Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part V

McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin

“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”

“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.

The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”

“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisianan and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”

New Orleans State Times, 08 March 1968

The referee stood between Hillary and me on the mat and pointed a hand to the center lines. I put my right foot on the line and so did Hillary. Like a lot of the best wrestlers, he was somewhat ambidextrous; starting on his right foot meant he was going as hard as he could. We squatted into our strongest stances and faced off.

The ref asked us to shake hands and we slapped palms, a compromise everyone did rather than grasp hands when you’re trying to focus. The ref rested his whistle between his lips and raised his hand. In my periphery I watched his chest, looking for telltale signs of him compressing his lungs to exhale and giving me a fraction of a second advantage, a form of Todd’s lazy eyes; but mostly I just watched Hillary’s hips.

“Where someone’s hips go, they go,” Coach said.

Head taps and dancing feet are distractions: any shot or throw comes from someone’s center of gravity, and it’s good to know when there’s is higher or lower than yours. My lazy eyes now included the ref and Hillary’s face, but my focus remained on his hips.

The referee dropped his hand and blew his whistle without any hint of it coming, and both Hillary and I were in motion before the whistle’s sound waves reached the top bleachers. We collided so hard that the Baton Rouge High gym rafters rattled. We fought for control, chest to chest and pummeling our hands over each other’s arms, trying to snake an arm deep between their ribs and arm to set up a strike, to use it for a throw or to keep a bit of control as you drop to the hips. Though we were barely moving across the mat, every muscle was firing on full throttle and within thirty seconds we were drenched with sweat and sucking air in and heaving it out in deep breaths.

Hillary kept a tight stance and got in closer to me, using his shorter height to stay low and keep his center of gravity below mine. His hand shot up and behind my head, yanking hard and trying to set me up for a throw; but Coach had taught me how to defend against that.

“Don’t be a headhunter,” he said.

“Use that moment to your advantage,” he continued, “or let go. Don’t grab their head because you don’t know what else to do.”

Hillary yanked down and forwards and I allowed my head to go, but I simultaneously swooped my hips lower and closer to Hillary. My hand was held close to my body to prevent Hillary from catching it, and when I was below his center of gravity it shot forward between his legs and my body followed. My right foot was planted and my right quad was ready to fire, but my hips continued to swing forward and bring my center under his. My head passed his elbows, and I turned my gaze to the sky. I felt the weight of his leg in my arms, and I knew it had broken contact with the mat and that I was about to lift Hillary off the mat.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. His hand moved seamlessly from my neck to over my arm and into my arm pit, locking my arm in place, and he yanked my arm upwards and slammed his foot down, freeing it from my hold and planting it back onto the mat. I dropped back into a pig slop stance and so did he. We were face to face but neither of us backed away.

We circled slowly, sliding our feet across the mat to never have all of our weight on one foot. He tapped towards my head again and I thought I was watching his hips but maybe he moved too quickly, because the next thing I saw was his lower back and I felt my right ankle get snatched by a low single.

I sprawled like the lives of my teammates depended on it. I kicked my legs away from us and forced my chest onto Hillary’s back, but he pulled my ankle closer and closer. My right leg was folded under me and he was bringing his hips closer so that he could finish the takedown. I sprawled and I sprawled again, and then I sprawled again, and Hillary’s head began to lower from the repeated blows against his back and the force of my legs against his strong hands.

I sprawled again, and his head extended over his hips and his nose poked above my right foot. That’s when my right hand made a tight fist and I crossfaced him with the force of God.

Hillary head turned and he was off overstretched. His arms were useless and his grip was weakened. I planted my chest and did a high-leg low-leg, temporarily turning my back to the mat as I swung my right leg high over myself and planted it behind Hillary, then swinging I my left leg low, under my body, flipping my chest back down and ending up on top and behind him. Instantly and automatically, my left hand automatically snaked under his left leg and my right hand wrapped around his neck; I clasped my hands with the left on top and both thumbs held tightly beside the fingers. I felt the padlock clasp, and I held Hillary in my cradle for the first time. I breathed in to prepare for what was about tot happen.

Like a boy named Sue’s dad when Sue finally fought him as an adult, Hillary “kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile.” He didn’t actually bite, but he definitely kicked like a mule: hard and in rapid secession. He kicked and he kicked again; if I had sprawled with everything I had, Hillary was kicking with everything he had, and he had a lot of leg strength from all of those steps at the state capital. He kicked so frequently that my grip took the brunt of every kick, and he would kick again before I could move my hands away and hobble his leg close to his face.

At first, Hillary’s kicks were what happens when an unstoppable force hits and unmovable object; thunder roared and lightening flashed, but nothing changed. Hillary furiously attacked my grip for the next twenty seconds, and kick by kick my sweaty hands began to slip apart. My left hand was – and is – the weaker of my two hands and it was receiving the full brunt of Hillary’s kicks; my body was biased towards being near Hillary’s head, so my right arm was tucked closer to my body and therefore at an advantage. But soon my right hand was clasped only my left ring and pinky finger as if grasping the handle of a bayonette that you didn’t want to lose in battle; the base of my right thumb pushed against the top half of my left ring finger. He kicked again, and my left thumb slid too far away from my grip to do any good. I squuezed as if someone would die if I let go. He kicked again, and I felt my ring finger snap.

I held on with my right hand, and he kicked again and broke free and stood up and turned to face me with the speed of a mongoose whirling in mid air to face a cobra. I dropped into a pig slop stance and kept wrestling.

We were face to face again, his strongest position, and his bushy eyebrows furrowed with anger. I had never seen him angry on the mat before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. The referee awarded me two points for a takedown him one point for an escape point. I had lost a chance: people make mistakes when they’re angry. One of those Greek philosophers, like Aristotle or Socrates, had said it first, something like: if they gods want to torment someone, they make them angry first.

The ref pointed us to our corners. The scoreboard showed I was up 2-1. I had never be ahead of Hillary before but I didn’t dwell on it. Jeremy was beside Coach and ready with a fresh hand towel. I accepted it with my right hand. My left finger was swelling and was a useless plank. I wiped my face and arms; the towel smelled of fungicide, like everything carried in the back of Coach’s truck.

I wiped the sweat from my eyes, only to have more pour down my forehead, pool in my eyes, and drip off my nose and chin and splash on the mat by my shoes. I alternated between shaking my limbs to stay limber and dabbing sweat off my face. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. I didn’t want to have anyone look at my finger; I wanted to face Hillary while he was still riled and I was calm.

Coach nodded his acorn-shaped head, briefly showing the bald poking through his whispy grey hair, and stepped back. He was so calm there was no hint of him shouting during the last match. I sensed that though I didn’t say anything, he respected that I had stood my ground and not listened to him. It was my match then, this was my match now. I wanted to own it.

I glanced down at the shoes I was wearing, frayed and faded size 12 Asics that used to be white but now a dull gray. They were still tied with a double knot. In my younger days, I did not double-knot them because, like a lot of wrestlers, I’d pause between matches and tell the ref I had to tie my shoe. I had developed the knack of quickly and secretly untying them like a magician doing a rope trick, just to give me a few extra seconds to catch my breath. I started tying double knots Christmas, because I realized I was in better shape than most and I wanted to use that to my advantage; it was only a coincidence that I needed a size larger shoe and Coach lent me an old pair of Craig’s from when Craig was Belaire’s state champion in the early 80’s.

I loved those shoes, not because they had been Craig’s or because Coach gave them to me, but because they fit perfectly. I hadn’t known shoes could matter so much. They fit snugly but did not restrict like my size 11 had, and the rubber on the bottom gripped the mat as tenaciously as Coach griped a tricep; but the sides, worn smooth by Craigs dragging them across the mat in thousands of shot drills and by me shooting a few hundred more, slid like a hockey puck across ice and gave precious moments of advantage. Several times I scored a shot, I had been so close to failing that I attributed the minute advantage of Craig’s old Asics. Even if I had the money for a new pair, it would have taken them an entire season to approach the fit of those old Tigers.

The knots were sound. I moved up and down on the balls of my feet, and shook my arms and wiggled my legs and dotted the sweat off my forehead with the now drenched towel. My breath whooshed in and out through pursed lips while I stared at Capital’s corner, hoping for a glimpse of the strategy he’d apply in our next round. Two of the maroon hooded Lions dried each of Hillary’s arms while he bounced and shook his limbs like a mirror image of me.

I focused on the Lion’s coach. He was a spherical mountain of an African American man who couldn’t squeeze into even the largest of sweatsuits. He had never wrestled, but he had stepped forward and started a team when no one else would. He accepted Coach’s old LSU mats and borrowed some of Coach’s books and magazines, but he didn’t socialize with other coaches and I never learned how the Lions grew so fierce, or how he sparked their self-motivation, and I’ll never know what he thought about the old war school.

I never learned what motivated Hillary, or what The Mountain did to organize the Lions into a team with Hillary as leader of the pack. Like I was aware of a referee’s whistle or an opponent’s breath when I was focused on wrestling, I was aware of Capital’s situation when I was focused on training to wrestle them. Not just me, but the Bengals; other kids on my team had their own battles playing out. I had pondered Hillary and The Mountain’s stories before, but none of that was on my mind as I tried to decipher The Mountain’s hand gestures.

It was as if listening a foreign language for the first time. The Mountain had never wrestled and the Lions never participated in all-city practices, and many of their hand signs were different than any other school I knew. Hillary nodded after every emphatic hand gesture. The Mountain kept lowering his hand, as if telling Hillary to calm down and focus; or, telling him to shoot lower next time; or, telling him to not shoot. In a few seconds it wouldn’t matter and the possibilities would clutter my mind, so I focused on letting my breaths stabilize by doing nothing and keeping my limbs limber by wiggling them and wiping off sweat though it was like trying to stop a flow of blood with a small bandage. Coach and Jeremy let me be, which was the best thing they could have done. Lea said when I was between matches my face looked like the Mississippi River, opaque and barely moving. I don’t recall hearing anyone in the bleachers, and I don’t recall hearing any sounds echoing in the gym; all I can recall is the sound of my breath wooshing in and out through pursed lips.

The referee called to us only a few brief seconds after we had ended the first round. I trotted back to the center of the mat. There would be a coin toss and one of us would choose top, bottom, or neutral. I won the coin toss, which wasn’t a coin but a red and green disc. I don’t recall which color I was – they changed every match. I did not glance at Coach for guidance. This was my match. Hillary was so much stronger in neutral that I’d never choose that. He had just proven that he could break my cradle from the bottom, and my cradle, the strongest weapon I had on top, was now useless. I chose down.

The ref motioned and I got down on all fours but with my chest held high, like the Bulldog mascot painted around Baton Rouge High’s campus. I sat low on my ankles and tucked my big feet under me to restrict Hillary’s hands from grabbing them. I stopped moving and the ref gestured to Hillary, and he got behind me and clamped my right tricep with his right hand, planted a foot behind me, and wrapped his left arm around my waist.

Hillary had switched sides. He could wrestle as if he were left or right handed, though his right was stronger. It didn’t matter to me. I knew I couldn’t sit-out or reverse Hillary; I had tried many times, and it wasn’t my strongest moves. I was pretty good at most bottom moves and I would use them to get two-point reversals when I felt I could, but mostly I stood up for a one-point escape and I knew I could sometimes do that against the best wrestlers in the state. I would have been stronger if he had clasped my left tricep; my muscle memory was stronger against right-handed wrestlers, because that’s how I trained 90% of the time. But it didn’t matter for what I had planned, which wasn’t a plan as much as it was a decision. I would stand up.

It was the first move I saw Coach do, and it was the week after my grandfather was released from prison in 1986. Big Head Big Abrams told me I’d like wrestling. I said I wasn’t big enough. I wasn’t sure how much I weighed; I had never stepped on a scale before. But I was probably around 120 pounds, and just by looking at Ben and other athletes in football and baseball I knew I wasn’t big enough. He said it didn’t matter because wrestlers compete against kids their same weight. I didn’t know that, because that’s not how Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant wrestled. I said okay, and Ben took me to practice.

I didn’t have a physical or waiver signed by my mom yet, so I just watched. Ben was floundering on the mat while Timmy manhandled him and slid his face across the mat (though smaller than Ben, Timmy was twice as strong and gave everything his all, even in training). Andy did the same to Todd, and even though Todd was the toughest kid I knew he was manhandled by Andy the way the twins and their minions had manhandled me in middle school.

Timmy rolled Ben and pinned him, and Ben said there was nothing he could have done. Coach overheard him and asked them to get back down, flat on the mat.

“Just stand up!” Coach said.

Ben tried again and Timmy flipped him again. He said Timmy was too strong.

“Here,” Coach said, “watch.”

He gestured to the football cage and a few big players came out. Big D was the first; during the overlap between the beginning of wrestling practice and the end of football season he, like a few wrestlers, prioritized football. Marcus Spears followed; he made Big D look tiny. Marcus was our star player and in another year would play for the all-African American Southern University and be an all-American; he’d switch to LSU and gain national attention and go on to play pro for Dallas and gain so much of a reputation that he’d become a famous football sportscaster and a huge man who stood out beside other large men.

Clint Osborne joined Marcus and Big D. Clint was a giant when standing next to me, but he looked tiny next to them. He was a brute who was as old as Hillary and was probably already shaving even though he was in the 10th grade, like I was. Clint sported a mohawk and was known to plow through a line of defense like swatting away mosquitos. Once, to prove a point about how wrestling techniques were for people who don’t try hard enough, he shot on Big D and scored a double. Big D sprawled, but Clint just drove him forward as if Big D were just a football dummy on treads being pushed across a field. He pushed Big D across the mat and against the gym wall; he grunted and pushed again and again, his head hitting the wall every time, but Big D’s big belly taking the brunt of Clint’s shoulder every time. Big D quit. Clint smiled and said, “See?”

Clint, Marcus, and Big D stood by Coach. Any one of them could have been a Goliath against him. He plopped face down on the mat, and asked them and Big Ben pile on top of him. Big Ben weighed around 180 back then. Combined, there was probably 800 pounds piled on top of Coach.

He glanced up at us and said, “Just stand up.”

“But,” he said. “Look how I landed. I’m still in shoveling stance.”

His right leg was pulled up high and his left leg was slightly bent. He was right, he looked like he took his stance and laid down in it.

“Just stand up over your foot,” he said, and in one fluid motion he stood up and the mountain crumbled into a pile of kids laughing at the improbability of what they just saw. Coach repeated it to remove all doubt.

Marcus, Clint, and Big D went back to the weight room, and the wrestling team returned to training. I stood there, dumfounded. It was like the scene in Star Wars where Luke said he couldn’t lift his x-wing from sinking in the swamp of Degobah, yet little Yoda could and told him he had a lot to learn.

Standing up from down position is similar: just stand up. It’s less about technique than it is determination. Technique follows and can be refined, but determination is what makes standing up work or fail, whether that’s your determination or your opponents. Hillary would be prepared for me to stand, and no move is infallible. I watched the referee, and because I couldn’t see Hillary’s face I listened to his breath and searched for any muscle twitch that would give me an advantage. I had stood up on him before, and I knew I could do it again if I calmed down and focused.

The whistle blew, and I punched my right hand towards the sky and let my body follow. I punched past my head and through the Bulldog’s rafters and out of Baton Rouge High’s domed gym and through the clouds; if there were a heaven, angels would see my fist flying past them and with no indication of slowing down. Simultaneously, my right foot slid forward and planted on the mat and my left hand snapped to grasp Hillary’s hand; I caught it in the crotch of my thumb and first finger, which I would have done even if the ring finger were not broken, and pushed down and away. Had he been on the other side, the only difference is that I would have clasped it with my right hand and held on to set up the next move, but on my weaker side I had trained to stand up and not hold on and pivot away. That’s what I did, and as soon as I was up in stance I pulled my right hand back down from heaven and dropped it to my side, ready for anything.

But Hillary moved so fast that the referee didn’t have time to call my point. Hillary may have had let me stand up; that’s what his coach could have been telling him, to give up a point and set me up for a two-point takedown and possibly back points or a pin. Sacrifice a battle to win the war. Or, he was just so much faster at recalibrating that as soon as I stood up he was already ready. Before I could take a breath he stepped in and snagged a bear hug under my arms.

I made fists and pummeling my gnarled knuckles between us and into his rib cage. It was the first time I felt my broken finger spike with enough pain to distract me, and I focused on using my right hand, which was stronger anyway, to force my knuckles down. Coach had shown me that without a story behind it, and even Clint Osborne released me when I did it to him. But Hillary was a beast impervious to pain, and he stepped under me and lifted me into the air and threw me in what was about to become a perfect 360 degree throw.

Hillary’s bear hug had caught me on exhale, when my lungs almost empty, and I was out of breath and trapped in mid-air, weakened like Antaeus lifted from Mother Earth by Hercules. Those Russians were right: I was in Hillary’s control, and there was nothing I could do about it until I was on the ground again.

The ceiling appeared in my view, and above the bleachers I could see the giant Baton Rouge High scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant neon monster with dozens of small orange lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented, and with a massive countdown timer so that people as far away as Texas could see how many seconds were left in each round. I watched Craig’s shoes fly through the air, their momentum lagging behind my knees just a bit.

The shoes moved between my eyes and the scoreboard and blocked the lights for a moment, then Hillary and my names came into view again. The shoes arced back down and I saw the bleachers again. Faces of fans staring wide-eyed in awe, and some were applauding because it was a beautiful throw. Some, probably those experienced with wrestling, cringed, because they knew I was about to hit the mat with the full force of Hillary following.

He slammed my shoulders to the mat with a thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. The impact sent a shock wave that reverberated back from the bleachers, and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out. Everything went dark, but my body acted on its own and bridged as quickly as Hillary had moved earlier. My feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Tigers flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light after the shockwave dissipated, stared to the trellised roof high above the gym floor. I tried to breathe but could not. I was arched like the Mississippi River Bridge, and probably just as strong.

I had escaped the pin. If I had paused with my shoulders on the mat a fraction of a second longer, the ref would have called Hillary in control and I would have lost then. I was spared, and a new battle was beginning.

Hillary squeezed his massive hairy arms with the patience of a boa constrictor, bit by bit, waiting for the slightest exhale or wiggle to squeeze a bit more and kill his prey. His tightening was controlled, calm, and deadly, a disciplined and dispassionate sniper who took calculated shots at the peak or valley of breaths. I tried force my right hand between our chests, making a tight fist so that its gnarly knuckles would rasp across his rib cage and cause enough pain for him to loosen his hold, but he took advantage of my wiggles to pull his body closer to my spine, compressing my ribs even more. I was burning precious fuel and my bridge began to buckle, so I stopped fighting and focused on saving energy. Had I asked, I’m sure Lea would have told me I made the river face again.

I couldn’t move. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock. There was almost a minute left. I could see Coach and Jeremy watching me in silence. Behind them I saw Paige and a gaggle of blue-hooded Bengals violating rules by leaving the bleachers and inching close behind our corner. I didn’t pray. Like I said, I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling, even if wrestling motionlessly and fighting an internal battle. I put everything I had into bridging and waited.

I could feel and see, but no air was coming into my nose for me to smell anything. I couldn’t smell the fungicide, which I had smelled earlier and would still have been fresh after the mat was cleaned for finals. Nor could I smell Hillary any longer. His body odor was astringent, like burnt roux at the bottom of a cast iron skillet or black tea burnt on an electric stove. He had thrown me in a headlock at the Lee Invitational only a few weeks before, and his armpit had smothered my nose for forty seconds as I gulped breaths and kept fighting. It’s a smell you never forget. I had held off then and lost by points. I could hold off again, and then fight another battle in the next round.

The absence Hillary’s familiar pungency was just as a strong in my mind. I knew I couldn’t breath. I didn’t know how long I could last. I was always a weak swimmer mostly because never could hold my breath long, probably because I had weak technique and over-exhausted myself, and though swimming was constant motion, it was nothing compared to the muscles firing just to keep me stationary while Hillary squeezed and arced all his weight to push my head and shoulders down. I tried to relax any muscle not being used to keep my bridge.

In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, about half of Belaire’s team gathered to watch, a few of them knowing me since middle school, too. If there were such a thing as psychic energy, I felt it radiating from them, trying to send me some of their strength when I needed it. Then I saw a group of six wrestlers gather in white shirts beside the Bengals.

They were the all-city wrestlers from the previous summer freestyle camp, the same ones who wrestled on the all-Louisiana team during summer junior olympics. Like I remembered from middle school, the all-city wrestlers all wore different colored hoodies to represent their teams, but now I knew that they were aligned with the sport of wrestling more than any color. Six of them gathered behind the blue hooded Belaire Bengals, all wearing the same white t-shirt over their different colored hoodies. Only Chris Forest, heavyweight for the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, wasn’t wearing one, because he couldn’t squeeze his broad torso into an XXL. Next to Chris and two feet shorter was Clothodian Tate, the Bulldog’s captain and 136 pound champion, a wrestler just as terse as Hillary but with a perpetual smile and generous hand at helping others.

The summer before, Clodi’s dad, a minister, found the t-shirts in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU, just were it branches off of I-10 and where a few small shops sprouted up under the rumble of Teamster trucks overhead. The shirts were simple white shirts printed with Ephsians 6:12 in an unremarkable font, but the message wasn’t about religion for most of us, it was about wrestling. It said:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

My flesh was out of oxygen, but my body somehow kept wrestling with whatever fuel was left for it to fight against darkness. Gradually, the guys in my corner began to fade into one dark grey blur, and the clock became a single spot of fuzzy orange light at the end of my tunneled vision. No sound from the gym reached my mind’s ear; but in it, I heard the slow opening lyrics of Lunatic Fringe:

Lunatic fringe
I know you’re out there…

The song at that line, like my energy at that moment, drifted away silently. The acne on my back protruded further than my tight singlet and I could feel the bumps contact the mat and push against my skin. The orange light dimmed and then vanished, but I saw the referee’s blurry face when he slid beside my head with his whistle pinched between his lips, and I felt my skin contact the rubber mat. I heard a whistle and the slap of a hand against the mat. My vision quest was over. Hillary Clinton had won.

We stood up and the referee raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook the gym more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It was a beautiful throw and Hillary earned his win.

The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me at 3:40, twenty seconds to go in the second round, and those records persist in LHSAA.org archives for the world to know that Hillary won the gold, and that Clodi won most outstanding wrestler using the same ranked voting system Coach used for captain. No one argued that the Bulldog’s captain deserved that honor among a gym full of outstanding wrestlers; in two years of sparing with him, I never once scored on Clodi. He was perpetually calm and cordial; he did not wrestle against flesh and blood. Had he been ten pounds heavier, I suspect he could have defeated Hillary in what would have been the world’s most silent yet brutal battle.

I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand reached up and clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance now permanent part of how he stood, and he said: “Good job, Magik.”

Jeremy offered me a fresh hand towel. He was a man of few words but of kind actions who never agreed with the team’s decision to make me co-captain, but he stood up and offered the chair next to Coach. Surprised, I accepted the towel and sat down. He had nothing to prove with his gesture; he was the champion, not I. Jeremy stepped behind me and into the corner that was now empty; a quick glance let me see our team back in the bleachers with their parents, and I turned around and sat beside Coach. Another wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.

Later that day, a few of us were helping the Bulldogs clean up their gym. I couldn’t help much, because my finger had a splint from the medic and I had kept a bag of ice from the concession stand on it for an hour or so. Instead, I stared at the blank clock, powered off but still foreboding if only because of it’s bulk handing over our heads.

My vision quest had ended, and I had won. It wasn’t about winning. Of course the guy in Vision Quest won; that was a movie. In real life, a lot of the most memorable wins in life follow losses on the mat, just like Coach becoming a better person after Doug defeated him. I finally saw that. No one had died, and we still had tomorrow; in the end, that’s all anyone I’ve ever known really wanted.

I heard laugher I recognized, and in my periphery I saw Pat, a former Bulldog heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches and Andy and Timmy, who had known Pat from when they all trained at the all-city camp before my time as a wrestler. They were laughing with a small group of other old-timers with Pat, who volunteered at the downtown camp and who, like Chris Forest, couldn’t squeeze into an XXL shirt.

“Hillary stuck Magik so hard,” Pat said in a playful tone, “the only thing he could wiggle was his eyeballs.”

Pat wiggled his eyeballs and everyone laughed; he set up that joke every time someone was pinned. I had seen him do it a million times. I would have laughed again, too, had I not been so focused on the timer. I was thinking about how it faded from my vision, and wondering how I was unable to remember the exact moment I stopped being able to see it. I stared at the clock and wondered how much of my body acted on its own, habit and conditioning rather than thought. I looked down at the ice pack wrapped on my hand, and wondered if I’d be able to wrestle in regionals, and I scanned the empty bleachers and wondered if it mattered.

The laughter dissipated and the gaggle of wresters and coaches parted. In my periphery, I saw Pat’s smile go away. He leaned down and softly asked Coach:

“What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all season. It looked like he gave up. Is he okay?”

Coach said that I had a lot on my mind, that my grandfather was sick. Then he slid his reading glasses from around his neck and put them on the tip of his nose, glanced down at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to help someone do something.

Pat didn’t know what to say. Everyone had seen the news that my grandfather was not expected to live much longer. After the New Year he was confined to a nursing home and was being cared for by his daughter, my Aunt Janice. Pat had forgotten. He glanced at me, then turned towards where Coach had gone and hustled off after him.

My grandfather died a week later.

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