Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II

Partin Reign May be Short-Lived

Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.

‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.’

‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’

The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.

‘Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.’

New Orleans State Times, 27 January 1968

Coach didn’t know it, but when he lent me his keys to Belaire’s gymnasium and offices I made copies. He lent them to me so I could wheel the massive television and VCR machine from the shared coach’s office and use it to play Vision Quest for new wrestlers at the first day of practice. He wanted to watch it first, and told me he’d meet me after school. I used that time to jog over to Little Saigon and make copies.

Like Baton Rouge, Southern Vietnam was a hot and humid seafood-producing region and had been a French colony. When Saigon fell in 1975, hundreds of Vietnamese families fled and settled in, of all places, Belaire subdivision. They worked in our seafood industry and to set up shops in strip malls along Florida Boulevard, fare enough from wealthier subdivisions that rent was cheap and regulations were lax. Their shops were known to sell practically anything. They were industrious, classic examples of what Americans touted as hard working, but they weren’t accepted by the working class families around Belaire back then; it was probably too soon after the Vietnam conflict.

One Halloween, a local Vietnam conflict veteran with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder, though it was still called shell shock or battle fatigue back then) shot a Vietnamese kid who knocked on his door one Halloween and was, ironically, trying to blend in by dressing as a GI Joe soldier and trick-or treating. Several other shootings made national news, and Belaire became known as an undesirable neighborhood. For whatever reason, white families blamed the Vietnamese for violence around Belaire and had begun moving away; houses became cheaper, and more ethnicities moved in. Though few of us of any race interacted with the Vietnamese community we all shopped there, and we especially liked the Bon Migh sandwhiches made with their version of French baguettes and were advertised with hand-written sign that said: “Bon Migh (a Vietnamese Po’Boy)”

Besides Vietnamese Po’Boys, their shops sold practically anything to anyone. Teenagers could buy cigarettes and bootleg cassette tapes, rent porn, and have keys copied despite “do not copy” being engraved on the original. Ironically, they also sold t-shirts and hats that catered to American veterans and teenagers who looked up to them, shirts with skulls wearing the beret of Airborne berets and sprawling, elaborate letters that said: “Death from above,” or some with a skull and beret with criss-crossed M16 machines guns and plain letters that said: “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.”

In the middle of the day on any weekday, you’d see bearded veterans wearing those t-shirts or faded green army fatigue jackets, smoking cigarettes both inside and outside of a windowless bar in Little Saigon’s strip mall. Beside the bar was an arcade that sold single cigarettes for a quarter, and we’d skip school with a handful of quarters and make our mark on the world or to save it by playing Space Invaders and Galactica and stand outside with the vets, who would often buy us beer and talk about making our mark on the world.

Inside the arcade, only three letters fit the screens to leave your mark for the world to see. Shortening Magik to Mag didn’t sound right to me, so I used my birth initials, JiP; no one knew the real identity of JiP, who held the top score in Centipede and Donkey Kong for a while. When games began accepting up to six letters, I used JipBit, a play on the new 32-bit video games and funnier to me than using Magik. Besides, if all of my teachers called me Magik, it would be hard to explain how my name was so well known in the arcade.

On the day I copied Coache’s I didn’t play video games or linger with the vets. I jogged back to Belaire before anyone would notice I was gone. That afternoon, in the same time slot already allocated for wrestling practice when season would begin, Coach and I watched a bootleg copy of Vision Quest together.

Vision Quest was barely known outside of wrestlers. It paled in comparison to the box office success of similar movies like The Karate Kid, Rocky, and of course Star Wars. All mainstream movies versions of the heroes journey that dominated films after 1979’s Star Wars and George Lucas shared the formula: an orphan or kid with a struggling parent stumbled upon a mentor, overcame a stronger opponent, and returned to help others do the same. But Vision Quest was different, because the protagonist lacked a mentor and was self-motivated. It spoke to me the first time I saw it at The Abrams house on their laser disc system, and I bought a bootleg VCR version for what was probably only $2 soon after.

Vision Quest was quickly forgotten in the wake of other films, but its saving grace was that it stared Madona before anyone knew who she was. When she became famous, Vision Quest was rereleased and advertised as a movie staring Madona, which is probably why Coach wanted to watch it before letting me show it to the freshmen. She only has a small, quick scene where she’s a bar singer and sings a slow song for the wrestler and his older girlfriend (an analogy to Lea I had already noticed). Soon after that song, they drove off and fooled around in a discrete scene; the sex was downplayed because the wrestler emphasized having burned 150 calories and said it was a great way to cut weight; and, as I noticed when I first watched it as a 13 year old, when she said she liked strong hands he subtly kept showing his disproportionately large hands to her every time he gestured.

The film was based on a book by the same name that I read after watching it. John Irving, the famous author whose book was made into The World According to Garp in 1982 and starred Robin Williams as Garp, a high school wrestler who becomes a coach, said Vision Quest was the best book about wrestling ever written. Irving, a high school wrestler who coached a team in Virginia, was in the USA Wrestling Hall of Fame. But even with that endorsement, Coach wanted to watch it before lending me the VCR to show it to the team. It took about an hour and a half, the time we were about to both start staying after school for practice, anyway. In that brief time, we saw a condensed version Lauden’s senior year and all of the lessons he learned, like how to stop a nosebleed, counter a chicken-wing, and how to cut unhealthy amounts of weight in a short time. And because Lauden was studying for medical school and talking about what was happening with his weight loss and sexual urges, we learned – or at least memorized – a bit of biology, too.

Coach nodded and said it would be fine to show Belaire’s kids, though not the middle schoolers. Typical of almost everything Coach said, he never mentioned Vision Quest again.

We wheeled the massive television back into the coach’s shared office. He reached up and clasped his hand on my tricep and began walking towards the football team’s weight cage. Coach’s grip was like a thick steel vice locked on my arm, and I followed without much choice.

“Listen,” he said when we reached the cage. It shared a gym with the basketball and wrestling teams, and Belaire’s faded blue mat was in three sections and rolled up against the wall so basketball players could use the full court. The cage was locked during school so no one would use it unsupervised. He paused to pull his keys out of his sweatsuit pocket.

He opened the padlock, swung the gate open, and locked the gate against the cage so it couldn’t accidentally swing shut. He put his left hand on my shoulder again, raised his stubby right forefinger and looked up into my eyes.

He had soft grey eyes that matched his whispy hair, and I saw a tiny bald spot forming atop a head so flat you could rest a can of beer on it. His finger was about a foot from my face, and his stubby arm bulged with muscles like Popeye’s. He held eye contact silently for a few seconds, then said:

“If you’re going to be co-captain, I’d like you to earn a B average.”

I nodded and said I’d try my best. Coach nodded back and released his hand. We never spoke of it again.

State law required varsity athletes to maintain a C average, and most star athletes I knew were given grades to keep them playing. I had failed about a third of my classes in ninth grade and a few in 10th, around the time my dad and I were hauled out of his cabin by armed deputies, and my grades were only part of why I couldn’t wrestle that year; I was also suspended for using vulgarity in school, though I don’t recall what I said and was probably just repeating something my dad and I joked about all summer.

I rejoined the team my junior year and barely earned a C average, and that was with repeating classes I already taken but failed in 9th and 10th grades. I never saw the point of school. Both of my parents had dropped out in 11th grade, and Big Daddy never obtained any degree yet was the most powerful man in Louisiana. Newspaper pundits and the state attorney general said, “If Edward Partin had a college degree, he would be governor,” which only sounded good to people who respect titles and don’t realize that it comes with more limitations and oversight than the real people in power.

None of the Vietnamese shop owners and seafood packers had American diplomas, and most barely spoke English yet were doing better financially than the unemployed white people around Belaire; those people perpetually complained that their jobs were being taken by people willing to work harder, and newspapers kept quoting unemployed white people as saying a high school diploma doesn’t get you much in America any more. All of the bearded vets smoking outside of the bar had high school degrees, or at least said they did, and my teachers, most of whom complained about their jobs, all had college degrees. I never saw anyone in those groups I wanted to emulate. Had it not been for wrestling, I would have dropped out of school.

I was voted team co-captain at the end of my junior year, which is why I was helping recruit middle schoolers to build our freshman team that fall. Coach had never seen a wrestling co-captain before, and he was as surprised as I was when it happened. To put that in perspective, Coach, like John Irving,was in the USA Wrestling Hall of Fame. Unlike Irving, who admitted that he’s in the hall of fame not because of his talent but because of his fame, just like Vice President Dick Cheney and a lot of other famous people who happened to have wrestled, Coach was a lifelong wrestler who was revered internationally. When he was named Wrestler of the Year, a tribute to Coach by another legend wrote:

“Coach Dale Ketelsen has forgotten more about wrestling than any of us will ever know.”

They may have rephrased that sentence if they knew Coach would develop Alzheimer’s years later, but it was meant as a compliment spoken among wrestlers who knew more about wrestling than I ever would and still looked up to Coach. He was an all-American, olympian, high school wrestling coach, assistant collegiate wrestling coach at Iowa, and, after LSU recruited him to start a Louisiana wrestling program in 1968, he was head coach of the LSU Tigers; by the 1970’s, Coach’s Tigers were ranked fourth in the nation, earning top team scores in tournaments and defeating Titans like Iowa in dual meets. Coach grew up in a family of Iowa wrestlers and surrounded by legends like Dan Gable, the more common known wrestling Iowa and olympic team coach, whom Coach brought down to Baton Rouge to lead wrestling camps in the 1970’s. There was no end to stories about Coach, and that’s what led him to becoming USA Wrestling’s Man of The Year; that’s where the accolade about forgetting more than most people knew about the sport was written.

And yet with all of that experience, the only other time Coach would hear of a co-captain was when LSU revitalized their team in the mid-1990’s, and the first batch of wrestlers used the same voting system Coach used at Belaire.

Most teams elect their captains. To facilitate the process, Coach used a ranked voting system similar to the Most Valuable Player award for team sports and the Outstanding Wrestler award for wresters who stand out in a tournament. Every voter ranks their top five or so choices, and no one seems upset when the winner is announced. Ranked voting has been touted as a more democratic system than a two-party, winner-take-all system that seems to frustrate and alienate 49% of voters every four years, and currently Maine and Oregon are testing if ranked voting could replace their older methods. I’m unsure if they’ve solved the problem of having two winners.

Almost inevitably, teams elected their best or most winning wrestler as captain, and the Belarie Bengals captain for two seasons was Jeremy Gann, who, like Hillary, was a terse but talented wrestler. His working class family had moved to Louisiana from a wrestling hub in Pennsylvania, and they settled in Belaire subdivision and Jeremy stepped into a team with a few years of experience and was captain for the 1988-1989 season. Jeremy won second in state at 135 pounds in 1989. That was the same year Andy and Timmy both placed in city and regionals, but they were graduating and wouldn’t be there for the next season, so they weren’t eligible for captain. There were other, better wrestlers than I was, but the team voted for me just as much as for Jeremy; but even that shouldn’t have resulted in co-captains.

It turns out that everyone ranked either Jeremy or me first or second, I ranked Jeremy first and didn’t include myself in my choices, and Jeremy only voted for himself. Coach wrote down the results on a clipboard full of paper he always carried, checked the math twice, and said, “Hmm.” Belaire ended up with co-captains for the 1989-1990 season, one of them the team’s most talented wrestler and me, probably the most average of the dozen or so wrestlers who returned after summer and the few new freshmen who wanted to see if wrestling was for them; it was for those freshmen that I borrowed Coach’s VCR. In my mind, they weren’t middle schoolers, they biding time until they were freshmen, but they weren’t middle schoolers; in a way, I saw myself in a similar situation with the army, which is probably why I agreed to not show middle schoolers but didn’t think about the in-betweeners that would show up.

Because Coach was a man of so few words, I listened to everything he said. I was co-captain because of one day my 10th year, after I was ineligible to wrestle but allowed to participate as a “Red Shirt,” a person who can attend practice and support the team but can’t compete. I felt privledged to say I was on the wrestling team, and Lea and I would show up at Belaire-hosted dual meets and tournaments. At the annual Thanksgiving tournament, I was sitting with her midway up the bleachers with my baseball hat cocked to the right side. Coach came up the steps and smiled at us and slowly crept his hand to the bill of my hat, then slowly rotated it forward. He said that should help me see the mats better. He walked back down and Belaire didn’t fare well; it was still only the third or fourth years since more than two kids had shown up. After a few losses, Coach came up to Lea and me again, and asked, “Why are you here?”

“To support my team, Coach,” I said.

He looked me in the eyes, held up his forefinger between us, and said:

“No you’re not. You’re up here with this lovely young lady.”

He twisted his body and pointed his finger down towards the mat and said:

“If you want to support your team, go down there and support your team.”

I did. Lea sat with me on the first row bleachers, and I leaned forward and rotated my hat backwards so I could simultaneously see both the mat and the roof-high basketball scoreboard we used to keep score for each match. Over time, when a Bengal was on deck I made sure they weren’t distracted that they missed their name being called, and when they came off the mat I would have a dry towel ready so they could wipe the sweat from their eyes. I saw when they succeeded and when they faltered, and I listened to Coach and Jeremy give advice that was unique to each person and not what I had heard in the few group practices I had attended.

I listened to whatever Coach said. I didn’t always do it, but I thought long and hard about why he said things before making my choice. He had said he’d like me to earn a B average, and I said I would try. I did. I didn’t listen to his advice to sit in the front rows and show attention, a version of his sitting by the mat to show support, because I felt more comfortable in the middle rows (where I could also practice card tricks under my desk without teachers noticing). I was unconcerned with whether or not I had a B or a C, as long as I graduated and met my army contract. And though I requested the college fund, I was indifferent to college and simply putting money aside in case something changed. I and was an in-betweener, a person neither here nor there, on my own vision quest to find where I wanted to be and trying to envision the type of person I’d like to become.

I wasn’t sure what that person would be like yet, but I hoped it would be a taller version of Coach. Everything good about me seemed linked to him. It was because of Coach that I grew to have the strongest cradle in all of Southern Louisiana, and that began the summer in between my junior and senior years of high school.

When Uncle Bob got sick and Auntie Lo was too sloshed by 3pm every day to drive me to and from practice at summer camp, Coach found a compromise. He didn’t take me to camp, but he took me on errands to different wrestling programs all over southern Louisiana. Once a week, he picked me up in his old brown Ford 150 pickup truck, the one we knew well from helping him load rolled up wrestling mat sections and shuttling them between schools for tournaments in winter and spring. But in summer his truck was filled filled the truck with mops, 5 gallon buckets of fungicide, and bags of off-white headgear that he bought in bulk and dropped off at schools with even less of a wrestling budget than Belaire, mostly smaller rural schools along the 80 mile River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

We’d stop at Region I schools like Brusly and Clinton and chat with their coaches, who were often former high school wrestlers or simply adults who signed up for the job and weren’t given much budget. Coach made sure they had fungicide and mops and spare headgear for wrestlers, and then we’d hustle off to the next school. Headgear was mandatory by then, but many kids would be too embarrassed to admit they couldn’t afford it and Coach didn’t want lack of a few dollars to stymy their future.

“I started a company,” he once told me on the drive. The windows were down despite the muggy air blowing on our faces, but the noise was negligible because Coach rarely approached the speed limit when driving, and the speed limit was a paltry 45 along most of the narrow and winding River Road.

“A small company,” he said. He pushed the turn signal lever up and slowed down and got into the turning lane that would take us to Clinton. He stopped, turned, and continued.

“It let’s me buy equipment at wholesale prices,” he said. “They only sell to companies.”

He kept both hands on the wheel and shrugged and said, “I figured, with a company, I could buy more with the same amount of money.”

“That way,” he said, “I could give more schools what they need.”

We pulled into Clinton’s parking lot and he lowered the gear lever into park, turned off the truck, looked at me, and said, “Rising waters raise all ships.”

Growing up in a port town, that was probably the first metaphor that made sense to me. Phrases like “raining cats and dogs” were fantastic, and bromides like “work smarter, not harder,” were useless. But everyone rising simultaneously was clear. For years, I had watched the Plaquemine docks raise and lower water, and knew that all ships did, in fact, rise equally.

Coach opened his door and slid onto the parking lot pavement. I climbed out and helped him carry a bucket of fungicide into Clinton’s gym. He shook hands with their coach and chatted a couple of minutes, then we walked back to the truck and I climbed back in. We drove with levee on our left and houses on our right, and we took the take potholed roads that dipped into small towns and led to schools with only two to three hundred students total, often combining middle and high schools to share a building. About two and a half hours to three hours after leaving Belaire, we reached New Orleans stopped at St. Paul’s in Covington, a relatively wealthy suburb of New Orleans.

Coach would almost always stop at St. Paul’s to visit his son, Coach Craig Ketelsen, who was head coach of St. Paul’s and on a few state athletic committees. Craig was Belaire’s first and only wrestler when Coach started the team in 1980, and in 1981 he was our first state champion. He had wrestled at 171 pounds, and as an adult he towered over Coach like my family towered over me. He had a broad smile and was always happy to see his dad and say hello to me. They’d chat about the state’s athletics and Coach would, when asked, offer his thoughts. Like how my family groomed each other to run the Teamsters, Craig was gaining respect in state athletic committees and Coach would sometimes share stories of how he got USA Wrestling started in Louisiana.

St. Pauls never needed supplies and we never lingered; Coach and Craig would shake and chat quickly and wave goodbye, and Coach would take me over to Jesuit High School, home of the Bluejays.

Jesuit was a massive and ornate Catholic school with three tiers of wrestling teams. There varsity team was away competing in and winning a few national freestyle tournaments, but their second and third string teams were training all summer in one of their gymnasiums, a wrestling-only room that could have swallowed any one of the Region I schools along the River Road. They had two new Bluejay blue mats permanently laid out, and the ceiling rafters were decorated with rows of state championship titles dating back to practically when Louisiana was still a French colony. 

Their coach, Coach Sam, was as diminutive as Coach but had been a nationally ranked collegiate athlete and still competed in masters-level judo tournaments. He was half Japanese and a bit younger than Coach, and from a distance they were the same height and had a similar stance, relaxed but centered and able to move in any direction at any moment. I never heard what they chatted about, because I was too busy getting beaten by the second-string Bluejays.

I could hold my own on with their third string, but the second string would throw me around with moves that seemed more like judo than wrestling. I learned to turn face down in midair instead of being pinned, and they punished me for that by slipping half nelsons on me and pushing my face across the mat until it was rubbed raw and as bright red as the pimples I kept hidden under my t-shirt. I learned to fight the half-nelson with pure perseverance, and I quickly learned that whatever brand of fungicide Jesuit used, it didn’t sting mat-burn like whatever Coach’s company bought and gave away.

My only strength remained a strong crossface and long legs that I’d sprawl all the way back to Clinton high school whenever a Bluejay tried to shoot on me; I’d crossface them and spin behind them and wrap my long arms in a cradle around their neck and one leg. I’d clasp my hands and, like most inexperienced wrestlers, try to control them by muscling my arms together. It sometimes worked against third string wrestlers, but invariably a second string wrestler would break my grip and escape.  

On the drive back one day, Coach moved his right hand off the steering wheel and held it up, not like a handshake, but with his thump pressed against the side. The windows were up because we were driving around 55 miles an hour along I-10 to get home, so it was easy to hear him even though he only glanced at me to see if I were looking before looking back at the road and speaking into the windshield.

“A wrestler looses 15% of their strength with their thumb out,” he said.

He moved his thumb out to emphasize the point.

“To have a stronger grip,” he said, glancing at me, “keep your thumb in.”

His thump slammed back against his first finger.

He put his hand back on the steering wheel and watched the road and hummed softly. I practiced clasping my hands with thumbs by the sides and trying to yank my hands apart by thrusting my elbows away from each other. My grip was noticeably stronger the first time I tried it, a rare instance of instant gratification that’s fun to show freshmen just starting out in wrestling or judo; you can try it right now faster than it took to explain it.

On our next trip, I was holding a Bluejay in the cradle as he kicked and kicked, but I was unable to roll him to his back and pin him. I was still squeezing and trying to use muscle I didn’t have. Coach appeared and asked us to hold still.

“Put your left knee here,” he said, pointing to the Bluejay’s lower back.

I did that.

“And plant your foot there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the mat across from my opponent.

“Now push with your foot and pull your hands towards your chest,” he said.

I did, and the Bluejay pivoted on my knee and rolled onto his back; he laughed at how he couldn’t stop it in the way someone laughs on a roller coaster because they feel out of control but safe.

Coach pointed to my clasped hands. “Now move that,” he said, then moved his finger to an empty spot in the air about a foot and a half from my chest, “here.”

I did, and his knee and nose were brought together with no noticeable effort from my arms. His laugh was muffled by his knee pressed against his face. I had defeated my first Bluejay. I kept getting drug across the mat by Bluejays that summer, but whenever I clasped the cradle I usually got them to their backs and often pinned them. They learned to avoid the cradle and I got better at it and at countering throws. By mid summer, our ships were floating higher; when a few wrestlers would come in for summer open gym days, I’d share what I learned and help lift those ships, too.

After Uncle Bob died and I joined the army, I was with Coach on our last drive along I-10 before school began and was crumpling a sheet of newspaper in each hand. The floorboard of Coach’s passenger seat was piled with tightly compressed wads somewhere between the size of a baseball and a golfball. Coach had told me that was a way he and other athletes developed grip strength back in Iowa. The main way was farm work, grasping and tossing bails of hay or shoveling pig slop all day, but whenever they had down time they exercised whatever they could. I used the handgrips my dad had bought me at school, but I had grown stronger and though they were the extra strong type I duct taped them together; to stop them from squeaking and alerting teachers what I was doing under my desk, I oiled the springs. Per the instructions that came with the grips, I would alternate holding the grips together as long as I could to develop a “vice like” grip, and squeezing and releasing them as many times as I could to develop a “crushing grip.” Coach said that was fine, and told me a lot of kids when he was in school just used newspapers.

Had they had grips, he said, they probably would have done both. He handed me his newspaper from that morning, and I had been crumbling every copy I found since. Monday to Sunday wasn’t too challenging, but the thick Sunday paper led my forearms to tremble by the end; as a treat, I saved the color comics to the end; they would rattle as I held them them with shaking hands.

I saw my family in the news at least once a week. Big Daddy was released from prison early because of declining health – diabetes and an ambiguous heart condition – but that was old news’; the focus was on his return and if he was influencing Uncle Doug, who was by then president of the Teamsters, and Uncle Keith, who was a senior labor official that Doug said would take his place. The Partins were a Louisiana legacy, and the articles all mentioned Big Daddy being an all-American hero who risked his life to save Bobby Kennedy’s; on days where I saw that, I crumpled the wads extra tight in Coach’s truck and wrestled a bit harder wherever we stopped.

I was already emancipated and in the army delayed entry program, but I didn’t tell Coach; as I said, I was unsure if it would affect my eligibility, and asking Coach about the rules would tempt fate and risk what was most important to me. Other than my emancipation and the copied keys, I was transparent with him. I felt that was like Lauden in Vision Quest, using wrestling to find my role in the bigger picture, and I wanted to ask Coach things without alluding to the army and how I was able to join. I thought about what I wanted to ask while I nudged the balls of newspaper around with my untied and loosely draped size wrestling shoes. They were a size 11, snug when laced but comfortable when open, and I tried to use my big toes to bend the thin rubber soles and pick up one of the tightly balled pages that was mostly about the Partin family. I stopped fumbling with my feet and looked towards the driver’s seat.

“Coach,” I began timidly.

“Yes?” he replied, not taking his eyes off the interstate. He flipped his turn signal and we exited Oneal Lane.

“Why didn’t you try out for the olympics again?” I asked. “I mean, the guy who barely beat you was the greatest. You could have gotten a gold.”

He nodded to show he heard me but kept his gaze on the road and took a deep breath, as if trying to simplify a long story into something more like he would say.

Coach was barely defeated in olympic trial semifinals by Doug Blubaugh, a gold-medal winner in the 1960 Rome olympics who pinned all four opponents in record time, yet he only defeated Coach 4 to 3 in sudden death overtime. Had it been anyone other than Doug Blubaugh, Coach probably would have won trials and earned a gold medal in Rome when he was still a young man.

He had never mentioned his background, but I had overheard other coaches talking about him that summer. Most coaches quoted the same stories, and they all spoke of Iowa with reverence and how Dan Gable had come down to wrestling camps in Baton Rouge in he 70’s, when most of them were high school wrestlers and would have learned the same techniques as Coach. It was only that summer that I realized Coach was an olympian and almost as much of a legend as Dan Gable.

I asked him timidly because I assumed, deep down, either without realizing it or without articulating it as a thought in words, that most people didn’t want to be questioned about their personal lives. But that wasn’t Coach. He was as transparent as his truck windshield. He peered through the windshield and watched the road while pondering how to answer. I watched the wheels inside of his head crank and turn a long story into a few sentences, and I suspected no one had asked him that before.

We approached Florida Buelevard and Coach stopped at the red light. He looked at me and said, “Well, by that time I was married.”

He took a hand off the steering wheel and looked at me and shrugged with his palm held up as what he said explained everything and the answer was in plain sight on the palm of his hand. But I didn’t see it. The light turned green and he replaced his hand and turned left onto Florida Buelevard. I waited. We got up to around 45 miles an hour and he shrugged again but kept his gaze forward, and said:

“I had done my best at wrestling, and now I wanted to do my best as a husband.”

He flicked on the turn signal and eased into the right side turning lane across from the Little Saigon.

“And a father,” he said. “Craig was born by then.”

He looked back at the road and said, “I was a PE teacher. They don’t make much money. With a master’s degree I’d earn $1,400 more a year.”

He glanced at me and shrugged as if it were obvious what to do in that situation. He looked back at the road and said:

“So I started taking night classes and earned a master’s in education.”

We stopped at a stop sign and Coach looked at me and smiled and said, “And here we are.”

He turned left and pulled into Belaire’s parking lot and didn’t say anything more about college or how he got to Belaire. He went home to Mrs. K, punctual as always. I jogged over to the Abrams’s house three miles away.

Season began and I grew a reputation as having a deadly cradle. Teammates said I had a kung-fu grip, and they kept calling either me or my grip tenacious. I was still loosing once or twice a tournament and never reaching above third place. Hillary was undefeated again that year, thrashing even Jesuit’s 145 pounder. I didn’t think I could defeat either of them, but I didn’t think I could not, either; as Doug told Coach, someone has to win, and it might as well be you. Lea said that sounded detached from the outcome, like a Buddhist or Hindu who say detachment is the key to liberation, and that Coach was my mentor on a hero’s journey whether I realized it or not. She said he was right: someone would win. She added that no one knows what the future holds in its hand, so try to enjoy the ride.

I used my emancipation paperwork to get my driver’s license using Lea’s van to take the test, but then I made the worse mistake of my life up to that point and broke up with Lea because of some ill-conceived belief that I wanted to be morally superior and avoid anyone who indulged in cigarettes, booze, or sex, probably sparked by Rocky’s cranky old coach Mickey, whose raspy voice said: ‘Dames make legs weak.” Lea said she was saddened, but she practiced what she preached and it had been a good ride. She started college an hour away at Southeastern in Hammond and evolved into something like an older sister of mine who, though promising to visit home every weekend, developed friends her age with similar interests and ended up staying in Hammond most weekends. It worked out for the best. With her new lifestyle, we probably would have broken up anyway, and if that had happened during wrestling season my ranking would have suffered.

While Lea was at Southeastern, her dad helped me find, buy, and repair a 500cc Honda Ascot motorcycle, one with a shaft drive that wouldn’t need maintenance and got around 55 miles to the gallon so I could drive the 20 or so miles to the downtown training camp for about 25 cents each way.

Nothing lasts forever, and I left the Abrams house after their dad developed an aggressive cancer. Just like with Uncle Bob, his deterioration was swift and ugly; the Abrams wanted private time with just family. I heard the hint, and instantly I viewed the Belaire Bengals as my family. I still visited the Abrams and helped move their dad around, just like I had moved Uncle Bob around to clean his backside and to prevent bed sores, but I saw myself as a visitor and friend of the family, the same way I was a guest at Jesuit High School and not on their team.

I moved back with my mom, who was back with her boyfriend and out of her depression and lived about five miles away in a newer subdivision that was still in Belaire’s district. We rarely saw each other, because I was spending most of my time at either Belaire or downtown, running up and down the state capital steps, or at magic meetings with Ring #178. I’d let myself into my mom and her boyfriend’s house late at night, and I’d be up and running before dawn. On weekends, she and her boyfriend were in Saint Francisville, about an hour away, past the smokestacks and Fort Pickens civil war site and nestled along the Mississippi River among plantations that had survived the north’s iron-clad warships. The private prison there was named Angola, after Angola prison, which was named after Angola, Africa, where the slaves came from. The 1,500 person town was seeing a resurgence of bed-and-breakfasts, cafes, and restaurants that appealed to retirees who wanted an old-fashioned community. My mom and her boyfriend were building their dream home, one that was immune to valuation based on school districts and bussing, and they only had a few more months until I graduated and then they’d be free, just like me.

Wrestling season began, and on some weekends I’d use Coach’s keys to sneak in to school. There were no electronic alarms back then, just a controlled number of keys stamped “do not copy.” Sometimes another coach would be there with a few football players, baseball players, or track runners, and on those days I’d sometimes train with them just to be social with kids I knew. But almost always I’d find a day where I could be by myself. Coach had bought a 75 pound throw dummy with stubby arms to practice ducking under, and I wanted the extra practice before dual meets and tournaments began. I’d finish and walk over to Little Saigon and play video games with kids and veterans I had grown to know.

My favorite joke at that time, kept private because I was breaking into school on weekends, was: “Everyone wants out of school, but I sneak in; who’s the real dummy?” Most people thought I smiled because I had so much fun playing Asteroids and Centipede. They were right, but I had always found irony and coincidences hilarious and my smile was mostly because I saw it where others did not.

I turned 17 in October, and the name JipBit held the record on almost all of Little Saigon’s video games. Season began some time in late October or early November, a fuzzy opening day as football season wound down and basketball and wrestling geared up; like how Coach was football’s assistant coach, many wrestling coaches had other duties and the typical lax Louisiana laws let them get started whenever they could. By the Thanksgiving tournament season was in full force, and Belaire, remarkably, was consistently winning dual meets and placing in tournaments for the first time in the fledgling team’s few years of history.

I was happy to be a part in that. And I was happy to consistently be called Magik, a name so far removed from my family that I knew my emancipation was a part of me as permanently as anything could be permanent. When not wrestling or practicing, I rode my motorcyle around town in the pleasant fall weather, dodging the thunderstorms that came with hurricane season by dropping into whichever video arcade was nearby. I was, as Lea had suggested, enjoying the ride, and had yet to set my sights on wrestling Hillary Clinton; that was the future, and a wise lovely lady once told me that no one knows what the future holds in its hand.

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