Wrestling Hillary Clinton

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

Edward Grady Partin.

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

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

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

As of 09 January 2025, this is mostly true; I’ll come back to that after two intertwined stories that continue to shape history.

I’m Jason Partin. Thirty four years ago, Hillary Clinton pinned me in the second round of the 145-pound finals match of the Baton Rouge city high school wrestling tournament. I almost won in the first round, but he escaped my cradle by kicking so hard that he broke my left ring finger, just below the middle knuckle. It healed awkwardly, and to this day my two middle fingers point away from each other, and look like Dr. Spock’s “live long and prosper” salute in Star Trek. I’m a close-up magician, so for thirty years I’ve been asked about that hand, and most people laugh when I say Hillary Clinton broke it. They assume it’s part of the act, but it’s not: wrestling Hillary Clinton is the my proudest moment of my life.

The joke about Hillary was that he was like Johnny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue,” a kid who grew up tough and mean because of his name, but he was a hairy black dude bursting with muscles, and faster and stronger than most 18 year olds. I was 17, lanky, relatively weak, with negligible underarm hair and a face dotted with pimples. But no wrester had broken my cradle in almost a year, and by the time I stepped onto the mat to face Hillary I had pinned 36 opponents that season, a few with the half-nelson, but most with my cradle.

The cradle wasn’t a move Coach used himself, probably because he had stubby arms that wouldn’t easily reach around an opponent’s head and leg. His signature move was the half-nelson, but he had coached for more than forty years and knew a thing or two about all types of wrestlers. As one author for USA Wrestling reverently said in the 90’s, not knowing Coach would pass away in 2014 with Alzheimers, “Coach Dale Ketelsen has forgotten more about wrestling than most of us will ever know.”

Coach showed me how use my relatively large hands and spindly arms to have the strongest cradle in all of Baton Rouge, maybe even in all of southern Louisiana. The trick was to not hold both hands together like a handshake, but to lock them with thumbs flat against the first fingers (“A wrestler looses 15% of his strength if he thumb if out”), and, instead of squeezing harder, move your hands away from your body, bringing your elbows together like pivot points of a bolt cutter (“An opponent’s legs are stronger than your arms”). I was a senior taking physics that year, and the bolt cutter example stuck in my mind, not because of a textbook or charismatic teacher in front of a chalkboard, but because I had hands-on experience and saw immediate results. I began pinning people with Coach’s trick the same day he showed me, and I didn’t stop all season.

Armed with physics and with Coach in my corner, I clawed my way from loosing all 13 matches my sophomore year to being seeded third in the Baton Rouge city tournament, with an impressive record of 56-12. Two days and three matches later, I was 59-12 and stepping onto the mat to face Hillary Clinton, captain of the Capital High Lions, the returning three-time Louisiana state champion. He was undefeated almost two years, formidable enough to place in summer freestyle nationals against kids from Iowa and Pennsylvania who grew up with the sport. (Coach was from Iowa, and practically introduced wrestling to Louisiana in 1968; my school, Belaire, didn’t have a program until 1981.) I spent most of my senior year focused on one thing: wrestling Hillary Clinton.

He was up 3-1 when I took took him down in the first round by sprawling and spinning behind him, catching his head and leg in my cradle. I was the first person to score on him all weekend, and it must have pissed him off, because he grunted like an animal trying to rip its leg from a coil-spring trap. He kicked against my hands with the cadence and urgency of a 50 caliber machine gun trying to destroy a charging tank, but with much more force; when I felt my finger snap it less like physical pain, and more like the pain of lost hope, but I’m sure it would have hurt like hell if I weren’t wrestling. I clung to my surviving thumb and two fingers, but with what teammates called my kung-fu grip weakened, Hillary broke free, stood up, and turned to face me with the speed I had grown to respect. The referee awarded him an escape point.

The score was 4:3. I was still down, because I hadn’t held his shoulders above the mat long enough to score back points. We were face to face again, Hillary’s strongest position, and his eyebrows furrowed with anger; I had never seen him angry before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. The referee pointed us to our corners. I had lost my chance: people make mistakes when angry.

Jeremy, our 140 pounder and co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, handed me a fresh hand towel. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, only to have more pour down my forehead, pool in my eyes, and drip off my nose and chin. I alternated between shaking my limbs to stay limber and dabbing sweat off my face, mindful of the break; the knuckle was a swollen, and my ring ginger useless rigid plank. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. Coach nodded and stepped back. I wanted to face Hillary while he was still riled.

My breath whooshed in and out through pursed lips and stared at Capital’s corner. Two of the maroon hooded Lions dried each of Hillary’s arms while he bounced and shook his limbs like a mirror image of me. I focused on his coach, a spherical mountain of an African American man, and tried to decipher his hand gestures. He had never wrestled, and the Lions never participated in all-city practices, so many of their signs were different than any other school I knew. Capital High was near the downtown Louisiana state capital building, a dilapidated school with peeling maroon paint, and a dingy gym with a duct-taped purple and gold mat Coach had given them after LSU disbanded their team after 1979’s Title IV law.

We used to see the them running up and down the capital building’s 34 flights of narrow art deco steps in a line of ascending weight classes, like maroon hooded Matryoshka dolls, with Hillary leading the charge and their coach standing at the base near the old civil war museum, and a few buildings that were still pot-marked from yankee bullets; he was too big to fit in the narrow stairwell. Hillary always ran an extra round up and down, just by himself. He probably ran when no one was there to see him.

Hillary listened intently and nodded after each gesture of the mountain’s massive hands. Coach and Jeremy let me be. Seconds later, the referee called to us, and I trotted back to the center of the mat. Hillary won the coin toss, and of course he chose neutral. We each put one foot forward and faced off. The ref stood poised, whistle in mouth, with one hand raised.

I focused on Hillary’s hips. Coach only gave a handful of nuggets of wrestling advice in the three years I had known him at that point, and one was to watch an opponents hips, not their eyes or hands, because where their hips went, they went. That was advice from an Iowa coach when Coach left as an alternate on the olympic team, at a time in history when Russians were dominating the sport because they focused on taking an opponent off their feet with bear-hug throws, like Hercules defeating Antaeus by lifting him above Mother Earth to severe his source of strength.

“But to do that,” Coach told us, “they need to get their hips close to yours. Get you to overreach, so they can step in close.”

He’d pause and let that sink in, raise a stubby finger, and say, “The Russians realized that if you break a man’s stance, you can do what you want to him.” He’d put down his finger, and finish, “Don’t break your stance.”

I saw him say that the same way three times, once at the beginning of each season. He’d stop talking and demonstrate a strong stance, which he compared to holding a shovel so you could dig heavy dirt on a farm all day, legs bent and thighs strong so they would never fatigue. You could shovel pig shit all day like that, another coach once quipped about Belaire’s stance.

“Vince Lambarti said that fatigue will make a coward out of anyone,” Coach would remind us two or three times a year.

Armed with that knowledge, a few of us ran cross-country track or swam, just for extra exercise. A few hit the football team’s weight room after wrestling practice. A couple of us did all of the above, and I, per Coach’s old-school suggestion, I spent idle time crumbling pages of each day’s Baton Rouge Advocate into tight balls, littering them on the floor in front of a black and white television late at night. I was in remarkable physical condition – a few months later I’d be disappointed by the U.S. army’s basic training, advanced infantry training, and Airborne school, all of which were a pale shadow in the light of wrestling. But with my kung-fu grip weakened, my signature move was useless against Hillary and I lost what little advantage I had. There was nothing else to do, so I got into stance and focused on my opponent’s hips.

Hillary was calm and his stance was perfect. In my periphery, I was aware of the referee’s chest and cheeks: sometimes, they telegraph blowing the whistle, giving a fraction of a second advantage before wrestling.

Coach’s most persistent piece of advice was to just wrestle. No matter what happened the previous round or that morning or the weekend before, just wrestle. With everything you have left in you, just wrestle. He never elaborated, he only said “Just Wrestle.”

His words had roots a gold-medal olympian, the most celebrated of a generation; that guy pinned all four opponents in the 1960 olympics, but had barely beaten Coach 4:3 in overtime during olympic trials. Before Coach’s next match for third place, held only minutes after his loss in semi-finals and back when rounds were three minutes each, that legend approached Coach catching his breath in the locker room and said, “Someone will win. It might as well be you.”

Someone will win. For the next two minutes, it doesn’t mater who. Just Wrestle. Of course rules mattered, but they were ingrained deep down from practice and a part of our core. Coach was on the USA Wrestling rules committee, and he had advocated making the full-nelson illegal after a few kids had their necks broken. Rules let you give more, not less. With that knowledge deep down, nestled next to your primal state, just wrestle.

The referee blew his whistle and dropped his hand, and I began wrestling before spectators heard the whistle end.

Hillary was faster and shot a high double that caught both my legs. I sprawled, kicking both feet into the air like a bucking bronco, and slammed my chest onto his shoulders. He resisted with the strength of Atlas, and pulled my legs with all his might. I sprawled again and again, and he held my thighs and tried to push his hips under mine and tried to look towards the sky. But my lanky legs gave me an advantage, a fulcrum that I leveraged to push the weight of the whole world onto Hillary’s broad hairy shoulders. Sprawl by sprawl, Hillary’s arms crept further from his body, and his head began to bow under the force of my sprawl. He was no longer in a good stance, and that’s when I cross-faced him with the force of God.

Hillary’s head turned and he released his grip. My right hand continued moving into a cradle, my body acting from a core with no concept of pain. I began to spin behind Hillary, my left hand targeting his raised left leg, ring finger stuck straight out, but he sprung backwards, towards the mat’s edge, and popped up into a perfect stance.

We kept eye contact and crab-walked back towards the center, a truce-of-sorts wrestlers fall into without discussing it. We were almost to the center when Hillary’s forearm shot to my neck like a rattlesnake snagging prey. He yanked my head forward, wanting me to plant all my weight on my leading foot. Hillary had a lethal head-heal pick, but Coach had told me how to stop him.

“Don’t be a headhunter,” Coach said. He was given that advice from the US Olympic coach, because the Russians used the same head-heel setup. I used the forward momentum generated by Hillary’s yank, and swung my hips under his and shot a high single that took him to the mat; but he sprung back up and faced me so quickly that no points were scored either way. We stood face to face again for the briefest of moments, then he moved so quickly that I don’t recall how I ended up in a bear-hug: I may have blinked.

Hillary caught me on exhale, my lungs almost empty, and he instantly threw me in a beautiful, perfect throw. I watched the ceiling appear in my view, and I watched my size 12, dingy grey and frayed Asics Tiger wrestling shoes rise above my head. They once belonged to Coach’s son, Craig Ketelsen, a 171 pound wrestler in the early 1980’s, and Belaire’s first state champion. I loved those shoes. I watched them fly through the air above my head in slow motion. They temporarily blocked the basketball scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant orange neon monster with dozens of small lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented. It had a massive countdown timer so everyone in southern Louisiana could see how many seconds were left in each round.

Craig’s shoes flew past the orange lights in slow motion, memories forming faster than thoughts form words, a pinhole camera snapshot rather than a written description of a moment in time. The shoes passed the scoreboard above Baton Rouge High’s bleachers, and our names flashed into view again. They began to arc back down, a perfect 360 degree circle. I saw the faces of a few hundred fans who paid to see finals on a single mat placed in the center of the gym floor. Our stands were filled mostly parents and teachers who didn’t know the sport well, but almost had looks of awe on their faces. It was a beautiful throw. Some faces were cringing at the inevitable: I was about to hit the mat like a meteor crashing into Earth.

Hillary slammed my shoulders to the mat with a thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like. The shock wave reverberated back from the bleachers and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out. I don’t know if my eyes were open or closed, but my memory is of the same pitch blackness you’d see deep under Earth, in a bunker and in the middle of night.

My body bridged so quickly that Hillary didn’t get the pin: my feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Asics flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light, stared to the trellised roof high above Baton Rouge High’s gym floor, and I realized I had to get my shoulders up, quickly, and I heaved with neck muscles strengthened by nine months of weight training, and pivoted onto the top of my head. I had promised myself I’d never get pinned again, and I would die before I broke that promise.

I bridged and Hillary squeezed my chest with the patience of a boa constrictor, bit by bit, waiting for the slightest exhale to squeeze a bit more. His tightening was controlled, calm, and deadly, like when a disciplined sniper takes precise shots at the peak or valley of each breath, focused on his target more than himself. My bridge began to collapse, and I stared at the bright orange clock – upside down then but somehow right side up in my memory today, as if my mind righted it over time – and I saw that I had almost a minute left.

I tried force my right hand between Hillary and me, making a tight fist so that its gnarly knuckles would rasp across his rib cage and cause enough pain for him to loosen his hold, but he only exhaled and pulled himself closer to my spine, compressing my ribs even more. I was burning precious fuel and my bridge buckled a bit, so I focused on saving energy instead.

I couldn’t move. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock, hoping for time to speed up. I didn’t pray. I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling. Instead, I tried to relax and drift closer to my core.

In my periphery, gathered behind Coach and Jeremy, I saw a few guys from last summer’s all-Louisiana junior olympic team. I knew the white t-shirt they were wearing over their different colored hoodies, the shirt we all wore last summer. It was a simple white cotton shirt with plain black letters that formed a chest full of words. Only Chris Forest, heavyweight for the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, wasn’t wearing one; he couldn’t squeeze his broad torso into an XXL. Next to Chris and two feet shorter was the Bulldog’s team captain, Clodi Tate, the 136 pound city champion as of two matches ago. The summer before, Clodi’s dad, a minister, had found the shirts in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU. They were printed with Ephsians 6:12, but it wasn’t about religion for most of us, it was about wrestling. It said: “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 the words by heart. I would repeat them to myself almost exactly a year later, late at night on 02 March 1991, just before my third ground fight inside an Iraqi bunker and a day before our team captured Khamisiyah airport and when the C-130’s dropped two 15,000 bombs onto it and unknowingly unleashed a mushroom cloud of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapon stockpile. By that afternoon, I’d be covered in melted asphalt and other people’s blood and dust falling from the mile high mushroom cloud in the sky, more fatigued than I ever had been in my life; we had spent three days without sleep and with negligible food, crawling over thousands of melted Iraqi corpses who died along the roads leading to (or from) Kamisiya during the air bombing campaign, fighting survivors dug deep in bunkers (ironically searching for evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction), and planning to capture Khamisiha and use it to launch a parachute attack into Bagdad. The war ended – officially at least – and the allied forces decided to destroy Khamisiya and it’s fleet of Soviet MiG fighter jets so that Saddam couldn’t use it again. I have no doubt that the words of Ephisians 6:12 are true for me.

Today, the words written on the all-Louisiana team shirt they would ring true for thousands of high school wrestlers every year since then, even the ones who never heard of Hillary Clinton or knew what happened in the 1990 Baton Rouge city finals. The words may have been upside down, but they were already a part of a core state that had no concept of up or down. Whatever I am, it wrestled, and it would die before it quit fighting against rulers of the darkness of this world.

But my body was out of air and Hillary was an unrelenting beast. The guys in my corner began to fade into one dark grey blur, and the clock became a single spot of fuzzy orange light.

I’m not a coward. Vince Lambarti’s words were meant to spark training, not judgement; I first pondered that a few months later, when I saw a hand-written sign above the advanced infantry training field that said: “More sweat in training means less blood in combat.” Less blood, not none. Sometimes hope isn’t enough. The other wrestler wins. Your teammates loose. They weren’t cowards, either. Fatigue is relative.

Our wrestling singlets were skin-tight and exposed our shoulders so there could be no doubt of a pin. The acne on my back protruded further than the singlet, and I felt the bumps contact the mat and push against my skin. My vision blurred, and I could no longer see the orange light, but I saw the referee’s blurred face when he slide beside us with his whistle pinched between his lips. He blew the whistle and slapped the mat. It was over. Hillary Clinton had won.

We stood up and the referee raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook the gym more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It really was a beautiful throw, and Hillary earned his pin. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me with twenty seconds to go in the second round, and I couldn’t argue with that. Hillary Clinton would go on to win a gold in city and regionals, and then state, still undefeated. I’d never hear from him again.

I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance a permanent part of him, and he said: “Good job, Magik.”

I nodded. He had shaken my hand and clasped my tricep the same way and said words to the same effect almost 152 times over three years. 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. 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, someone who never agreed with the team’s decision to make me co-captain, stood up and offered the chair next to Coach. Surprised, I sat down and accepted the fresh towel in his hand. He had nothing to prove with his gesture; he had dropped to 140 earlier that year to avoid wrestling Hillary and had won his city finals match when I was warming up on deck. Jeremy was the champion, not I. But he stepped behind me, in the corner that was now empty. I sat beside Coach. Another wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.

Later that day, I saw Pat, a former Baton Rouge High heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches, laughing. He had assisted the all-Louisiana team, but, like Chris Forest, Pat couldn’t fit into the XXL shirt. He always laughed, and at the end of long days in summer camp his laughter kept us practicing longer than Vince Lambarti’s words ever could. I overheard him saying how Hillary held me so hard the only thing I could wiggle were my eyeballs. Everyone laughed at Pat; he could wiggle his eyeballs, and whenever someone was pinned he told that joke and showed what they must have looked like. I had seen it a million times, so I didn’t look in their direction. I was staring at the clock again, unable to remember when I stopped being able to read it.

I thought I was pinned with thirty or so seconds left to go, and I wondered what had happened in those final ten seconds. I wanted to know what my body did when my mind stopped remembering. What does it mean to give it everything you have, or to “be all you can be,” that hokey army recruiting slogan, when you’re out of air, trapped, and your body slides closer and closer to some primal thing that existed before we had thoughts. Somewhere between what you know and who you are, there’s something that nurtures your core and shapes it into an unchanging, permanent, ineffable pinpoint of force stronger than muscles or memories. Belaire Bengals or Capital Lions, Louisiana or Iowa, north or south, black or white: what made your body move when your mind was blank?

In essence, I was contemplating nature vs. nurture.

It had been on my mind a lot that year. My dad was in an Arkansas federal prison for growing a few marijuana plants – a casualty of Reagan’s war on drugs – and my grandfather had just been released from six years in a cushy Texas federal penitentiary; he was a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, lier, bearer of false witness, racketeer (I wasn’t sure what that meant), embezzler, betrayer of teammates, and a man who, according to Mamma Jean, crossed the line when he stopped going to church on Sundays; that’s a sin, you know.

Nature vs. nurture, to me, could be explained in ten seconds missing from my memory, and I was more interested in that than anything a gaggle of coaches had to say.

The crowd parted, and Pat’s smile went away. He leaned down and privately asked Coach: What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all spring. It looked like he gave up. Is he okay?

Coach replied that I had a lot on my mind, because my grandfather was sick. Coach was a man of few words; Jeremy was loquacious compared to him. He put on the reading glasses he kept draped around his neck, glanced down at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to help someone do something. Everyone nodded. All of Baton Rouge had seen the news; Edward Partin was released early because of declining health, and wasn’t expected to live long. My teammates were kind enough to let me be.

Hillary was a beast, but I almost defeated him. Forty years later, I’m still more proud of that than anything I’ve done since. To a 17 year old high school senior with a family I didn’t want to discuss, almost defeating Hillary Clinton in the Baton Rouge city tournament was bigger news than when my grandfather died a few weeks later.

On 16 March 1990, I rode a Honda Ascot 500cc motorcycle to my grandfather’s funeral. I was wearing a white helmet airbrushed with blue letters that said “c/o 1990?,” a jab at overzealous seniors who wore shirts that said, “Class of 1990!” I sported my cherished but gaudy fuzzy orange letterman jacket with blue sleeves a big letter B on the left chest, and I had meticulously adorned it with 36 small gold safety pins, grouped in clusters of five for easy counting; one pin was stood out by itself and made the others more remarkable.

The jacket had an admittedly awkward looking wrestling letterman pin with one man down and the other behind him, Mercury’s winged feet for cross-country track, and the comedy and tragedy faces of theater (because I was a magician who helped build interactive sets, I lettered as a thespian). The safety pins tinkled in the wind when I slowed the motorcycle down and rode along the shoulder, the small engine barely audible over the traffic jam of cars and idling 18 wheel trucks heading towards Greenwood Funeral Home.

My right hand was on the gas side, my left hand was on the clutch side with its middle fingers buddy-taped; for the occasion, I applied two fresh strips of bright white cloth tape that morning. I slowly braked onto the grass beside a paved parking spot and as close as police would allow, turned off the bike, and draped my helmet on the handlebars.

My face shone from lingering pride at media coverage and a small award from Coach and the team that they presented in front of all 380 Belaire seniors. Most athletic. Coach’s award. A few others. There was a color photo spotlight about me in the newspaper about performing magic at Baton Rouge General’s childrens hospital as part of David Copperfield’s Project Magic, a rare instance of a Partin other than my grandfather in the news. After all of that attention, I was unimpressed by the crowds of people and reporters clustered outside of the funeral home. I walked up to Aunt Janice, she bent down to hug me, and we went inside.

Besides the Patin family, the former Baton Rouge mayor was there, and so was the entire Baton Rouge police department, reporters from every major newspaper, a hell of a lot of huge Teamsters, a gaggle of FBI agents, and Walter Sheridan, former director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force and a respected NBC news correspondent in the 1980’s, and a surprisingly long lineup of aging brutes from the 1954 LSU football national champion team. Billy Pappas, our first Heismann trophy winner, former pro for the Houston Oilers, and the biggest celebrity on the biggest float in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade, was one of the pallbearers; his handsome face was on billboards all along I-10, his bright white smile advertising his dental business, and everyone wanted to see him.

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 his marriages, proving that even the NY Times makes mistakes.)

Only Walter asked about my fingers. He noticed details, and was good at his job. That’s probably why J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy hand-picked him to rejoin the force with one job: get Hoffa.² For twenty years, he focused on nothing else, and he was a friend – of sorts – to Mamma Jean and Grandma Foster. I barely knew him, but I knew that year he was focused on my grandfather and his final words.

My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the president of Baton Rouge Teamsters Local #5, famous for testifying against International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and sending him to prison. Hoffa had famously vanished in 1975 and was pronounced dead in 1985, and most people assumed my grandfather was a part in his demise. The Partins didn’t think much about Hoffa at all. We called my grandfather Big Daddy, and so did a lot of people in Baton Rouge. He was front page news weekly, with governors seeking his endorsement and corporate managers hoping to avoid his wrath. He drove the economy, shipping all agriculture and oil products to and from Louisiana, and he overtly built the Baton Rouge International Speedway (originally the Pelican Speedway) with materials skimmed from deliveries to construction site all across the south, and until he sold it, he ran the racetrack with the generosity of a man who wanted his neighbors to have good time without being bogged down by cash or rules. Before he went to prison in 1981, political commentators said that he’d become governor if he only had a college degree.

Big Daddy was portrayed by the classically handsome actor Brian Dennehy in 1983’s Blood Feud, at a time when America knew what Big Daddy looked like and therefore Brian was a logical choice. Robert Blake slicked back his hair to look like Jimmy Hoffa, and won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” Some daytime soap opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby Kennedy, but he didn’t win anything for it. Brian could have won an award, but he tainted his public image by stealing valor after his role as sheriff in that years’s “Rambo: First Blood,” and no one wants an asshole like that to win anything. I don’t recall who portrayed Walter, but the producers tried to make his character look like a hero by letting him slap Brian Denehy (Hollywood fabricates details to make people believe someone is a hero), but Walter would never be foolish enough to slap Big Daddy.

The mayor and the football players said a lot of words, and so did a few of my younger cousins. Tiffany, the only one older than I was and a public speaker who was a homecoming queen in Houston the year before, had everyone in tears. So did Jennifer, a younger cousin and another beauty queen in Houston, who talked about how Big Daddy was a hero who saved Bobby Kennedy’s life. After the funeral, when most people got up and flocked around Billy and the aging Tigers, I leaned over and told Walter – who didn’t seem to care about football – that Edward Partin’s final words were: “No one will ever know my part in history.” He agreed that it sounded funny when said out loud, and that Big Daddy was probably right.

Big Daddy’s final words stuck with me, and for the next thirty years I pondered what he meant. Practically every book and film has it wrong, and a lot of the information wouldn’t trickle out until the 1979 JFK Assassination Report was made partially public in 1993, and then when memoirs of dying Teamsters in the early 2000’s. Please read the next chapter with an open mind; it his story, according to what I know so far, and based, in part, based on faulty memories.

For reasons I hope are obvious now that you know about wrestling Hillary Clinton, I call the next part of the story “A Part in History.”

Go to A Part in History

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 charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
   
   Big Daddy fills a big part in both of Jimmy Hoffa’s autobiographies, the first which was written in prison and sounded much, much angrier. I assume six years of beating the stuffing in prison mattresses calmed him down and let him focus on his words more than his anger; Hillary’s coach would be proud.
   ↩︎
2. Walter Sheridan, in his 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” coincidentally published the month I was born, he had to address the reputation of his star witness. Of the hundreds of names detailed in the appendix, Big Daddy takes up space second only to Hoffa. I trust Walter. He wrote:
   
   “Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
   
   Walter noticed details, but he didn’t always elaborate. I never learned what it meant for Big Daddy and Hoffa to “forcibly install” Chuck Winters, but I doubt it was a pleasant story. No one in New Orleans lived to tell the tale, and Big Daddy was better at keeping secrets than a magician. ↩︎