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 in 1962.
His surprise 1964 testimony, the sole reason Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and sentenced to eight years in prison, was ten months after President Kennedy’s assassination. My family was showcased across national media alongside the new first family, the Johnsons, and my grandfather was made to seem like an all-American hero who thwarted Hoffa’s plot to assassinate President Kennedy’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, by risking his life and the lives of his family to swear under oath that Hoffa asked him to bribe a juror in 1962.
In 1983, seven years after Hoffa vanished from a Detroit parking lot, Edward Partin Senior was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in the movie Blood Feud. Robert Blake won an academy award for “channelling Hoffa’s rage,” and a daytime soap opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby Kennedy. Brian was less famous than my grandfather back then, but he was an up-and-coming star known for his “rugged good looks,” green-blue eyes, and charming smile. As Hoffa said in his second autobiography, published only a couple of months before he vanished, “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.” Producers had to match an actor to everyone’s image of Edward Partin, so Brian was a good fit. (Coincidentally, Brian’s break-out role followed Blood Feud later that same year, when he co-starred alongside Sylvester Stallone in another film with blood in the name, “Rambo: First Blood.” Brian was the sheriff and Korean war veteran who took no nonsense and led the manhunt against Rambo, a Vietnam Special Forces veteran with PTSD and a huge knife, who had escaped into the mountains around the sheriff’s small town.)
Everyone in Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy. He watched Blood Feud from his cushy federal penitentiary cell in Texas, and he thought Brian did a fine job of portraying him, and that Robert Blake nailed Hoffa. I never asked what he thought of Rambo.
Thirty years after Blood Feud, Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly Craig Vincent as “Big Eddie” Partin in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 opus about Hoffa, The Irishman, based on a 2014 memoir by Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, a Teamster leader who knew Big Daddy well and claims to have killed Hoffa on behalf of the mafia. By then, most people had forgotten what Big Daddy looked and sounded like, and Scorsese said he was making a film for entertainment, not as a documentary, so he didn’t need to find actors who matched the original characters.
Scorsese raised $270 Million and hired a long list of Hollywood’s most famous actors know for gangster films, like Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and about a dozen others. Craig was chosen to portray Big Daddy because he had worked with Scorsese before, playing a big, brutal, thug in alongside Pacino and Pesci in Casino. Scorsese eliminated a chapter of The Irishman centered around Audie Murphy, President Nixon, and Big Daddy; downgraded Big Daddy’s role to a minor one; and changed his southern drawl to match Craig’s northeastern Italian accent. The Irishman sold out theaters until Covid-19 shuttered theaters, then it set global streaming records on Netflix for two years of the pandemic. Millions of people all over the world got a simplified glimpse at Big Daddy’s small part in history. In one scene with all the famous actors together, Scorcese lowered the camera angle and placed Big Eddie behind the big names, exaggerating his size and making him loom large over people who didn’t see it that way.
I believe that Big Daddy, who died in 1990, would have appreciated how he was portrayed. He knew Frank Sheenan well, but he never discussed Frank or Hoffa and the Kennedys. When probed for details not already disclosed in Look!, Life, movies, and the 1966’s supreme court case, Hoffa versus The United States, he just smiled as if he knew the funniest joke in the world that he’d never share with anyone.
There are dozens of Jason Partins on the internet. When I began writing this memoir, I Googled my name for the first time and saw that a few Jason Partins were criminals, a few were people typical in anyone’s town, and one was an aging mixed martial arts competitor who coincidentally looked like a younger version of me. One was – and is – my second cousin, Jason Partin. He’s my grandfather’s nephew and a year younger than I am. That Jason was the football star of the Zachary High School Broncos when we were kids in Louisiana, and he went on to play for Mississippi State University. He currently owns the largest physical therapy treatment center in Baton Rouge, and his smiling face looks down on I-110 traffic from the Lamar Advertising billboards that line I-110 between downtown Baton Rouge and Zachary.
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. When I began writing this, I was the smiling Jason Partin dressed in a suit on two university’s web sites. I ran a hands-on innovation laboratory called Donald’s Garage, named after Donald Shiley, co-inventor of the world’s most successful heart valve, and I designed and led engineering classes at The University of San Diego’s Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering. I was also an advisor for the University of California at San Diego’s entrepreneurship program in what they called The Basement, which was similar in concept as Donald’s garage, encouraging students to learn through hands-on trial and error, to practice the real-world grit and perseverance necessary when innovating almost anything.
There were a few other Jason Partins listed as inventors on patents for a range of gadgets, 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 facet joints spinal vertebra, ankles and toes, and wrists and fingers. Among friends, the joke is that of course I’d focus on healing fingers in a hands-on laboratory, because my left hand is hideous.
I broke my left ring finger just below the middle knuckle in a high school wrestling match two weeks before Big Daddy’s funeral, and it healed askew. To this day, it looks like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute when he wished people to live long and prosper in the Star Trek televisions series and films. On x-rays, you can see the fracture line and calcium buildup that would have been stymied by a small screw or simple pin across the fracture. When I raised investment capital in the early 2000’s – a long and tedious process that required persistence and luck – I held up my hand and showed its x-ray and said that my finger would have been a candidate for small bone-healing implants.
My hand’s also scarred from a machete gash along the length of the first finger from when I was ten years old, and a mishmash of barbed wire pinpoints and small slices from when I was 13. Even without the scars, the knobby middle knuckles of both hands stand out, and so does the calcium buildup and callouses around the two first knuckles of each hand, a result of poor choices when practicing Ku-Kempo as a teenager, punching wooden panels with perfect form to develop muscle memory and strengthen the alignment of knuckles, hand metacarpals, wrist carpals, and the radius; and from countless pushups training during my senior year of wrestling, and for what I thought would be challenging service as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne after graduation.
Thousands of people have stared at my hands since 1990, maybe more. I’ve been an amateur magician since a kid, and for decades I’ve performed in the downstairs member rooms of Hollywood’s Magic Castle, and in a few San Diego venues near the convention center, like The Gathering Restaurant and Lounge in Mission Hills. When asked, I sometimes joke and say I broke my finger wrestling Hillary Clinton. That usually gets a chuckle, but it’s true.
In 1990, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the wife of Arkansas governor William “Bill” Clinton, but few people knew their names because President Clinton wouldn’t be elected until 1992. The Hillary Clinton I knew was the three time undefeated Louisiana state wrestling champion at 145 pounds, a fierce beast who would have impressed even Big Daddy.
The joke about that Hillary – though never to his face – was that he was like a boy named Sue in Johny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” who “grew up tough” and “grew up mean” because of his name. 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 and captain of the revered Capital High School Lions, and any jokes about his name were made respectfully and never within hearing distance.
Hillary was born in mid-October of 1971 and began kindergarten at age 5. He turned 6 a month later, 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 (possible because Louisiana was the last state in the United States to raise the legal drinking age to 21), and he had been shaving since the 10th grade.
Referees check for clean-shaven faces at ever weigh in, because a few wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive like sandpaper or a steel Brillo pad; which, if you’ve ever had a Brillo pad rubbed across your face, hurts more than you’d expect. 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 crossface without needing to cheat. If someone grabbed his leg, he crossfaced the hell out of them and they either let him go or would be so distracted by pain that Hillary could spin behind them and score a takedown. If you wore braces, like I did, his crossface would shred your lips if you didn’t wear a mouthguard.
He was only 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller in two years. 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.
For three years, Hillary had been captain of the Capital High Lions, a 100% African American school located near the downtown state capital building. Like a lot of downtowns back then, interstates had cut through neighborhoods and created pockets of persistent poverty. The neighborhood around Capital was criss-crossed by the elevated interstates 10 and 110; I-10 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, but the misnamed I-110 only went from the downtown Mississippi River bridge to a row of petrochemical plants 30 miles north of Baton Rouge.
The dead-end I-110 passed the Baton Rouge International Airport, Glen Oaks High, and the turnoff to Zachary High, where my cousin Jason went to school and my great-uncle, Big Daddy’s little brother, Joe Partin, was football coach and principal. It stopped just before the split that led to either either Scotlandville Magnet High School or Fort Pickens State Park, site of the longest battle of the civil war. (If you continued past Fort Pickens, you drove along miles of pine forests and passed an old paper mille, then reached the quaint plantation borough and retirement community of Saint Francisville, which was only an hour upriver from Baton Rouge by boat). All downtown neighborhoods changed after the interstates cut through neighborhoods and the civil rights acts of the late 1960’s forced segregation; white families with resources moved to neighborhoods with less crime and school districts funded by local taxes, like Zachary and St. Francisville, and what remained downtown was a cycle of poverty that produced the hairy terror I knew as Hillary Clinton.
I lived near Belaire High School, about twenty miles southeast of downtown. Other than wrestlers, no one I knew ventured near Capital High. Their gym wasn’t large enough to host a tournament, but they proudly dubbed their small nook the Lion’s Den and hosted around three or four dual meets every season.
Over a few years, most Baton Rouge wrestlers would have stepped into the Lions Den at least once. Like a lot of schools, including Belaire, wrestlers shared a gym with the basketball team. Wrestling mats are split into three hefty segments that take a small team to unroll. Every day, small schools with shared gyms spent the beginning of practice unrolling the mats, taping the seams, and mopping them with fungicide; and the end of practice, teams cleaned and re-rolled the mats to clear the floor for the next day’s gym class. Capital’s mat stood out because their wrestling mat was a faded and duct-taped purple and gold mat donated after LSU’s team disbanded in 1979, when the Title IX law required equal numbers of males and females in collegiate sports, and about 100 wrestling teams nationally were rolled up and put away. Overnight, Baton Rouge had a surplus of expensive wrestling equipment and dedicated coaches. Capital and Belaire High were two lucky benefactors of Title IV, because both of our programs began in 1980.
The first thing you saw as you approached the Lion’s Den was a hand-painted sign above the doorway, large gold letters against a black scroll that said welcome to the Lion’s Den. Inside, tufts of asbestos dangled from their rafters. The walls were painted maroon to match their singlets and warm-up hoodies, and students had painted over the maroon with gold and green murals of lions and kings with crowns. The maroon paint was so faded it was a close approximation of LSU’s deep purple mats, and the residual gold lettering somewhat matched Capital’s murals.
Like most wrestlers I knew, I first thought the Lions were paying tribute to the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade, because we had little to no exposure to Ethiopia and the Lion of Juddah. By my senior year, I thought they were modeling the lion’s den from the Book of Daniel. That made sense, because wrestlers, like Daniel, fasted before facing a pack of lions; he did it for faith, we did it to make weight, but the analogy was obvious.
Hillary led the pack. He would be at the head of the Lions lineup as they trotted onto the mat to warm up. His 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. The rest of his team followed in a row beginning with their 103 pounder and ending with their 275 pound heavyweight, like a line of purple hooded Russian Matryoska dolls but with their 145 pounder placed in front.
The Lions trotted onto the old LSU mat and jogged in a circle while stomping their feet in unison and remaining eerily silent. Every team had its own warm-up ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the contrast of their vocal silence against the musical echo of their feet echoing in the gym. Their foot 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 with their left foot on every forth step, like the 1 of a 4 step beat: ONE two three four, ONE two three four… The echos reverberated in the small enclosed room and we could feel the beat in our chests while we waited our turn to warm up.
The Lion’s spectators filled their relatively small set of worn wooden bleachers and stomped their feet on the one with Hillary and his team. They rented cheap houses that had once been built for the middle class, or small apartments in the eight unit rectangular brick buildings that dominated their neighborhood after I-110 was built, but they radiated more pride than any suburb school I knew. Every time spectators stomped on the one the stands would shake and rattle, loose screws would squeak, and flakes of paint would fall off the bleachers. No one seemed to notice the derelict stands other than visiting teams, who were more used to modern gyms without asbestos and quiet spectators.
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. For about two minutes, the den became a church; there’d be no stomping or squeaks from the stands, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat.
When it came time to compete, 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 wrestling mask for kids who competed with a broken nose. A hockey mask is rigid and covered in holes, but a wrestling mask is padded to be soft on the outside and has 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. It was so hard to miss that I assume he began wearing it in 1989, when I first saw him step on the mat with it and he pinned me a minute and twenty six seconds later. He was one of only three wrestlers in the Louisiana to wear one that season. 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, not Hillary’s, because practically every person in Baton Rouge called me by my nickname, Magik. But I thought about the irony every time Hillary and I faced off.
I had tried to wear a mask after another wrestler bloodied my nose early in 1989. I could breathe more easily in it than with the silicone mouthguard that protected my lips from being sliced aparrt, but I couldn’t see clearly through the two eye holes so I abandoned it. Instead, I began to strengthen my neck muscles using Belaire’s football team’s weight room. It was a double-edged sword, because a stronger neck didn’t reduce the pain; the more you resisted, the greater the pain and the longer it lasted. But it was worth it, and by January of 1990 I was holding off all three rounds and loosing to Hillary by a few points instead of being pinned. The city tournament would be our 8th and final match.
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 second tallest flight of stairs you could run up in all of Louisiana. The first is inside of LSU’s Tiger Stadium, which we all knew you could see from atop the state capital.
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 around Saint Francisville, which was named after the patron saint for kindness to animals by slave owners who didn’t see the irony.
When we toured Fort Pickens, we’d see stumps of trees on display with two cannonballs embeded on opposite sides, one from the north and one from the south, and we’d watch reenactments of the battle that lasted almost a year and a half but simplified into ten minute shows led by men whose great-grandfathers had fought in what some of them also said was the war of northern aggression. The state capital museum didn’t have those reenactments, but it had plenty of cannons and cannonballs and bullets, and it showcased how the officers of that long battle learned to be leaders, emphasizing how bravely they fought to preserve their way of life. A few trinkets with the rebel flag were for sale in nearby stores that said: “Heritage, not hate.”
Like most kids, we didn’t think much about what we saw other than having a day away from classrooms to enjoy being outdoors in springtime. I don’t know what Capital high kids thought. Most schools toured in Mardi Gras season, which lasted an entire month each spring and shifted dates depending on when Easter fell. Everyone wanted to get outside when the typically muggy southern Louisiana weather was still mild. The landscaped state capital grounds would be ablaze with red azaleas, and the air would be filled with the sweet sent of jasmines, and we’d walk past those fragrant gardens, poke fingers in bullet holes, peek at the old war school, and tromp up the 49 outside steps, one step for each state in the union when the capital was built. At the top, at least one kid would turn around and toss his hands up like Sylvester Stallone did on the steps of Philadelphia’s capital in the first Rocky film.
Once inside the tower, we’d split into groups of about eight kids and squueze 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 at point-blank range in front of the elevator, and of Long’s bodyguards shooting the alleged gunman, a Baton Rouge man named Carl Weiss. His corpse had almost 60 bullet holes, and some people believe Long, who only had one bullet hole, was shot by a bodyguard in the chaos. Long died in 1935 at the beginning of his presidential bid against incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who incorporated many of Long’s ideas into The New Deal after winning his reelection. We were told that Huey Long was the first senator assassinated; the second was Bobby Kennedy, who was shot and killed in 1968. Coincidentally, Bobby was also at the beginning of his presidential bid.
President John F. Kennedy, as everyone knew back then, was shot and killed on 22 November 1963, allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native who had trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee. Like The Kingfish’s alleged assassin, Oswald was shot and killed and never stood trial. But, Bobby’s assassin, the redundantly named Sirhan Sirhan, was captured alive, tried, and sentenced to life in prison, where he still sits to this day.
Teachers would tell us historical tidbits like that while we waited for the elevator, and I went on that tour with three different schools and teachers so it stuck in my mind more than the history lessons I mostly ignored in class, despite not focusing on the teachers. Like most kids, I was more interested in the bullet holes. We couldn’t finger them because a plexiglass sheet protected them, but we’d stand beside them and the mural of Long’s last moments while we stood, bored, and waited for up to half an hour for our turn in the elevator. Had I known then what I know now, I would have taken the stairs.
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 and were next to a sign pleading for people to not toss pennies over the edge. 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 loved the old war school and he drained the swamps near downtown to build the modern LSU campus and model it after a quaint Italian town, but with massive sprawling stately oak trees draped in grey Spanish moss. He couldn’t get state legislators to fund a new football stadium, but he convinced them to fund dorms for athletes, and the dorms he built happened to be in an oval shape and looked like a Roman colosseum with a football field and 80,000 stadium seats inexplicably in the center. One of Long’s brothers owned the construction company that built the dorms, and no one else noticed the inside until it was completed.
Baton Rouge revolves around LSU football. On game day, Death Valley becomes one of the largest cities in Loiusiana. Almost 90,000 fans concentrate on the bleachers, and up to thirty thousand tailgaters are outside around BBQ pits roasting whatever the opposing team’s mascot is, like pigs for the Arkansas Razorbacks and alligators for the Florida ‘Gators. People said you could see Death Valley from space, a glob of purple and gold specs concentrated in an area the size of a few football fields. It’s impossible to miss from atop the capital building, which, from our perspective, was as high as we could imagine being. Huey Long’s brother, the equally quirky Governor “Uncle Earl” Long, a man committed to an insane asylum while in office and therefore could pardon himself, was so enamored by our capital that when visited Manhattan he flamboyantly told reporters about how tall our capital was, as if the towering skyskrapers behind him didn’t exist. To him, they probably didn’t.
Tiger Stadium is the heart of Baton Rouge. Like in the Lion’s Den, fans often jumped up and down in Death Valley’s bleachers, syncing with the Tiger marching band’s beat. On 08 October 1988, three days after my 15th birthday and when I skipped the game to prepare for my junior year wrestling season, LSU fans in a sold-out game celebrated a winning touchdown pass against Auburn with so much enthusiasm and for so long that the waves superposed and created a 3.8 magnitude earthquake measured on the Richter scale. It was captured by a LSU physics laboratory, and that game is still listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the only human-generated earthquake ever recorded. For all of us, seeing Tiger Stadium from atop the capital was a highlight of our youth. Collectively, we felt the pride for Death Valley that the Capital High fans felt for their Lion’s Den.
Twenty miles downriver from the capital were billowing smokestacks from a row of petrochemical plants at the end of I-110 deemed Chemical Alley. 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. It was more than 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, connecting international ports like Miami and New Orleans, second in size only to New York’s harbor, to the rest of the country.
I was told that every thing on every shelf in America had spent time in the back of a Teamster’s truck. Teachers told me my grandfather had run the Teamsters like Huey Long had the state, and they did it with the same smile as when they talked about how Tiger Stadium was built. The Teamsters always supported teachers union strikes, threatening to shut down Louisiana’s economy if state legislators didn’t do what Big Daddy asked.
Back in Hoffa’s day, the threat of a national Teamsters strike slamming the American economy to a halt scared senator and future president John F. Kennedy, chairman of the U.S. Labor Commission, so badly that he began focusing on ousting Jimmy Hoffa from power. After Kennedy became president, he appointed his little brother, Bobby Kennedy, a fresh Harvard law school graduate, to be the U.S. Attorney General with only one goal: get Hoffa.
To my teachers, and probably to most of Louisiana, my grandfather and Hoffa were versions of the Kingfish they knew and remembered. They were always excited to have a Partin along on field trips and would ask me about my grandfather. My response always got a chuckle: I pleaded the fifth amendment.
Sometimes, while waiting for the elevator beside Huey Long’s bullet holes 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: white, black, Creole, and a few Asian. In high school, I’d learn that they wore multi-colored hoodies because they were from different schools and part of the downtown all-city wrestling camp.
From camp, 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; that’s the route wrestlers would take to run the state capital steps. I followed the same route when I became one of those high school wrestlers. Invariably, Hillary would already be at the capital. It’s not cold in Louisiana, snowing only once every decade or so, but we’d all be dressed in layers as if running in Antartica. A few, like Hillary, would add a layer of plastic. The heat and trapped sweat saps your strength, but it’s a balancing game; extra sweat means fewer laps up and down the steps. Only the wrestler knows their balance between an extra layer in one hand versus an extra hour in the other.
Once, I saw Hillary running up and down the steps. His face was hidden in the shadows of his hoodie, and he was wearing plastic bags and spitting into an old 16 ounce Gatorade bottle. He was chewing gum salivate more, shaving off a persistent pound by not swallowing his spit. That probably saved him a few laps up the steps or gave him an extra half hour of sleep.
USA Wrestling rules changed in the mid-1980’s and allowed two extra pounds for each weight class after January 1st of each season. The idea was to account for growth spurts after the Christmas break, and January 1st was close to the midpoint of a four month wrestling season. USA Wrestling didn’t want kids starving themselves to stay in the same weight class. Though we competed in what was called the 145 pound class, by March of 1990 every time Hillary Clinton stepped on the mat he was a 147 pound hairy terror.
I never learned his average weight, but I assume he was around 154 pounds most days. 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. There wasn’t a gram of anything wasted on Hillary. Even his hair was cut as tightly as an army buzzcut, an uncharacteristic style back then.
I was the opposite. I was born on 05 October 1972, which meant that I was four years old when I began kindergarten in 1977. I was 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; I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16, and by the city tournament I would have been 18 and able to vote and buy beer; and, because I hit a growth spurt at 18, I’d be 5’11” and around 190 pounds. Instead, I began my senior year as a 145 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 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. 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 wasn’t broken yet, was already scarred and knobby.
I had never shaved and didn’t need to. 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.
My only saving grace 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. In high school, after my dad went to prison in 1986 for selling marijuana, coincidentally the same year Big Daddy was released early, I augmented my leg strength with runs in capital steps and laps up and down the Belaire football bleachers. On a few lucky occasions, I’d ride with a teammate and we’d sneak into Death Valley when no one was there, and we’d run up those bleachers a few times, jumping up and down at the top as if the Tiger Marching Band were playing just for us.
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. 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.
The difference between Hillary and me is obvious in hindsight. Coincidentally, in the mid 1980’s a research scientist in Canada noticed that professional hockey players 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.
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 re 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; the gap between those who have and those who don’t have grows based not astrology dictating our lives, as Gladwell wrote, but on the initial advantages between kids five years versus four years old, which is 20% more time on an exponential scale of mental and physical growth.
Gladwell coined this phenomenon “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 like David and Goliath, a book about how little companies outmaneuver big ones, and Blink, those brief moments of intuition that outperform teams of experts. 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; others create their abundance.
I knew none of that in 1989. But I knew that if I had anything in abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity. Some people called it persistence, grit, or determination; my mom called it stubbornness, a trait she said I inherited from my dad. I had lost all 13 matches of my brief, three week stent of wrestling in the 10th grade, the year after my dad went to prison and I was floundering to adapt to school again. I began my junior year, the year of LSU’s earthquake game, not much better. But, by the end of 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 but would start over anew in the bottom bracket, where we’d claw our way towards third-place finals. A year of fighting in the loser’s bracket was like putting in 10,000 hours of work.
I began my senior year with 124 matches behind me. I was only 16 years old, but, by a quirk in Louisiana law, I was a legal adult like Hillary, though I couldn’t vote buy beer like he could.
I grew up in and out of the Louisiana foster system. My dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, began to be arrested every few months for selling drugs when he was a high school student in the early 1970’s. Because of his name and federal oversight while Hoffa was still in prison, he was never convicted. My mom had a nervous breakdown and fled the state, and Judge Pugh of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District removed me from their custody. In 1976, soon after Hoffa vanished, Judge JJ Lottingger overrode Judge Pugh, who had alleggedly committed suicide just after removing me from Partin custody, and gave my mom custody. My foster parents appealed, and I floundered back and forth for another few years until my dad and mom split custody of me between Louisiana during the school year and Arkansas over summers, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter breaks. When my dad went to prison in 1986, I bounced around again.
In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I petitioned the new family court judge, Judge Robert “Bob” Downing, for emancipation from 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, there was a lot of media focus on us. After Big Daddy 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), stepped in to fill his shoes. Louisiana depended on Teamsters so much for the economy that they took over as the Partins already discussed weekly in every state newspaper, and though Doug and Keith were no where nearly as notorious as my grandfather, his name followed theirs in almost every articles. Joe and Jason were in the news, too, but that was mostly the sports section. I hadn’t placed in a tournament yet, so I was never in the news other than a few articles about magic and the local magic club, The International Brotherhood of Magicians Ring #178, The Pike Burden Honorary Ring, where I was the youngest member and the Sargent at Arms.
I had been in the newspaper a lot that year. Not just the black and white sections, but in the full color Sunday “Fun” section, highlighting my magic shows. I had been living with my coincidentally named Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo earlier that year, when Uncle Bob was in and out of Our Lady of The Lake Hospital (the same hospital Huey Long had died in), and I spent my time performing for the children’s wing using a version of David Copperfield’s Project Magic, a program that tried to give kids in hospitals confidence by teaching them skills healthy kids didn’t have, and to help their physical rehabilitation and hand-eye coordination by practicing sleight-of-hand. I was, in my mind, a big deal; and I wanted to show Judge Bob that I was not like my family; I was a good person who volunteered in his community, and proof was printed in the Baton Rouge Advocate’s aptly named Fun section. Uncle Bob had passed away from spinal cancer, and Auntie Lo was a lush who was passed out by four every afternoon, and the only way I could get to and from wrestling practice was if I were emancipated and could sign my own contracts and get a driver’s license without parental approval.
Because of Louisiana’s system, a form of France’s Napoleonic code an unique among all the rest of the United States, Judge Bob could waive the waiting period to reach my dad and get his approval for my emancipation. I said I hadn’t seen my dad since he was released from prison a year before, and I brought in a few stamped postcards to prove it. Every one was in black ink and in his meticulous, perfectly aligned script handwriting; if you glanced at them, you’d think they were done by a perfectionist, especially if you read the first line where he began by telling me how much he loved me. But when you read them, they quickly evolved into rants about what an asshole Reagan was.
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; it was unconstitutional! he penned in his immaculate handwriting. Fuck him! it said. One card from Arkansas showed fog over the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains, and it had a cryptic message saying he’d get his high school diploma and go to law school and show the world how the war on drugs was unconstitutional bullshit, driven by the fundamental Christian whackos who put that asshole Reagan in power.
I told Judge Bob that schizophrenia ran in my family, and he didn’t doubt that. In a year’s worth of cards, not one implied my dad would ever return to Louisiana, and there was never a consistent address or phone number to reach him. Judge Bob used those postcards to justify waiving the waiting period for my dad’s signature, part of the leeway granted him by the Napoleonic system.
He called a meeting with my mom, who was in another bout of depression and didn’t contest the petition. Considering how sluggishly things creep along in a muggy Baton Rouge summer, Judge Bob allowed my emancipation in only a month. By comparison, in 1976, when Judge Lottinger regranted my mom custody of me, I languished in the foster system for another three years. Because of experiences like that, I was pleasantly surprised when a month after I began my petition Judge Bob stamped my petition with the raised seal of Louisiana, a mother pelican nesting baby pelicans, and sprawled his name across it and scribbled the date, 03 August 1989.
The Baton Rouge Advocate used my entire name in their weekly court summary, perhaps so there would be no confusion with my cousin. It said:
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.
That blurb from the Advocate is archived online decades later at TheAdvocate.com, and my match against Hillary is also now archived the Louisiana State High School Athletic Association, LHAA.org. Like most of my family history, this much of my story is public knowledge and once you know which Jason Partin or Edward Partin you’re reading about. The story tells itself if you filter out the rest. What follows is my perception as a 16 year old legal adult who knew enough about my family to leave it however I could.
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- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975 ↩︎