Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part I
“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.
“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“
Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966; Warren was the only one of nine justices to vote against using Edward Partin’s sworn testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa.
I heard that Hillary was born in mid-October of 1971, and that he began kindergarten at age 5. He turned 6 a month later, and was seven by the end of his kindergarten year. By the time we were seniors in high school, was a legal adult, able to vote in elections and to buy beer (possible because Louisiana was the last state to raise the legal age to 21).
He was 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller since the tenth grade. His burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, and 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. To fit into Capital High’s skin-tight maroon wrestling singlet, he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed. His uniform looked like a second skin stretched tautly across his dark chest and thighs, but it hung in loose folds around his stomach unless he was bridging in his signature move, a brutal bear-hug throw worth a full five points in summer Freestyle tournaments, one that would almost always end in a pin for Hillary. He could clamp a bear hug and arc backwards 360 degrees without his feet leaving the ground; at that moment, with his opponent’s feet flying through the air above him, Hillary’s maroon singlet was pulled tautly across his stomach.
Hillary had been shaving since the 10th grade. At tournaments, everyone in the same weight class would stand side by side to weigh in, and referees checked for clean-shaven faces because a few wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive, like course sandpaper. But Hillary shaved his face smooth each morning before competing.
He kept his arm and leg hair natural, and he had Brillo pads for forearm hair and thorny spines for chest hair, but the reason most of us turned our heads when he crossfaced us was not because of the abrasion, but because of the sheer strength of his arms and the intensity and commitment of his actions. If you wore braces, like I did my junior year, his crossface would shred your lips and you’d choke on your own blood while he pinned you. He never hesitated, and he always followed through.
The closest thing my friends and I had to compare him to was Wolverine, the then practically unknown comic book anti-hero with a hairy body, an Adamantium skeleton, retractable claws, and a gruff disposition. Unlike the version of Wolverine made popular by the 6’2″ Hugh Jackmon in the Marvel movie franchise, the original Wolverine was only 5’2.” Like Hillary Clinton, Wolverine’s arms and legs bulged through his yellow skin-tight costume that looked a lot like the Robert Lee High Rebels and their crotch-hugging yellow wrestling singlets. His famous line was something like: “I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t very nice.” Wolverine, in all his incarnations, always scowled, as if telling you from far away that he could rip your head off if you gave him a reason to.
He defeated me seven times our senior year. At every tournament, I watched him compete against other wrestlers, hoping to learn weaknesses I could use to my advantage. There were none. He was undefeated, and the closest thing Hillary’s body ever came to staring at the ceiling was when he grasped wrestlers with his bear hug and arched his back to throw them over his body and to the mat. He was the best there was at the bear hug, and flocks of wrestlers from other teams would gather to watch him compete. At the Robert E. Lee Invintational, schools from as far away as Texas, Florida, and Oaklahoma came to Baton Rouge to compete in Lee High’s annual tournament. We all knew that Hillary’s strength and low center of gravity gave him an advantage for throws that we couldn’t imagine overcoming.
For three years, Hillary had been captain of the Capital High Lions, a 100% African American school located near the downtown state capital building. The surrounding homes were Capital neighborhood, once a nicer area near downtown and the port of Baton Rouge. Like a lot of downtowns back then, interstate cut through and over Capital, and created bridges to other highways and sliced communities in half.
I-10 was the longest; it stretched from near the east coast of Florida through New Orleans and Baton Rouge and all the way to the Santa Monica pier near Hollywood; if only five miles longer, it would stretch coast to coast. The confusingly named I-110 branched off of I-10 and jutted north of downtown Baton Rouge and terminated around 30 miles away. Capital was separated from both the old and new state capital buildings by the criss-crossed and elevated interstates 10 and 110, and homes constantly rattled from the 18 wheelers passing overhead.
Those interstates are how I saw myself linked to Hillary.
As you drove away from downtown, I-110 passed the Baton Rouge International Airport, Glen Oaks High, and the turnoff to Parish road 19 and a row of billowing smokestacks from petrochemical plants like Exxon, DuPont, CoPolymer, and Exxon’s subsidiary, Exxon Plastics, where my mom was a secretary. Her mother, my Granny, was a secretary at CoPolymer, and had been since 1958. Locals called that part of I-110 Chemical Alley, and 18 wheelers from Teamsters Local #5 moved in and out all day, shipping raw gas and processed plastic across America. Their 18 wheelers bypassed the airport, train station, and Mississippi River port on their way to I-10. From there, they could enter the arteries and veins of America.
Only a few trucks ventured beyond Chemical Alley. The next exit was was for Zachary High, where my cousin Jason went to school and my great-uncle, Big Daddy’s little brother, Joe Partin, was both principal and the beloved football coach of the Zachary High Broncos. A lot of engineers worked at the petrochemical plants, along with a lot of secretaries who were grateful to finally have more jobs farther north of downtown. They settled in Zachary and sent their kids to school under Coach Joe, which is what everyone called him even after they made him principal.
A mile after Hwy 19, I-110 just quit and died. It ended only two football fields from Scotlandville Highway and Parish Road 61, a two lane parish highway that had been around since Teamsters drove horse wagons. Scotlandville was a predominately African American neighborhood and school, but balanced by a new magnet program for the engineering professions that recruited white kids from Baton Rouge willing to take the 45 minute bus ride. They had no wrestling program, and the half of their school with a football team was so small it was in a different division than any of the Baton Rouge schools. But the engineering half of the school was good; famous alumni include the guy who invented the Sim City video game franchise, and Stormy Daniels, a Baton Rouge Gold Club stripper would become a household name after she accepted President Trump’s settlement in her sexual harassment suit.
(I attended Scotlandville Magnet my ninth grade year; I was dropped off by my mom on her way to Exxon, so it was not such a long commute, and a bus would drop me off at Granny’s house, by the airport, so I could stay there after school and wait for my mom to get off work and drive us all the way back to near Belaire. But, because of failing grades and a long rap sheet of disciplinary actions for pranks, like breaking into school and rearranging bookshelves, I was told I couldn’t return. For years, I’d joke that Stormy Daniels did two things I couldn’t: graduate Scotlandville Magnet High School for the Engineering Professions, and slide down a pole with the grace of a ballerina.)
If you continued past Scotlandville for a few miles along Hwy 61, you reached Fort Pickens State Park, site of the longest battle of the civil war and a popular field trip for Baton Rouge schools. It was such a short ride from Scotlandville that a few of us were known for frequently cutting class and going there instead. The park had daily battle reenactments where locals flew Rebel Flags, and you could walk around and discover small round musket balls after rains washed away mud and clay. Our goal was to find a musket or cannonball. The year and a half that soldiers sat there shooting at each other had a lot of down time, especially in muggy summers, and men on both sides would lean their muskets against a tree and forget about it, and 120 years later people were still finding rusted muskets 50 feet in the air, with bark grown around them and Spanish moss camouflaging them from easy view. The museum had a few on display, along with cannonballs and bayonets and a few native American artifacts discovered while people sought civil war memorabilia. The most remarkable display was an old stately oak tree cut down to show two cannonballs embedded on opposite sides of the stump, one on the north and one on the south. We were sure there were other treasures in the thick forests, and going there was much more interesting than history classes at Scotlandville.
After Fort Pickens, you drove along miles of pine forests and passed a paper mill that had Teamster trucks hauling logs in and paper out. Soon after that was the River Bend nuclear power plant, with Teamster trucks driving in and out of it, too. Those were the only trucks driving back onto I-110.
A dozen or so miles after River Bend, you’d reach the quaint plantation borough and retirement community of Saint Francisville. It was only an hour upriver from Baton Rouge by boat; in the civil war, northern iron-clad warships with steam engines trudged upriver to bombard the small towns of southern Louisiana, but they temporarily stopped fighting in Saint Francisville. The town named after St. Francis de Assisi, the patron saint of kindness to animals, and its river shores were dotted with churches of different denominations. When Masons died in the battles near St. Francisville; the fraternal order existed on both sides of the battle, and they would put down their arms and bury the dead with full rights before returning to their ships and fortifications and shooting again. The cemeteries are full of soldiers on both sides who died, and the Masons built elaborate tombs under the stately oak shade canopies that caught breezes from the nearby Mighty Mississippi River, and on the muggiest of Louisiana days it was more pleasant to relax in Saint Francisville graveyard than to sit in a Scotlandville Magnet classroom.
Surrounding Saint Francisville were a dozen or more old plantations converted into public gardens and event centers, with slave quarters converted to bed-and-breakfasts. Surround the plantations were three prisons, two state and one private federal prison, Angola, which for decades was considered the bloodiest prison in America. It was named after the nearby Angola plantation, which was named after the region of Africa where they obtained their slaves. Each spring, the Angola prison rodeo pits the predominately African American inmates against bulls to raise money for the prison, and that was always more interesting to see than anything Scotladville had to offer.
A few miles after Angola prison was Woodville, Mississippi, a sawmill driven town and where Big Daddy was born in 1928, and where his mother, my Grandma Foster, was born in 1903.
When Big Daddy first took over the Baton Rouge Teamsters in the mid 1950’s, the criss-cross of overhead interstates were just being planned and built. President Eisenhower pushed it, noting that Germany’s autobahn system had allowed their military to move efficiently across the country, and his administration prioritized building standards that would allow military carries to travel under interstate bridges and move between ports quickly. There was probably with influence from the Teamsters and the automotive industry.
The phenomenon was nation-wide but especially pronounced in the deep southern cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Burmingham; urban poverty followed the interstates, and the worse pockets seemed to all share a street named after Martin Luther King Junior, which was a common punch line in standup comedy routines of famous African American comedians like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Areas around Martin Luther King streets became more and more undesirable. In Baton Rouge, white families moved to newer subdivisions in Zachary, far away from I-10 and downtown, and investors began building gated communities around quaint towns like Saint Francisville, where engineers from Chemical Alley could live and invest in their own school districts.
Because schools were funded mostly by local taxes, wealthier neighborhoods improved and poorer ones fought to maintain what they had. It was that urban poverty, and the history of slavery and civil war battles all around us, that produced the hairy terror I knew as Hillary Clinton.
It’s no wonder he scowled.
I was the opposite. I usually wore a sly grin, though that’s more of a facial feature I inherited from Big Daddy. Our cheekbones are high and pull up on the corners of our mouths, making it look like we’re smiling even when we’re not. Several of my cousins have the same smile. You can tell when we’re really smiling by looking at our eyes and the skin just above our cheeks, which crinkles when we’re happy.
I was born on 05 October 1972. I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, when I was only four years old. I was always the youngest, smallest kid in class. Had I been born a few days later, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and would have been pushed back a year. If that had happened, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16. I would have been 18 my senior year, and able to vote and buy beer like Hillary. And, knowing what I know now, I would have also been four inches taller and almost forty pounds heavier. Instead, I began my senior year as a 16 year old, 145 to 147 pound, 5’5″ tall, mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands, long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet.
My toes were bulbous monstrosities best kept hidden inside of tightly fitting size 11 wrestling shoes that, on my feet, looked like two torpedos strapped to the bottoms of my legs. My blue Belaire singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso. I had negligible underarm hair, and my pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet. I had auburn hair that seemed to turn red with the increased sunlight of spring, and I kept it cut like a mullet, stopping just before my collar so I was still within state wrestling rules.
My mullet was less to be fashionable and more to hide a few scars on the back of my head, including an 8-inch long, finger-width thick scar and shaped like a big backwards letter C that I had hidden with hairstyles of the 70’s and 80’s ever since I was five years old. My left hand, which Hillary hadn’t broken yet, was already scarred and knobby. I had a smaller C shaped machete scar across my left forefinger from helping my dad cut down male plants before they seeded the female buds, and I had a sprinkling of pinpoint scars all over my hand from handling barbed wire on our Arkansas farm (my right hand was unscathed because I always held machetes and wire cutters in my right hand and used my left to bend plants over and pull wire tautly.)
I had never shaved and didn’t need to. Unlike Hillary’s Brillo pads, my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. Unless you were ticklish, they would do me no good. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scragly black hairs hidden by my underwear. (That’s not true: Once I didn’t make weight by a smidgen of an ounce, so I stripped off my wet underwear and wiped the sweat off my body and stepped back onto the scale to make 145.0 pounds. But, by then everyone was focused on nothing but the eye-level needle bounce slowly up and down before setting on 0; I had my sweat-soaked underwear back on before anyone noticed.)
My saving grace as a wrestler was that I had quads thick with muscle from hiking the Ozark Mountains with my dad most summers in the early and mid ’80’s, carrying hefty backpacks full of horse and chicken maneur to his marijuana fields hidden far from roads. We were arrested in 1985, which is how I ended up back in Louisiana and at Scotlandville in the ninth grade. After my dad went to prison in 1986, coincidentally the same year Big Daddy was released early, I was a fledgling wrestler at a mere 123 pounds who had no arm strength; but, if I shot deeply enough, I could stand up and bring a heavier wrester off the ground.
I augmented my leg strength with runs inside the new capital steps, and laps up and down the Belaire football bleachers. On a few lucky occasions, I’d ride with a couple of teammates and sneak into Tiger Stadium through a gate in the apartments, then run up the steep steps to the top. Our stadium held more than 80,000 fans on game day, and at that moment we were on top of the world. We’d raise our hands and jump up and down like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, then scuttle back down before anyone saw us. Inside the new state capital, a 34 story art-deco tower that was the tallest capital in America back then, we’d do laps inside the stairwell during the rains of hurricane season, which was around the beginning of the school year and coincided with the first few weeks of wrestling practice.
My cross-face was strong. Not because I had upper body strength, but because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face my bulbous thumb knuckle caught and opponents nose. I was rarely taken down by a shot because my crossface would deflect their face and halt their momentum. It’s a legal move; a good crossface is essential if you don’t have strong arms yet.
But my Achilles Heel, the weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was my lack of upper body strength when standing. I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary. Because he was almost two years older than I was, it was unlikely I’d ever catch up with strength. I suspected I’d eventually grow to be like all the other Partin men (I was the runt in the family; even my aunts and girl younger cousins were bigger than I was), but that was unlikely to happen by the end of wrestling season, and I resigned to competing at 145 pounds.
The difference between Hillary and me is obvious in hindsight. Coincidentally, in the mid 1980’s a research scientist noticed that professional hockey players in Canada were statistically likely to be born in spring. At first it seemed like astrology, but then researches realized that Canadian laws required being five years old by January 1st to begin practice; kids born the first few months of the year had an entire year advantage over kids born in the final few months.
Every year after, the kids who started sooner outperformed the ones who didn’t, and they placed higher and were therefore promoted faster and received better coaching, similar to how Hillary began kindergarten as the oldest kid in class and I began as the youngest. A year at four to five years old is a lifetime on an exponential growth scale, and the differences between two kids in the same class but eleven months apart grow and multiply each year.
That research study was practically unknown until brought to the world’s attention in 2008 by a book: “Outliers, the Story of Success.” It was written by Malcom Gladwell, a Canadian by birth who became a journalist for The Washington Post, writer for the New Yorker Magazine, author of several bestselling books, and popular TED speaker. He combined other research studies to paint a bigger picture in Outliers, and he pointed out that America didn’t have the sports laws as Canada, but the age cutoff for kindergarten creates a similar academic disparity: older kids in kindergarten begin with a 17% advantage on aptitude tests. Like how older hockey players are placed in more competitive groups and therefore grow stronger in a self-fulfilling prophesy, many older American students are grouped academically and their initial advantages grow over time, which, by definition, creates a class with disadvantages.
Gladwell quoted a social justice expert and called the phenomenon of advantages from birth and circumstance “The Mathew Effect,” after the New Testament’s book of Matthew, 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.
Most of Gladwell’s books focused on topics about how little companies outmaneuver big ones, detailed in his book David and Goliath (named for the biblical and David who defeated a much larger foe, Goliath, using only a slingshot), and how individuals have brief moments of intuition that outperform teams of experts, detailed in his book Blink, as in the blink of an eye. In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to the unseen trends that shape success, like which month you were born; but, though dozens of interviews and case studies and research reports he showed how constant, persistent determination and practice seems to help anyone succeed. He interviewed people like Bill Gates and cited famous bands like The Beatles, and pointed to the 10,000 hour phenomenon that implies 10,000 hours of effort is necessary to overcome obstacles.
Most outliers, by Gladwell’s definition, are lucky. Even though putting in 10,000 hours of work is admirable, Bill Gates still had access to one of the world’s first computers to practice with, and before The Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” as they said, they played their first 10,000 hours in the windows of a redlight district as background noise while men shopped. Luck is the first and often most unseen way, he concluded, but it’s not the only way. Others create their abundance, but they are so rare that they wouldn’t fill a paragraph in his book.
Because schools were funded by local taxes and white people quickly left integrated school districts. Over a few short years, Capital High became a statistic on urban poverty, and Hillary Clinton’s nemesis, more than the interstates or civil rights struggles or any single wrestler he would fight to overcome, was The Matthew Effect. From that perspective, if I had been born a few days later I would not have competed against Hillary, because I would have been 5’11” and around 190 pounds. I’d still be small for a Partin – even my younger cousin Jason was bigger than that – but the Matthew Effect would have worked in my favor sooner.
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