to school size, a chance to give smaller schools like the ones along River Road a chance to be state champions like Jesuit, the Baton Rouge city tournament was all inclusive and therefore larger, and, in a way, more prestigious than other tournaments. Baton Rouge High hosted that year. I won my first three matches, two on Saturday and one on Sunday, winning that match in 3-2 overtime and upsetting the number two seed, Frank Jackson, a formidable wrestler from Brusly, a small school along the River Road. The gym cleared after semi finals, mats were rearranged to have just one in the center, and people who paid to see finals tricked back in.
I began warming up when the undefeated 136 pound captain of the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, Clodi Tate, was called to the mat; if he won quickly, which was likely, the 140 pound match would take around six minutes, and then it would be my turn. Belaire’s other co-captain, Jeremy Gann, was our 140 pounder, was seeded first, but it was against a comparable wrestler and their match was likely to go all six minutes, though you never know for sure. I always warmed up longer than most wrestlers, anyway, something I began after reading that constant aerobic energy was more efficient than anaerobic bursts. It was true, at least for me, I believed that it helped me outlast opponents, especially in overtime matches, like the one that morning against Frank. During Jeremy’s match, one of the other Bengals sat in the captain’s chair next to Coach in Jeremy’s corner. I had done the same thing during the 1988-1989 season, and though there were other wrestlers better than I was on the mat, so many said that I made a good assistant coach that they voted me co-captain for my senior year. Even as captain, a wrestler must think of themselves first and lead by example, so before every match I eased my body into fine sheen of sweat, ready to pounce as soon as the whistle blew, and I saw the cycle continuing every time someone else temporarily took my place in Coach’s corner.
I skipped rope in my blue and orange Belaire hoodie, and listened to a mixtape on my Walkman that included songs from the 1985 Vision Quest soundtrack, songs like “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider and “Hungry for Heaven” by Rio. I added alternating tracks with a few of the new electronic jams that helped me skip rope more quickly, like “Don’t Stop the Rock” by Freestyle. I had a CD player by then, the one given to me by Uncle Bob before he passed from cancer the summer before, just before I was emancipated, but CD’s couldn’t track a song when I jumped rope, and back then there weren’t CD burners to make custom playlists like we could with dual-cassette boom-boxes. Even at 17, I was old-school.
The Vision Quest soundtrack was pure placebo, placing me into the mindset of Lauden spending his senior year cutting weight to wrestle Shoot, the undefeated state champion, which was Lauden’s vision quest to find his place in the circle. It was an obvious analogy, especially because the film opened to the sound of a jumping rope in an empty gymnasium. The fictitious film’s ending was predictable because of Hollywood allowing underdogs to win, but placebos themselves are fiction and impervious to logic. When I listened to the soundtrack, I felt a burst of adrenaline from sympathetic celebration of Lauden pinning Shoot in the last second of the third round, and I could feel more than see the freeze-frame ending of him being raised into the air by his teammates, still on the mat and in his headgear. Even if unrealistic, it was motivating. I added Freestyle to the mix because the dance music helped me skip rope in a steady pattern that was fast enough to get my head away from Vision Quest and back to reality; few underdogs actually win, especially if their minds are, like Yoda cautioned young Luke Skywalker, thinking of the past or the future rather than focusing on the present moment. Don’t Stop the Rock pulled me into the moment, and the beat motivated me to move faster than Lauden jumped rope to prepare for his vision quest; that was fine as long as I remained aerobic, keeping my breath calm, not building lactic acid, and tapping into minuscule pieces of body fat that somehow survived fasting to cut weight.
Waiting to get on the mat against Hillary, I skipped rope and crossed my arms back and forth to the beat of Freestyle. When the chorus came up, I’d criss-cross my hands to the beat:
Freestyle’s kickin’ in the house tonight
Move your body from left to right
To all you freaks don’t stop the rock
That’s freestyle speakin’ and you know I’m right.
I skipped fast but breathed slowly and remained aware of what was happening on the mat. Once, the year before, when I was barely 15 and still immature when it came to wrestling, my headphones blocked calls from the refere and my mind was focused more on imagining myself as Lauden than watching the mat, I didn’t notice the quick pin and I almost lost to forfeit. That would never happen again, both because my teammates watched me and because I kept one eye on my breathing and one on the mat.
Clodi won by pin in the first round, then Jeremy won by points after all three rounds. I turned off my cassette player, jogged to the chair beside Coach, took off my hoodie, and handed my Walkman and jump rope to a teammate. Jeremy took his seat next to Coach, and a handful of Bengals gathered by the bleachers about ten feet behind them. I was a talker off the mat, but everyone knew that I never spoke before competing, so they left me alone, not even wishing me good luck or telling me to go get ’em, or any other trite bromide that chatty kids hurled out. I had read some article that our brains used 20% of our calories, and I quipped that I talked in class to burn off pounds, but that I needed every bit of energy when I faced off against Hillary. It wasn’t a joke, because our brains really do burn up about 20% of our energy in ways that aren’t useful in the midst of a match or in intense combat. Habits act faster than thoughts, and by the time you’re in the midst of a moment you rely more and more on your core, that thing you’re born with that’s augmented or reshaped by intention and repetition. The team said that reading and sharing articles like that, and wheeling Coach’s old VCR and television he used for driver’s education into the wrestling room to show Vision Quest, led them to voting me co-captain at the end of my junior year, even though I was, in everyone’s words, just an okay wrestler.
I put on my headgear and trotted to the center of the mat, shaking my arms to keep them alert. The referee stood beside us as we put our lead feet on the line and faced off. He asked us to slap hands, a handshake of sorts to encourage fair play. He stood back with his whistle in his mouth and his hand raised, and suddenly dropped his hand and blew his whistle; both of us were in motion before spectators in the upper bleachers heard the whistle.
The gym rafters rattled with the force of us colliding. A minute and a half later we were drenched in sweat and Hillary was up 3-1. We were near the center, an arm’s reach apart, and he tapped my head to temporarily block my view and shoot a low single. But I was watching his hips and undistracted by his tap, and I sprawled and crossfaced and spun behind him; instantly, my right arm shot around his neck and 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. I only had a moment to savor the feeling, because his muscular leg instantly began kicking against my hands with the cadence and urgency of a MK-19 grenade machine gun trying to stop a charging tank, the same model used by John F. Kennedy on his marine boat in Vietnam that would, in a few months, be given to the 82nd Airborne to help fight the first Gulf war. It launches 40mm grenades at 48 rounds minute, sending fist-sized, high explosive, dual purpose grenades – the type that melt through two inches of armored steel and explode with a 5 meter kill radius – more than a mile away. Each round has enough recoil to rattle a Humvee loaded with three paratroopers and a month’s worth of food and ammunition, but I believe Hillary kicked harder. With MK-19, I could remain in a stance remarkably like a wrestling stance, leaning my chest into the dual hand grips so my body took the brunt of recoil, but with Hillary my hands took the full force from every one of his kicks. 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. Hillary kicked like a wild animal trying to free itself from a coil spring trap; it’s no wonder everyone said he was like a Boy Named Sue, who fought a man who kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile.
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. I clamped on to my two left fingers with the tenacity of a kid who sat in algebra class all year squeezing silently oiled hand grips duct-taped together. I knew, deep down and below a layer of energy-sapping thoughts, that I hadn’t been training for Hillary, I had been training for war, and this was it.
I felt my left ring finger snap, but it felt less like physical pain and more like the mental anguish of lost hope, thought I’m sure it would have hurt like hell had I not been so focused. With my kung-fu grip broken, Hillary broke free and 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 bushy 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. The referee awarded him an escape point, and me a takedown without back points, which required holding them with control for at least two seconds. I was down 4-3. The ref pointed us to our corners. I had lost a chance: people make mistakes when they’re angry.
Jeremy was beside Coach and ready with a fresh hand towel that smelled of fungicide, like everything carried in the back of Coach’s truck. 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. They were always intimidating with their black skin hidden under the dark hoodies, especially when they warmed up as a team lined up from 103 pounds to heavyweight, like a row of maroon colored Russian Matryoska dolls, and they trotted behind Hillary in silent laps around the gym. I ignored them and focused on his coach, a spherical mountain of an African American man who couldn’t squeeze into even the largest of sweatsuits, and I tried to decipher his hand gestures.
The Mountain 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 after the then-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, including more than 100 wrestling teams regardless of how they performed. 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 the early 80’s with the LSU mats and some old gear Coach donated. Coach started Belaire’s team in 1981, with only his youngest son, Craig Ketelsen, showing up for their first practice. Another LSU mat was cut up to fit into a downtown auto garage that served as the all-city training camp. I knew most of those coaches from riding with Coach to deliver gear, and that’s how I knew how the Lions revered Hillary and probably why they never saw a need to practice with us. They called their gym the Lion’s Den, like in the Book of Daniel, but in their version the Lions prevailed over the gods of others.
Hillary nodded after every one of The Mountain’s gestures. Coach and Jeremy let me be. My cradle was useless; my intention to use it and my swollen finger were forgotten. All that mattered now was that my breath stabilized and my heartbeat calmed down, and that I paid attention to every sense simultaneously; the mind, too, is a sense, and the lack of thoughts meant I was focused on what mattered at that moment.
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 focused on Hillary’s hips.
Coach only gave a handful of nuggets of wrestling advice in the three years I had known him. One was to watch an opponents hips, not their eyes or hands, because where their hips went, they went. You can fake hand motion to get someone to react, and you can misdirect them with where you stare, but your hips belie where you will go. That was advice from an Iowa coach when Coach was an alternate on the olympic team, at a time when Russians dominated international wrestling 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. Coach told the same story once a year, at the beginning of practice, practically without change.
“But to do that,” he explained slowly, getting eye contact with each of us before continuing, “they need to get their hips close to yours. Get you to overreach, so they can step in close.”
He paused to let that sink in, then raised a stubby finger to make a point, and said, “The Russians realized that if you break a man’s stance, you can do what you want to him.” He put down his finger, and say: “Don’t break your stance.”
“Here!” he said, jumping into a gravediggers stance, the same one I’d use to stabilize myself behind MK-19 and 50 caliber machine guns.
“It’s like shoveling dirt all day. Or pig slop,” he said.
He slowly caught eye contact with each of us, one at a time.
“Here!” he said when we were all looking, and sprawled onto the mat and landing face down but still in that gravedigger stance, one leg closer to his hips than the other, foreshadowing what he’d look like standing. He’d effortlessly pop back up in that same stance.
By 1989, Coach had gotten older and stopped doing what I recall the first time I saw him demonstrate his stance in 1986, just after my grandfather was released from prison and when I was a 123 pound sophomore who didn’t know anything about wrestling other than contrived entertainment matches on television. That day, when he looked as old as Yoda but was what I now see as a young man of 51 years, he asked the heavyweights from the football team, where he was an assistant coach, to pile onto his tiny frame as he laid down in a gravedigger stance, as if he had just been taken down. One of them was Marcus Spears, Belaire’s star football player before he’d go to another school his senior year. Marcus was so big that in another two years he’d be play college ball at Southern, become an All American, and be ranked as the #1 draft pick nationally. Marcus would play for the LSU Tigers, then as a defensive end for the Dallas Cowboys, and after an impressive decade or two in pro football would become a celebrity sportscaster on on several televised sports networks, just like LSU’s Shaqueel O’Neal and other star athletes from that time period. He was huge, as big as The Mountain, and Marcus alone would have been impressive against the diminutive Coach.2 But more football players piled on. There was Dana “Big D” Miles, Belaire’s linebacker and the wrestling team’s perpetually smiling and beat-boxing heavyweight, who introduced me to Freestyle and told me I should develop rhythm, like the African American coaches who trained Sylvester Stalone to fight the Russian in 1985’s Rocky IV. There was Big Head Ben Abrams, the friend who invited me to practice that day, our former 189 pounder who quit the team to help care for his sick father our senior year. There was Clint Osbourne, the mohawk-sporting lineman with a name so cool he didn’t need a nickname, who once simultaneously demonstrated how to tackle someone and how strong his neck and shoulders were by crashing his helmeted head through a wooden fence, and who was an amateur magician and would sheepishly ask me for advice when no one was around. There was one other guy whose name none of us recall, a transfer student surprised that his diminutive assistant football coach asked him to pile on.
There must have been 600 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 merely a single middleweight. Coach came to his feet in a perfect pig-slopping stance without the slightest sign of strain on his face. 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. He said he was lucky to have so much training on his farm.
I joined the team that day, and listened intently to the few nuggets of advice whenever they slipped from his lips.
“Vince Lambarti said that fatigue will make a coward out of anyone,” Coach would remind us two or three times a year, saying that we run track or swim before wrestling season, and use the football team’s weight room whenever we could. Once, and only when asked, he said that he, though tiny, lettered in four sports: wrestling, football, baseball, and track; adding that he was often carried off the football field when Iowa linebackers trampled over him at practice. No one wanted to be a coward, and several of us joined other sports to be in peak physical condition for wrestling.
Coach’s most persistent piece of advice, repeated before practically every dual meet and tournament, were two simple words: “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 from the most celebrated wrestler or a generation, Doug Blubaugh, a gold-medal winner in the 1960 olympics in Rome who pinned all four opponents, but had barely beaten Coach during trials, 4:3 in overtime at a time when matches were nine minutes long. Coach dropped to the third place bracket, held only minutes after his loss in semifinals, and Doug walked over to him and said, “Someone will win. It might as well be you.” Coach said he listened, won, served as an alternate on the U.S. olympic team.
Someone will win. For the next two minutes, it doesn’t mater who. Just Wrestle. Krishna himself said it in the Bhagavad Gita: pure is the mind that acts without attachment to the fruits of action.
On the mat against Hillary, I forgot about my finger and focused on his hips and prepared to wrestle. In my periphery, I was aware of the referee’s chest and cheeks: sometimes, they telegraph blowing the whistle, and an alert wrestler gains a fraction of a second advantage. I saw the referee blow his whistle and drop his hand, and I began wrestling before spectators in the top row of bleachers heard the whistle end.
But Hillary was faster, and he 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 like Atlas shouldering the world, and he pulled my legs with the strength and patience 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, guiding his gravedigger stance under me so he could lift me off the mat. But my lanky legs gave me an advantage, and though they added a few extra pounds that weren’t muscle, they served as a fulcrum and began to overcome Hillary’s strength. I leveraged the weight of the world and onto Hillary’s broad hairy shoulders, and added whatever extra effort my measly muscles would provide. Sprawl by sprawl, Atlas began to weaken. Hillary’s arms crept further from his body and his stance faltered and his head began to bow, 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 in my finger, only from memories of the cradle having served me well all year. I began to spin behind, my gimpy left hand targeting his raised left leg; but he sprung backwards, towards the mat’s edge, and popped into a perfect stance. Like Coach, Hillary stood without a sign of effort on his face.
We kept eye contact and crab-walked back towards the center, a truce-of-sorts wrestlers fall into without discussing it, ensuring we stay away from the edge of the mat and the hardwood floor and bleachers. 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 so he could snatch it. Hillary had a lethal head-heal pick, but Coach had told me how to stop him.
“Don’t be a headhunter,” he said. Coach was given that advice from the US Olympic coach, because the Russians used the same head-heel setup as Capital High, and the best defense was to not react, but to stay focused on fundamentals and use their reach to your advantage. I kept my sites on Hillary’s hips, and I went along with the forward momentum of his yank. My hips dropped below his center of gravity, and I swung my left leg beside his right and flowed into a high-single that took him to the mat. But his speed was legendary, and 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 probably blinked: that’s how fast Hillary could move. No advice could counter such raw talent.
Hillary’s bear hug caught me on exhale, when my lungs almost empty, and he instantly threw me in a beautiful, perfect throw. The ceiling appeared in my view, and above the bleachers I could see the giant Baton Rouge High scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant orange neon monster, with dozens of small lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented, with a massive countdown timer so that everyone in southern Louisiana could see how many seconds were left in each round. I watched my size 11 Asics Tiger wrestling shoes, old and frayed and worn into a dull and dusty grey color, that once belonged to Craig Ketelsen, who wore them when he was a 171 pounder and became Belaire’s first state champion. I always had disproportionately large feet and was growing every year, and before Christmas, while I scrounging for money to buy a new pair of size 12 shoes, Coach pulled Craig’s old ones from a musty cardboard box in his driver’s ed office and lent me them to me. I wore them from then on; I liked the snug feel of Craig’s stretched-out size 11 rather than a slightly looser new size 12, because I felt I moved faster without wiggle room around my toes, as if I had a direct line from my feet to Mother Earth. I loved those shoes; though I wasn’t superstitious, I sometimes reflected on their history before a match, the same way I tried to focus my mind by listening to the Vision Quest soundtrack. I watched them fly through the air above my head and in slow motion; they crept through the air with a tiny bit delay behind my hips, inertia keeping them behind, and gradually began to block my view of the scoreboard. The grey shoes crept past the orange lights, and Hillary’s and my names came into view again. The shoes began to arc back down, forming a perfect 360 degree circle, inertia keeping them a 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, a work of art that even people who aren’t artists recognize as greatness. Some faces, probably those experienced with wrestling, cringed 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. 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.
My body bridged so quickly that Hillary didn’t get the pin. My feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Tigers flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light after the shockwave dissipated, stared to the trellised roof high above the gym floor. My feet spoke with Mother Earth, and pushed with a force greater than I had ever known, thrusting my hips high in the air and pivoting my body onto the top of my head; my neck muscles, strengthened by nine months of weight training to prevent myself from ever being pinned again, quivered under the opposing forces of my bridge and Hillary’s efforts to mash me down, an unmovable object against an unstoppable force.
Hillary went onto his toes and put all 147 pounds onto my chest. He squeezed his massive hairy arms 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, a disciplined and dispassionate who took calculated shots at the peak or valley of breaths. 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. There was almost a minute left. I could see Coach and Jeremy watching me in silence, and a gaggle of blue-hooded Bengals watching from behind them. 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, the part that needed less oxygen, less food, and less validation than my daily self; sometimes, people react and flail and flounder, not realizing they’re just trying to show how hard they’re working rather than being disciplined and focusing their energy, the way inexperienced wrestlers struggled against my cradle instead of kicking like mules. I put everything I had into bridging, and hoped I could hold out until the timer buzzed.
I could feel and see, but no air was coming into my nose for me to smell anything. I couldn’t smell the fungicide, which would have been fresh after the gym was rearranged and cleaned for finals, nor could I smell Hillary. He had held me down seven times that year, and I knew his smell, locked into my mind from the time he caught me in a head throw at the Robert E. Lee High School Invitational, when his bushy armpit covered my nose until he pinned me. My chest wasn’t squeezed then, so I could still breathe, and I inhaled his armpit for almost a minute. Hillary had a smell I associated with all the African Americans I wrestled, a combination of different diets and hiegene products of different cultures, and a carnal reality about races with different pigments, but Hillary’s scent was more pungent. He smelled like the Capital High gym, and the Lion’s smelled the similar in the same way that everything from Coach’s truck smelled like fungicide, hints of mold and asbestos blended into their singlets and hoodies, and probably inhaled during practice and sweat out during competition.
In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, about half of Belaire’s team gathered to watch; the other half had lost the day before and didn’t show up for finals, which was common when so few parents participated with our fledgling team. 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, two feet shorter and 150 pounds lighter, was the Bulldog’s team captain, Clodi Tate, the 136 pound champion as of two matches before, and who would be named “most outstanding wrestler” for the city tournament and go on to a respectable college career at Iowa. 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, it 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. I wasn’t moving on the mat, but I was wrestling with everything I had inside of me. I’m not a coward, but I could feel myself loosing. I was on my back and out of air, and I bridged with all I had, and then a bit more because something needed me to keep fighting. 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. Someone has to win, and sometimes it’s the other person. Even the best trained soldiers die without having quit. I would not quit, though I’m still not sure what “I” am, because of that match and a lifetime after of brief moments between conscious and unconscious, where our body behaves from old habits, conditioned responses nestled next to our primal core, augmenting the fight or flight response of the simplest animals with whatever we have trained to do at a speed faster than thoughts can form.
My attention narrowed down to what was happening with my body. My body had no more effort to give, but my mind was still awake. 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 win. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me with twenty seconds to go in the second round, 3:40. 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. Coach would hustle over as soon as he could. Win or lose, he’d great me at the edge and shake my hand and tell me, “Good job, Magik.”
Jeremy offered me a fresh hand towel. 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 accepted the towel and sat down. Jeremy had nothing to prove with his gesture; he was the champion, not I. But, he stepped behind me, into 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 turned around, and was at home 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, a few of us were helping Baton Rouge High clean up their gym, my finger had a splint from the medic, and I had kept a bag of ice on it for an hour or so. I stopped what I was doing and stared at the clock. I heard laugher I recognized, and in my periphery I saw Pat, a former Baton Rouge High heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches. He had helped coach the all-Louisiana team all summer, 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 who churned out wrestlers better than he had ever been. He 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. His booming voice could be heard by everyone in the gym, and he was telling the group how Hillary held me so hard the only thing I could wiggle were my eyeballs. Everyone laughed, not because it was true or funny, but because Pat could wiggle his eyeballs and did it every time he made that joke. I had seen him do it a million times, and I didn’t take it personally. Had I not been so focused on the timer, I would have laughed, too. I was staring at the clock, thinking about how it faded from my vision as I fought against being pinned. I was unable to remember the exact moment 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 all thought was gone from an exhausted mind?
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.
After he left, Pat glanced towards me. Baton Rouge was a small city of only around 150,000 people, and everyone had seen the news: Edward Partin was released from prison early because of declining health, and he wasn’t expected to live long. Pat was caught up in the tournament and had forgotten. He knew I didn’t want to talk about it, and when we got eye contact he looked away and went to see if he could help Coach.
My grandfather was famous, and most people I knew called him Big Daddy. He was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the big, rugged, handsome Teamster leader who U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover freed from a Baton Rouge jail to infiltrate the Teamsters inner circle and find something, anything at all, to remove Jimmy Hoffa from power. Big Daddy’s testimony that Hoffa suggested he bribe a juror on Hoffa’s behalf sent Hoffa to prison in an internationally showcased trial that reached the supreme court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, famous for the Warren Report that, though only a few people knew it at the time, mistakenly said Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy. After Hoffa’s trial, when the jury’s media blackout was removed, Hoover told national media that Hoffa had planned to assassinate Bobby Kennedy, the president’s little brother, and that Big Daddy was an “all-American hero” for risking his life to save Bobby and clean up corrupt unions. Because Big Daddy was so handsome and his southern drawl so charming, Time magazine and television news loved to showcase him, putting multi-page stories about him and showing the Partin family in the same issues as the new First Family, after President Kennedy was shot and Vice-President Johnson became president.
Big Daddy returned to Louisiana and ran the Louisiana Teamsters for a total of 30 years. His picture made front page news in Louisiana every month or so. His name came up again nationally when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and Hoffa vanished in 1975, and as part of the almost monthly campaign against organized crime in the late 1960’s, when New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello was ridiculed for not being able to get Big Daddy to change his testimony against Hoffa. In 1983’s film “Blood Feud,” people knew what Big Daddy and Hoffa looked like; the burly and handsome actor Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy, Robert Blake won an academy award for channeling Hoffa’s rage, Ernest Borgnine portrayed Hoover, and some tall daytime soap-opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby. For a decade or so, everyone in America knew Big Daddy and saw his charming smile flashed across the news.
In Louisiana, Big Daddy was famous for at least two generations. He ran the Louisiana Teamsters for thirty years, including when he was in prison in the early 1980’s, before Uncle Doug was elected in his place. Half of Baton Rouge had worked for Big Daddy at some point over the decades, driving trucks to ship Louisiana’s agriculture products across the country and up the Mississippi river, and for the burgeoning petrochemical industry in Baton Rouge that sent plastic to manufacturing plants in every state and, via the port of New Orleans, to countries all over the world.
The parents who filled Baton Rouge High’s stands for finals all knew him, even if they didn’t drive trucks, and not just because of the news and being portrayed in “Blood Feud.” Big Daddy had used his role in the Teamsters to bring industry to Baton Rouge, and to get Hollywood films made in town that would need Teamster trucks to haul equipment and Teamster trailers to house actors; you can see some of my teachers and a handful of my classmates in a stadium of 10,000 Baton Rouge people dressed up in 1950’s garb for the 1988 film “Everybody’s All American,” an epic football tale spanning 25 years of a celebrated LSU football player’s life, staring Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, Timothy Hutton, and John Goodman. One scene of a crowd gathered around the 34 story art deco state capital building, Baton Rouge’s most cherished icon after LSU’s Tiger Stadium, was reshot for the final film because of a snowfall so rare in our warm southern city that, though sureal and magical, would have been deemed too fantasatstic for the serious film and therefore was reshot when snow melted the next day. It was because of the snow that everyone in town talked about the first shootingh and their small part in it, saying the snow was magic meant for us and no one else. Everybody’s All American was still the talk of the town by the time I wrestled Hillary Clinton, and the obvious pun was linking it to Big Daddy’s “all-American” designation from his days in the national spotlight. I didn’t look like Big Daddy, unless you noticed that we had the same chin and thin, sly smile that Life magazine loved to show off.
There were only a few Partins in town and we were all related, so anyone who didn’t know Big Daddy was my grandfather assumed I was somehow related to him, and that made me a bit famous, too. I went by my nickname mostly to hide my relation to the Partins. I was one of the few people who knew that Big Daddy was a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, lier, bearer of false witness, racketeer (I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew it would send you to prison), 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. Bobby Kennedy had Big Daddy’s kidnapping charges expunged so he could testify against Hoffa, and that’s the “minor domestic problem” that Life magazine downplayed and Hoffa quipped about for the next ten years.
I also knew that the funniest coincidence about Big Daddy and my life was that the 82nd Airborne’s shoulder patch is an AA, standing for the All Americans. When the 82nd Infantry was formed in WWI, only a generation or two after the civil war, it was the first time in history to have a soldier from every state in a federal force, and the 82nd was dubbed the All Americans to heal wounds of a divided country. I was on my way to become a real All American, but no one other than Ben and Todd knew that, so no one but them got the joke or knew why I chuckled whenever someone called Big Daddy an all-American hero.
A lot of parents also knew my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, who had been the biggest drug dealer at Glen Oaks high school and probably all of town. He was a casualty of President Reagan’s war on drugs, and had also just been released from federal prison. We looked identical, with Mamma Jean’s dark brown eyes and thin frame, and we had the same last name, so there was no doubt I was his son. When parents met me and remembered him from high school, they either cringed or smiled, and that told me a lot about who they were when they were my age. Several mothers who knew my dad forbade their daughters from dating me without having met me.
By the time I filed for emancipation, the Partin name was famous in Baton Rouge and especially in the court systems. Not only did Judge Downing know my family well, he congratulated me for taking initiative to change; he was the first person to get me thinking about nature versus nurture, and the choices I could make to not follow my biologic family’s patterns. Coach had oversimplified my situation by saying I was distracted because my grandfather was sick, which was fine with me because I didn’t want to discuss my family with anyone, not even him. He knew I was living with Ben and Todd’s family by March of 1990, and that their father was dying; but it’s a long story to explain why another father’s illness meant so much to you, so I didn’t deny that I was distracted.
I avoided discussing anything other than wrestling, magic, and scoring a date from prom. And I was unconcerned with Pat’s comment that I had given up; I had long since realized that the only two only people who know what happened on the mat were on the mat, and that inside of each wrestler’s head was a complex mix of stories we never hear about. For all I knew, Hillary Clinton’s family was in prison, too. My teammates were my family, and they were kind enough to let me be.
Ben and Todd’s dad passed a week after Hillary broke my finger, and Big Daddy passed a week after that.
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 blue letter B on the left chest, and I had meticulously adorned the orange fluff over my heart 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. A girl in my theater club said it was a metaphor for captains who represent their teams, and though I felt it was more apt for Hillary Clinton’s achievements and how the Capital Lions revered him than for my performance with the Belaire Bengals, especially because they buoyed me up more than I led them, but I was still proud of my pins and I felt smart for knowing they were a metaphor.
The letter B had an admittedly awkward looking wrestling letterman pin, the one modeled after an old Greco Roman statue with one man down and the other grasping him from behind. For cross-country track, I had Mercury’s winged feet; for chess, a rook; and for theater, the comedy and tragedy faces of theater. ( was a mediocre swimmer and the coach knew I’d quit early each year when wrestling season began, so I didn’t letter; in a way, that was my only regret from high school.
Across the back was a sprawling embroidered “Magik” in black thread that I had splurged and had done at t-shirt shop on Florida Boulevard, in a run down strip mall walking distance from Belaire nicknamed Little Saignon because of the flood of Vietnamese who moved there after Saigon fell in 1975, when America officially ended our fifteen year military campaign there; like southern Louisiana, southern Vietnam was a humid, muggy agricultural and seafood region that the French had colonized, so Baton Rouge – Red Stick in French – was a logical move for thousands of Vietnamese. Below my name was a hand-sized black and white skull wearing what looked like a magicians hat, but was actually a character of Slash, the guitarist for Guns and Roses who wore a top hat wherever he went. I found it at the same shop, which was also a smoke shop and a clandestine hub from VCR porn tapes, and that ironically catered to Vietnam vets with Airborne patches and shirts with the 82nd’s maroon beret and phrases like, “Death from Above,” and “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.” Like a lot of refugees, the Vietnamese catered to local needs, and in the post-Vietnam era a lot of vets in the relatively poor area of Florida Boulevard wanted to wear shirts with death and destruction; in fact, Guns and Roses debut album was called “Appetite for Destruction.” I bought the patch but was out of money, so I painstakingly sewed it on by hand, and I was proud of that, too.
The 36 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, except for perhaps the skull and hat, which looked so much like a magician’s hat that I sometimes found myself vainly rotating my head to see it in a mirror. Not only had I ignored all the hype about Airborne and chose a patch that best represented who I was at my core, I recognized the choice I made to downplay my future in the Airborne. How can a country, supposedly under God, celebrate killing? If there’s a hierarchy to sins, not going to church on Sunday would probably be at the bottom, and murder would be at the top. Those were the things on my mind as I rode my motorcycle to Big Daddy’s funeral.
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. So many seniors applauded my brief moment on stage that my concerns for a prom date were alleviated, and I was still riding the high from how good life seemed to be going for me. There was a color photo and two-page spotlight about me in the color Sunday fun section of the Baton Rouge Advocate, telling everyone about how I performed magic at Baton Rouge General’s children’s hospital as part of David Copperfield’s Project Magic, a rare instance of the news talking about a Partin other than my grandfather. I had even been shown on television for a fund-raiser, performing Paul Harris’s “Immaculate Connection” linking cards routine, which was shown nationally by David Copperfield on one of his annual televised magic specials a year or two before, spring boarding me to a respected status even among members of The International Brotherhood of Magicians Ring #178, the Pike Burden memorial ring, and Baton Rouge’s local magic club, where I had been a member since I was 11 and was the current Sergeant at Arms. I had used the Immaculate Connection as part of a longer routine that won the state junior magician competition when I was 15, and I must have emphasized that to the reporter three or four times, though they chose to focus on Project Magic, probably because David’s twin assistants were coincidentally from Baton Rouge, and had been in theater at a Saint Joseph’s High School. My color photo took up an entire page, and they briefly mentioned that I also wrestled at Belaire.
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. Even the girls were taller than I was.
Besides Grandma Foster, Big Daddy’s mother and the only tiny person related to him, there were twenty or so members of the Partin family, mostly from Big Daddy’s marriage after Mamma Jean, who stayed nearby at her sister’s house waiting for us to join later. There must of been two hundred people I didn’t know, but there were a handful I either knew or recognized. 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 Cannon, a veteran of the 1954 team and LSU’s first Heismann Trophy winner, was there. He was a two time All American, former pro for the Houston Oilers, and the biggest celebrity on the biggest float in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade. Growing up, I saw Billy’s handsome face was on billboards all along I-110, between downtown and 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. When Hollywood filmed Everybody’s All American, people in Baton Rouge felt it was a movie about Billy regardless of the name; the film was based on a Sports Illustrated writer’s book of the same name who would have remembered Billy, so there’s probably some truth to that. Billy was also known for running a counterfeiting ring in Baton Rouge, printing millions in $100 bills; coincidentally, he was released from prison in 1986, the same year as Big Daddy, and at the 1990 funeral he was relishing in publicity and about to start a new career as the dentist for the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was so popular that even after he was released, people still flocked to see him in parades, and LSU still had him speak at ceremonies. Walter would always be amazed at how Louisiana, which he said had a unique form of politics and a high tolerance for corruption, would put criminals on a pedestal as long as they smiled and were entertaining.
Of course Billy would be Big Daddy’s pallbearer; it made Big Daddy seem bigger than life, even after death, especially after everyone finished speaking and Billy and the five other brutes heaved to pick up Big Daddy’s casket and carry it past all the reporters.
With all of those celebrities at the Greenwood funeral home, it’s 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, just like Life magazine and The Warren Report.
Only Walter asked about my fingers. He had a small role in “Blood Feud,” 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. In what was always funny to me, Walter looks remarkably like Jimmy Hoffa. It’s obvious if you look at the he cover of his 1972 opus, “The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa,” which has Hoffa’s image on the front and Walter’s is on the back in an almost mirror image, forever confusing the two in my mind. 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.3 For twenty years, he focused on nothing else, and after Hoffa went to prison he became a friend – of sorts – to Mamma Jean and Grandma Foster. I barely knew Walter, but I knew that for all of 1990 he had been focused on Big Daddy and his final words, visiting us and calling Aunt Janice every day to see if anything new was said. I told him I broke my finger wrestling in city finals, but didn’t know yet how funny it would sound to him if I said Hillary Clinton broke it, because I didn’t know who the governor of Arkansas’s wife was back then.
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. She and Janice lived near Mamma Jean in 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 so everything she said was true. I don’t know how much she new about what he did when he wasn’t with her. Big Daddy was better at keeping secrets than any magician I knew, especially around ladies and his beloved daughters and granddaughters. He never mentioned his past to anyone other than a few of the males when we gathered at Grandma Fosters. Tiffany told stories she rememberd, and everyone was already in tears when Jennifer took her turn. She was Cynthia’s oldest daughter and only a sophmore in a Houston high school, but she was still taller than I was. Jennifer had written a letter about Big Daddy when he was sick, just after the 82nd jumped into Panama and when I was sharpening my focus on wrestling Hillary Clinton. She read it in front of everyone, and put it in Big Daddy’s pocket before they closed the casket.
Cynthia would send a photocopy to Uncle Doug after the funeral, and he would print her letter in his 2013 memoir, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Doug Partin Tells His Side of the Story.” Aunt Cynthia wrote:
Uncle Doug, Jennifer, my daughter, wrote this in school almost 2 months ago. She put it in Daddy’s pocket, along with Janice’s letter.
Jennifer wrote:
I never really knew my grandfather. His whole life is a mystery to me. For he ended up being a bother to Hoffa and a good friend to Kennedy. The only way I learned about his part was from reading Life magazine and books. Now time is flying by so very fast, and I am afraid I will never look at his tender and loving eyes again. For he is extremely ill and near death. Lord, when he dies, his new life will begin. So give him mercy, for he tried his best. I know he’ll go to the heavens above and look down upon me and feel my love.
To Big Daddy from your loving granddaughter, Jennifer
January 1990.
Jennifer finished reading and everyone was bawling; not even I wanted to point out the understatement of being a “bother” to Hoffa. She and Tiffany were the only two of about a dozen of my cousins to speak. I did not because no one asked me to, and neither did my cousin, also named Jason Partin, a football star for the Zachary Broncos who was younger than I was but already over six feet and around 190 pounds. It was hard for us to compete with our cute and articulate female cousins, especially because, for whatever reason, the ladies in our family spoke more kindly of Big Daddy than the males, maybe because he brought us closer to his work in hopes of creating a dynasty of Teamsters and, blatantly, what he hoped would lead to LSU football jerseys with Partin written across the back. Tough men, just like him.
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 I had joined the 82nd. He smiled, but didn’t pry. I then told him what Edward Partin’s final words were, and I chuckled as I said it: “No one will ever know my part in history.” He agreed that it sounded funny when said out loud, and that my grandfather was probably right.
I left Louisiana two months later. On 03 August 1990, Saddam Hussein and the world’s largest fleet of tanks overtook the small country of Kuwait, and President Bush Senior called on the 82nd Airborne to draw a line in the sand. An international coalition of 560,000 soldiers soon followed, and my platoon led the battle for Khamisiya airport and we won. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was the democratic presidential nominee, and I finally saw the joke about Hillary Clinton. The 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK prompted American voters to demand that if Clinton won, he’d release the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, which had been classified since it’s completion in 1979. The summer JFK was released in theaters, I was training with what most people call special operations. For one training course, 268 of us began, and after two weeks of food and sleep deprivation and extreme physical effort, nine of us crossed the finish line; of the nine, six had wrestled in high school. That was the first time I showed my finger and said that Hillary Clinton broke it, which got a chuckle and began a pun I’d use the rest of my life.
By 1993, I was on President Clinton’s quick reaction force. I was 5’11” and 195 pounds, with size 14 boots (I never grew into my feet). My dress uniform had spit-shined jump boots, and I sported a maroon beret the color of Capital High’s singlets, adorned with the bright blue and gold shield and sword of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. My shoulders were draped in a ribbons, and my left shoulder proudly displayed a red, white, and blue 82nd Airborne combat patch. Each side of my chest was an impressive display of badges, patches, and shiny silver icons with wings (Airborne loves to put wings on everything). Above my heart was a stack of multi-colored ribbons and a gold medal with scimitars crossing a palm tree, a gift from the prince of Kuwait for the 82nd’s role in stopping Saddam Hussein. I had qualified for the post wrestling team. My 17 year old self would have been impressed.
But I rarely wore my uniform; I no longer had anything to prove. I was being reviewed by a federal agency for a diplomatic passport to serve in the middle east as an unarmed peacekeeper; I was recommended after commanders called me a peaceful warrior, impressed that I quoted Ephsians 6:12 and emphasized that wrestling had rules to protect the weak, even when they were your enemy. I even quoted the Good Samaritan, and my record showed fighting Saddam Hussein’s personal guard in a bunker, yet stopping once they were no longer a threat. I had never having forgotten my time with the Vietnamese shops near Belaire, and the scruffy veterans who shopped there with horror stories of death and regret, or the feeling of being welcomed into the downtown wrestling camp regardless of race or religion and seeing how that unified more people than regional alliances ever could. I had decided I wanted to work towards ending war rather than winning it, a victory over war itself. If my passport were granted, I’d deploy to Egypt, where I’d be based with the Multinational Force and Observers, a group of 17 countries united by efforts of Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Benin, which led them to win the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and facilitated by future Nobel Peace Prize recipient President Jimmy Carter. With my passport, I’d have unrestricted access to Egypt and Israel, and a new team from which to learn and grow.
During the review process, when I already had a national security clearance, I had access to key parts of the JFK Assassination report. It was public by then, but that was in the nascent days of the internet, so you’d have to travel to Washington DC for the library sized storage room, or have access to simplified versions that were just beginning to coalesce. That’s where I first learned that Big Daddy was involved in killing President Kennedy.
I didn’t tell anyone what I realized. As a magician who grew up with a drug dealer as a father and a racketeer and murderer as a grandfather, I was good at keeping secrets. I was given the diplomatic passport, and I returned to Baton Rouge before I deployed. Of course I stopped by Belaire. When I told Coach what I’d be doing, he shook my hand and said, “Good job, Magik.”
I would visit him and sometimes assist him in coaching, similar to what Pat and other guys had done for their coaches, until he retired and assisted Craig at St. Paul’s. In all that time, we never once talked about the past or the future, unless it was an anecdote to help a wrestler wrestle the best they could. His stories never changed, and neither did he. After Coach passed in 2014,4 Louisiana renamed the Robert E. Lee Invitational the Coach Dale Ketelsen Memorial Tournament for obvious reasons. Everyone I knew said it was about time.
My 14 year old cousin Jennifer was right when she spoke at Big Daddy’s funeral: time is flying by very fast. By 2018, I was a middle aged man who wore bland clothing and had a nondescript job title as an engineering instructor for the University of San Diego. A bald spot had begun to poke its way through my receding hairline, and I usually wore one of several LSU baseball caps; I wore size 14-wide shoes, and size 15 hiking boots with thick socks. I had a handful of patents for implantable medical devices that healed small broken bones in fingers, feet, and the spine, and I led project-based courses in engineering and physics with a focus on biotechnology and what I first learned from Coach: biomechanics.
I sported a suit on some weekday evenings when I performed magic at San Diego’s The Gathering, a cherished restaurant and lounge in the relatively wealthy neighborhood of Mission Hills; their owner was a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and he had brought in magicians three nights a week ever since his aging body limited his ability to perform. On some weekends, performing in the small theaters inside Hollywood’s Magic Castle, I’d spend a few evenings dressed in custom suits fitted with lots of secret pockets to hide cards, coins, and gadgets that would have impressed James Bond. Those were the times people asked about my Dr. Spock salute fingers, and my short answer always got a chuckle.
Around that time, Martin Scorsese raised $257 Million to make a film on what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, saying it would be his opus. He bought the rights to a 2014 memoir by Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, a former WWII infantryman, mafia hitman, and Teamster leader under Hoffa who knew my grandfather well; Frank’s book, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was based on a mafia lingo for painting walls red with blood, and Frank claims to have painted the walls of a suburban Detroit house red with Hoffa’s blood on the afternoon of 30 July 1975. Scorcese focused the film on Frank, called it “The Irishman,” and hired all the big name actors, like Robert DeNiro, Al Paciono, Joe Pesci, Ray Ramono, and other wise guys associated with the gangster film genre. The burly actor Craig Vincent, who had starred as a big thug in Scorcese’s “Casino,” would portray Big Daddy in a shortened and fictionalized role, eliminating a chapter of Frank’s book to condense the film into what would still be a whopping 3 hours and 29 minutes when it would be released in theaters the summer of 2019. To match Craig’s Italian accent and fit the film’s theme, Big Daddy became “Big Eddie” Partin.
Though a small role, Craig took it seriously and called my family to research the real Edward Partin rather than the one from a movie script. Doug had retired, but Keith Partin, my dad’s brother, was head of Teamster’s Local #5. That wasn’t surprising, because many people follow family legacies: the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was James Hoffa Junior, and several FBI agents I knew had come from long lines of operatives. Even on my team in the Middle East, more than half had come from fathers of special ops legends; I was the only one I knew who was emancipated from their family of drug dealers and presidential assassins. Craig also spoke with Aunt Janice, Big Daddy’s oldest daugher who had shared media spotlight with him. Craig asked a simple question that came more from the mind of an actor than the dozens of FBI agents, reporters, and authors who had interviewed my family over the years: what were the personality traits of my grandfather that led him to fooling Hoffa, Kennedy, Hoover, Carlos Marcello, and the rest of the mafia? Not what did he do or why he did it, but what traits could someone else emulate to convey who he was at his core.
No one could help him, other than to keep pointing out the obvious: he was handsome and charming. Craig watched Blood Feud and old news reels, but still didn’t see how one man could fool so many. When we spoke, he had read Doug’s book and Jennifer’s letter in it, so he knew about Big Daddy’s “tender and loving eyes,” which were sky blue, but Scorcese had already changed Craig’s role to be more of a thug than a charmer. When I learned he grew up Italian Catholic and viewed his mother a saint, I said Mamma Jean told me that people worship false gods; Craig and I spoke on that for a while, but that ended up being more about Mamma Jean than Big Daddy. When we hung up (an archaic term I still use when ending a call), I began pondering Craig’s question almost daily.
If it were a simple answer, I’d give it now. Big Daddy was more nuanced than can be easily scripted, not even by someone of Scorcese’s caliper; and in the end it was always more about the other person’s faith than anything you could nail on Big Daddy. It’s likely that Walter, who passed in 1995, one year before Mamma Jean, was right: no one will ever know Edward Partin’s part in history. But we can try. Someone may do it, and it might as well be us, especially if we ignore the fruits of labor and try to laugh along the way. For me, the best part so far has been telling you this much, because it lets me tell you a pun I’ve savored since Big Daddy’s 1990’s funeral:
“My grandfather was Edward Partin, a big part in history; I’m Jason Partin, and this is my small part in his story…”
If you saw me say that, you’d see my eyes crinkle, and I would break into that same sly smile Big Daddy wore all the time, as if he knew the funniest joke he’d never tell you.
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 told me he doesn’t recall the moment with Clint and Big Head Ben, but I kept him in my version of the story to emphasizes that memories form from varying degrees of importance. It’s likely that Marcus simply doesn’t recall the time we all there together, because it was a small part of his journey. Similarly, Hillary Clinton may not remember me; I may have been nothing more than his 46th victory that season, a blip on his way to the state championship. Ben Abrams remembers the moment almost exactly as I described, but we’ve talked about it with other old timers from Belaire so many times over 30 years that our memories could be contrived. That’s a problem with any memoir based on memory, and therefore any story I share is inherently flawed. By keeping Marcus in the story, I hope to show that there is no one answer to any question that’s based on memory and interpretation, which is why I try to augment my memories with quotes from books, newspapers, and court records. When it comes to details unrelated to Big Daddy, I’ll stick by the memories that make me smile the most. ↩︎
- 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. No one in New Orleans lived to tell the tale, and Big Daddy was better than a magician at keeping secrets. ↩︎ - Coach passed away in 2014. When I began writing this, his oldest son, Craig, was head coach at St. Paul’s School in Covington, Louisiana, and on the board of the Louisiana High School Sports Association that recorded my loss against Hillary Clinton and maintains an online record of Louisiana sports. When I asked Craig if I could use Coach’s name in a memoir I was writing, he asked Mrs. K and Penny; they all gave me their blessing. What they wrote in his obituary was like Coach: concise, humble, and remarkably short for such an accomplished person.
Dale “Coach” Glenn Ketelson Obituary: 2014
Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
Published by The Advocate from Mar. 26 to Mar. 29, 2014.
According to online reports but not included in his obituary, after the olympics, Coach revived a high school team in Iowa that went on to win a conference championship, produce 30 all-conference wrestlers, 20 district champions, eight regional champions and two state titlist; in the twelve years as head coach of the new LSU program, his teams won two SEC Intercollegiate Wrestling tournaments, produced 15 individual conference champs, and rose LSU to be ranked 4th in the nation, surpassing even Iowa.
As a young man, Coach wrestled at 126 pounds. He left me with big shoes to fill, and at the weakest point in his life he was stronger than Big Daddy ever was. But both made me who I am, a combination of nature and nurture; may they rest in peace, wherever they may be.
↩︎