Wrestling Hillary Clinton: 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. My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, and my grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for infiltrating Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle and sending Hoffa to prison.
Ed Patin Senior was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s Blood Feud, where Robert Blake won an academy award for “channelling Hoffa’s rage.” Brian was already known for his “rugged good looks,” green-blue eyes, and charming smile; but he was chosen mostly because he looked like my grandfather, who in 1983 was more famous than Brian. (Coincidentally, Brian’s break-out role was in another 1983 film with blood in the name; he was the sheriff who went against Sylvester Stalone in “Rambo: First Blood.”)
Thirty years after Blood Feud, Ed Partin was portrayed by the burly Craig Vincent as “Big Eddie” in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 opus about Hoffa, The Irishman, starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and about a dozen other big-name actors from Scorsese’s gangster films over the decades. Craig was chosen because he had worked with Scorsese before, and though he was a charming person in real life, he was already known for his roles in gangster movies as a big, brutal, thug. He was the type of person who could keep a secret while infiltrating America’s most ruthless men. Despite having black hair and a northeastern Irish accent, Craig was a good choice for my grandfather, because by 2019 few people remembered what he looked or sounded like; and Scorsese emphasized he was making entertainment, not a documentary, so his priorities were to gain a return on his investment by recruiting reliable actors who fit the image he wanted to convey. The Irishman sold out theaters until Covid-19 shuttered them; then it set worldwide streaming records on Netflix during the pandemic and millions of people all over the world got a glimpse at my grandfather’s small part in history.
There are many Jason Partins on the internet. A few are criminals, a few are people typical in anyone’s town, one is an aging mixed martial arts competitor with a few old Youtube videos who coincidentally looks like a younger version of me, and one is my cousin, Jason Partin. He’s my grandfather’s nephew and a year younger than I am. That Jason Partin was the football star of the Zachary High School Broncos when I was 25 miles away and wrestling with the Belaire High Bengals and going by the nickname Magik.
Jason went on to play for Mississippi State University, and he currently owns the largest physical therapy treatment center in Baton Rouge. His smiling face looks down on I-110 traffic from the Lamar Advertising billboards that line I-110 between downtown Baton Rouge and Zachary. Like my grandfather and most Partins in my family, Jason is physically large and has a nice smile, and he inherited the same sky blue eyes as his father and my grandfather, which comes from their mother, Jason and my Great-Grandma Foster.
We look nothing alike other than that smile. Jason and my smiles are less dictated by moods and more like permanent features of our cheekbones, which, now that you know to look for it, are identical to my grandfather’s and his little brother, Joe Partin, who was Jason’s dad. Other than the smile and cheekbones, you wouldn’t suspect we were related, because I inherited my dad’s dark brown eyes and I’m only 5’11” and around 180 pounds, the smallest Partin male who’s not a kid.
I’m the Jason Partin listed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as an inventor on several patents as either Jason Partin or Jason Ian Partin. There are a few other inventors named Jason Partin, but all of my patents are for medical devices, implants, and technologies that help heal bone fractures and repair soft tissues. Most are focused on small bones and joints, like the toes and ankles, fingers and wrists, and facet joints of each vertebra in the spine.
I broke my finger wrestling in my final high school match in 1990, two weeks before my grandfather’s funeral. My left middle fingers have a permanent gap starting at the middle knuckle because the break healed askew. Calcium built up around the break and pushed the ring finger sideways. Ever since I graduated high school, my left hand has looked like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute, the one he used to wish someone a long and prosperous life, and I’ve used that as a joke since I was a teenager. In the early 2000’s, I was presenting one of my first inventions to investors, Active Compression Technology, which we called ACT because I’ve always appreciated acronyms and puns.
The patent was basically taking two halves of screws or plates and connecting them with a tiny spring made of NitiNol, a shape-memory and super-elastic metal made of Nickel and Titanium that was developed by the Naval Ordinance Laboratory (hence the acronym NitiNol). Unlike standard bone screws, ACT used NitiNol to apply compression when wrist or ankle swelling went down or when bone resided due to creep or relaxation. The idea was similar to how you clamp a broken piece of wood together to make glue seal more tightly, but with a spring that adapts to unforeseen changes after the surgeon walked away. When I presented test results to venture capital firms, I smiled and held up my left hand to show what happens when bones are not compressed throughout healing and said it would be nice if we could live long and heal properly.
After showing my hand, I’d push a button on my laptop to change slides and show an x-ray of my finger and the calcium buildup around an old fracture line. (There are three small lines, one for each time I hit the old injury and the thick calcium acted as a stress-riser and caused another small crack, though only someone looking for that detail would notice.) I’d tell potential investors that my finger would have been a candidate for ACT, so they should “act now” and invest.
Every time I said that pun, I grinned the world’s biggest grin; but, the investors didn’t seem to have the same sense of humor (or I delivered the joke poorly), and it took many years of presentations and iterations on the product to develop and then sell ACT. In all that time, I never talked about my family history with investors and I did not go into detail about who broke my finger. But, among friends who ask, I’ve used the same joke since 1992, when Arkansas governor Bill Clinton won the presidency and Hillary Rodham Clinton became a household name: I smirk and tell people that I broke my finger wrestling Hillary Clinton.
In 1990, the Hillary Clinton I knew was the three time undefeated state champion at 145 pounds. The joke about him – though never to his face – was that he was like a boy named Sue in Johny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” whose dad named him Sue before he ran off because he knew the world was unfair and he wanted Sue to “grow up tough” and “grow up mean.” Sue grew up fighting kids who picked on him and became the toughest man in town, and at the end of the song fights his dad and wins.
But Hillary wasn’t mean. He was terse and focused and intimidating, but he was never mean. He was the toughest 145 pounder in Louisiana, a three time undefeated state champion and captain of the revered Capital High School Lions. I was co-captain of the Belaire Bengals and our 145 pounder, and for two months after the Belaire Christmas tournament, as my grandfather lay dying, I focused on wrestling Hillary Clinton.
Hillary was born in March of 1971, and by the end of the 1989-1990 high school wrestling season he was a legal adult about to turn 19. He had been able to vote in presidential elections and buy beer since the 11th grade. (Louisiana was the last state to raise the legal drinking age to 21, and even then our legislators kept the purchasing age at 18, so Hillary could still buy beer if he promised not to drink it). He had been shaving since probably the 10th grade.
Referees check for clean-shaven faces at ever weigh in, because a few rare wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive like sandpaper or a steel Brillo pad. But Hillary shaved his face smooth each morning before competing, and his stout hairy forearms were so strong that he could get anyone to turn their head with his cross-face without needing stubble to irritate their face; if someone grabbed his leg, he cross-faced the hell out of them and they either let him go or be so distracted by pain that he could spin behind them and score a takedown.
Some time in the late 1980’s, USA Wrestling rules changed to add two pounds to each weight class beginning just after Christmas of each season. The idea was to account for growth spurts and not have kids starving themselves to maintain the same weight as when season began in October. By March of 1990, though our weight class was called 145, Hillary was a 147 pound hairy terror. He was only 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller in almost two years, so his extra two pounds went straight to muscle. He was like an African American version of the short comic book character Wolverine: hairy, muscular, terse, and a fierce fighter.
Hillary’s 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, so the singlet looked like a maroon-colored second skin painted over his upper torso but with loose folds around his waist.
Capital High was a 100% African American school, a lingering consequence of supreme court cases Brown versus the Board of Education, the civil rights acts of the 1960’s, and federal pressure for public schools deep in the south to integrate by withholding highway funding unless African Americans were bussed into white school districts; over time, people with resources moved away from locally-funded schools and left pockets of perpetual poverty in urban centers. (I don’t know much about urban poverty, and I’m sure Hillary Clinton would have more to say about that than I would.)
I lived near Belaire, about twenty miles away from downtown. Other than wrestlers, no one I knew ventured near Capital High. Teams alternated hosting dual meets every year, so a wrestler would only enter The Lions Den once or twice during their entire high school career. I went there once my first year of wrestling, in 1987 when I was in the tenth grade, and then again at the beginning of my senior year. But from talking with other wrestlers, we all had a similar experience.
Their gym wasn’t large enough to host a tournament, but they proudly dubbed their small nook the Lion’s Den. Asbestos dangled from their rafters, and their recycled LSU purple and gold mat was faded and patched with grey duct tape. The walls were painted maroon to match their hoodies, but students had added gold and green murals of Lions and kings with crowns. I used to think were the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade, but years later I learned the murals were the Lion of Judah – a symbol of strength, courage, and sovereignty – and it makes sense that as white families moved away the Lions gradually covered their maroon walls with colors they chose.
As you walked in, above the doorway you saw large black letters that said welcome to the Lion’s Den. I didn’t know anything about Ethiopia back then. What I recall is thinking their den was a metaphor from the Book of Daniel, where Daniel fasted and then was tossed into a den filled with lions to test his faith. It’s a logical analogy for a wrestler who had cut weight and was about to wrestle any one of the Lions.
Hillary’s skin was so dark that his singlet appeared a darker shade of maroon than the other Lions, and when he wore his hoodie his face disappeared in its shadow. He would be at the head of the Lions lineup as they trotted onto the mat to warm up, his face invisible and with all of his team lined up behind him. They followed him a row beginning with their 103 pounder and ending with their 275 pound heavyweight, like purple hooded Russian Matryoska dolls.
The Lions would stomp their feet in unison with their captain while remaining eerily silent. Every team had its own ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the combination of their vocal silence and the musical echo of their feet in the gym as they circled the mat for a few minutes. Their pattern mimicked a funky rhythm in the style of popular performers from the 70’s and 80’s, like James Brown or George Clinton, and as they circled they stomped the mat harder every forth step, like the 1 of a 4 step beat: ONE two three four, ONE two three four…
The Lion’s spectators filled their relatively small set of worn wooden bleachers and stomped their feet in sync with Hillary and his team. Most were from the neighborhood, renting houses or cheap 12 unit apartments but with more pride than any neighborhood I knew. The bleachers rattled with them, and what sticks in my mind the most – other than how intimidating Hillary seemed – was hearing squeaking sounds from loose screws rubbing against the rusted metal frames of their rickety bleachers every time they stomped on the one. The stands would shake and rattle and flakes of paint would fall off the bleachers, but no one seemed to notice other than the terrified visiting team.
When the Lions finally stopped circling and sprawled into a tight circle, they landed with their faces close together, and they did it on a silent cue that no one watching could decipher. The spectators would calm down and give the team a moment of silence, and Hillary spoke so softly that I never heard what he told his team as they prepared for battle; there’d be no stomping and no squeaks, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat.
When it came time to compete against an opponent, Hillary would stop warming up and take off his hoodie and don his light brown hockey mask, like the one worn by Jason in the 1980’s Friday the 13th slasher films. It wasn’t an actual hockey mask, it was an official wrestling mask for kids who competed with a broken nose.
It was not rigid and full of holes like a hockey mask, it was padded to be soft on the outside and had only two holes for eyes and one for the mouth, but it looked so much like a hockey mask that we all called it one. The analogy with Jason the slasher was apt because, like Hillary, he also never spoke and showed no mercy. I never noticed him wearing it the year before my senior year, and it was so hard to miss that I assume he began wearing it in 1989. By then, he was one of only three wrestlers in the state to wear a face mask; his nose wasn’t broken like theirs was, but the mask protected him from crossfaces and – I suspect – added to his reputation as a silent killer on the mat.
No one made the joke about my name being Jason, because practically every person in Baton Rouge called me Magik. I may have been the only one who saw the irony in Hillary’s hockey mask when I stepped onto the mat to face that killer. Had I not been so focused on wrestling, I probably would have laughed at the ridiculousness of our situation.
Like a lot of us, Hillary had to sweat off a few pounds before each match. He would drape a black plastic law bags over his torso and run up and down the 34 flights of steps inside Louisiana’s state capital building. It was, and is, the tallest building in Baton Rouge and an icon of our city. It was tallest in America when I was a kid, an architectural gem built during the depression by Louisiana’s Kingfish, Governor Huey Long, when labor and materials were cheap. It’s the tallest flight of stairs you could run up in all of Louisiana.
Practically every kid in Baton Rouge toured the capital in middle school, where we’d learn about the Kingfish and how he built the new capital. It was on the original grounds of Louisiana State University, called “The old war school” because it trained southern officers to fight in the civil war. A few teachers called that war “The war of northern aggression,” some as a sarcastic joke and others as a lingering belief made stronger by the pockmarks on downtown buildings and tombstones from northern bullets, and from cannon balls on display that had been launched from iron clad warships coming up the Mississippi River and bombarding towns and plantations.
The war school buildings are still there as a museum to the civil war and southern heritage. Cannons are placed here and there like they were when they guarded the Mississippi from northern ships sailing up from New Orleans, which worked until the iron clad ships began appearing. When I toured it as a kid, I was in an all-white middle school and unempathetic. I’ve gone back many times as an adult, and I can’t imagine what it was like to be in an all African American school and hearing white teachers talk about the war of northern aggression. In hindsight, it makes sense that the Lions would remain quiet around other schools.
Our state capital tours coincided with Mardi Gras because everyone wanted to get outside in spring, when the typically muggy southern Louisiana weather was still mild. The landscaped state capital grounds would be ablaze with red azeleas, and the air would be filled with the sweet sent of jasmines. We’d walk past the gardens, poke fingers in bullet holes, peek at the old war school, then tromp up the 49 outside steps. There was one step for each state in the union when the capital was built, and at the top at least one kid would toss his hands up to celebrate making it like Sylvester Stalone did in Rocky.
Once inside, we’d split into groups of about eight kids and cram into the ancient elevator and ride to the top; those of us who waited stood by the mural of then U.S. Senator Huey Long being shot by his bodyguard, eliminating his chance for presidency and spring-boarding one of the two President Rosevelt’s instead (I still confuse those two, but it was whichever one made the New Deal during the Great Depression.) We couldn’t finger those holes because a plexiglass sheet protected them, but we’d stand beside them as groups of kids took turns riding to the top; over time, compliance with war, assassinations, and shootouts were as much a part of the lesson as anything else we saw. Like some kids imitated Rocky, others would point their fingers like pistols and make shoot-out noises while we waited for the elevator. To us, the Louisiana gangsters Bonny and Clyde were more famous than the two Rosevelts.
From atop the capital we could see all of the world. We stood in a crow’s nest with six metal telescopes bolted to the edge that only cost a dime to use. Even without them we could see for dozens of miles along the meandering Mighty Mississippi River and across the flat forests between us and New Orleans. About three miles upriver was Death Valley, LSU’s Tiger stadium, the fifth largest college stadium in the world and probably the most unique; the outside looks like apartment buildings because it is.
Huey Long couldn’t get state legislators to fund a new stadium, but he convinced them to fund dorms for athletes, and the dorms he built happened to have an 80,000 seat stadium in the center. People said that if you were in space on a Tiger football game day and looked down towards the boot that forms Louisiana on a map, you could see a purple and gold dot along the Mississippi River from the almost 100,000 fans inside and the dozens of thousands of tailgaters outside. From any other perspective on Earth, Death Valley looks like a Roman colosseum lined with apartments jutting above LSU’s campus. It’s impossible to miss from the tallest point in Baton Rouge. In 1988, the fans of Tiger Stadium celebrated a 50 yard touchdown by jumping up and down to the Tiger Marching Band’s beat, and so many people jumped in unison that they created a 3.8 magnitude earthquake that is still listed in The Guiness Book of World Records as the only human-generated earthquake ever recorded.
Twenty miles downriver from the capital, at the end of the elevated I-110 freeway, were the equally hard to miss billowing smokestacks from petrochemical plants. Companies like Exxon, Dow, DuPont, CoPolymer, and many others processed crude oil from our offshore oil rigs and shipped gas and plastics from Baton Rouge using Teamster 18 wheelers that would haul the goods along I-110 and connect with the raised I-10 that created the ceiling of Capital’s neighborhood. I-10 crossed the almost mile-wide Mississippi river using The Baton Rouge bridge, a steel truss arch rumored to be lower than federal waterway standards as an intentional act by Governor Long to prevent larger barges from passing upriver, forcing them to stop in the port of Baton Rouge. The bridge was a few football fields away from the state capital building, and across the bridge were a few cement factories around the small port of Plaquemine and endless miles of sugar cane fields.
From atop the capital, I began to understand how The Mighty Mississippi River got its nickname. It’s the world’s fourth largest river, and though barely moving and just creeping along, you can see its wide meandering path from space. From our perch atop the capital, barges and ships looked like bathtub toys, and the 18 wheelers rumbling across the bridge were like Hot Wheels toys on a plastic racetrack. It wasn’t just petrochemical products crossing the bridge; I-10 stretched from Florida through the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge and all the way to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, a cross-country interstate that had a constant stream of Teamster trucks flowing like streams of ants carrying food to and from their hills. I had heard that every thing on every shelf in America had spent time in the back of a Teamster’s truck.
Back in Hoffa’s day, the threat of a national Teamsters strike slamming the American economy to a halt scared the chairman of the U.S. labor relations committee, then senator and future president John F. Kennedy, so badly that he began the Blood Feud against Hoffa. After Kennedy became president, he appointed his little brother Bobby Kennedy to be the U.S. Attorney General with only one goal: get Hoffa. But Hoffa would outlive both of them: the president was shot and killed in 1963, and his brother was shot and killed in the middle of his 1968 presidential bid. Hoffa would survive until 30 July 1975, when he vanished without a trace and his story became one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of a century. To many, what happened Hoffa was of more importance than who killed his nemesis, President John F. Kennedy.
To this day and despite thousands of books and dozens of movies, both mysteries are unsolved. For Baton Rouge kids in the 70’s and 80’s, Teamster lore and the Kennedy assassinations were as was much of the lessons learned on state capital tours as bullet holes, the Kingfish mural, and the old war school.
Sometimes while waiting for the elevator to open, I’d see high school wrestlers from the downtown training camp bypassing the elevator and stepping into the stairwell. They’d be dressed in different colored sweats or draped in the big black plastic trash bags we used to collect pine needles in the fall, sweating and yet still running up and down the stairwell steps as if Rocky could have gone inside his state capital building. Unlike every school I knew, they didn’t seem to be part of a team and they were of all races imaginable in our small world. In high school, I’d learn that they wore multi-colored hoodies because they were part of the downtown all-city wrestling camp.
The camp was a nonprofit formed by former LSU wrestlers, and all they could afford was a dilapidated and asbestos-lined former auto repair garage that they stuffed with faded and duct-taped purple and gold wrestling mats salvaged when the team was disbanded in 1979, when the Title IX law required all American universities to have the same number of females in collegiate sports as males. Title IX was fiercely contested, especially by male athletes and the 100 or so wrestling teams that were eliminated to quickly comply with the new law; many athletes lost their college tuition, but the disgruntled LSU wrestlers who had relocated from midwestern towns loved the sport so much that they banded together and opened a training camp.
They paid for it by hosting Bingo nights in a downtown community center once a week, but they only earned enough to rent the derelict garage. It was too small for an entire wrestling mat, so they cut up one of LSU’s purple and gold mats like pieces of a puzzle and tucked it between the support columns and wrapped leftover pieces around the columns as padding. Someone donated a few weight machines for the small room that used to be an office. The former LSU wrestlers would show up after their day jobs and train with any kids who showed up. The camp is no longer there but the building still is, and it’s still directly across from a 1950’s era Frosty Cone soda shop on Government Boulevard. When you stand there sipping a milkshake, you can see the towering state capital building only a mile away. If you walked towards the capital, you’d walk the route of northern soldiers during the civil war, and you’d pass churches and tombstones riddled with their bullets.
When I became one of those high school wrestlers, I’d run from the camp to the capital and then up and down the steps. It’s not cold in Louisiana, snowing only once every decade or so, but wrestlers would be there dressed in layers as if running in Antartica.
Like a lot of wrestlers, Hillary sweat off a few extra pounds off of his lean frame at the last minute and add a layer of black plastic. The heat and trapped sweat saps your strength, but it’s a balancing game; you sweat so much more you can run fewer laps up and down the steps, and only the wrestler knows the balance between an extra layers versus an extra hour. Once, I saw Hillary running up and down the steps wearing plastic bags and spitting into an old 16 ounce Gatorade bottle. He was chewing gum salivate more, and shaving off another pound by not swallowing.
I assume that like Daniel in the old testament and most of the wrestlers I knew in Baton Rouge, Hillary fasted for a day or two before a match. There wasn’t a gram of anything wasted on him. I never learned his average weight, but I assume he was around 154 pounds most days and cut down to 145 for Wednesday dual meets and weekend tournaments, then down to only 147 after the Christmas bump to weight classes. At tournament check-ins after Christmas, he’d toss his gum into a trash can, strip naked, wipe his body dry, and fully exhale before stepping on the scales. The needle would barely move up and down before settling on exactly 147.0 pounds.
I was the opposite. I was born on 05 October 1972, which meant I began kindergarten in 1977 at four years old, the youngest kid in class. Had I been born a few days later, I would have been to young to start kindergarten and I would have been pushed back a year and began at five years old instead of four, and I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16. Instead, I began my senior year as a 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 wrestling shoes that, on my feet, looked like two torpedos strapped to the bottom of my legs.
My blue Belaire singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso, and I looked like a blueberry popsicle wearing off-white ear guards. 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 my headgear was off-white. In a way, I sported a red-white-and-blue all-American color scheme whenever I stepped on the mat, with little red pimples marking my face and back like the 50 white stars on our flag.
I had never shaved. Unlike Hillary’s leg and forearm hair, which was thick and curly like Brillo scouring pads used to clean cast iron skillets, the hair on my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scragly black hairs hidden by my underwear. The hair on my head was close-cropped on the sides, almost like in the army, but it was a bit longer in the back, like a mullet style awkwardly popular in the 80’s.
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 wasn’t broken yet, also had a C-shaped scar along the first finger from tripping with a machete in my hand when I was ten years old and helping him cut down male marijuana plants on his farm in Arkansas. The front and back of both hands were sprinkled with pinpoint scars from handling barbed wire on the farm. And despite being a magician who placed his hands in front of audiences for all to see, I sometimes bit my fingernails mindlessly, and the nails were sometimes jagged and almost always unprofessional looking.
My legs were lanky, like with most growing kids, but they were strong from hiking the Ozark mountains with my dad, hiking backpacks of horse and chicken manure to fertilize a few acres of marijuana hidden in the forests. I augmented that with runs in capital steps and laps up and down the Belaire football bleachers. 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 and hurt more than a Brillo pad ever could. I was rarely taken down by a shot because my crossface would deflect their face and halt their momentum, but my Achilles Heel, the weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was my lack of upper body strength. I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary, and no amount of training would help me catch up with him.
I read a Malcom Gladwell book in 2008 that explained Hillary and me, “Outliers, the Story of Success.” It focused on hockey players in Canada after someone noticed that professional players were statistically likely to be born the first few months of the year than summer or fall. It turns out that like Hillary, Canadian kids born in spring started each year of school as the oldest kids in class. The difference between four and five years old is more than 20% of life, and every year those kids were grouped together and accelerated faster, then they began the next school year ahead of their peers physically and mentally. The pattern continued each year from elementary school, middle school, and high school, and the gap of opportunity widened over their lifetimes and it took researchers to identify the pattern. The advantages of being born in spring and beginning with more size and experience created a self-fulfilling prophesy where the best get the best opportunities and therefore stay the best.
Gladwell, a Canadian by birth and journalist for The Washington Post and writer for the New Yorker Magazine, was already an influential author and he created a term that caught on nationally, “The Matthew Effect,” named 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.
In Outliers, Gladwell starts with the Canadian hockey players, but though dozens of interviews and case studies and research reports, he shows how socio-economic factors impact success, and 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, create their abundance.
If I had anything in abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity. No one who knew me would say I was either tough or mean; my reputation was for smiling, making puns, doing coin tricks, and training hard. I had lost all 13 matches of my brief, three week stent of wrestling in the 10th grade (when my dad went to prison), and I began my junior year not much better. But by the end of the 1988-1989 season I was ahead 75 wins to 36 losses.
That’s twice the number of matches most kids have because of how tournaments run; you must loose twice to be eliminated, and the highest seeded wrestlers begin by competing against the lowest seeds to reduce the likelihood of an upset and increase the chances of the two best wrestlers meeting in finals and having more exciting matches for spectators. In a way, that’s a version of the Matthew Effect, because the better you are the easier your first few matches are at each tournament and the higher your ranking becomes. For those of us who populated the losers bracket, we began in the top bracket against the best and would start over in the bottom bracket and wrestle five or six matches on our way to third-place finals. A year of fighting in the loser’s bracket was like putting in 10,000 hours of work. Show up and wrestle, time and time again, win or loose, and eventually you’ll improve.
I began my senior year at 16 years old, but, by a quirk in Louisiana law I was like Hillary in that I was a legal adult before the school year began, and it had to to with Louisiana’s unique legal system.
Because of my dad’s imprisonment and my mom’s depression, I lived with my Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo toward the end of my junior year. They were my mom’s family, French Canadians who settled in Baton Rouge (which means “red stick” in French, Uncle Bob taught me), and they took me in when my mom had bouts of depression. Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob were childless and spent their time and money having fun; they were rarely sober after 4pm, so they never drove to pick me up for practice or tournaments, but I had friends who would drive me. Though only 64, Uncle Bob developed spinal cancer and it spread quickly.
He was never religious, but Uncle Bob was baptized Robert M. Desico, and as a kid he had attended an old Roman Catholic church left over from when his home town was a French colony, too. He spoke Latin out of habit. He was multilingual, a WWII navy veteran who moved to Louisiana and traveled the world on behalf of Montreal Canada’s Bulk Marine, a stevedoring company that oversaw loading and unloading of cargo freighters in ports all over the world. New Orleans was – and is – America’s second largest port after New York, and he accepted the job some time in the 1950’s. He worked in New Orleans and I stayed with Auntie Lo in Baton Rouge, but he came home on weekends. He and Auntie Lo had chosen to live so they could afford a nicer home than the more expensive big city and live near the Sherwood Country Club, where they golfed and drank with friends. Though he enjoyed his parties, Uncle Bob was pragmatic; when he planned for all finances and his sprit to be prepared for death, he pointed out that unless you met Matthew and spoke the same language it was unlikely you knew what he said; that’s why I wrote that Matthew said “something like” instead of quoting him.
Uncle Bob passed away the summer between my junior and senior year. Auntie Lo was a lush and I couldn’t stay with her without becoming a caregiver, and I couldn’t get a driver’s license to attend summer wrestling camp without parental consent, so I petitioned the Louisiana court system for emancipation. I knew that an emancipated kid couldn’t suddenly vote or buy beer, but he do things without parental approval, like get a driver’s license and sign a lease or a contract.
My emancipation petition was overseen by the coincidentally named Judge Robert “Bob” Downing of the East Baton Rouge Parish Court 19th Judicial District. Louisiana is the only state in America with parishes instead of counties, a quirk left over from Catholic influence when the French colonized Louisiana (which was named after France’s King Louis and Queen Anna), and to this day Louisiana is the only state in the United States with a legal system based on the European Napoleonic code. Tulane law school in New Orleans is known to attract people from all over America seeking to practice international law, and the joke is that Louisiana is the best country in America to do that.
The Napoleonic system gives judges more leeway than in other states, and Judge Bob (as I called him) was impressed that I knew that. Uncle Bob taught me a lot of things like that, I told Judge Bob about Uncle Bob in our first meeting. Like Uncle Bob had respected my hustle in getting magic shows around the Sherwood Forest neighborhood and country club, Judge Bob respected that I earned the $140 fee to file for emancipation by hustling three magic shows for middle-school birthday parties in Belaire subdivision and performing a public show at a local synagogue. That show was covered by the Advocate’s Sunday Fun section, and I brought a copy in to show anyone interested that I volunteered in my community and therefore, in my logic, already doing things a respectable adult should do. I was not like my family.
Like most people in town, Judge Bob knew the Partin family well. For a city of only around 150,000 people and only a dozen Partins in the phone book, that was a lot of media focus and everyone knew us or about us. Not a week went by without a Partin photo in the newspaper. Everyone had known my grandfather since the 1950’s. After he went to prison in 1980, my uncles, great-Uncle Doug Partin (my grandfather’s other little brother), and Uncle Keith Partin (my dad’s little brother), filled his shoes. Louisiana depended on Teamsters so much for the economy that they took over as the Partins in the newspaper, and though they were no where nearly as notorious as my grandfather, his name followed them in almost every articles.
My dad was infamous as a former drug dealer in Baton Rouge who had gone to prison in President Reagan’s war on drugs, and like all wars victories are highlighted in the news. His name was Edward Grady Partin, too, and that led to my grandfather being mentioned whenever my dad was. Great-uncle Joe Partin was the respected principal of Zachary High School after a successful career as their football coach, and his son, Jason, was the cheerful and upcoming high school football star of the Zachary Broncos.
I showed up in the news every now and then as the youngest member of the local magic club, the International Brotherhood of Magicians Ring #178, The Pike Burden Honorary Ring, which held public shows at the synagogue shared by a few members. Sometimes, people confused my cousin and me and said I seemed small for a football player. But I was never in the sports section, because in the summer I was emancipated I had yet to place in the top four of a tournament and only the medal winners were listed.
Because of Louisiana’s system, Judge Bob could waive the waiting period to reach my dad his signature. I hadn’t seen my dad since he was released from prison a year before, and I brought in a few stamped postcards from him to prove it. He stopped by after being released from prison and bought me a new jump rope and two of those extra-strong hand grip exercisers with a coiled spring in the middle, but I hadn’t seen him in the year since. He wrote plenty of postcards, though, and I showed them to Judge Bob as proof he wasn’t coming back. The cards were always nature scenes, moose in front of mountain ranges at the border of Washington State and Canada, a mountain lion from Big Bend National Park at the border of Texas and Mexico, and an elk in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where my dad said he could live out his days as a mountain man if that asshole Reagan hadn’t taken his land and money; every one of the cards began by telling me he loved me and ended with rants about what an asshole Reagan was. One from Arkansas had a cryptic message that sounded like something a crazy man would say, that he was going to law school and would show the world how the war on drugs was unconstitutional bullshit and driven by fundamental Christian whackos who put that asshole Reagan in power. Judge Bob used those postcards to justify waiving the waiting period.
He then met my mom, who was in another bout of depression and didn’t contest the petition. In record time considering how sluggishing things move in a muggy Baton Rouge summer, Judge Bob stamped my paperwork with the raised seal of Louisiana. The seal is a huge pelican nesting baby pelicans, and Judge Bob sprawled his name across the nest and scribbled the date: 03 August 1989. The Baton Rouge Advocate would mention my entire name in their weekly court summary, and that summary would eventually be pulled from archives and put online. It says:
Jason Ian Partin was emancipated by Judge Robert Downing of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District, and has all of the privileges entitled by emancipation.
The piece of paper and all the privileges it would provide only had one sentence typed in black font, but it was longer than a legal sized paper and looked almost comical with a few letters on it like the sprinkling of pimples on a kid’s face the first few weeks of puberty. A court secretary gave me a legal sized envelope on my way out, and I carried both to meet my girlfriend, Lea, nicknamed Princess Lea like in Star Wars, who was waiting for me in her dad’s work van.
I plopped into the passenger seat and held up my emancipation paperwork and the envelope and grinned, flashing the braces across my teeth.
“It’s a legal piece of paper that doesn’t fit in a legal sized envelop,” I said.
She laughed and I folded the paper to fit into the envelop. She started the van and pushed a cassette into her tape deck and handed me the case.
She lit a cigarette and asked, “Have you heard of this yet?”
I hadn’t.
“Guns and Roses is my new favorite,” she said as she pushed play.
The tape was called Appetite for Destruction. It was a legitimate copy, not one of the bootlegs a lot of us bought from a strip mall near Belaire nicknamed Little Saigon. The cover had original artwork, not a bad Zerox from the Little Saigon print center, and it was an ornate cross with a skull wearing a hat at each corner. One skull wore a magician’s top hat, which I’d later learn was Slash, the lead guitarists. Their album was one of the country’s best selling and had been out since 1987, but popular trends were sometimes slow to reach all the way down to Baton Rouge. We all knew Motley Crue and Ratt and other bands with enviable mullets that came from the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, but Guns-N-Roses was new to me.
Lea rolled down her window to let out smoke and turned up the volume, and for the first time I heard Axl Rose’s wailing voice leading into Welcome to The Jungle and Slash’s guitar riffs ramping up to meet him. She put the van in gear and we left the courthouse and rocked out on the way to the recruiter’s office on Government Bulevard. It was so close to the courthouse that Lea didn’t finish her cigarette and Axl was only partially through It’s so Easy when she parked and I walked into the recruiters office.
He was surpised to see me again. He was an E6 with what I now recognize as Vietnam service campaign medals but without combat infantry badge or airborne wings or an air assault badge or anything I’d later associate with combat. He was slightly overweight and was sitting behind a cheap desk adorned with fliers advertising the latest recruitment campaign. Their slogan was, I felt, hooky: “Be All You Can Be.” A slogan like that could have only been contrived by someone who didn’t wrestle.
I was at the recruiter’s office a few months before, when Uncle Bob was still sick but unquestionably dying, and the recruiter told me I needed my parents signature to join the army. He was from another state and didn’t recognize my name, and when I explained my situation he suggested getting emancipated. He probably thought that would be the end of hearing from me, yet there I was with a legal envelop bulging with the folded emancipation proclamation from Judge Bob.
I handed the recruiter my emancipation proclamation. He unfolded it and looked up at me from behind his desk. I pointed out the raised seal and signature. He said he had seen one before, and we began the process of me joining the army at age 16.
I signed a contract joining the army’s delayed entry program 11 months before I’d ship off to basic training, where, in exchange for such a long delayed entry, I’d automatically be granted an E2 rank, which paid $75 more a month than E1. I was guaranteed infantry training if I graduated high school, and an assignment with the 82nd Airborne if I passed Airborne school. I agreed to give up $100 a month of pay for a year in exchange for $36,000 towards college after service, and another $100 a month towards Series E savings bonds that had tax-free profits if used for education. I had done my research and talked with Uncle Bob as he lay dying. I didn’t understand what $36,000 was – it might as well have been millions of dollars – but when I calculated the rate of return for $100 invested per month over three and a half years it was something like 3,000%, and Uncle Bob told me that sounded like a good deal and I accepted it. Besides, after taxes, that would leave me with almost $425 a month, more than I’d make hustling magic shows every weekend, and it would be guaranteed and come with “three hots and a cot.” I would be wealthier than I ever had been.
Lea and I left the recruiter’s office and finished listening to Appetite for Destruction on the way to my orthodontists. I had set up an appointment to have my braces removed even though I was supposed to wear them at least another year. When he asked what my mom would say about that, I unfolded my paperwork and held it up like an FBI agent flashing a badge. He said okay, and two hours later I was free from braces. He fit me for a retainer and said that wearing it at night would be the best compromise, and that it would be ready in a few weeks. I hopped back in Lea’s van, and we headed towards the levee to watch the sun set while I practiced smiling and talking with smooth teeth for the first time in three years.
Lea was prone to dramatize things. She was about to start Southeastern University and study theater and literature, and she said removing my braces was symbolic of removing the shackles of my family. I disagreed. I said it was harder to breath when wearing a mouth guard. She liked her version better, and said one day I’d see the metaphor. I said I saw the metaphor but it wasn’t true, but that I was anxious to try out my lips’s freedom and that was no metaphor.
We parked along the levee in front of the old old state capital, a building built like a three-story castle and perched on the tallest hill in Baton Rouge, a forty foot mound of dirt overlooking the Mississippi levee that’s only a hundred yards from the new capital. We hiked up the hill and sat under the sprawling moss covered branches of an old stately oak tree, took deep breaths, and sighed peaceful sighs. She had a small hardshell Igloo cooler with a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best she had bought to celebrate, more for the joke of calling it Milwaukee’s Beast than anything special, but I had stopped drinking the year before to focus on wrestling. She knew that, she just liked beer and had recently turned 18 and enjoyed flashing her ID to buy it.
She brought a Coke for me, but I told her I had given up sugar, too. I sipped water from my dad’s old boy scout canteen that I carried to reduce the temptation to drink sugary things. As she sipped her Beast, I explained the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, which I had just read about in one of Coach’s training magazines. She listened, not because she was interested in carbohydrates, but because I was in a good mood and chatty and she had planned on letting me have a day where I could be free, metaphorically speaking.
I had always felt at peace sitting on the mild slope of the old state capital and I still do. In his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain called our old state capital the worse eyesore on the Mississippi River; but, most people I knew adored it. To us, it was our cherished castle on a hill. Like you could see from the state capital, all of southern Louisiana is flat; many parts near the river are a foot or two below sea level, as if the only place to slide down something was into a muddy ditch beside the levy. It rarely snows in Baton Rouge, but as kids we would pretends we were snow sledding down a mountain by sitting on pieces of cardboard boxes and sliding down the 30 or 40 feet of grass hill in front of the castle. It was – and is – a Baton Rouge icon. I don’t know what Mark Twain would say if he saw the billowing smoke stacks of petrochemical plants called Chemical Alley a few miles downriver from the two capital buildings, but I grew up knowing nothing else and didn’t notice them and I only saw the old castle and the new capital and the Mighty Mississippi River with all of its barges passing under the bridge. That day was Lea’s gift to me: a moment to sit in on that hill and process all that had happened on my first day as an adult. To be free.
She finished her beer and another cigarette, and we found a giant old stately oak tree with enough gnarled branches to get privacy from the few people walking by on a weekday afternoon. She was a snuggler after a few beers, and I cradled her and we chatted with our faces only a few inches apart.
“Coach gave us marriage advice,” I said, practicing talking without braces. I had to concentrate on not spraying spittle while I talked.
Lea raised a dark eyebrow over her narrow eye. She was a quarter Japanese on her mother’s side and had slightly narrow eyes because of that, but she had her dad’s thick eyebrows. Her parents met when her dad returned from Vietnam and out-processed in San Diego’s navy base, where Lea’s mom lived with her parents in the Asian district off Convoy street; during WWII, they had been forced to live in remote southern California Manzanita concentration camp during the detainment of around 250,000 Japanese-Americans. Lea’s parents returned to Baton Rouge and adapted to local culture, but she mostly she kept to herself and never integrated with the strong southern Catholic culture; she said she had learned from her parents to be wary of neighbors who don’t accept who you are.
I held up my finger the way Coach did when he was saying something important, and said:
“He held up his finger and said…”
I changed my voice to mimic his raspy midwestern accent, slowed my speech, then continued:
“Gentlemen. The secret to a happy marriage is: no matter what type of day you had, the first thing you do when you get home is kiss your wife on the cheek and ask her how her day was.”
Lea cocked her head as if expecting more.
“Why’d he say that?” she asked.
I lowered my finger and shrugged that I wasn’t sure.
“He was in a good mood all day,” I said. “I think it’s his anniversary this week or something like that. He was smiling like a kid in a candy store all day. I think he and Mrs. K had a date night.”
“Hmm,” she said. “That must be nice.”
Not all of Coach’s advice applied to everyone. To us, asking how someone’s day was would be the most invasive thing you could do. She was a year and a half older, and though I was still mid-pubescent I had been able to perform for almost a year and even ejaculated a bit; none of her friends knew I had scraggly public hair. She spent three years in middle school being molested by her uncle on weekends; her father never knew, and no one would ever learn it from me. We trusted each other to say what was important to us and did not pry into what happened elsewhere.
Few people knew Lea’s background. Kids in school said she looked exotic, like Angelina Jolie or other actresses who bucked the mainstream blonde good looks of the 80’s. Most people assumed she was Creole, the darker skinned people mostly from near New Orleans who were a mix of white French, olive skinned Spanish, and black African Americans. The French and Spanish kept swapping ownership of Louisiana and the slaves, but Spain sent their aristocratic males without wives accompanying them; hence, Creoles with dark skin and a mixture of backgrounds that overlaps with the Cajuns, who came from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where Uncle Bob had been born.
But no one I knew associated being Creole with slavery. Instead, Creole was a badge of honor, considered a race unique to southern Louisiana. My reputation at Belaire was buoyed by dating a gorgeous Creole who could buy beer. Even better, everyone thought she was smart because she spoke a bit of Japanese and knew a lot about things we considered Asian, like martial arts and Buddhism, and by default I was known to talk about those things, too, like a parrot dating someone older and wiser.
“We had a bunch of kids from Belaire Middle over,” I said. “Some from the shows I did. I was showing them some basics and invited a few guys from the team to meet us. Andy and Timmy showed up. They hadn’t found jobs yet, and told us how any of us could earn a living.”
Lea raised an eyebrow to show she was interested.
I changed back to my midwestern accent, held up my forefinger, and said: “Pig Farming.”
Both of her eyebrows went up; I smiled, because that was the response I was shooting for.
“Pig farming,” I repeated, just like Coach had. It had pricked my curiousity, too.
“They don’t need a lot of attention,” I said, still using a poor impersonation of Coach’s accent. “But if you treat them well, you’ll be happy in life.”
We mulled that over silently for a while.
Eventually, she smiled and said: “They’re just like me.”
We chuckled and then she said, “Tell Andy and Timmy I said hi. I won’t see them at Todd’s before school starts up in two weeks.”
I nodded and we both sighed peacefully and watched barges float down the river and in no hurry to be anywhere, just like us.
Lea and I knew everything about each other and our families, but we rarely discussed what happened when we weren’t together. Like half of Baton Rouge, her dad worked for my grandfather at some point in their lives. Lea grew up hearing of his exploits stealing building materials from construction sites all over the southeast by keeping parts of orders in the back of his 18 wheeler and brining them to Baton Rouge, where my grandfather – whom everyone called Big Daddy – used them to build a NASCAR racetrack called the Baton Rouge International Speedway that was later renamed The Pelican Speedway and sold for a huge profit that benefited all of the Teamsters involved. All of them knew how to keep a secret.
None of the Teamsters who worked for Big Daddy pried into anyone’s business. When he testified against Hoffa it was international news for years, especially when Chief Justice Earl Warren oversaw the supreme court case in 1966. And it was national news when Big Daddy returned to running Local #5 and was unanimously voted back into power every year, as if Louisiana Teamsters adhered to a different loyalty than the International Brotherhood. In a famous Life magazine photo pointed at by practically every one of the 2.7 Million Teamsters after Hoffa went to prison, Big Daddy’s on the phone at Local #5 headquarters, handling Teamster business, and on the wall behind him is a photo frame reversed to hide Hoffa’s face from view, emphasizing that business would go on and probably improve.
When Big Daddy was in national news again for publicly defying bribes and threats from New Orleans’s mafia boss, Carlos Marcello, Lea’s dad and most men in Baton Rouge began to revere him as legendary. He could defy Hoffa and the mafia with impunity. He was a man to be admired, the all-American hero that Life said he was.
But I knew my grandfather was a rapist, and after knowing Lea I began to see him differently. Big Daddy was also a murderer, lier, thief, adulterer, betrayer of teammates, and – according to Mamma Jean before all of the truth came out – a man who upset her when he stopped joining her at church on Sundays. He went to Teamster meetings instead, and took my young father out of church to go with him. Life the mafia, being a Teamster was a family business; James R. Hoffa Junior had grown to run the International Teamsters, and Edward Grady Partin Junior was being groomed to run Big Daddy’s Teamsters.
Lea knew about all of that despite our respect for privacy, because she had helped me prepare my emancipation petition. Unlike most emancipations, where the parents want to distance themselves from legal liability of an out of control teenager, I was the first Judge Bob had seen of the teenager petitioning for freedom from their family. It turned out that I didn’t have to sell him on what the Partins were really like, he was one of the few people who read all the news and Chief Justice Warren’s three page missive ranting against my grandfather in the 1966 Hoffa versus The United States; everything I knew was public knowledge fore anyone prying deeper than Life magazine.
After sunset, Lea and I found an oak tree with exceptionally dense branches undulating across the ground that made a nook inside, fooled around, and went home to her family for take-out pizza dinner. Her parents had always been fine with me staying in her room. That night, I told her I had a glorious day. It wasn’t as eventful of a day as Ferris Bueller’s Day off, I said, but I bet it was the best first day as an adult any 16 year old had ever had. If Mark Twain had days like ours, I said, maybe he would have appreciated the old state capital more.
The next two weeks was just as blissful. But all good things come to an end, and Lea left for college in late August and rented an apartment in Hammond. Her dad offered me to stay in her room for my senior year. He said any son of Ed Partin was family to him. (He meant grandson, but because my dad shared the same name and went to high school with a lot of my friends’s parents, many people slipped up and sometimes called me his son even if they knew better. I grew up not correcting the slips.) But Lea’s family lived too far from Belaire to attend practice practically, so at the end of August I moved in with Todd’s family, who lived three miles from away. I could jog to and from practice.
Todd was Todd Abrams, son of Lea’s former fifth grade math teacher, Mrs. Barbee Abrams. The Abrams were an all-American family. Mr. Abrams led a local boy scout troup and was a HAM radio enthusiasts with a 3-story antenea behind their garage that he would sometimes show us and let us speak with people all over the world. Todd was a junior at Belaire and star of theater, drummer in the Bengal marching band, state martial arts champion, and president of the Baton Rouge Knive Throwing Club, The Red Stick Flingers. Ben Abrams was a senior at Belaire, honor student, baseball letterman, trumpet player in the Bengal marching band, and former wrestler who had introduced me to Coach in the 10th grade. Our mutual friends, the twins Timmy and Andy, were neighbors who had graduated the year before. Lea trained with all of them at Todd’s dojo and sparing events he held in his back yard, near his dad’s HAM radio tower and a big wooden spool from a new power-line that we had taken from the construction site and rolled down the street to lay on its side and use as a knife target.
Though Lea smoked, she was active and flexible and could kick Todd’s face just as easily as his crotch, and she never telegraphed which it would be. I started joining them the summer before as a way to improve wrestling throws, and the Abrams treated all of us like family. Lea planned to visit Todd’s house on weekends, and I couldn’t imagine a better family to join for my final year of high school. It was the end of summer, with long days of sunlight and hot, muggy weather that beckoned days of leisure. and I had a few weeks of nothing to do but enjoy time with people I loved. In the end, that’s all Uncle Bob would have wanted.
I started my senior year fall of 1989, 16 years old but a legal adult. I kept it a secret. The only people who knew were Judge Bob, my mom, the recruiter, the Abrams, and Lea’s family. I was unsure if it would affect my sports eligibility, so I asked them to keep it a secret, too. and that was easy because we were all people who kept our family lives private. I said I wanted to focus on training to become the best wrestler I could, and the deep truth behind that oozed from me whenever I spoke about plans for my senior year.
I was not mimicking Vision Quest’s coming of age story or any other story, I just thought it sounded like a fun challenge and I wanted something to focus on until I left for the army. I already knew from wrestling that the army recruitment slogan was possible without needing to join anything, I could do it on my own if I asked a few friends for help. The army would just help me get out of Louisiana and not take a job with my family. It was a method, not a goal. I didn’t know what the goal was yet, but I knew that no matter the goal the first two steps would be emancipating myself and leaving Louisiana.
To do that I needed to finish my senior year, and if I were going to be in school it would be doing the things I loved with people I respected. Being on a team was just one way to do that. The 82nd would be my next team. Even though I was going into the army, in my mind anyone in Louisiana who needed a team’s uniform to be their best didn’t get the point of wrestling, nor had they paid attention to the uniforms hanging in our old war school museum. If they had, maybe they would see that not everyone wearing a military uniform does the right thing, and by definition they weren’t being all they could be.
Hillary Clinton was probably more of a man to be respected than any one of the soldiers from Louisiana’s old war school or the countless Vietnam veterans chain smoking in strip malls around Belaire, and he did it on his own. I can’t say for sure, but I think that army recruiting slogan planted a seed in my mind about wrestling Hillary, and that seed would soon sprout and grow into my Vision Quest.
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- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975 ↩︎