Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part IV
“[Jimmy Hoffa’s] mention of legal problems in New Orleans translated into his insistence that Carlos Marcello arrange another meeting with Partin, despite my warning that dealing with Partin was fruitless and dangerous.”
“He wanted me to get cracking on the interview with Partin. In June, Carlos sent word that a meeting with Partin was imminent and I should come to New Orleans. As [my wife] watched me pack in the bedroom of our Coral Gables home, she began crying, imploring me not to see Partin. She feared that it was a trap and that I would be murdered or arrested.”
Frank Ragano, J.D., attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafacante Jr., in “Lawyer for the Mob,” 1994
By March of 1990 I was 17 years old and a few months away from basic training. I weighed around 149 pounds and fasted for two days before weigh in, and I had splurged on a fancy vinyl workout suit to replace the trash bags that most wrestlers still used; it had long sleeves and pant legs with elastic ends that trapped heat and sweat and helped me squeeze out the last few drops of weight to make 147.
The Baton Rouge city tournament was one of the largest in Louisiana because – unlike regionals and state, which try to be fair by separating big schools from small ones for titles – the city tournament hosted schools in all regions of southern Louisiana regardless of size. It was the final open tournament of the season, the last chance for some wrestlers face off against foes from the previous four months. Because so many schools attended, only the largest city schools took turns hosting.
City was hosted by the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs that year. Baton Rouge High is on Government Street only three miles from the state capital, but it was an old and respected public school from before forced segregation. It had become a magnet school for college prep with a focus on pre-medicine, part of a state program to encourage parents to send kids there instead of moving away as forced integration picked up in the 70’s.
We had a few magnet programs, like Scotlandville Magnet a few miles past the billowing smokestacks. They focused on engineering and had a few famous alumni, like the kid who invented Sim City video games and Stormy Daniels, the stripper who would settle a sexual harassment suit with President Donald Trump, but they didn’t have a sports program and they were too far away to host anything. Belaire added a magnet section modeled after Baton Rouge High’s pre-med focus, our school wasn’t big enough to host a tournament as big as city.
Baton Rouge High was also well known and a marketing draw, and they hosted more often than other schools with large gyms, and their alumni seemed to do well and linger in Baton Rouge instead of leaving, which is partly why they had such a loyal following and alumni donation money to keep improving the school. Their college placement rate was the highest of any public school, and they had a large campus that was meticulously landscaped, and that helped encourage parents and fans to fill the bleachers because it seemed like a safe school despite being so close to downtown. Their newly refurbished gymnasium was large enough to hold six mats and hundreds of spectators, and nothing squeaked when people walled up the bleachers to take their seats.
The only public school with a gym larger than Baton Rouge High was Robert E. Lee High School, a massive school near the LSU lakes named after the confederate army’s revered general. Lee High had a gym that looked less like a high school gym and more like one of LSU’s smaller dome stadiums, and the Lee High Rebels were just as fierce as the Capital Lions. Instead of jogging the state capital steps, they kids jogged around the lakes in the fancy neighborhood that paid for their school, and sometimes up and down the towering bleachers of Tiger Stadium. They did not have a magnet program and their grounds were unremarkable, but their gym was so big and the invitational was so prestigious that it sometimes brought in teams from Texas and Florida, and the Rebels would have eight mats going on at once. The city tournament wasn’t that big, but it was a close second and, to most people in Baton Rouge, more prestigious just because it was called the Baton Rouge City Tournament and only locals could participate. I came in fifth at the Robert E. Lee Invitational a few weeks before, not high enough to earn a medal but high enough to end up seeded third for city, the highest I had ever been seeded in any tournament.
I won my first two matches in the Bulldog’s gym on Saturday, both by pin, and on Sunday morning I barely beat the second seed, a senior from the Region II school Brusly High named Frank Jackson. We were evenly matched, and his coach had worked with him to stop my cradle by widening his stance as I tried to turn him. I held him in it almost all of the third round, but I was unable to roll him to his back with his legs spaced far apart and his hands pushed forward; conversely, in that stance he couldn’t stand up so we struggled an invisible battle for the entire round, trying to sense a fault open up in the other’s position one subtle muscle movement at a time. The buzzer sounded and I won by one point, 3 to 2, a slow and close match that most people said was boring to watch; but only a wrestler knows what’s happening in those six minutes, and I was proud of my win and all the mistakes I didn’t make by wrestling Frank conservatively. And I was proud of how attuned I remained to what was happening on the timer and scoreboard despite wrestling with everything I had; I used the timing to decide whether or not to take a risk, and in the final few seconds I focused instead on not letting him escape, which would have tied the match.
Coach had shown up late for my match, rushing over from another match and taking a seat next to Jeremy, which was held by our 103 pounder unil Coach returned. He glanced at the scoreboard and made a mistake, thinking I was behind a point and holding on to Frank with hopes of turning him.
“Magik!” he shouted. “Let him go!”
I realized his mistake. He wanted me to let Frank go and give him a point; in Coach’s perspective that would give Frank 4 to my 2, but I’d be prepared and could shoot before Frank recoverd and take him down to tie 4-4 or take him to his back and get back points for the win; neither woudl happen if I kept clinging to the cradle when I obviously couldn’t turn him.
“Magik!” he shouted again. He was standing up now, his wooden clipboard was clasped so tightly it curved to fit his clenched hand.
“Let – him – go!” he bellowed.
I had never heard Coach raise his voice at me, but I couldn’t let Frank go. I scooted around to face away from Belaire’s corner.
From my periphery, I saw Coach stepping forward to circle the mat and follow my face. He threw away the clipboard with his left hand, and with his right hand and in one deft motion he flung his reading glasses straight up in the air so that they carried away the cord that held them around his neck, and I saw what had made Coach such a good wrestler back in the day: in one motion he shot twenty feet across the side of the mat and slid into a position facing me again, on his knees and poised in a perfect down-position stance, ready to pounce again. He had reached the entire length of the mat faster than I could have sprinted it, and his controlled skid stopped exactly at the next corner; had he gone an inch farther, he would have broached the opponent’s side and may have cost us a penalty point.
“Magik!” he bellowed from his spot one inch from the corner I was now facing.
His face was low to the mat and even with him; it was bright red, and he took a deep breath and his chest bellowed out like a bullfrog about to unleash a deep croak, and he shoutedL: “Let! Him! Go!”
I didn’t, and Coach’s face darkened and his chest filled with air again. But before he could shout again, the buzzer sounded and the referee blew his whistle less than a . Coach’s face was the brightest red acorn you could imagine, and he exhaled in frustration and stood up and paced back and forth and then noticed the ref holding up my hand. He glanced up at the scoreboard and his countenance instantly changed – that’s what stands out in my mind most now, how quickly the red left and his smile returned. He realized his mistake and waddled in his typical slow gait back to his chair in Belaire’s corner and waited for me.
The referee raised my hand, and only then did I realized that I was headed to finals for the first time.
I’d face Hillary again. He had defeated me seven times that year, but I would be guaranteed at least a silver medal and our match would be reported in the newspaper on Monday. It wasn’t like I’d be a soldier on international television, but I’d be a wrestler who was the co-captain of the Belaire Bengals under Coach Dale Ketelsen. I had stuck to my vow over Christmas, and my life could have been transparent for the two months leading up to city and been nothing but motivational to anyone watching.
I scanned the crowd and saw a couple of hundred people in the bleachers, but their attention was split across all four mats and the semifinal matches on each. Two sets of hands waived and I saw Andy and Timmy, the twins who had graduated the year before but still showed up sometimes to help us at practice, and at a few tournaments to support us and visit with old rivals who had graduated and showed up to support their teams. More people would attend finals, when there would be only one mat in the center to focus on.
I would stand in the center for the first time. I had won the Belaire Christmas tournament, but that was a one-day tournament with only six schools and mostly junior varsity wrestlers (we called ourselves The Island of Lost Wrestlers, like The Island of Lost Toys in the Christmas Rudolf special). But this was city. It was a big deal, and from my perspective all of Baton Rouge would be there. Despite panting hard, I allowed my hand to be held high and I smiled. Breath wooshed in an out of my toothy smile, finally free from the braces that had sliced my lips and distracted my attention last season. Hundreds of people were applauding me, and a few were pointing to the scoreboard and presumably explaining how Coach had made his mistake.
The ref dropped my hand and I walked off the mat and accepted a towel from Jeremy, who had won his 140 pound semifinal match only minutes before mine began. Coach was there beside him, as always, and he stuck out his right hand and I clasped it. He looked up into my eyes, grabbed my left tricep in a vice-like grip with his thumb alongside his fingers, and said, “Good job, Magik.”
Coach Dale Ketelsen was a man of few words. He had told me those same three words more than 150 times regardless of if I won or lost, yet they were never insincere; like I said, only the wrestler knows what happens in their mind on the mat, and Coach trusted that you did your best no matter what it looked like from his corner. He had raised his voice a few times, but that was only to be heard over the din of gymnasiums and to break a wrestler out of whatever his mind was locked upon; invariably, he would toss off his reading glasses and fling aside his clipboard, and slide across the mat to get at the wrestler’s level and holler, “Sprawl! Sprawl!” or “Stand up! Stand up!” As soon as a match ended, he’d find his glasses and clipboard – or one of us would hand them to him – and his face would quickly loose the red hue from being riled up and he’d be back to the same mellow Coach, and he’d shake your hand and say the same three words to each and every one of us.
He made mistakes, like walking up and misreading the scoreboard, which was easy to do because with so many mats going we never knew which team was the ref’s red-wristband side or green-wristband side, and he forgave himself as quickly as he forgave us. A few kids joked that his memory was slipping, and in a way that you look back on and cringe, a couple quipped that he had Alzheimer’s. In a way, he did have a short memory: whatever had just happened was already history and not worth worrying about. Any time talking about the past was better spent catching your breath, doing a few pushups, or helping someone do something. If he mentioned a past match, it was only to emphasize a point relevant to the current moment, like a move that should either be improved, utilized again, or not repeated.
Coach almost never offered advice or repeated himself. The only advice I heard him tell the team and say it more than once was, “Just Wrestle.” A few times, when he was feeling verbose, he’d say: “Just get out there and wrestle.”
I once asked him to elaborate, and he said was that his words had roots with Doug Blubaugh, the gold medalist who had barely defeated him in 1959.
Back then, matches were a staggering nine minutes instead of the measly six minutes of my generation. After nine minutes he and Doug went into sudden death overtime. The first one to score a point for any reason would win, and the referee could award someone a point if the other wrestler stalled. Doug scored (but I never learned how), and Coach’s version of this story was shorter than mine.
After losing to Doug, Coach dropped to the third place bracket. Logistics weren’t good back then, and his next match was scheduled only minutes after his loss in semifinals. He was sweating and panting and knew that if even if he won third he would only be an alternate in Rome, there in case Doug or the silver medalist got sick or injured. Coach sat in the locker room, his head lowered, fatigued and distracted by his loss. Doug walked in and approached him, and that’s where Coach started his story.
“I was sitting in the locker room,” Coach said. “And Doug walked over.”
He paused and held eye contact for a moment, then continued: “He said, ‘Someone will win, and it might as well be you.'”
Coach paused to let that sink in, then said, “Right then, I saw things differently.”
He shrugged and said, “So I went out there and wrestled.”
That was the end of his story. He won third and traveled with the 1960 olympic team to Rome as an alternate and returned to coach a few schools, be an assistant at Iowa, then started LSU’s team in 1968, and there we were.
Just Wrestle.
After semifinals the gym cleared and I, like the other team captains, stayed to help the Bulldogs roll up three of the mats while they moved their new, bright green mat to the center. Their team taped it together tightly the same way Belaire did, and they applied the same fungicide that we all knew well, the one that smelled like something you’d use to clean a public toilet and that stung mat burn as if a stinging caterpillar had fallen from an oak tree and landed on your cheek.
The doors opened again and spectators began coming in. They paid $2 each to see finals, and proceeds went to the hosting team to improve their facilities or buy better fungicide or headgear. People kept coming through the open doors and filling the stands, and the smell of jasmines from the Bulldog’s landscaped gardens wafted inside and mingled with the smells of cheese pizza and hot dogs from the concession stand. It was a Sunday afternoon, and some people were dressed in suits as if they had come from church or they were proud of their kids or grandkids. Coach’s family joined, with Mrs. K and their daughter, Penny, a freshman at LSU, in church clothes and helping with the concession stand.
The chatter was cheerful and bounced between the hard courts and the metal ceiling rafters high above. Some time around 2pm a buzzer sounded and echoed loudly enough to stop all chatter. All of the captains walked onto the single mat in front of around a thousand spectators.
I stood beside Jeremy and ostensibly listened to the referee talk about fair play, but I scanned the bleachers and looked for people I knew. Big Head Ben Abrams was there (his head was hard to miss among the crowd) with his little brother, Todd. Ben had wrestled at 189 but quit to care for his dad, and Todd was the state martial arts champion who wrestled junior varsity for a few weeks but quit after he kept getting beaten badly by Timmy, our varsity 171 pounder. That was three years before Hoyce Gracie would win world mixed martial arts using Gracie Jujitsu and ground techniques adapted from wrestling, and no one yet suspected that wrestling was so effective or so demanding; Todd never added a wrestling medal to his shelf of karate tournament wins, and to torment him I gave him a few of mine.
Lea was beside them and waved, but I was too stoic and pretending to be focused on the ref to wave back. He was just talking about fair play and rules, and I knew all of the rules by heart and had read the latest magazines with all of the case studies explaining why; I felt just like I did in class, listening to a teacher while my mind thought about other things (and Lea as usually one of those things).
I pondered how Lea and the Abrams knew I was in finals; this was before the internet or cell phones, yet somehow they knew. Then I saw the twins, Andy and Timmy, walk up the bleachers with concession stand drinks in their hands and I realized they must have driven home and told them I was in finals. The turned towards the mat and held their drinks up and cupped their free hands around it, and in unison they shouted, “Dollllly! Dollllly!” but I ignored them.
Like Lea’s dad, Andy and Timmy’s father used to work for my grandfather. Practically half of Baton Rouge had at some point, because our economy centered around agriculture, petrochemicals, and the burgeoning film industry. Teamsters shipped all products to and from Louisiana that weren’t put on a train or barge, just like they shipped all products across America. He was Louisiana’s version of Jimmy Hoffa. Like Hoffa, he also had ties to Hollywood, and he brought the film industry to Baton Rouge.
Hoffa invested the uncontrolled and untraceable Teamster pension fund however he saw fit. Almost 3 million Teamsters paid cash dues every month, and by the mid 1960’s Hoffa had access to around $1.1 Billion dollars, an unfathomable amount of money back then. He lent it to the mafia to build hotels and casinos, and to Hollywood producers to finance films. If you sat through the credits of most American made movies back then, the final screen was nothing but a giant Teamster’s logo, the heads of twin horses named Thunderbolt and Lightening framing a giant ship’s steering wheel. The horses were from when Teamsters drove horse wagons instead of trucks, and the steering wheel implied that they were driving the ship. The investments were paid with a high rate of return, growing the pension fund even more, and the mafia and producers hired Teamster labor to transport materials for casino construction and to haul film equipment for sets all over the country. As an added perk, Teamster trailers housed famous actors, and a few lucky Teamsters were paid well to guard those trailors and be seen with celebrities.
The Baton Rouge films began with some John Wayne movies during a stent of civil war films that were popular in the 1970’s. Producers used the plantations around Baton Rouge and an hour upriver in Louisiana’s Saint Francisville and Mississippi’s Natchez for most home scenes, and for some battles they used the civil war battlefield just beyond the petrochemical smokestacks and Scotlandville, Fort Pickens. The 80’s brought Baton Rouge films like The Toy, staring Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason, and Everybody’s All American, staring Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lane, and that’s movie most of my friends remember and associated with my grandfather and, by default, with me.
Everybody’s All American was about The Grey Ghost, a college football star in the 1950’s, and everyone in town was invited to dress up like the 1950’s and cheer for the actors recreating football scenes. It was filmed near Christmas of 1986 – football season – and if you rented the VCR tape in the 1990’s or streamed Everybody’s All American today, you could squint at a scene when the crowd is cheering Dennis Quaid and see a middle-school aged Lea, Timmy, and Todd mixed in the with the crowd of around 10,000 people and dressed in 1950’s garb to like the stars of television’s Happy Days, with poofy poodle skirts and their parent’s old letterman jackets.
Everybody’s All American filmed in an unusually cold year, and in one scene everyone gathered around the new state capital for an award ceremony on behalf of The Grey Ghost. They had to shoot that scene twice, because on the first time it snowed, something no one saw coming, and though everyone thought it was a magical experience the director thought it was to fantastic for a drama film set in the south. They reshot a few days later, and no one I recognize is in the final cut. Local news covered the entire filming and made the obvious connections to Billy Papas, LSU’s star player from 1954 and a two-time all American who went on to play for the Houston Oilers; and they mentioned Big Daddy, who, though in a Texas federal penitentiary during filming, was still running the Louisiana Teamsters the same way Hoffa had run the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from his New Jersey penitentiary. Big Daddy was still known locally as an all-American hero, and the joke about everybody being all-Americans was obvious and, in my mind, over-used. But I no longer think of that film the same, and today when I meet up with those friends we’ll stream it and forward to the football scene and try to find Lea and the twins dressed in 1950’s garb and cheering the Grey Ghost; we’re not sure, but we think we can point out Lea’s dark eyebrows in a brief camera sweep, and it’s more fun to talk about that than everything that happened to us when we were in middle school.
The twins were older and bigger than I was, and they were always fans of television’s professional wrestling. In middle school, before they joined Belaire’s team, they mimicked moves by watching Hulk Holgan, Rowdy Randy Piper, The Junkyard Dog, SuperFly, and Andre The Giant. To practice, they’d grab me and have their minions hold my arms while they practiced jumping off the White Oaks Middle School bleachers and onto me like Super Fly bringing his elbow down from the sky and into Rowdy Randy’s chest. They were in 7th grade with Lea, and I was in 6th grade and the smallest and youngest 6th grader; the difference between me and my burly grandfather was poignant, and my tiny size drew attention to me. I was also socially awkward, a consequence of living summers with my dad and spending on the school year with my mom. My nickname was Fartin’ Partin because of a few loud farts in 6th grade, and during gym class they’d gather and call me Fartin’ Partin and practice wrestling. There wasn’t much I could about it when I always began as the smallest kid in class.
A few Cajuns pronounced my last name Pah’tan, and most people today pronounce it Part-in. But the twins had more of a generic southern accent, and they pronounced it Part’un, like Dolly Parton, the country singer. After they snuck into a theater to see Dolly and Burt Reynolds star in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (a rated R film that wouldn’t have allowed them in even if they were emancipated), they realized that I had the same last name as Dolly Parton and began calling me Dolly. It stuck and then spread, and most kids called me Dolly until Ben and Todd introduced me to the wresting team as Magic in 1986 (I spelled it with a c, like the scar on the back of my head, before the team changed it to Magik with a k, though it was always pronounced the same.)
Andy and Timmy didn’t start out liking me. Baton Rouge was a small city of around 150,000 people and only a handful of public schools, and I had known them since before Big Daddy went to prison. They never told me why they seemed to hate me so badly and I never asked, but they spent two years in the early 80’s tormenting me every day in middle school. Their dad was a Teamster and had worked the cushy film set jobs, but a few Teamsters didn’t agree with the rest of Baton Rouge. Uncle Doug expressed that many times in stories over the years, and he repeated himself in his self-published 2014 autobiography, From My Brother’s Shadow: Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story. In it, he summarized how Baton Rouge felt about Big Daddy:
“You either loved or hated Ed, there was no in-between.”
Most people idolized my grandfather and I never met anyone who had something negative to say about him, but there were many examples of people who would hate him. Of course, there was the family of the girl he raped and all the people he killed who either wouldn’t join the Teamsters or wouldn’t hire his Teamsters, but that wasn’t known back then and they weren’t Teamsters.
The most famous example of Teamster’s hating Big Daddy in the 80s’ was from 1979, when he was finally convicted and sent to prison in 1980 for stealing $450,000 from the Local #5 safe. Newspapers followed the drama daily, and they reported when police found the massive but empty safe near a bridge in the murky Comite River a mile from the house my dad and I lived in back then, one of the many houses Big Daddy owned around town. Two Teamsters who ratted him out were found beaten and bloody. The survivor refused to testify, but a jury found Big Daddy guilty of embezzlement, a fancy word for stealing. Other charges rolled in, and without Bobby and J. Edgar’s support (because Bobby was assassinated in 1968 and Hoover died in 1972), the judge sentenced Big Daddy to federal prison for a range of crimes including embezzlement, racketeering, and obstructing justice. The names of the Teamster who died and the one who refused to testify were witheld from news and I never met them, but I assumed they were the type of people Doug meant when he said some people hated my grandfather.
At first Andy and Timmy mocked me when I started wrestling, especially after I lost all of my matches in 10th grade and did nothing for the team. But when I came out again my junior year they changed their minds and became something like mentors, helping me with technique and encouraging me to lift weights to be less scrawny. At the end of my junior yer nominated me for Most Improved Wrestler – which I would end up winning – and suggested to the team that I’d make a fine captain, which led me to being co-captain. They said calling me Dolly was like a Boy Named Sue and Hillary Clinton, it made me stronger. I doubted that was true, but I grew to appreciate that only two people in all of Baton Rouge still called me Dolly, and they were the ones who showed up to watch me wrestle Hillary.
The referee probably new none of that, and he probably didn’t notice the shouts of Dolly! as he spoke. He finished talking and we left the mat, and about fifteen minutes later the 103 pound finals began. When the 121 pounders walked onto the mat, I walked away to warm up.
I always warmed up for ten to fifteen minutes if practical. I had read in one of Coach’s magazines that warming up for ten to twenty minutes ransistioned your body to burning fat, which was more efficient for a long day than using muscle glycogen. In my experience that was true, so I tried to get my heartbeat up and a develop a thin bit of sweat on my arms. After the 121 pound match would be a 129 match between people I didn’t know well, so it could go anywhere between a quick pin and sudden-death overtime for a maximum of eight minutes. Clodi Tate would be next 136 pounds, and he was undefeated that year pinned his finals opponent in the first round at the Robert E. Lee Invitational, so it was realistic to assume he’d do it again. Jeremey would be up at 142. He had defeated his opponent before and they usually went all six rounds, but you never know for sure what the future will hold. I had somewhere between ten and twenty minutes before my match, maybe a bit longer if there were any overtime rounds.
I wore headphones and skipped rope while listening to a mixtape that included songs from the 1985 Vision Quest soundtrack. I didn’t add Madona’s slow song, “Crazy for You,” because it didn’t help me with motivation or rhythm, but I picked songs like the slow but deeply moving “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider and the perky “Hungry for Heaven” by Rio, songs that played in when Lauden skipped rope or ran.
I added hard rock songs from my limited cassette collection or the local radio station’s Heavy Metal Hour played late at night, where they played entire albums without commercials so kids could record it. A few were from bootleg tapes bought in Little Saigon. My playlist included “Panama” from Van Halen (it was on the tape before I saw the 82nd play it in Panama for President Noriega), “Battery” from Metallica’s Master of Puppets album, “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister, “Bang Your Head” by Quiet Riot, and enough other songs to fill a 60 minute cassette.
Big D, our heavyweight and a cheerful beat boxer in the spirit of The Fat Boys, helped me make a new version at the beginning of season that included new electronic jams that I had never heard before but helped me skip rope more quickly, like “Don’t Stop the Rock” by Freestyle, “Supersonic” by JJ Fad, and “Push It” by Salt ‘n Peppa. Big D laughed about me not having rhythm, and would do better against schools like Capital if I learned, the same way Sylvester Stalone learned from Apollo Creed’s trainers in Rocky III. He contributed a new, 90 minute extended play cassette and I had been using that tape since the Belaire Christmas tournament. With Big D’s additions and input, the tape alternated songs to with a pattern that I used to change how I skipped rope, speeding up or slowing down, crossing hands or bouncing on one foot, or whatever seemed to fit the beat.
Clodi won by pin in the first round. Jeremy’s match began. Lunatic Fringe began during his second round, and late in the third round my Walkman began playing “Don’t Stop the Rock.” I sped up my pace the fastest of all songs and I criss-crossed my hands and alternated bouncing on each foot to the rhythm:
Freestyle’s kickin’ in the house tonight
Move your body from left to right
To all you freaks don’t stop the rock
That’s freestyle speakin’ and you know I’m right.
da, da, da-tada-da-ta
da, da, da-tada-da-ta
da, da… tada-da-ta
At the final tada-da-ta of each chorus, I crisscrossed the rope double-time to pass under my feet twice on each jump, just like Lauden in Vision Quest. I kept one eye on Jeremy’s match and one on my heartbeat and breath; I was silent when I warmed up, but I kept my breath slow so that I could have held a conversation while skipping rope, another technique I learned from the magazines on Coach’s desk.
Jeremy won by three points. I pushed the stop button on the Walkman before the ref raised his hand and trotted to the empty chair beside Coach. I took off my hoodie and handed the Walkman and jump rope to Little Paige, our 103 pounder who had lost both matches on Saturday but showed up on Sunday to support his team, just like I had my first year. Jeremy took his seat next to Coach. A handful of Bengals in blue hoodies gathered about ten feet behind them, between our corner and the first row of bleachers. The Abrams brothers and Lea and the twins were behind them, a few rows up. Mixed in with the crowd’s applause for Jeremy I heard cheers for Magik and Dolly.
I put on my headgear and turned to the mat. Paige handed Jeremy a towel and stepped aside so he could sit next to coach. The scoreboard above the bleachers chimed and the bright orange neon letters spelled out my name and Belaire, and Hillary’s name and Capital. The timer reset to zero, and the ref motioned us to the mat.
“Kick his ass, Dolly!” someone shouted.
I took a breath and exhaled. I felt what Coach meant rather than thought the words: “Someone has to win, and it might as well be me,” and I stepped forward to face whomever or whatever would be on the mat against me.
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