The Stakes

My little brother and I loved wrestling. We had all the action figures and a ring we would make them fight in. We would watch it on T.V. every week and especially when we were at my grandparent’s house down south. My grandfather loved to watch wrestling. When I found out I could actually wrestle on the school team I was thrilled. I had my backstory prepared and knew exactly what personality I wanted to have.

Then I got to wrestling practice.

Let’s just say olympic wrestling is not quite like the T.V. First of all, you aren’t even allowed to hit the other person. There were a lot of grabbing and complicated twists. Sure, you could throw people to the mat, but you certainly weren’t allowed to put them over your head or bring them down on your knee to break their back.

Wrestling was not anything like I thought it was going to be, and I was horrified to find out you did even MORE running than basketball. My dad wrestled a lot in highschool so this is a sport he put his foot down and made me stick with.

Several factors compounded into me being a bad wrestler. The level of physical exertion disagreed with me. Also, those damned singlets. I was self-conscious enough about my weight, but now there was an outfit I had to wear that showed off every single roll.

Critically, for me, was my weight. Wrestling is all about weight classes. It makes sense, you don’t want a 150 lbs kid like me fighting someone who only just hit 70 lbs. It would hardly be fair. The trouble was, at my weight, as a 5th grader, I was having to fight kids who were in 7th and 8th grade. Their years of experience and actually being mostly muscle just turned me into a sandbag to be thrown around. I was crushed. Every match. I think I only had two meets in two years that went into the second round.

One particularly horrifying defeat was against a kid with only one arm. He destroyed me.

It didn’t help that I really didn’t have a good way to practice. I was the heaviest kid by far on our team so that left me with the coach to wrestle against who just whooped my ass and called it a lesson.

That is, until Jamie came along.

She was bigger than I was. There was no girls team because most girls in 5th grade are still far more interested in dolls and trying makeup for the first time.

Not Jamie. She was a shy girl who didn’t seem to have many interests but for some strange reason was interested in wrestling. I’m assuming she had a lot of pent up anger due to her years of being very overweight and just not fitting in.

Let’s get this clear, right out of the gate, reader. I did not hate Jamie. She was a nice enough girl. Sure, she smelled awful. Her mom did too so she probably didn’t even notice. She had an older brother who was well over 300lbs in middle school. She came from a long line of people who were about as far to the right of the bell curve as you can get for their weight and were all headed straight for heart disease. I never hated her or even disliked her. I did however, abhor wrestling her.

She became my de facto partner for the rest of my short career. This posed several problems. One, a lot of wrestling moves require you to grab a person where I was explicitly told were off limits when touching a girl. She was also way heavier than I was so even if I did manage to get a hold of her moving her wasn’t a good option. She learned all of this very quickly and absolutely exploited the advantage.

By that I mean, she sat on me.

I’d go in for a grab and she’d just shift her weight a bit and boom, I was on my back and she was sitting on me. Sometimes, she’d just straddle my chest facing me and sit on me.

This was all around bullshit and I hated every second of it. With my coach I could at least think to myself, “I’ll try harder next time.” With Jamie, I became absolutely rebellious. I’d fake throwing up to get out of practice, smash my forehead against a heater to try and trick my mom I had a fever. I’d make up that I had a lot of homework to do and couldn’t make practice. Anything.

In her defense, she utilized these same tactics at meets and actually won a fair few matches. The 7th and 8th grade boys were a lot more aware of exactly what bits of her they’d have to grab to pull off their moves and simply let her win. I remember there was one particularly burly boy she wrestled who wasn’t having any of it. He beat the ever living shit out of her. She came away from that match crying and bleeding out of her nose. The look on her face when he had her in the air, that’ll stick with me.

All of this was culminating in me being very unhappy. After a match lost against a kid who had no legs, I could hardly stand it. Mind you, wrestling is all about leverage and keeping your center of gravity as close to the floor as you can. This is made infinitely easier when you have no legs. The kid was a fucking weeble wobble. I am sure his lack of legs made his life challenging in a lot of other ways, but that day it was used as an instrument of my shame and I still have a hard time looking back at that.

About this time I was really getting into video games. They were coming a long way from the arcade games that were out there and the Nintendo 64 held a particularly coveted place in my heart. After a lot of shouting matches with my father--and me just wanting to be done--he convinced me to make it to one more meet.

The day of the meet I one my first match by default. The other kid had diarrhea and never made it to the floor so I won the fight. This put me into the next round. All in all I was actually pretty pissed about this. Wrestling meets are an all day thing and I had a good book waiting for me in the stand. You had to stay the whole day to “support the team” and I was used to a comfortable rhythm of getting my ass beat in the first round and reading the rest of the day with a soft pretzel and cheese.

In the second round I did my warm ups and went to the mat. What did I see? Not an older kid waiting to whoop up on me, but another short, fat kid. Just like me. I looked at my father, and with the tact that should have a parent escorted from the premises, he shouted from the stand, “Kick this kid’s ass and I’ll buy you that Nintendo.”

I locked eyes with the kid. We shook hands. He heard. He knew what was on the line. I looked deep into his eyes and said, “Sorry about this.”

The whistle blew and two years of having my ass beat by my coach, every other big kid, and being sat on by Jamie came out at once. I went right for his legs, head butting him in the process and knocking the wind out of him, ripped that leg up, and drove him with my shoulder into the mat as hard as I could. He whimpered and panicked. I drove my elbow into his bicep and rolled over this kid and had him locked. Every move I’d never managed to pull off came out at once and every ounce of my aggression was poured into punishing this kid. Did I hate him? No, but these were high stakes. He knew what was on the line for me and knew what I had to do.

All in all the match lasted about thirty seconds. The hand hit the mat and I stood up and walked right to my coach. He was shouting for joy.

“I quit.”

He looked at me stunned and I calmly walked over to my dad who hugged me, never more proud of his son than that moment. I picked up my book and half-eaten pretzel and said, “Time for your end of the bargain.”

He said we had to stay for the third round and I said, “Oh no. I already quit. Coach is at the table now telling them.”

What still baffles me is that my dad, usually a hot head and never one to be told what to do, especially by his own kids, didn’t even argue. He saw the look in my eyes. He knew I was done. He looked at the coach, a good friend of his, and just shrugged. He grabbed his coat and we went straight to K-Mart.

A few hours later my brother and I were happily taking turns on Super Mario 64.