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, 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, to this day, looks like a split-finger salute.

I’m a close-up magician, so for most of my life people have stared at my hands and asked about that finger. When I say Hillary Clinton broke it, most people laugh and assume it’s part of the act, but it’s not. The Hillary in this story was the three-time undefeated Louisiana state wrestling champion at 145 pounds and captain of the revered Capital High Lions, and he broke my finger and then pinned me in the second round of the Baton Rouge City finals tournament on Sunday, 03 March 1990, when I was a 17 year old senior at Belaire High School and about to leave for the army; I wouldn’t hear about President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, until Bubba was elected in 1992, when I would, coincidentally, serve on his quick-reaction force for two years.

The joke in high school was that Hillary 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 he wan’t mean; he was terse and focused, putting his energy towards training harder than any wrestler I knew, but he wasn’t mean. He was born in March of 1971, and at the end of the 1989-1990 wrestling season he was a legal adult in high school and about to turn 19, and had been shaving since at least the 11th grade. At weigh-in before each match, referees checked our faces and forearms for stubble and our legs for Vaseline, because some wrestlers shaved their a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive like sandpaper, or applied Vaseline to their legs to make them too slick to grasp. But Hillary didn’t cheat; he shaved his face smooth each morning before competing, and his stout hairy forearms were so strong that he could cross-face anyone without needing stubble. If someone grabbed his leg, he cross-faced the hell out of them and they let go.

USA Wrestling rules added two pounds to each weight class after Christmas to account for growth. By March of 1990, Hillary, though only 5’4″, was fully grown, so his extra two pounds were pure muscle put on by lifting weights, and he was a 147 pound hairy terror. 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 of arms or legs. His thighs bulged with muscles and his lats were wide, so to fit into his elastic wrestling singlet he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed, and the singlet looked like a maroon-colored second skin painted over his dark black body, but with loose folds around his tapered waist.

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, an architectural gem built during the depression by Governor Huey Long, Louisiana’s Kingfish, when labor and materials were cheap; the Kingfish’s photo still hangs at the top of the stairs by the bullet holes that killed him when he was a senator about to become president, and it was the tallest capital building in all of America and the tallest building in Baton Rouge. Practically every kid in Baton Rouge toured the capital in middle school, and we’d see high school wrestlers from the downtown training camp running up and down the steps like Sylvester Stallone in the film Rocky. When I became one of those high schoolers, I saw Hillary wrapped in big black plastic bags, running up and down the steps every Friday before Saturday weigh-ins, sweating off a few extra pounds.

Capital High was – and is – a mile from the state capital building. It 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, like most other white wrestlers, only ventured there because of the nearby all-city wrestling camp. I never learned his midweek weight, but Hillary was probably around 155 pounds before fasting for a couple of days and sweating off the last pound or two. Once, I saw him running while spitting into an old 16 ounce Gatorade bottle, cutting another pound by not swallowing for hours.

I was the opposite. I was born on 05 October 1972, so I began my senior year as a 16 year old kid. Had I been born a few days later, by Loiusiana law I would have been to young to start kindergarten, so I would have been pushed back and began kindergarten a year later, starting school at five years old instead of four, and my senior year at 17; I would have been 18 for city finals, and much larger and stronger. Instead, I was 5’6″, two inches taller than Hillary, but a lanky mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands with long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet. I had negligible underarm hair, and my pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples. I had never shaved. Unlike Hillary’s leg and forearm hair, which was thick and curly like the Brillo pads my Granny used to clean her cast iron skillet, the hair on my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. My cross-face was decent, but only because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face my bulbous thumb knuckle caught the opponents nose and hurt more than forearm sandpaper ever could.

I didn’t know this then, but in a 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers: The Story of Success,” he focused on a Canadian research study investigating why, statistically, professional Canadian hockey players were likely to be born in March. It turned out that they, like Hillary, started each year of school as the oldest kids in class, and the difference between four and five years old represents 20% more life along an exponential growth curve, an unquantifiable leap in physical and mental development that makes sense in hindsight, a phenomenon that is most evident in sports but also applies to scholastic aptitude tests. Older kids in kindergarten have advantages that persist and grow all the way through high school and college, giving professional an unseen advantage that began with nothing more than luck of when they were conceived. Malcolm 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 read Outliers and put Matthew 13:12 in context, I instantly thought of Hillary shaving when I was getting my first pimples, and then of my sluggish start in school academics. But I was lucky. If I had anything in abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity, a trait demonstrated by getting back on the mat against Hillary no matter how badly he beat me. I inherited the trait, though not the size, from my biologic father, a burly street brawler and drug dealer, and his father, a former heavyweight boxer with a criminal record you could write a book about, though most people called them stubborn rather than tenacious.

Because of a quirk in the law, I was also a legal adult in 1989. A week after my great-uncle Bob’s funeral on 03 August 1989, the coincidentally named Judge Robert “Bob” Downing of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District granted my request to be emancipated from my family. The justice system of Louisiana is unique compared to all other other 49 United States, based on the Napoleonic Code of France from when Louisiana, named after King Louis and Queen Anna; it persisted after the Louisiana purchase and civil war, and that code lingers to this day, just like Louisiana is still divided into Catholic parishes rather than counties like every other state in the United States. Under Louisiana code, Judges have more leeway and can rely less on predicate cases, so Judge Bob could practically do what he wanted. He told me what I had to do, and I began the paperwork as Uncle Bob lay dying.

Parish laws required me to say, in writing, that I “pray for” a favorable judgement, and though I’ve never been a religious person, I said what I had to say to become free. I paid the $150 filing fee by performing three thirty-minute magic shows at $40 each for birthday parties of middle school kids at Belaire Middle, plus $60 Granny gave me for new magic books. With the remaining cash, I went to Walmart splurged on two extra-strong hand grips that I duct-taped together to form one big enough for my massive mits, and I bought a fancy rubber sweat suit with elastic cuffs on the wrists and ankles to trap in heat and sweat out pounds with less running up and down the steps.

Judge Bob already knew my family well, especially my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, from when he was first arrested at age 17. Judge Bob’s predecessor as the only family court judge, Judge Pugh, had removed me from Partin custody for a few years in the early 1970’s; he died soon after, and Judge J.J. Lottinger took his place, retired in the 80’s, and passed the torch to Judge Bob. After I filed for emancipation, Judge Bob interviewed my mom, then answered my prayer by stamping the raised seal of Louisiana, a Pelican nesting with her babies, on an emancipation decree longer than a sheet of legal paper. My girlfriend, Lea, nicknamed Princess Lea like in Star Wars, picked me up and drove me from the courthouse to the army recruiter’s office, where I held up my certificate and, at age 16, I was able to sign a contract and enter the army’s delayed entry program and college fund for $36,000 in exchange for my service. I was guaranteed an assignment with the 82nd Airborne Infantry if I passed Airborne school. My contract depended on me graduating high school, passing the ASVAB test, and not being found guilty of a crime. If I were arrested, Judge Bob emphasized, I’d be charged as an adult and go to jail, just like my dad and his father, and not even he could help me.

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 word I preferred to tenacious or stubborn, and I would show up to practice early and stay late, sparing with hulking football linebackers nearly as strong as Hillary. I weighed around 152 midweek, and fasted one to to days, sweat off a pound or two, and on Fridays I ducked my head to subtly spit in a Gatorade bottle held between my legs. When Coach noticed me training so hard, he showed me how to be more efficient and take advantage of my gangly arms and legs, using biomechanics to compensate for strength. He taught me to pin opponents with the cradle, wrapping my long arms around an opponents neck and a leg, locking my hands, and bringing their knee to their face and rolling their shoulders to the mat.

Thanks to Coach, I grew to have the strongest cradle in all of Baton Rouge, maybe even in all of southern Louisiana. The trick was to not clasp 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 and straining against a stronger opponent (“An opponent’s legs are stronger than your arms”), Coach showed me how to bring my elbows together effortlessly by focusing on moving my hands away, using my long arms as a fulcrum, like how pivot points of a bolt-cutter amplifies your strength and cuts through steel. I began pinning teammates the same day he showed me that trick, and I pinned an opponent with it that weekend. I didn’t stop all year, and 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, a move still allowed after the full-nelson was banned by USA wrestling because a kid’s neck was broken by it, but he had coached for more than forty years and knew how to train all types of wrestlers. When he 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.” If I had one thing to balance to The Matthew Effect, even more than persistence, it was Coach and his wealth of knowledge and his dedication to the sport.

To get even stronger, I took his 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. I used my duct-taped handgrips in school, oiling the springs so I could exercise under the table without teacher’s hearing squeaks, and when I wasn’t in school I crumpled every newspaper I could find. 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 and read them with a pile of crumbled paper balls filling the floorboard of his truck when 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 small Region I schools that competed in the Baton Rouge city tournament with Region II schools before splitting off into their own regional and state tournaments. The drive was about an hour and a half each way, enough for at least one Advocate to be transformed into a pile of compacted paper balls the size of plums. At least once every week or two, I’d see a photo of my grandfather; on those days, I crumpled the balls even tighter.

By March, teammates quipped that I had a kung-fu grip and was stronger than I looked. They began to believe that I could actually beat Hillary, and they rallied to help. Though I was co-captain, they took charge and played a modified version of King of the Mat with me, insisting I remain on the mat even if I were taken down. After an hour, I was so weak that even Little Paige could take me down, but I’d get back up and a fresh wrestler would take their place. The game would continue until Coach made us quit so he could turn off the lights and go home to Mrs. K. I was in remarkable physical condition, and I had a kung-fu grip and the focus of a sniper’s scope.

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; the number was so high because, like most mid-skill wrestlers, I kept getting beat in semifinals and dropped to the loser’s bracket, where I’d fight my way up to third or fourth place. By the city tournament my senior year I had an impressive record of 56-12 and was ranked third, though I had never competed in finals except for smaller tournaments like Coach’s Thanksgiving and Christmas tournaments, when many wrestlers took a break from fasting to be with families.

Hillary had been captain for almost three years, and his senior record before City was 45-0, lower because he was consistently ranked first, which meant brackets placed him against lower rankings first, setting up an exciting final match against the second seed, an understandable version of The Matthew Effect that favors the strong. Six of Hillary’s wins were against me in semi-finals. City would be our seventh match, and because I made the finals, I was a guaranteed silver medal and had a chance for the gold.

Hillary and I had never spoken. As co-captain, I stood with Jeremy Gann, our other co-captain, and we faced Hillary before every pre-tournament meeting and dual meet, shaking hands in front of spectators to represent the fair play each of our teams promised, but we didn’t chat, not even never when running the state capital steps with other equally terse wrestlers. Most of us were panting too hard to talk, and I never saw Hillary outside of the capital building or tournaments. Despite Capital High being jogging distance to the downtown wrestling camp, the Lions kept to themselves and didn’t train with the mostly caucasian all-city team, with only Clodi and Chris standing out among us. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why: the capital is surrounded by civil war barracks and the original LSU campus, called “Old War School,” which supported the surrounding plantation homes by training military leaders to preserve slavery. Huey Long drained the nearby swamps to build today’s LSU, which led to the Washington DC phrase “drain the swamps” of bad politics, but the Old War School remained as a museum and as a testament to southern heritage. To this day, in addition to the bullet holes from Senator Long’s assassination, the buildings around the capital are still riddled with bullet holes from “The War of Northern Aggression,” and the longest battle of the civil war was held an hour upriver from Baton Rouge in the plantation region of Saint Francisville, where a lot of kids toured Fort Pickens and learned that Baton Rouge soldiers fought 378 days to preserve their way of life. It’s no wonder Hillary looked angry running up and down those steps.

The only reason white kids like me were there was the downtown wrestling camp, a free, nonprofit training center founded and operated by volunteers from LSU’s team from the 1970’s, when Coach was the head coach of LSU and brought them to 4th in the nation. LSU’s team disbanded in 1979, a casualty of the Title IX federal law that required the same number of women as men in college sports, and Coach donated the purple and gold mats and matching gear to high schools all over southern Louisiana; USA Wrestling attributes him to starting Louisiana Wrestling, which no one denys.

Coach, after driving along the River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans to drop off fungicide and spare headgear at schools smaller and poorer than Belaire (a shock for me back then), would stop by Jesuit High School to chat with Coach Sam, a diminutive Japanese wrestler and judo champ, and then St. Paul Middle School to visit his son, Craig, who, despite being coach of a middle school, was a board member of the Louisiana High School Athletic Association. The summer that Uncle Bob was sick, when I didn’t have a vehicle and couldn’t make it to the downtown wrestling camp, Coach would pick me up once a week and take me along so that I could train with Jesuit’s second-string team, when their first-string was competing in national freestyle tournaments. They were a rich school with state tournament flags dating back to the turn of the century, with fancy fungicide that didn’t irritate your nose or eyes. I’d get smeared around the mat, but when recuperating I’d overhear Coach and Coach Sam plotting how to make the sport more accessible for more kids all over the state. After they hugged, I’d hear a similar conversation between Coach and Craig. About an hour later, I’d sit in Coach’s passenger seat, digesting everything I saw and heard, crumpling newspapers, contemplating nature versus nurture, and chatting with coach about whatever popped up each week.

Baton Rouge High hosted City in 1990. I won my first three matches, two on Saturday and one on Sunday, winning that match 3-2 and upsetting the number two seed, Frank Jackson; he was a formidable wrestler from Brusly, a small Region I school along the River Road of about 300 kids and fungicide that stung the raw abrasions on my face inflicted by Jesuit wrestlers. Frank and I had faced off a few times, and after I beat him in City I was ahead 4 to 3 matches for the season. He, too, had lost to Hillary seven times that year, a few of them in finals, and we joked that the punishment for winning against each other was a thrashing by Hillary in the center mat while everyone watched. March 3rd would be my turn.

After the semifinal matches, the gym cleared and Baton Rouge High wrestlers rearranged the mats to have just one in the center. People paid $2 to come back inside and see finals, money that went to help buy equipment for more teams. Coach’s daughter, Penny, an Iowa girl from a wrestling family, worked the concession stand when she wasn’t taking classes at LSU, and sometimes Mrs. K was there to support Coach and the Bengals. The big tournament was a social event, and all the families of coaches seemed to help each other when they could, similar to military families uniting when their soldiers were away in war.

As co-captain, I helped the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs when I could, and sat beside Coach in Belaire’s corner when we had a wrestler competing. When there was nothing to do and we didn’t have a wrestler on the mat, I spent the tournament looking up at the bleachers. There must have been 300 people watchign, the same number of spectators as there were seniors at Belaire, a Region II school comprised of 54% African American and 16% Asian, mostly Vietnamese from refugees when Saigon fell. The rest of Belaire were a mix of caucasian and that olive complexion of Cajuns and Creoles with at least one African American in their lineage. For whatever reason, the bleachers were full of almost all caucasians, except for a few parents of Baton Rouge High kids like Clodi and Chris. When the Bulldogs 136 pound captain, Clodi Tate, was called to the mat, I left Coach’s side to begin warming up. If Clodi won quickly – which was likely, because he was an undefeated returning state champion – the 140 pound match would take around six minutes, and then it would be my turn.

Jeremy, our 140 pounder, was seeded first and expected to win, but he was against a comparable wrestler and their match was likely to go all six minutes; but you never know for sure, because upsets always happen. I kept one eye on the matches as I skipped rope in my blue and orange Belaire hoodie, and I listened to a mixtape on my old Sony Walkman that included songs from the 1985 Vision Quest soundtrack. I had a CD player by then, the one given to me by Uncle Bob before he passed, his final gift to support me when spine cancer kept him bedridden, but back then there weren’t CD burners to make custom playlists like we could with dual-cassette boom-boxes, and even the best CD players skipped when I jumped rope, so for tournaments I still listened to my Walkman and a mixtape Lea helped me make. We picked songs like “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider and “Hungry for Heaven” by Rio, both from Vision Quest, and “Panama” from Van Halen’s 1985 album aptly titled “1985,” because I thought the album and David Lee Roth were awesome (I was one of the kids who took David’s side when Sammy Hagar replaced him for the 5150 album). I knew the lyrics by heart, and as I watched the mat my mind sang along in a ritual I repeated around 50 to 60 times a year.

I alternated tracks with a few of the new electronic jams that helped me skip rope more quickly, like “Don’t Stop the Rock” by Freestyle. Every time the faster chorus came up, I 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 and breathed slowly and coaxed out a thin sheen of sweat, transitioning my body to burning the tiny bits of fat tenaciously clinging to a few muscles, keeping one eye on the mat because I couldn’t hear my name called with headsets on. A few Belaire Bengals watched me, just in case, like I did for them when they warmed up.

Clodi won by pin in the first round, then Jeremy won by points after all three rounds. I pushed the stop button on the Walkman, jogged to the chair beside Coach, took off my hoodie, and handed the Walkman and jump rope to Little Paige, our 103 pounder who insisted on calling himself Paige “The Rage” Russel; he showed up for finals despite having been eliminated the day before, just like I had when I was a floundering junior who rarely made it to the second day, and he sat in the bleachers directly behind our corner. Jeremy took his seat next to Coach. A handful of Bengals in blue hoodies gathered by the bleachers about ten feet behind them.

I put on my headgear and trotted to the center of the mat, shaking my arms and moving my legs to stay 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, and both of us were in motion before the sound waves reached spectators in the upper bleachers. We collided so hard the gym rafters rattled, and a minute and a half later we were drenched in sweat and Hillary was up 3-1.

My heartbeat was racing and my breath was deep and faster than I could sustain, but there wasn’t much I could do about it then. We were near the center, an arm’s reach apart, and he tapped my head to temporarily block my view and allow him to shoot a low single. But I was watching his hips and was therefore undistracted by his tap, and I sprawled and cross-faced him and spun behind; instantly and automatically, 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 for the first time.

I only had a moment to savor the feeling, because his muscular leg began kicking against my hands with the cadence and urgency of a MK-19 grenade machine gun trying to stop a charging tank; pronounced Mark-19, it launches 40mm grenades at 48 rounds minute, sending fist-sized, high explosive, dual purpose grenades more than a mile away, able to melt through two inches of an armored steel personnel carrier and explode with a five-meter kill radius, and the vicious kickback from each whump! is strong enough to rattle a Humvee heavily loaded with three paratroopers and two week’s worth of food and ammunition. But I believe Hillary kicked harder and with more ferocity: Thump-Thump-Thump at a count faster and with more intentionality than 1-2-3 chest compressions on a dying teammate in the midst of battle. Hillary 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; he kicked like a wild animal trying to free itself from a coil spring trap, or like the man a Boy Named Sue fought who fought who “kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile.”

Hillary’s mule kicks were fierce and I felt every one. I began to feel my sweaty hands slipping apart with every thump, and soon my right hand was clasped only my left ring and pinky finger. He kicked again, and 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, preparing for that moment, knowing it was about more than just a match.

I felt my ring finger snap, and of course it hurt like hell, but I was too focused to pay attention to anything but grasping at a win I felt was close enough to smell. I clung on with my right hand, but a useless finger my kung-fu grip was gone, and 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, his strongest position, and his bushy eyebrows furrowed with anger. I had never seen him angry on the mat 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 on my ring finger, swollen to 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 while 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 trotted onto the mat to warm up as a team, following Hillary and lined up 103 pounds to the 275 pound heavyweight like a row of black and maroon Russian Matryoska dolls trotting in a synced rhythm that reverberated in every gym they visited. Once a year we competed in their gym, a dilapidated and asbestos padded room with peeling maroon paint faded and duct-taped purple and gold mats, where the bleachers were filled with parents and neighbors who could walk there and stomped their feet to the rhythmic beat of Hillary and the Lions warming up. They called their gym the Lion’s Den, like the one Daniel was tossed into, and a few crude murals from Ethiopia were hand-painted on the double doors that were usually double-chained and didn’t meet fire codes, but served their purpose well enough to keep out the transients who lived downtown, busted flat in Baton Rouge on their way to New Orleans. I ignored Lions circling Hillary and focused on their 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, hoping for a hint of help against Hillary.

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. Hillary nodded after every one of The Mountain’s gestures. Coach and Jeremy let me be. My cradle was useless, but there was nothing I could do about it. All that mattered was that my breath stabilized and my heartbeat calmed down. I bounced and shook my arms gently to keep them warm and to maintain a sheen of slippery sweat on my legs, a tiny advantage that no one would consider cheating.

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, and raised his hand. 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 as sweat dripped down my face in the heat of Iraq’s deserts and made my kung-fu grip slippery against the butterfly handles; that stance was the only way to keep on target with the force of their kickback, and it’s an old-school way to keep yourself grounded in the face of overwhelming odds with no end in sight. I learned it from Coach.

“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, drop back down and ask a few linebackers to pile on, and pop up just as effortlessly, like little Yoda lifting Luke’s X-Wing from the Degobah Swamp.

“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 could run track or swim before wrestling season and use the football team’s weight room when they were done. Once, and only after I asked, he said that he lettered in four sports: wrestling, football, baseball, and track; adding with a chuckle that he was often carried off the football field when Iowa linebackers trampled over him at practice. But he kept coming back, and was voted captain of this and that regardless of his size.

Several of us joined other sports to be in peak physical condition for wrestling. I ran cross-country track and swam. I was mediocre in both, barely lettering in cross-country and coming in last at every swim meet, but I showed up at practice every day to prepare for wrestling season. When I lifted weights, I focused on my neck, adding strength to keep my shoulders above the mat against Hillary’s arsenal of pinning moves.

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, wrestled, and won. He served as an alternate on the U.S. olympic team and watched Doug win the gold, then became a coach at Iowa State before being recruited to start a program at LSU in 1968, bringing them to 4th in the nation by the mid 70’s.

On the mat against Hillary, I forgot about my finger and focused on his hips and prepared to wrestle. Someone will win. For the next two minutes, it doesn’t mater who. Just wrestle. In my periphery, I was aware of the referee’s chest and cheeks; sometimes, they telegraph blowing the whistle and you may gain a fraction of a second of advantage. I saw the referee blow his whistle and drop his hand, and I began wrestling before the whistle ended.

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 slamming my chest onto his broad hairy shoulders. He resisted my weight like Atlas shouldering the world, and tried to pull my legs closer to him. But my lanky legs began to give me a mechanical advantage, and sprawl by sprawl, Atlas slowly faltered. His arms crept further from his body 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. 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.

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 us how to stop head-heal picks.

“Don’t be a headhunter,” he said. He was given that advice from the US Olympic coach, because the Russians used the same head-heel setup as Capital High. Don’t grab their head and fight like a brute, keep your stance, and stay focused. To grab your head, they must overreach their stance first, and an alert wrestler can use that brief moment to their 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 Hillary’s legendary speed was faster than you could imagine. 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.

Hillary’s bear hug caught me on exhale, when my lungs almost empty, and he instantly threw me in a perfect throw that would have earned five full points in summer freestyle. 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 people as far away as Texas 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, 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, when I was scrounging for money to buy a new pair of size 12 shoes to match my growing feet, 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 watched Craig’s shoes fly through the air above my head and in slow motion. 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 in a perfect 360 degree circle, inertia keeping them a bit behind my shoulders and hips. I saw the faces of fans, and most had looks of awe. It was a beautiful throw, a work of art that approached greatness. Some people, probably those experienced with wrestling, cringed with empathy: 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. Almost exactly a year later, during the battle for Khamisiyah on 04 March 1991, I’d feel two explode close enough to be dusted with sand and debris, and after the shock waves dissipated and the mushroom cloud blocked out the sun, I’d feel happy that at least it didn’t hurt as much as being slammed to the mat by Hillary Clinton. When he slammed me down, the impact sent a shock wave that reverberated back from the bleachers, and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out.

I was temporarily dazed and disoriented, but my body bridged automatically and 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. Mother Earth spoke to me through Craig’s shoes, and I 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, quivered under Hillary’s efforts to mash me down. My eyes, now seeing light after the shockwave dissipated, stared to the trellised roof high above the gym floor.

Hillary went onto his toes and put almost all of his 147 pounds onto my chest, though it felt like all of the football team had piled on, too. 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 sniper 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 Paige and a gaggle of blue-hooded Bengals violating rules by leaving the bleachers and watching from the floor behind our corner. I didn’t pray. Like I said, I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling. 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 intimately from having been held in a headlock by him several times. A few wrestlers paraphrased the comedian Eddie Murphy, and said Hillary’s armpits were so hairy that when he stepped on the mat, he already looked like he had Buckwheat in a headlock; but that wasn’t funny to me, especially when he caught me in a head throw at the Robert E. Lee High School Invitational and his bushy armpit covered my nose and I took in deep breaths for almost thirty seconds until he finally pinned me. He had a smell I associated with all the African Americans I wrestled, a combination of diets different than mine, hiegene products of different cultures, and a carnal reality about races with different pigments. But Hillary’s scent was more pungent than anyone else’s, and reminded me of the Capital High’s asbestos-laden gym the same way that everything from Coach’s truck smelled like cheap fungicide. I associated that smell with being pinned, and I was determined to break the pattern even if I broke my neck in the process.

In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, about half of Belaire’s team gathered to watch, with Little Paige standing in front. 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, which took cues from Coach by showing up to support those of us who made it to the second day, 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 didn’t waste precious energy with a thought about them, but the meaning resonated inside of me and made my suffering bearable. I just had to be patient and not panic. I was on my back and out of air, and I bridged with all I had, and then a bit more. 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 at the end of my tunneled vision.

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 shoulders. The orange light dimmed and then vanished, but I saw the referee’s face when he slid beside my head with his whistle pinched between his lips. I felt skin contact rubber, and 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 at 3:40, twenty seconds to go in the second round.

I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand reached up and clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance now permanent part of how he stood, 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 160 times in two and a half years, reaching up a bit more every year as I grew. 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 say, “Good job, Magik.” It wasn’t just talk, it was trust: you’re the only person who knows how you did on the mat. No one else knows what happens in your mind for those six minutes; or, in my case against Hillary, those three minutes and forty seconds. Coach trusted everyone to do their best, so win or loose, they always did a good job.

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, and a quick glance let me see our team back 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 the Bulldogs clean up their gym. I couldn’t help much, because my finger had a splint from the medic and I had kept a bag of ice from the concession stand on it for an hour or so. Instead, I stared at the blank clock, powered off but still foreboding above us.

I heard laugher I recognized, and in my periphery I saw Pat, a former Bulldog heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches and Andy and Timmy, the burly twins I knew since middle school who had dropped out of school but sometimes swung by to help Belaire wrestlers, the only people who still called me Dolly rather than Magik; with a name like Jason Partin, it was inevitable that bigger kids would pick on me by calling me Dolly, like the big bosomed country singer Dolly Parton who was also famous in the 80’s for films like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; Andy and Timmy said their picking on me made me strong, like Hillary and a boy named Sue. That may be true. When they were studying for their general equivalency exam, they practiced their vocabulary with us by using words like loquacious, tenacious, and dilapidated, words I still use today as side-lessons gained from my brief stent as a high school wrestler. They were the ones who first nominated me as captain, and they paid admission to see how I fared against Hillary at a time when $2 was a lot of money to us. They were laughing with a small group of other old-timers with Pat, who volunteered at the downtown camp and who, like Chris Forest, couldn’t squeeze into an XXL shirt.

“Hillary stuck Magik so hard,” Pat explained to the guys who missed my match, “the only thing he could wiggle was his eyeballs.”

He wiggled his eyeballs and everyone laughed. Pat set up that joke and wiggled his eyes every time someone was pinned. I had seen him do it a million times, and I would have laughed, too, had I not been so focused on the timer. I was thinking about how it faded from my vision; I was unable to remember the exact moment I stopped being able to see it, and I wondered what happened in the ten or so seconds I couldn’t recall. The laughter dissipated and the gaggle of wresters and coaches parted. In my periphery, I saw Pat’s smile go away. He leaned down and softly asked Coach: “What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all season. 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 the reading glasses he kept draped around his neck onto the tip of his nose, 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 Grady Partin was released from prison early because of declining health, diabetes and an ambiguous heart condition, and he wasn’t expected to live long. It had been in the paper almost weekly all season long, but 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 had been the head of Teamster’s Local #5 since the 1950’s, and was probably the most famous person in Baton Rouge, if not all of Louisiana. His face was in the newspaper or on the news practically every week, and the attorney general once said he was so popular that be governor if he had a college degree. Most people I knew called him Big Daddy, but he known nationally as Edward Grady Partin, the big, rugged, handsome Teamster leader who was in a Baton Rouge jail on kidnapping and manslaughter charges when U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover freed him infiltrate the Teamster’s inner circle and find something – anything at all – to remove International Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa from power.² His 1964 testimony and Bobby and Hoover’s phrasing of his task was challenged by Hoffa’s army of attorneys as violating the 4th Amendment against unlawful search and seizure, which required specificity, and the case reached the supreme court in 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States, overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was already famous for many things including authoring the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination, in a nationally covered trial that forever changed America’s interpretation of the constitution. The case caused conspiracy theories to thrive, especially the Warren Report mistakenly claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee and looked up to Big Daddy, acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy. My family was showcased across national media to build trust in Bobby’s key witness.

Because Big Daddy was so handsome and his southern drawl so charming, Look! and Life magazines loved to put his face on full pages throughout the magazines for years, including a six-month series of investigative journalism about organized crime in America that showed Big Daddy standing up against Marcello. My family’s sprinkled in those photos, with a famous shot showing him atop the Baton Rouge state capital building with my dad, whom I look so much alike hat many people assumed I was him, especially because he had me so young, and his four siblings: Uncle Keith and Aunts Janice, Cynthia, and Theresa. After Kennedy was killed and Vice-President Johnson was appointed president, the Partins were highlighted in the same issue as the Johnson family, one of the most famous issues of Life in decades, just before the Johnson administration escalated the Vietnam conflict from Kennedy’s 55 thousand or so “special forces” to more than 500,000 kids drafted and sent overseas for the next decade.

Bobby said that Big Daddy was an “all-American hero” for risking his life and the lives of his family to clean up corrupt unions and stand up against Hoffa’s mafia colleagues, men like New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello. Life magazine quoted them in issues dedicated to him and the Partin family, and the moniker stuck. His prestige grew in Baton Rouge because he could defy America’s most powerful man, the mafia, and the constitution of the United States with impunity. My daddy was Edward Grady Partin Junior, so calling my grandfather Big Daddy made sense ever since I was a toddler.

Big Daddy returned to Louisiana and continued to run the Louisiana Teamsters, and 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 1983’s film “Blood Feud,” people remembered what Big Daddy and Hoffa looked like, and the burly and handsome actor Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy in one of his first major roles, the same year he portrayed the Korean war veteran and sheriff who pursued Sylvester Stalone as Rambo, the Special Forces Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Robert Blake won an academy award for channeling Hoffa’s rage, Ernest Borgnine portrayed Hoover, and some tall daytime soap-opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby. Big Daddy was our home-town hero and everyone talked about him more than anyone else in the film.

He ran the Louisiana Teamsters for thirty years, including when he was in prison in the early 1980’s, just like Hoffa ran the International teamsters from behind federal bars where he pummeled mattresses eight hours a day for his prison work detail, brooding about getting out. In 1981, my equally huge great-uncle Doug Partin, was elected in his place, and Uncle Keith was on deck to take his place. The Partins were a Louisiana legacy, and half of Baton Rouge had worked for Big Daddy at some point, driving trucks to ship Louisiana’s agriculture products across the country to ships in the ports of Baton Rouge and New Orleans to be sent up the Mississippi river or out the Gulf of Mexico and across the globe. The burgeoning petrochemical industry in Baton Rouge depended on Teamsters to ship gas and plastic pellets along the purpose-built I-110 that connected to the cross-country I-10, and, like Hoffa funded Hollywood films, Big Daddy brought the movie industry to Louisiana, using Teamster trucks to haul equipment and Teamster trailers to house actors and workers.

The 1988 film “Everybody’s All American,” an epic football tale spanning 25 years of a celebgrated football player’s life, staring Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, Timothy Hutton, and John Goodman, was filmed in Baton Rouge the winter two years before it was released, and in it you can see a handful of my classmates and some of my teachers as uncredited extras in a stadium of 10,000 Baton Rouge people dressed up in 1950’s garb; ironically, I was not in the film, because I was with my dad in Arkansas over Christmas. In one scene, they show 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 surreal and magical, would have been deemed too fantasatstic for a serious film set in the warm south was reshot a week later. But it was because of the rare snowfall that everyone in town talked about the first shooting and their small part in it. Everybody’s All American was still the talk of the town by the time I wrestled Hillary Clinton, and the film’s name was an obvious shout-out to Big Daddy.

Big Daddy had moved my family to Baton Rouge from Woodville, Mississippi, so there were only a handful of Partins in the phone book, and everyone knew I was related to them, especially because I look so much like my dad, who was famous in his own right as the town’s main drug dealer.

I never talked about my Partin family. 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, collaborator with Fidel Castro, 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 that Hoffa used “rabbit ears” to quote every time he spoke of Edward Partin and his status as an “all-American hero.”

It was because of Big Daddy that I asked to be assigned to the 82nd Airborne, famous for the AA patch on their shoulder that stands for All Americans, a name given to them when they were created to fight what was called The Great War before we began calling it World War I, which began only a generation after the civil war, where brother fought brother. Someone noticed that the 82nd was the first time in American history that a military unit had soldiers from every one of the United States, and the moniker All Americans was chosen to inspire unity. When Hitler began using paratroopers in WWII, the 82nd became America’s first paratroop’ unit, the forefathers of our special forces, and the Airborne tab was added above the AA on our shoulders.

The All Americans were as famous as Big Daddy was when I was a kid. The Christmas and New Year of 1989-1999, when I was already signed up for them and training to wrestle Hillary Clinton, they were on the news every day after President Bush Senior sent them to Panama. They flew there overnight in a fleet of C-130 and C-141 aircraft and parachuted into Panama from a mere 400 feet above the jungle tree-line, landing at 4 am and overtaking the country within a few hours. Televised international news followed and showed them holding President Noriega captive by surrounding his compound for weeks; to capture him alive, they brought in speakers big enough to host a massive music festival and blared heavy metal 24 hours a day, depriving him and his personal guard of sleep with songs taken from Van Halen’s 1985 album, songs that so ironic that not even Hollywood could contrive the scene; all day and night, the 82nd blared “Jump!” and “Panama,” and I suspect Noriega is the only person other than David Lee Roth who knows the lyrics to Panama better than I do.

The news was so detailed that we noticed no 82nd paratroopers died, yet a handful of the then newly-known Navy SEALS did, and so did two Delta Force anti-terrorism commandos, a team we suspected existed after Chuck Norris’s cheesy 1986 film, “The Delta Force,” the first in an equally cheesy three-part franchise based, in part, on the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the 1979-1980 Iran Hostage crisis where 53 Americans were held aboard an airplane for 444 days that, in addition to the oil crisis, cost Jimmy Carter his reelection to Ronald Reagan, news that even kids noticed. Teamsters earned their livelihoods with trucks running on gas, so the Middle East oil embargo and extraordinary cost of fuel and long lines at gas stations made the news daily chatter for the Partins; like anyone who hears names and topics at home, I began noticing those names in the news again and again.

The 82nd was the president’s quick-reaction force, 12,000 paratroopers on call to deploy anywhere in the world within two hours without congressional approval. Before Panama, the 82nd was on the news for Grenada in 1985, the Dominican Republic in 1983, and Honduras in 1979; before that, they were one of many units in Vietnam for more than a decade. In WWII, the 82nd was known for five combat jumps behind enemy lines in Europe that turned the tides of war, and celebrated by actors as big as John Wayne shown wearing their maroon berets, coincidentally the color of the Capital Lions singlets. But, what stuck in my mind in the 1980’s was their nickname and the sarcastic taunt Jimmy Hoffa used about Big Daddy being an “all-American hero.” In August of 1989 I walked into the recruiters office as a pimple faced 16 year old kid with a piece of paper signed by Judge Bob saying I was an adult, and I signed a contract to join the real All Americans.

On 16 March 1990, two weeks after Hillary Clinton broke my finger, I rode a Honda Ascot 500cc shaft-drive motorcycle to my grandfather’s funeral, a small and low-maintenance machine that got around 55 miles per gallon. Because Baton Rouge was an oil refining town, and perhaps because of Teamster influence in state policies, our gas has always been cheap compared to elsewhere, so the round trip to practice cost less than a dollar, and a trip to and from New Orleans to earn tips performing near Bourbon Street was only three dollars. My two left middle fingers were buddy-taped; for the occasion, I applied two fresh strips of bright white cloth tape, not because the fingers still needed it, but because I liked the way it looked and how it made me feel, and I hoped someone would ask about it so I could tell them about wrestling.

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!” and a form of psuedo-apathy about my abysmal grades from 9th and 10th grade that made my graduation uncertain; had it not been for Coach asking me to try my best in academics, I probably would have had to attend summer school and forfeit my army contract, but I would graduate with a 1.87/4.00 GPA and make the requirement by 0.37 points. 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. 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.

Across the back of my jacket was a sprawling black-colored “Magik” that I had splurged on and had embroidered at a t-shirt and nick-knack 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 the fifteen year military campaign euphemistically called a police action; like southern Louisiana, southern Vietnam was a humid, muggy agricultural and seafood region that the French had colonized and spread foods like French baguettes and pate, so the muggy port town of Baton Rouge – which means Red Stick in French – was a logical move for thousands of Vietnamese who had supported America and had to flee the communist takeover. To blend in, and after a few of their kids dressed as GI Joe for Halloween trick-or-treating were shot by Vietnam veterans living in Belaire’s cheap apartments, the Vietnamese strip malls on Florida Boulevard without walking distance of school began selling heavy metal patches and veteran shirts with Airborne wings and berets that said things like “Death from Above” and “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,” and rebranding bohn-mi sandwiches as “Vietnamese Po’Boys” and not checking ID’s when selling cigarettes and cheep beer, which endeared them to the teenagers at Belaire who skipped school to buy cigarettes and cheep beer.

I never drank alcohol, a trait I picked up from Big Daddy, who said it loosened lips, but I liked the heavy metal t-shirt shop that also sold glass tobacco pipes and ornate desk lamps that most kids knew were bongs. 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 a new band called Guns and Roses, who wore a top hat wherever he went. I spent all of my money on the embroidery and Guns-N-Roses patch and a Vietnamese Po’Boy, so I painstakingly sewed the skull and top-hat on by hand. I was proud of that, because few kids knew how to sew, and I liked the bling on my jacket.

But the pins stood out more than anything on my jacket. It was a common thing to do with wrestlers, but my 36 pins were remarkable because one was by itself; Lea said it was a metaphor, that it was unlike the Hero’s Journey of Star Wars, The Karate Kid, or Rocky, and more like Lauden’s solitary quest in Vision Quest. His team rallied around him at the end, just like my team celebrated me for being tenacious. That’s how, after years of not paying attention in uninteresting English classes, I finally understood what a metaphor was; I was anxious to tell everyone about that, too.

The 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. 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 I was still riding the high, and after all of that attention I was unimpressed by the crowds of people and reporters clustered outside of the funeral home. I past the rows of police and federal marshalls dressed like Men In Black wannabes, and walked up to Aunt Janice. She bent down to hug me, and we went inside. I was always the runt of the Partin family; even the girls were taller than I was.

Besides Grandma Foster, Big Daddy’s mother and the only other tiny person in our family, there were twenty or thirty Partins, mostly from Big Daddy’s marriage after Mamma Jean, who stayed nearby at her sister’s house and was 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 who had served as Big Daddy’s entourage.

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; the fictitious 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, and part of the reason they set the film in Baton Rouge. Billy was also known for running a counterfeiting ring, 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 from prison, people still flocked to see him in parades and called him a hero, and LSU still had him speak at ceremonies. Walter would always be amazed at how Louisiana, and he would write in his book that we had a unique form of politics and a high tolerance for corruption. No one argued with him about that.

Of course Billy would be Big Daddy’s pallbearer; it made Big Daddy seem bigger than life, even after death. After everyone finished speaking, Billy, Doug, Kieth, and three other Teamster brutes heaved to pick up Big Daddy’s casket and carry it past all the reporters to be laid in Greenwood cemetery.

With all of those celebrities at the 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. Hoover oversaw around 6,300 FBI agents, and 500 of them were under Walter with only one goal: Get Hoffa. It was so blatant that there team was called the “Get Hoffa Task Force,” and they were, until America’s efforts to get President Manuel Noriega and Osama Bin Laden, the most expensive and extravagantly resourced American effort against an individual. It would take a unique person to head that team.

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. He had even managed part of the Senator John F. Kennedy’s successful presidential campaign, and that’s probably why J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy hand-picked him to rejoin the force and get Hoffa.³ After Big Daddy’s testimony sent Hoffa to prison, Walter became a friend – of sorts – to Mamma Jean and Grandma Foster, Big Daddy’s momma, a sweet old lady smaller than Coach who lived four miles from the Baton Rouge airport. I barely knew Walter, but for all of the 1990 wrestling season he kept checking on us and asking if Big Daddy said anything, calling Aunt Janice every day to see if anything new was said. He seemed interested in anything a Partin did. I told him I broke my finger wrestling in city finals, but I dind’t use Hillary’s name because I didn’t know yet how funny it would sound if I said Hillary Clinton broke it; though I spent a lot of summers and holidays with my dad in Arkansas, I didn’t know that Bill Clinton was governor and that his wife was named Hillary. Walter congratulated me and seemed interested in whatever I had to say, and I talked his ear off about how I was headed to the 82nd.

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 18, almost six feet tall, and, like my dad, Janice, and me, had Mamma Jean’s dark brown eyes instead of Big Daddy and Grandma Foster’s sky blue eyes. Tiffany was gorgeous, like Mamma Jean and Janice, and had been homecoming queen in a Houston high school. She and all of my aunts and most of my cousins lived near the house Bobby bought for Mamma Jean in exchange for her silence. Tiffany was a remarkable public speaker and she held the hundred or so people listening captive. She told stories about Big Daddy’s sweet smile and dotting affection for his family, and everyone was already in tears when Jennifer took her turn.

Jennifer was Cynthia’s oldest daughter and a high school sophomore in high school, but she was still taller than I was. Jennifer had written a letter preparing for the funeral in January, when the 82nd was still in Panama and dominating the news, and when we knew Big Daddy only had months or weeks left to live. 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. Aunt Cynthia would send a copy to Doug after the funeral, scribbling a note to explain it and saying:

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.

For his book, Doug photocopied Jennifer’s hand-written letter, which said:

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 sobbed as she read her letter, and when she finished everyone was bawling; not even I wanted to point out the understatement of being a “bother” to Hoffa, nor did I want to tell my cousins that the Big Daddy they knew from Life magazine and books wasn’t the one I knew from growing up with him in Baton Rouge rather than with our close-lipped Mamma Jean in Houston. 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; his father, Joe, was Zachary’s football coach and principal, the only Partin not a Teamster, which may be why neither of them spoke.

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, and, like every wrestler I met in training, I breezed through basic training, advanced infantry training, and Airborne school. But we took our training seriously, because we were preparing for war; on 03 August 1990, Saddam Hussein and the world’s largest fleet of tanks overtook the small country of Kuwait and turned their turrets towards Saudi Arabia, threatening the world’s oil supply and reminding everyone of 1979 gas prices; President Bush Senior responded by calling on the 82nd Airborne to draw a line in the sand. Two hours later, a small fleet of C-141’s were en route, and 18 hours later a handful of young paratroopers armed with puny machine guns and about twenty .50 cals and just as many TOW anti-tank missile systems faced off against 400,000 Iraqi soldiers and hundreds of Soviet T54 and T55 tanks. They held their ground in what media dubbed Desert Shield, and soon an international coalition of 560,000 soldiers soon followed; that’s when I showed up as an 18 year old ready for my first duty assignment. Nine months later, my platoon, Anti-Tank Platoon 4 of Delta Company, 1st Battallion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, led American forces across the Iraqi border to begin Desert Storm, and we spearheaded the battle for Khamisiya airport. We won, ending the first Gulf War under the command of General Stormin’ Norman Scwartzcoff in the most well-planned and concise war of American history. A few months later, back in Fort Bragg I won a few awards and was called an All American hero by people who never heard of Big Daddy.

Coincidentally, it turned out that Stormin’ Norman was an amateur magician and member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, sparking the local “All American” Ring #341 in Fayeteville, North Carloina, the civilian town near Fort Bragg, Home of The Airborne. Though I never met him, I attended meetings and stopped using my nickname, Magik, because it seemed ostentatious among such an elite group of magicians. My callsign changed with every small team I joined, beginning with Scarhead because of the large scars on my scalp from childhood and the 1988 Oliver Stone film about a drug lord called Scarface, where Al Pacino held a machine gun and uttered the famous line: “Say hello to my little friend!” JP stuck for a while because of my initials and the smell of JP-4 jet fuel every time we jumped, but my feet flattened and spread out I was called Bigfoot for obvious reasons. Eventually, everyone settled on Dolly, which was inevitable given Dolly Parton’s enduring fame. That moniker stuck for years and lingers among old buddies to this day, karmic retribution for all the jokes I made about Hillary and a boy named Sue.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was the democratic presidential nominee, 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 first release to President Carter in 1979. The summer JFK was released and when President Bush Senior was still in office, I was unofficially training with Delta Force, which was headquartered in Fort Bragg a few miles from the 82nd.

One two-week course that sticks in my mind was 268 of us began, and after two weeks of food and sleep deprivation and extreme physical effort and strict silence, only nine of us crossed the finish line; when we finally talked, we learned that of the nine, six of us had wrestled in high school. Fasting was forced and new to many people, but wrestlers had done it weekly by choice, and we thought the self-directed experience gave us an advantage over anyone just doing what they’re told. Also, almost half the soldiers failed the first day, when we were blindfolded and in full uniform with backpacks and combat gear, and we blindly walked along a high-diving board until we plummeted into the pool; the only people who continued the course were able to ditch their backpacks and surface with M-16 in hand, simulating an accidental water landing in a combat zone and the ability to keep calm in tense situations when you couldn’t breathe. I had seen a couple of the guys a month before at the Fort Bragg swimming pool, when we were doing laps with waterlogged clothes to prepare, though we didn’t know each other then. When we finally talked, we swapped war stories about high school, and that was the first time I showed my finger and said that Hillary Clinton broke it. Their chuckle reminded me so much of me laughing at Pat’s wiggly eyes that I began to use that joke whenever a few of us felt we were too fatigued to continue. I was on a new team.

By 1993, I was on President Clinton’s quick reaction force. I was 5’11” and 195 pounds with size 14 boots (my body never grew to match 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 right shoulder proudly displayed a red, white, and blue 82nd Airborne combat patch that I could wear forever. 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 their liberation.

Though I was certified expert in every weapon NATO had to offer, probably due to Big Daddy being an skilled elk hunter who taught me to shoot a rifle with intention and precision, I only wore my expert rifleman marksmanship badge; I had outgrown the bling of youth. I only wore my uniform at award ceremonies, including when I lost in the finals for soldier of the year, a life-long fate of facing the equivalent of Hillary Clinton wherever I went. The review board included soldiers like three-star General Hugh Shelton, who would become Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking soldier in the United States, in 1997, and two-star General Wesley Clark, a Rhodes Scholar like Bill Clinton, who would serves as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and bow out of his presidential bid to support George Bush Junior; and many others who, like Coach Dale Ketelsen, were not a household name but were remarkable people who impacted the lives of everyone they met. During the week-long process, I was asked what led me there; I unequivocally said Coach and the all-city wrestling center, and the small team of wrestlers who wore Ephsians 6:12 on their shirts.

Though I lost, I was asked to be an unarmed peace keeper in the Middle East in the Multinational Force and Observers, a coalition of 17 nations spearheaded by President Jimmy Carter after he brokered a treaty in the Camp David accords of 1979, just after he decided to keep the congressional report on President Kennedy’s assassination classified despite the Freedom of Information Act; coincidentally, I noticed, the MFO wore an orange beret the color of my Belaire letterman jacket, which garnished a chuckle I didn’t explain. A senior chaplain who noticed that I quoted the bible gave me a copy of the Koran and asked if I could study it, too, and serve as a communications liaison between opposing teams in the MFO. I said I would try my best. My clearance passed, and I had access to key parts of the JFK Assassination report; but so did anyone in America willing to drive to Washington DC and read it, because President Clinton made it public in 1993, overriding Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior’s decisions to keep it classified.

The 1979 report, officially called the House Select Committee on Assassinations Report on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, reversed the Warren Report and said there was likely a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that the three people most likely to have orchestrated Kennedy’s murder were Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Traficante Junior. Big Daddy was implicated as having plotted to kill the president’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, by recruiting a lone sniper with a high-powered scope and training him to shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in his convertible. Lee Harvey Oswald being from New Orleans and training in the Baton Rouge civil air force four miles from Grandma Foster’s house, under the alias Harvey Lee, was too strong of a coincidence to ignore, but I didn’t tell anyone what I suspected. As a magician who grew up with a racketeer as a grandfather and a drug dealer as a father, I was good at keeping secrets. The report was massive and I didn’t get to the parts about Martin Luther King Junior, and I’m sure that even if I did, Hillary Clinton would have more to say about it than I would. The complete report would remain classified until President Trump’s second term in 2025, though I had seen all I needed in 1993 to understand how good Big Daddy was at keeping secrets; he would have made a great magician or secret service agent.

After my diplomatic passport was granted, I returned to Baton Rouge for a two-week leave before I left for the Middle East again. I stopped by Belaire, and when I told Coach what I’d be doing, he shook my hand and said, “Good job, Magik.”

He reached up and took my tricep with a firm grasp that would make the strongest of special operations soldiers pause and pay attention. “You remember Little Paige?”

I said of course.

He looked up at me and grinned and said, “Well, he’s captain now.”

He chuckled and said, “Goes by the name Paige The Rage.”

Coach turned and waddled towards his desk among the other assistant football coaches that doubled as his driver’s education desk, a cluttered mess of paperwork and photos of legendary wrestlers from his era, and I followed.

“He’s doing fine,” Coach said. “He’ll probably win state this year.” He rummaged around his desk, looking for his glasses.

“But we have a new guy,” he said when he found them. “Big guy. 275 pounds.”

He paused and looked up at me with glasses in one hand and his other hand pointing a short stubby forefinger to make a point: “But fast. We don’t have anyone to challenge him at practice.”

He lowered his finger and said, “If you’d like to come by, he could use someone to give him a workout.”

Coach chuckled and said, “Calls himself The Hulk.” His face became serious and he said, “Stay alert! He may surprise you.”

I said I would return the next day, and I left so he could catch up on paperwork and prepare for his driver’s ed class later that afternoon.

He didn’t have a size 14 wrestling shoe for me to borrow, so for the next two weeks I wore out three pairs of socks while being, to my great honor, Coach Ketelsen’s assistant. He was right, and Big Rodney was a 275 pound gentle giant who could slide me around the mat if I didn’t stay focused, though I blamed the slick socks sliding on Belaire’s faded blue and orange mat. At the end of those two weeks, those three pairs of threadbare socks meant more to me than my faded and blood-stained desert fatigues or anything the army ever pinned to my chest. I was happier than a pig in slop.

I bought a pair of size 13 wrestling shoes and slit the toes to fit my feet, and whenever I was back in country I visited Belaire and helped Coach until he retired and assisted Craig at St. Paul’s. Lea was studying art and theater at Southeastern Louisiana University, but visited me at Belaire and said returning to help new wrestlers was the completion of a Hero’s Journey. I couldn’t argue the analogy, especially because every 1980’s film followed the formula: Rocky would train new boxers, Luke would train new Jedis, and the Karate Kid would open a dojo in his own Netflix series. After Coach passed in 2014,⁴ Louisiana renamed the Robert E. Lee Invitational the Coach Dale Ketelsen Memorial Tournament for obvious reasons. Everyone said it was about time, and only my wife and Lea and a few aging wrestlers knew why I cried when I heard the news.

My 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; I was as an engineering instructor for the University of San Diego, a small private college with $56,000 year in tuition – almost twice my entire college fund for seven years of service – and the only Catholic university in America not under the diocese. I still wasn’t religious, so USD appealed to me, especially because their mission statement sounded similar to Ephsians 6:12, at least by my interpretation. A bald spot had begun to poke its way through my receding hairline, and I usually wore one of several LSU baseball caps to protect my scalp from the perpetual San Diego sunshine. My right leg was held together by bone screws and tenacity, and I limped at then end of long days and when my body was fatigued and my mind was distracted.

Uncle Keith was president of Teamsters Local #5, like his uncle and father had been, and James R. Hoffa Junior was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; they were as professional and cordial with each other as possible given that Keith’s dad betrayed Jimmy Hoffa Senior’s trust and sent him to prison when James Junior was a kid.

Jeremy was in the northeast helping his son’s wrestling team; the twins had passed from drug abuse; Big Rodney had wrestled for LSU’s revived program and was head coach of Baton Rouge’s Catholic High; Pat was still at Baton Rouge High and still told the same joke every time someone was pinned; Paige wrestled in college and then went into the air force and won Korera’s national mixed martial arts title, just like Chuck Norris had won karate tournaments when he was stationed in Japan, and he returned to Baton Rouge to open a fitness club called Rage; Lea was an eminent grandmother who designed background film props for her livelihood; and Hillary had won state, but none of us had heard from him since then.

Fans of Brian Dennehy were shocked to learn that his claims of military service were stolen valor. He lied to improve his tough-guy image and reap stronger rolesl I would have been interested in discussing that with him, but he would pass away during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Uncle Doug, an air force veteran from the WWII era, would also pass away in 2020 in a Mississippi veterans convalescent home; he self-published his 2012 autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story,”which was riddled with typos and chronological errors, but that’s understandable for someone almost 90 years old trying to recall events 60 years prior. He didn’t say anything not already known, but he felt better by finally telling the world his part in history.

I had a few patents for implants that healed small bones in the fingers and feet, and was co-author on a few standards of the American Society for Testing and Materials for testing orthopedic implants, and one for wrestling mats to ensure they sufficiently softened impacts and were reasonably anti-microbial. My passport was filled with stamps from visiting international medical device companies wanting to enter the United States but were more used to the European Napoleonic code than the system for every state other than Louisiana. My feet had flattened and spread out from years of humping heavy rucksacks and hitting the earth like a meteor shot out of a C-141, and I wore size 14-wide shoes and size 15 hiking boot with thick socks.

Sometimes I sported a suit when performing Thursday evenings at The Gathering, a restaurant and lounge in the relatively wealthy San Diego neighborhood of Mission Hills that hosted strolling magicians three nights a week. My tailored suite was adorned with two small pieces of bling – a dime-sized gold membership pin from The International Brotherhood of Magicians and a similarly sized gold owl from The Academy of Magical Arts in Hollywood’s Magic Castle – and I had sewn in hidden pockets and filled them with coins, decks of cards, and gadgets that would have impressed the British secret agent James Bond. On some weekends, I drove two hours north and performed in small theaters deep inside the Magic Castle. I had performed at other venues over the years, which is how I learned to deflect questions about my forked finger by laughing when I said Hillary Clinton broke it.

In 2019, Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent in Martin Scorcese’s $257 Million epic about Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, “The Irishman,” starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and all the other high-grossing goodfellas from decades of gangster films. When Covid shuttered theaters worldwide, “The Irishman” set streaming records on Netflix. Scorcese admitted it was entertainment to sell tickets and recoup a hefty investment, not a documentary to educate the masses, and to simplify the film he cut out a chapter of Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan about Big Daddy, a Teamster leader and mafia hitman who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa Senior in a Detroit suburb on 30 July 1975 and incinerated the body in a mafia-owned funeral parlor. Because of Craig’s northeastern Italian accent, and to downplay Big Daddy’s role so that the focus was on Frank, my grandfather’s character was renamed “Big Eddie” Partin. Scorcese used exaggerated camera angles to emphasize Craig’s formidable bulk and make Big Eddie loom large in the background over Hoffa and the mafia. I don’t know what James R. Hoffa Junior thought of the film or of Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan or what it’s like to have Hollywood focus on your family history, but I bet he was asked about it more often than people asked about my finger.

Walter had died in 1996 and Mamma Jean followed a year later; both took secrets to their graves. Soon after Mamma Jean passed, Tiffany, the only grandchild who knew Big Daddy longer than I had, took her own life; may she rest in peace. I’ve lost a few other cousins and several army buddies to suicide, and I don’t have a joke for that.

It’s likely Big Daddy was right when he spoke his final words, and no one will ever know his part in history. But, now that you know this much of the story, you may get a pun I’ve savored since 1990, one that I could have used to begin this tale but may make more sense now:

My grandfather was Edward Partin, a big part in history; I’m Jason Partin, a 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. That smile is part of what made Big Daddy who he was, because it led people like Mamma Jean and Hoffa to trust him. To explain what happened, Hoffa penned his second autobiography from prison, where he spent six years pounding mattresses for his prison work detail solely because of my grandfather’s testimony, and he summarized Big Daddy by saying: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged man who could charm a snake off a rock.” Mamma Jean said the same thing, and that his smile is what first won her over when she was an 18 year old girl and he was a 26 year old aspiring union leader.

Though no one but me probably knows this, but Big Daddy’s smile looked just like the smile Coach Dale Ketelsen wore when I first met him. As a young man, Coach wrestled at 126 pounds and he was always shorter me, but he left me with big shoes to fill; at the weakest point in his life, Coach was stronger than Big Daddy ever was, and both made me who I am. May they rest in peace, wherever they may be.

Go to the Table of Contents

1. 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 charged with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
   ↩︎
2. On 11 March 1990, The Baton Rouge Advocate reported:
   
   Edward Grady Partin, a teamsters’ union leader whose testimony helped convict James R. Hoffa, the former president of the union, died Sunday at a nursing home here. Mr. Partin, who was 66 years old, suffered from heart disease and diabetes.
   Mr. Partin, a native of Woodville, Miss., was business manager for 30 years of Local 5 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters here.
   
   He helped Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy convict Mr. Hoffa of jury tampering in 1964. Mr. Partin, a close associate of Mr. Hoffa’s, testified that the teamster president had offered him $20,000 to fix the jury at Mr. Hoffa’s trial in 1962 on charges of taking kickbacks from a trucking company. That trial ended in a hung jury.
   
   Mr. Hoffa went to prison after the jury-tampering conviction. James Neal, a prosecutor in the jury-tampering trial in Chattanooga, Tenn., said that when Mr. Partin walked into the courtroom Mr. Hoffa said, ”My God, it’s Partin.”
   
   The Federal Government later spent 11 years prosecuting Mr. Partin on antitrust and extortion charges in connection with labor troubles in the Baton Rouge area in the late 1960’s. He was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding witnesses and arranging for perjured testimony in March 1979. An earlier trial in Butte, Mont., ended without a verdict.
   
   Mr. Partin went to prison in 1980, and was released to a halfway house in 1986. While in prison he pleaded no contest to charges of conspiracy, racketeering and embezzling $450,000 in union money.
   
   At one time union members voted to continue paying Mr. Partin’s salary while he was in prison. He was removed from office in 1981.
   
   Survivors include his mother, two brothers, a sister, five daughters, two sons, two brothers and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
   
   ↩︎
3. Walter Sheridan, in his 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” addressed the reputation of his star witness by being, as expected of a man like Walter, as truthful and transparent as he could. Walter 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.
   
   The “quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl” was Mamma Jean, but that wasn’t an accurate description; she was quiet around Walter and reporters because of the 5th Amendment and her quote from Jesus that anything you utter other than ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ came from the devil. When only family was around us, she was chatty and opinionated. Sometimes even Walter was mistaken. I never learned what he meant by Big Daddy “forcibly” installing Chuck Winters, though I’m sure it would be an interesting story.
   ↩︎
4. When I began writing this, Coach’s oldest son, Craig, was head coach at St. Paul’s and on the board of the Louisiana High School Sports Association, which kept records of my high school matches and Coach’s service. When I asked him 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. ↩︎