10th Reunion

Timeline 09:24h 16 September, 2011.

I love Wrestling.  Not that crazy WWF, Hulk-Hogan-TV sh*t.  I’m talking about folk-style, freestyle, and Greco-Roman wrestling, the styles practiced by most U.S. high schools and colleges (and the Olympics).  It is my favorite sport, bar none.

No other scholastic sport builds the kind of determination, and strength, in both body and mind (in my opinion) like wrestling. So I go and watch the local high school matches, even though I don’t know anyone on the teams, because I love the drama, and the strength, and the inherent quality of this sport. But I never really wrestled, so to speak. Here’s what happened:
My older brothers, Steve and Bob, were stellar wrestlers in the late ’60’s and early 1970’s at Lakeland High, under Coach Billy Hayes. I was supposed to follow in their footsteps. They even brought me to meet him when I was a kid.
I never really paid any attention to the sport until I got to Panas, as there was no Little League or midget club for wrestling (that I knew of) back then. [Now, in my area, they start kids wrestling pre-kindergarten].
So, freshman football season ended and I went to my first week of wrestling practice, way back in 1974.
I never participated in anything so hard in my life. Football’s summer double-sessions, lacrosse’s endless wind-sprints, baseball practice (hah!): nothing came close to the rigors of wrestling practice: I was utterly spent. I wondered if I could even stick it out.
On that Friday of the first week of practice, I got off the after-school bus, and some neighborhood kids were playing tackle football on Tommy Deitz’s front lawn. I joined in, ran the ball once, got tackled and broke my hand (fourth metacarpal). Secretly, I was actually kind of relieved: I had an excuse not to go back to wrestling practice.
My brothers were very disappointed, and I pretended to be too, (for their sake).
I went out dutifully again, my sophomore year. Same thing: it was the most brutal thing I ever saw or did. Now the other kids had a year of experience on me, and I was getting pinned and tossed around by everyone: Joe Berrios, Dougie Percesepe, Billy Murphy, Sammy Santiago. I was demoralized. I was so tired. My pimples were torn and bleeding (yuck). I went home and told my mom I wanted to quit. She didn’t mind, (she didn’t care for the sport) but my brothers gave me some hard, hard words and looks…but I quit anyway, my excuse being I needed to work at Carroll’s Burgers and earn some money. Right.
But I went out my junior year, again, determined to stick it out. This time I made it to our first match of the season. I was wrestling up at 132 lbs (I probably weighed 125). They put me on the J.V. squad, which in wrestling means you wrestle later in the evening, after the Varsity guys have their full-fledged, big-boy matches.
Mike ‘Beef’ DeStefano went out and wrestled before me, and he got pinned, and he left the mat and went into the locker room. Mike was a neighborhood buddy, and I saw he was down and out, and I followed him in to cheer him up.
When I arrived he had his head in his hands, and he was sobbing, his whole body heaving with every breath. I was momentarily stunned. I never saw that kind of reaction in any of the sports I played. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost, sometimes you were a hero, sometimes a goat, and that was it. You moved on and played the next day. I tried to console him, saying something just as dumb as the previous sentence, but he just shoo-shoo-ed me away.
I left him sobbing.   Now it was my turn to go out and wrestle.
I walked onto the mat, after a semi-push from Assistant Coach Scozzafava, and immediately something, everything, felt…weird.
First of all, in the sports I was used to playing (football, lacrosse, et. al.) you wore shoulder pads and helmets and jerseys and cleats and eye-black and gloves and all sorts of other stuff. People in the stands, if they didn’t know your number, usually couldn’t tell who was who out there on the fied. One could hide oneself a little bit, if necessary.
Suddenly, there I was out in the middle of this empty mat, under bright and glaring fluorescent lights, all by myself in front of a lot of angry dads.  And I was essentially naked. I mean, that wrestling singlet leaves nothing to the imagination. I felt really, really, really…small.
Well, I quickly got over it because my opponent stepped out onto the mat and there was no way in hell that he weighed 132 lbs. He had muscles on his teeth and a neck like a tree trunk. Remember I said that wrestling practices were really, really hard? There is a reason for that: wrestling matches are even harder.
The ref blew his whistle and this animal was on me before I was even done blushing. Suddenly I was in a fight to the death, semi-naked, in front of a lot of screaming people. I tried the two moves I knew and it was all wrong and immediately I was on my back. And I realized way, way too late that I was totally unprepared: I shouldn’t have walked out on this sport those last two years.
While I was having a semi-relaxing winter break between football and lacrosse seasons, partying with Dre and Reilly and Lips and Neck and Ze-Zay and Bony A., this guy was doing thousands of pushups and pullups and handstands and ankle-picks and wind-sprints and fireman’s carries and single-leg sweeps and neck bridges and running and basically learning how to pin jerks like me in twelve different ways. And that’s what he did, in about 27 seconds.
I went into the locker room, where 10 minutes before I was mystified by Mike’s tears, and I began sobbing. I mean, heaving weeping from my belly. I was making noises I didn’t know I had. I was mortified, both by my performance out there and by my reaction in here.
So I quit. Again. And to this day, that remains one of my single biggest regrets.
So, if any fourteen year old is reading this out there, and is considering quitting anything, especially wrestling, because it is hard and unpleasant, my sincere advice to you is to hang in there. Please. Wrestling lasts four years.  Quitting lasts a lifetime.

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
The Buddha