Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II
“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.
“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“
Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966
I’m Jason Partin. Hillary Clinton broke my left ring finger on 03 March 1990. It healed askew, and to this day my two middle fingers part like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute in Star Trek.
That Hillary Clinton was not Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first lady of Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Bill “Bubbha” Clinton became president in 1992, leading his wife to becoming a household name, a focal point of feminism after Bubbha received fellatio from an intern in the oval office and was impeached, a presidential candidate in 2008, and the United States Secretary of State under President Barak Obama from 2009 to 2013. The Hillary who broke my finger was the returning three-time undefeated Louisiana state champion at 145 pounds, and winner of the Baton Rouge city tournament gold medal after he pinned me one minute and twenty seconds into the second round.
My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, a convicted felon sentenced to prison in 1986 during President Reagan’s war on drugs; he’s currently a public defense attorney in Louisiana.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous as the surprise witness who sent Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1966 after he stood up in court in August of 1964, only ten months after President Kennedy’s assassination, and said that Hoffa implied he should bribe or intimidate a juror in an otherwise minor state-level case against Hoffa. In his second autobiography, penned from prison, published just before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot on 30 July 1975, Hoffa’s first sentence about my grandfather summarized him as well as I could: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged, man who could charm a snake off a rock.” He was portrayed by the ruggedly handsome actor known for his charming smile, Brian Dennehy, in 1983’s film “Blood Feud,” where the legendary actor Robert Blake won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage,” and a daytime soap opera heartthrob whose name I can never recall portrayed President Kennedy’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who, in 1968, had been, coincidentally, also shot and killed.
The first time I remember seeing Hillary Clinton was a Wednesday evening on 08 November 1989, four months before Big Daddy’s funeral was swarmed with reporters and covered in national news, where the New York Times and Los Angeles Times simply called me one of Big Daddy’s surviving grandchildren. I must have seen Hillary before, because he was captain of the Capital High School Lions, an inner-city public school a mile from the new Baton Rouge state capital, under the intersections of Interstate 10 and 110 in a pocket of urban poverty. Their team was 100% African American and they ritualistically wore dark maroon hoodies that shadowed their faces. I was a caucasian kid from Belaire High School who didn’t realize I was seeing history unfold, but I recall our first match so well because of my eventual broken finger and the seven beatings Hillary laid upon me the rest of that season.
That Wednesday was the first dual meet of Louisiana’s 1989-1990 wrestling season. Immediately after school let out, the Belaire Bengal wrestling team piled into the sliding side door of Belaire’s big blue Chevy van used by all the teams too small to need the school’s football bus.
I stood by the door with my hand on the handle. I was waiting for our 275 heavyweight, a big bellied rapper named Dana “Big D” Miles, to squeeze in to the bucket seat beside Michael, our 135 pounder and Belaire’s Junior ROTC captain. He was an alert and cheerful third-year wrester whose father had been one of only a handful of African American special forces officers in the Vietnam conflict, a point brought up in conversation because the conflict had ended in 1975, the same year Hoffa vanished, and by 1989 it was common for 12 to 15 year old kids in a working class neighborhood to have dad’s who were Vietnam veterans. To my knowledge, I was the only son of a drug dealer.
Michael and I were each the size of one of Big D’s legs. Coach, a man about Michael’s size, was in the driver’s seat with his seat pulled all the way forward to accommodate D, who laughed and patted his bulging belly as he squeezed in. He had jogged in a trash bag that morning and not eaten yet that day, and made jokes about having to cut weight for wrestling after gaining it for football season. His jokes were delivered in a hip-hop rhythm intentionally mimicking to the then-famous duo, The Fat Boys, in self-depricating self-awareness that was so obvious we all loved him for it. He tried to change his nickname to Lil’ Cool Fila Ice T, as if swallowing every 1980’s rapper and vomiting a collage of their names, but we still called him Big D.
(Michael, Big D, and our 152 pounder, Miasha, were the only African Americans on Belaire’s 15 kid team, something I never noticed until I searched my mind for something instantly remarkable about our team decades later, soon after they posted on an online obituary for our coach, Coach Dale Ketelsen, who would pass in 2014, and our team reconnected to reminisce. Coach had a way of making people color blind.)
The Bengal’s co-captain, a terse 140 pound returning state silver medalist named Jeremy, was in the front passenger seat with a stoic countenance that bordered on an annoyed scowl. His long lanky legs folded atop the glovebox so that he could lean his back rest forward. Jeremy’s had moved to Belaire from a wrestling-focused town in Pennsylvania when he was in the 10th grade and settling in the working class and rapidly evolving neighborhood of Belaire, and he instantly dominated the fledgling wresting team. He was our captain the year before. His dad was a Teamster under my uncle, Doug Partin, though Jeremy and I never discussed that and I don’t know if Jeremy ever used my last name around his family or knew the connection himself.
Coach was a former marine, and he kept his head rotated towards us and stared silently as he mentally counted to make sure there were 15 kids inside, the way a platoon sergent would count men before and after a battle without letting them know they were being counted. I glanced to the front and read of the van to ensure no one was being left behind, a habit I picked up from Coach the year before, then sat beside Big D and twisted my shoulder so I could slide the door shut.
We pulled out of Belaire’s gym parking lot and turned onto Tams Drive towards Florida Bulevard, the long road through town that predated the interstates and was jammed with traffic lights and strip malls. The Bengals cheerfully bantered about cutting weight and told the handful of freshmen and new wrestlers war stories from the year before. Jeremy pulled his hoodie over his head, reclined his backrest, and stared at road ahead. I folded my knees onto the back of his seat like he had folded his against the glovebox.
Eight and a half miles later we saw the 39 story new state capital building, an art deco gem built by Louisiana governor Huey Long during the Great Depression perched on a slight rise above the Mississippi River levee and the old state capital. We all knew it well, because practically every middle school class tours the capital and the old war school museum on its grounds. Coach turned onto North Street and passed the North Street Church, which had a cemetery potmarked with bullet holes from northern soldiers who reached Baton Rouge after winning battles in Mississippi. Baton Rouge was riddled with souvenirs of the civil war; a state park north of us was Fort Pickens, site of a year-long seige and the longest battle of the civil war, and to this day civil war enthusiasts use metal detectors to scour the thick pine forest around the battlefield and find bullets and cannonballs and occasional rusty but coveted muskets.
We passed under the cars and trucks rumbling across the elevated I-10, and a few blocks later we turned on 23rd Street and parked parallel alongside Capital High. I flung the door open the moment Coach put the van in park, and was practically squirted out by the pressure of Big D against my left arm. I stood by as everyone piled out, stuck my head in to make sure the van was empty, and slammed the door shut and followed the team. Coach and Jeremy led us into Capital’s gym.
I had never been to Capital before. It was in what most people considered an undesireable and crime-ridden part of town, separated from the gardens and museums around the capital building by I-110. Like a lot of downtowns in the 1960’s and 70’s, the new interstates split neighborhoods and created pockets of poverty that persist today and ironically have streets renamed after Martin Luther King Junior, a point nailed home by practically every comedian over the past few decades, from Richard Prior to Eddie Murphy to Dave Chappel.
President Eisnhower, a WWII general with his face immortalized on old silver dollars, had spearheaded the American interstate system and modeled it after Germany’s Autobahn, which he saw as the reason Hitler’s army quickly mobilized and dominated Europe’s relatively sleepy forces. All overpasses were made tall enough to allow military convoys, and a persistent myth of my generation was that strips of the paved interstate were enough to land military aircraft in emergencies.
The interstates shifted American commerce shipping away from barges and railways, and coincided with the influence and power of Jimmy Hoffa’s 2.7 Million Teamster truck drivers who delivered almost every product on every store shelf in every town in America. I-10 was one of the first, staring a few miles from Florida’s Atlantic coast, passing through the port of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and stretching almost 2,500 miles before ending within sight of the Pacific coast and the Santa Monica pier. A few years after my first trip to Capital neighborhood, soon after the internet began and www.Mapquest.com was launched, I plotted a map from Capital High to Santa Monica and it was only three lines: get onto I-10, go a couple of thousand miles, and exit onto Santa Monica Boulevard; for a military convoy, that would allow rapid defense of either coast.
I-110 was a short jaunt built to access the Baton Rouge airport, the one where Lee Harvey Oswald trained under the alias Harvey Lee, and the relatively new row of petrochemical plants north of the airport. Big Daddy had been influential in having I-110 built, and his Teamsters bypassed the airport, rail lines, and ships of Baton Rouge’s Mississippi River port to truck processed oil and plastics past the state capital and onto I-10 and into the veins and arteries of America.
The consequence to neighborhoods like Capital were universally considered a net positive impact on America’s economy, and as a token gesture streets were renamed after Martin Luther King, which led to generations of comedians like Richard Prior and Eddie Murphy quipping that every Martin Luther King Junior Bulevard was in a part of town where even they rolled up their windows and locked their doors. Baton Rouge didn’t rename streets, but a MLK community center was put near the intersection of I-110 and I-10. I grew up feeling connected to the endless stream of 18 wheelers rumbling across the elevated interstates that created shadows over downtown homes, believing the eminent domain was a good thing. I never went to the MLK community center, and I never asked anyone from Capital what they thought about eminent domain.
The first I thing I noticed was a hand-painted sign above Capital’s double gym doors in large yellow letters and against a black scroll that said: “Welcome to the Lion’s Den.” Inside, they had laid out a faded purple and gold LSU wrestling mat donated after the team disbanded in 1979, one of around 100 collegiate wrestling teams that shuttered like movie theaters during Covid after the controversial Title IX law passed and required equal numbers of male and female athletes in collegiate sports. The quick solution was to drop unprofitable male-dominated sports with negligible spectators, like wrestling, then slowly start building women’s sports teams.
Coach, a former olympian and assistant coach at Iowa, had been recruited to start LSU’s program in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated by a lone sniper in Atlanta in a way so similar to President Kennedy’s murder that they shared a then-classified congressional assassination report. Though Coach led the LSU Tigers to be ranked 4th in the nation, defeating even legendary teams like Iowa in dual meets, the Tigers became a casualty of Title IV. Coach donated their mats to schools around town, took a job as Belaire’s driver’s education teacher in 1980, and started our wrestling team with his youngest son, Craig Ketelsen, as our first wrestler and then our first state champion, who today is on the board of the Louisiana High School Athletic Association that keeps records of tournaments like the one where Hillary would break my finger four months later.
When Craig was at Belaire, Coach raised enough money to replace Belaire’s mats donated mats with a new blue and orange mat to match our uniforms, but Capital hadn’t raised enough funding to replace the old LSU mats. Their gym walls were painted maroon to match their singlets and warm-up hoodies, but the paint was so faded that the maroon was a close approximation of the faded purple, and the yellow on their murals matched the worn gold. Tufts of gray asbestos dangled from the rafters like the Spanish moss that hung from Baton Rouge’s stately oak trees on the grounds of schools with names like Glen Oaks, and former slave plantations with names like White Oak and Oak Alley. I read on Wikipedia that the laws back then said to leave asbestos in place rather than risk touching it.
The windowless and small gym that was shared with wrestling and basketball trapped the smell of their sweat. They had no air conditioner to help dry out the walls and wooden bleachers, and I could smell hints of mold an mildew, a putrid odor familiar to all of us in the hot and muggy deep south. Their locker room was a windowless prison cell that made my heart beat faster and added a bit of anxiety, something I’d later describe as mild claustrophobia when I suffered through 18 hours crammed in the middle of 62 paratroopers packed into C-130’s like sardines in flying cans. The suffocating smells of Capital’s locker room prevented me from breathing deeply, the same way sweating paratroopers vomiting into motion-sickness bags would prevent me from relaxing on the way to missions.
Though malodorous, Capital was immaculately clean and we had no problems stripping down to our singlets for weigh-in. Some had to strip to underwear; Big D had to strip naked and exhale before stepping onto the scale for a second time. The referee signed off that we met weight, then we donned our hoodies and gathered in the gym on our side of the mat.
No one from Belaire venture into Capital neighborhood, so we had no parents or spectators in our corner. But Capital’s gym was packed with people who could walk there, a combination of parents, former wrestlers, and community supporters. They wore the same green, red, and yellow colors of Capital’s murals. I had yet to learn about Ethopia’s Lion of Juddah on their green, yellow, and red flag that symbolizes strength and pride in Africa, and I thought the Lions were paying tribute to the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade.
By my high school prom a few months later, after having read parts of The Old Testament, I would evolve to think The Lion’s Den was named from the Book of Daniel, where Daniel was tossed into a den of lions to test his faith, because many wrestlers, myself included, fasted to cut weight before facing a pack of lions, just like Daniel had fasted so he could settle his mind and listen to God. In reality, most people probably didn’t know why they did what they did, they adapted to their peers the same way every school seemed to have a unique hair style or type of clothing because of some trend started by someone that no one recalls. No one looking at 1980’s hair styles and clothes would see a lot of deep thought put into our choices, and I still see that phenomenon today, when mullets and parachute pants have come back into style, though it’s more spread out due to social media and national influencers rather than localized individuals.
Hillary led the pack. The Lions trotted onto the mat to warm up in a line that began with their 103 pounder and ended with their 275 pound heavyweight, like a line of purple hooded Russian Matryoska dolls, but with Hillary moved to the front. He wore his maroon hoodie low over forehead, and his dark face was hidden in the shadow.
The joke about Hillary, though never to his face, was that he was tough because he was like Sue in Johny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue,” the one written in the 1960’s by the poet and cartoonist Shel Silverstein about a boy whose dad who abandoned his family after naming Sue and based on Shel’s childhood, saying that having a girl’s name would make Sue defend himself against bullies and grow up tough and mean and able to stand up against a harsh world.
But Hillary wasn’t mean. He was terse and scowled all the time, but he wasn’t mean. He was an focused athlete, putting in extra hours by running up and down the 39 flights of stairs in the state capital on weekends, doing pushups while other kids sat in bleachers, and staring intently at every match of his Lions he oversaw, learning from nuances most of us missed. He was the oldest wrestler I knew, already 18 years old in high school and able to vote in presidential elections and legally buy beer (still possible in 1989 because Louisiana was the last state to raise the legal age to 21, a testament to the New Orleans tourism industry, local democracies, and the several state legislators who represented parishes with Anheuser Bush distribution centers.)
I would later hear that Hillary was born in mid-October of 1971, a few days shy of being one year before I was born, and that he began kindergarten at age 5. That meant turned 6 a month later, the oldest and biggest kid in kindergarten. He hadn’t grown taller since the 11th grade, and by the time we were seniors in high school all of his calories went towards building stronger, denser muscle.
He was 5’4,″ and his burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers. His thighs bulged with muscles, and his lats were a hands-width wider than his narrow waist. To fit into Capital High’s skin-tight maroon wrestling singlet, he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed; it was taut across his chest, but hung in loose folds around his waist.
Hillary had been shaving since the 10th grade. Everyone in the same weight class would stand side by side to weigh in at tournaments, where referees checked for clean-shaven faces. Unscrupulous wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive, like course sandpaper, but Hillary shaved his face smooth each morning before competing. He kept his body hair natural, though, probably because his forearms were covered in Brillo pads like we used to scrub cast iron pots, and his chest hair was already a mat of thorny spines that hurt like hell when he put all of his weight into pinning you. He was so strong and skilled he didn’t need to cheat. His face scowled when waiting in line with the rest of us to weigh in, and he rarely spoke to us.
I was the opposite. I usually wore a sly grin, though that’s more of a facial feature I inherited from Big Daddy; our cheekbones are high and pull up on the corners of our mouths, making it look like we’re smiling even when we’re not. (Brian Dennehy did a fine job of mimicking that smile in Blood Feud, and it would become his signature look in the following decades, but for me and a few of my cousins it came naturally.)
My smile was part of my genetic features, but I was also a genuinely cheerful kid. Physically, I epitomized the awkward gangly years of a growing teenager, and I was the youngest senior wrestler in Louisiana.
I was born on 05 October 1972. I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, four years old and a tiny smidgen compared to some of the other boys. Had I been born a few days later, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and held back a year to ripen before starting school. That would have led to me beginning my senior year at 17, and by wrestling season I’d be like Hillary and able to vote and buy beer. And, knowing what I know now, I would have been 5’11” and around 190 lean pounds of muscle; instead, I walked into The Lions Den that Wednesday as a 16 year old, 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 hidden inside of size 11 wrestling shoes bulging like a stuffed boudin sausage skin. 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; it wasn’t just because of the fad from 1980’s heavy metal glam bands, it was also to hide an 8-inch scar on the back of my scalp that was, and is, about a finger width thick and curved like a backwards C. I had a few other small scars on my head. My mom had adapted my haircuts in the 1970’s to hide it, and because I associated with the heavy metal crowd I continued to choose a mullet.
My voice had already changed, so at least I didn’t squeak when I talked. I had never shaved and didn’t need to. 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 scraggly black hairs hidden by my underwear.
My Achilles Heel, the weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was my lack of upper body strength when standing. I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary. My 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 manure to his marijuana fields hidden far from roads, and I used my leg strength to shoot quickly in the first moments of a match. I used my physical conditioning to cling to leads while an opponent fatigued themselves trying to score. When they shot on me, my lanky legs sprawled up and pushed their heads down with the added force of long levers giving me an advantage; I owed my meager winning record more to physics and guidance from Coach than strength and talent.
I was taller than Coach but shorter than Jeremy. I stood beside them with my blue hoodie lowered so I could see more clearly, exposing a curly mullet that had only recently grown out enough to seem auburn again, and watched Hillary lead the Lions onto the faded mats to warm up.
The Lions remained eerily silent as they trotted across the wooden gym floor in single file, like a disciplined military unit efficiently moving a double-time. The small windowless gym echoed with every stomp of their feet, but softened once they trotted onto the faded LSU mats. They jogged in a circle and stomped extra hard on every fourth step to create an intentional rhythm that reverberated in rhythm popular with musicians like George Clinton and James Brown, who said funk is alwys on the one of a four 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.
I called people in the bleachers spectators, but at Capital they were participants. They stomped in unison with the Lions, and their ramshackle bleachers shook and rattled on every one-beat; loose screws would squeak, and flakes of paint would fall from the bleachers and land on the gym floor.
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. When they finally stopped circling and sprawled into a tight circle, they landed with their faces close together on a silent cue none of us heard. The spectators calmed down and gave 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 was Belaire’s turn, we pulled up our blue hoodies and trotted onto the mat silently and without being synced. It was the first time in our history we filled an entire squad, and no one had thought about a routine or ritual yet. Jermey led, I was second, and 13 Bengals followed in whatever order worked out that day.
We split into two groups like a flock of birds following two leaders, and each group split again into small teams that each warmed up uniquely. We naturally fell into zones of proximal development, small groups of three to five wrestlers who could all learn something from each other, and that zone would change every week as everyone evolved. Our warm-up routine was like a flowing stream that was never the same when you saw it again.
(The zone of proximal development is a concept that came from the Soviet Union after WWII, when 30 Million Russians died and left millions of orphans to fend for themselves in massive gymnasiums without much supervision but with Soviet researches carrying clipboards; toddlers naturally formed small groups, developing their own languages and patterns and mixing in and out of other groups to where give-and-take was balanced. Coach had a master’s in education theory and, because of his role to compete against the Soviet national wrestling team in 1960, at the height of the cold war and while then Senator John F. Kennedy was building his presidential bid, was knowledgable about all things Russian; he had mentioned the zone of proximal development offhandedly, and though Jeremy and I didn’t understand how the Bengals flowed into groups we never questioned it. Even Jeremy and I would weave in and out of being in each other’s groups each week, naturally flowing into zones where we could both learn and teach within the same group. For the next 20 years of Coach’s tenure as Belaire’s coach, the Bengals never developed a routine, unless you consider the Zone of Proximal Development a flexible routine.)
Each group methodically drilled single leg shots, doubles, stand ups, and sprawls, the building blocks of any great wrestler. Different zones practiced these moves with increasing levels of speed and intensity, but all with the intention of waking up muscles after a long day of sitting in classes. After warming up, the team gathered beside Coach in Belaire’s corner of Capital’s mat, and everyone in the Lion’s Den watched as Jeremy and I stepped onto the mat to meet Hillary in the center.
Belaire was the only team in Louisiana with co-captains. Hillary cocked his head and stared at both of us with stoic indifference, more like he processing new information rather than pondering why there were two of us on his mat.
The referee spoke softly to us and reminded us to wrestle fairly. Jeremy and Hillary slapped hands in a modified handshake to show the spectators we would take the message back to our teams; I held out my hand, but Hillary turned before slapping it and I don’t know if he had noticed. We returned to our corners and matches began at 103 pounds and proceeded up each weight class. Jeremy sat beside Coach and I stood by the team, because rules restricted the number of people on the mat corner to two, and Jeremy was the senior co-captain.
I began warming up when the 129 pounders shook hands, because you never know how quickly matches can end and there was only the 135 and 140 pound match before mine. Hillary did, too, and coincidentally we warmed up almost identically.
Hillary kept his hoodie on and slipped headphones into its shadows. I put on my Walkman headset and pushed play on my wrestling mix tape. I don’t recall which song started, but it was probably either Lunatic Fringe by Red Ryder, copied the soundtrack to 1985’s wrestling film, Vision Quest, the one where Mathew Modine played a high school senior cutting unhealthy amounts of weight to take on Shoot, the undefeated Washington state champion; or Metal Health by Quiet Riot, copied from their tape of the same name. I used to start a session lifting weights with Metal Health, and probably out of habit it got my heart pumping and my head focused, like the conditioned response of Pavlov’s dogs.
I don’t know what Hillary listed to, but for some reason I believe that his headphones were silent, serving more as a social que for people leave him alone so he could focus on both his team and his warmup, a technique I’d later use when I wrestled for the army and in college that I believe I learned from observing how Hillary lead his teams while competing himself.
We began whipping our arms around our chests and stepping up and down as if we were climbing steps on the state capital or hiking up an Ozark mountain. Then we shook our heads and hands and feet faster, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly. Hillary did jumping jacks and squat thrusts, I skipped a rope, like Mathew Modine in the opening scenes of Vision Quest. My breath was calm, my heartbeat only slightly elevated and in a positive, intentional way; focusing on wrestling overrode my claustrophobia, and I timed my skipping rope to the rhythm of whatever was playing on my tape but never fast that it wasted energy. A thin sheen of sweat formed on my arms and legs, and behind the scenes my body began pulling energy from meager stores of fat instead of muscle glycogen, words I used from some of Coach’s training manuals but didn’t understand yet.
Jeremy pinned his opponent, which triggered Hillary and me to move towards the mat. Hillare took off his sweatshirt and handed it to a teammate, then surprised me by donning a 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 a 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. Baton Rouge didn’t have a hockey team yet (it would be years before The Kingfishers were formed), but we all knew about hockey masks because of the slasher film series Friday the 13th and the killer named Jason. Only two other wrestlers in the state used a face mask. Hillary’s nose wasn’t broken like theirs was, but I assumed the mask protected him from cross-faces and, I suspect, added to his reputation as a silent killer on the mat.
By 1989 so many people called me by my nickname, Magik, that I was probably the only one who saw the irony of wrestling someone in a hockey mask. I smiled a bit at that thought, a genuine smile, which tells me today how ignorant I was of Hillary’s skills that day. I felt confident that after a summer of training with Jesuit once a week, and my two weeks in the downtown wrestling camp, that I’d likely win against a school as small and unknown as Capital. Through some foresight, the coaches ensured that smaller teams wrestled in dual meets first, saving new wrestlers from the humiliation of being slaughtered by established and well funded teams like Baton Rouge’s Catholic High Bears or New Orleans’s Jesuit High Bluejays.
I donned the state mandated headgear and took a few minutes to adjust the straps so they’d press tightly over my ears and protect them against cauliflower ear, that wrestling disease that comes from tight headlocks that destroys cartilage. It was my first match since the 1988-1989 season ended the previous March, so I hadn’t settled on a setting yet; and, because we often mixed up headgear, it was a good idea to always test the fit before stepping on the mat.
I barely understood the muffled sound of the ref calling us, but I knew the routine and what to expect. I trotted over and stood in the center and leaned forward to face Hillary. The whites around his dark brown eyes were barely visible in the shadows of his face mask. We squatted into our stances and slapped our right hands as a modified handshake to acknowledge we were ready.
The referee blew his whistle and I instantly shot a low single. Hillary sprawled, cross-faced the hell out of me, spun behind, drove my face into the mat, threw in a half-nelson, and turned me to my back before I realized how much it hurt. He rose up on his toes and thrust all of his weight through his spiked chest and onto mine; he cranked up on my head with his burly arm and pressed nose pressed into his hairy armpit.
I could feel blood gathering in my nostrils, but there was enough air flowing to smell his dank underarm odor in the brief moment before my shoulders touch the mat. I was so focused on the smell and pain of his half-nelson that I didn’t feel my shoulders touch, and I was shocked – and relieved – when the referee slapped the mat beside my face.
We stood back up in the center, and the referee held Hillary’s hand up in the air. The applause from Capital’s bleachers was deafening, even with my padded headgear. I could feel the reverberations in my chest as they stomped their feet and hollered. I was dazed. Hillary had pinned me in 22 seconds; it had taken me longer to adjust my headgear before the match.
Hillary seemed unfazed, as if the outcome were inevitable and he merely had to go through the motions before having his hand raised. It was almost a compliment that he took time to warm up for our match. Over the next four months, I noticed he treated every match as if it were his last and the most important thing in his life, and that’s when I saw that though he wore a headset I never saw him push play on his Walkman, and his gaze was always focused on his teammates while he warmed up.
I returned to our corner. Coach grasped my right hand in his and squeezed my left tricep in a vice-like grip with his left hand, looked up into my eyes, and sincerely said, “Good job, Magik,” just like he had 87 times in the past year and a half.
I had, based on my skills and what I knew then, done my best and therefore had done a good job.
I had more sweat from warming up than wrestling, but I accepted the hand towel Jeremy handed me to wipe off sweat out of habit. I took it and stepped behind him and Coach. Rules only allowed two people on the corner of the mat, so I sat on the front row bleachers in a spot the other Bengals had saved for me and leaned forward to watch the next match.
Hillary strolled walked back to Capital’s corner and began prepping their 152 pounder for battle against Miasha, a junior and second year wrestler who never cut weight because he preferred to have fun with everything he did, and he cheerfully placed in the top four or five of most tournaments with a full belly from lunch. He hopped off the bleachers, removed his hoodie, and donned his headgear as he trotted onto the mat without warming up.
I watched Miasha wrestle from my perch and with as much focus as I could muster, but I was lost in thought and kept glancing at my hand towel. I used it to dab the drops of blood I felt building in my nostrils, a result of Hillary’s brutal crossface, and kept checking to see when the bleeding stopped. My nose hurt. To feel what Hillary’s crossface felt was like, rotate your head to one side and try to hold it there with all of your strength, and have someone push a baseball bat covered in abrasive Brillo pads across the bridge of your nose and force you to look the other way.
My mind was split between Miasha’s match, the towel, and two years back in time, to my first match in the 10th grade, when I was a mere 123 pounds and easily made the 126 pound category. It had been against Capital, too, part of the same schedule that put us against them early each season. I had shot first then, just like I had against Hillary. That opponent also sprawled and crossfaced me and pinned me in a half-nelson. Like school decor and hairstyles, wrestlers pick up trends from their peers.
Their coach was a mountain of a man who had never wrestled but signed up to coach their team, so a lot of the team’s technique came from Hillary and the few former LSU wrestlers who volunteered with teams around town, wrestlers who would have been state champions in high school and then coached to national rankings in college. In my first match, my nose bled so much that I couldn’t breathe. That was before the Regan administration acknowledged the AIDS epidimic that began in 1985, so rules hadn’t changed to end a match and the referee let us continue. I panicked, probably due to mild claustophobia, and forced my own shoulder to the mat to end the suffering; I had promised myself to never quit again, and now I was wondering what to do when my best wasn’t good enough to stop someone as strong as Hillary. I was only partially focused on being co-captain, something I’d eventually overcome, but on that day my mind was as much in 1987 as it was on my job, aching nose, and slight anxiety from the small windowless Lion’s Den.
Capital’s 152 pounder pinned him towards the end of the first round. My nose had stopped bleeding by then. I kept the towel in my hands so no one would notice the maroon colored blood on my towel that, ironically to me, matched Capital’s hoodies and, eventually, would match the maroon colored Airborne beret I’d wear a year later.
After Capital’s heavyweight pinned Big D in the third round, both teams lined up and walked beside each other, slapping hands to congratulate each other and completing the circle from when team-captains shook an hour and a half before. I don’t recall the overall team score, but Capital won about 70% of the matches. Still, it was a victory. Coach reminded us that this was the first time in Belaire’s history that we had a full squad, and that momentum carries teams forward.
It was November, so days were short and we rode back to Belaire illuminated by street lights and traffic signals along Florida Boulevard. The deep south was still warm despite it being fall weather in most of America, a reason that plotters of Kennedy’s assassination chose Dallas to shoot the president in an open convertible, a subtlety of planning unrealized by people from colder climates back then. All of our windows were cracked open to allow air flow and flush away the stench of our sweaty post-match uniforms. Everyone joked with each other and talked about what they’d do differently next time.
The Bengals were chatty on the rides home, and even Jeremy would loosen up and joke around about how each person did. We talked about what happened on the mat and how we could improve. Miasha said he couldn’t help me, because he had blinked and missed my match.
I don’t know why Belaire evolved to chat about our matches on rides home, but I believe that immediate constructive review helped us improve. A famous Harvard research study years later would compare learning from three groups of people, one that only reviewed material immediately after a class, one that only reviewed before an exam a week later, and one that reviewed somewhere between; unequivocally, immediate review improved performance. Almost exactly a year after that match, during the first few battles of Desert Strom, my team of paratroopers would do the same thing after ever firefight. The infantry calls it an After Action Review, shortened to AAR, and it’s an essential part of small team growth used by practically every combat force in the world, especially small special operations teams who learn from each other like the Bengals learned through zones of proximal development. I would use a form of an after action review professionally for the rest of my life, and I’d use that Harvard study to accelerate through my college courses after the army, but I always looked back at the ride back from Capital as the first time I saw the wisdom of immediate assessment, when details were fresh in everyone’s mind and the motivation to improve was strongest.
I had a lot of time for internal reflection. My nose was sore and I was staring at the blood-stained hand towel. I ran my tongue across my front teeth, which had had braces until only three months before, and I thought that at least I didn’t have to wear a mouth guard any more; that was one thing for which I could be grateful.
I held the towel in my left hand and made a tight but relaxed fist with my right hand with the thumb pointed up. I pushed it down across my left forearm and felt the rigid force push the left hand and its towel down. I rotated my thumb sideways and pushed again, but instead of my left arm moving down my right wrist deflected upward; that was one of the first lessons I learned from Coach, whose signature move was also the half-nelson, which is probably how it spread from the LSU wrestlers to schools like Capital. The effect of hand orientation is so pronounced that you could try it now and instantly see the benefit, allowing you to instantly gain what seems like ten times the strength. Subtitles like hand orientation clarify the overused and ambiguous bromide of working smarter, not harder.
I stopped cranking on my arm and stared out the window without seeing anything, trying to see how I could wrestle more wisely while I worked towards getting stronger. I performed an after-action review inside my head. I had shot well, and didn’t see anything to improve my shot or setup. I needed to be stronger, I knew. And faster. Or, I was still telegraphing my shots, taking a breath and tensing before I moved. The martial arts master Bruce Lee said his secret was being both alert and relaxed at the same time, which is harder than it sounds and is another way to be smarter at whatever you do.
I sat with my face rotated away from Big D and squished against the side window, and began to relax, if only from fatigue of having cut weight all day and sat in a tiny room all evening. I watched lights from strip malls and po-boy shops fly by. I thought to myself: I’ll set my alarm 20 minutes earlier and add more pushups to the morning’s workout before I head to school.
Coach turned away from Florida Bulevard by the strip mall filled with bright lights from the Vietnamese business district with hand-written signs illuminated by flood lights and advertised things like: “Bon-Mi, a Vietnamese po-boy.” Baton Rouge had dubbed Little Saigon after Saigon fell in 1975 and refugees fled to the similar weather and seafood-and-agriculture economy of Baton Rouge. Belaire had a hard time filling teaching positions because locals had gradual left to newer subdivisions, motivated by annual reports of the increasing number of Asians and African Americans in what was once a predominately caucasian neighborhood, and many of our classes were led by a stream of substitutes and Teach for America volunteers. It was by luck that Coach accepted the role as our driver’s education teacher and assistant football coach in 1980.
Coach turned onto Tams drive and pulled into our gym’s parking empty parking lot, where parents were parked under the lights and waiting to take their children home. Everything and everyone looked different to me, and it wasn’t the lighting. Only three hours had passed since we left, but I was a different person and seeing things from a new perspective. The stream appeared the same, but it wasn’t.
I waited until all the Bengals left, strapped on my canvas Jansport backpack, straddled my motorcycle, donned my helmet, and pushed the ignition. The light illuminated Belaire’s two-story dark red brick wall of our relatively large gym. Coach waved from beside the big Ford F150 he used to haul mats between schools for tournaments. I waved back and rode out of the parking lot and onto Tams and towards home.
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