[I was going back through some of my unpublished work today and came across this essay, written a few years ago, about my time as a high school wrestler. In the spirit of letting no halfway decent writing go to waste, I’d thought I’d share it with you. It’s long-ish though, so I’m going to do it in installments.]
Part 1: The Beginning
I chose to wrestle because it was only chance I had left to be a good athlete. Before arriving at the Loomis Chaffee School, a prep school in Windsor, Connecticut, I was a soccer player, but by the end of my first fall at Loomis — a few hours a day of which I spent as a mediocre player on the freshman team — I knew that soccer wasn’t really an option. The boys around me were better, stronger, faster. They’d hit puberty earlier, and, even more importantly, they were specialists. Where they were raised – for the most part in wealthy Connecticut suburbs – parents knew that the competition for adolescent status was fierce; your boy had to specialize to succeed. Their boys had been playing soccer year-round since grade school, whereas I’d been dabbling in three or four sports, mastering none.
So soccer was taken away from me, and basketball, which had been my winter sport in junior high school, wasn’t really an option. I’d been able to play as long as I did only because the Jewish Community Center was picking from a rather short pool of talent.
Wrestling was an opportunity. In real wrestling states — manly places like Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania — they take wrestling seriously; to be competitive there, a boy has to begin training early. In Connecticut almost no one begins wrestling until high school. It’s a tabula rasa for the presumptive athlete. And it was more than that for a boy like me, a boy who had always been strong for his size, fast for his size, capable for his size – for me it was a sport with weight classes. I was tired of failing because I was small, and tired of wondering whether I failed not because I was small but because I was inadequate. No more excuses. I wrestled because my other options had dried up, and because I needed to prove something to myself.
The first season was something of a draw. I wasn’t very good, but because of the weight class system, I was able to wrestle enough varsity matches to earn a letter. And so at the varsity banquet freshman year, I was seated around a table with fifteen of my teammates, given soggy lettuce with Italian dressing, grape drink, a plate of ziti, and when the school athletic director, a man named Bob who we liked to call Vinnie (not to his face), read aloud the names of those who had earned a varsity letter, my name was on the list. More than that, I was on my teammates’ list; I was part of their team. It had happened fitfully, a consequence less of my potential than of my wit.
To wit (!): on the way back from one of our away matches, a teammate and his girlfriend started making out in the back of the bus. I whispered “slip in the third leg” – a play on the wrestling phrase “slip in the leg” – to the senior in the seat in front of me. He laughed, and told me to repeat it, more loudly, to everyone else, and when I did they laughed too. Emboldened, I made a few more jokes, found a few more double-entendres (not hard to come by in wrestling). Mostly, I just had to remember the names of a few moves: the Spread-Eagle; the Saturday Night Ride; the Ball & Chain. As the coup de grace, I aped our coach Hank’s commandment during a takedown drill, barking, “It’s all about penetration.”
My cleverest moment of the season came in the wrestling room, as I stretched out my neck during warm-ups. Before practice, down in the locker room, Hank had measured us with his body fat calipers, gripping the folds at our waist and the skin on our biceps and quadriceps. Most of the team came in at five or six percent body fat. One boy, a former gymnast, was two percent. I was gauged at nine percent, a fit percentage for a normal adolescent but soft for a wrestler. We were comparing numbers up in the room, and when the question came around to me, I copped to my result.
“Nine percent,” someone said, “God Damn.” Everybody laughed.
“All right, all right,” I said, “I’m a fat fuck.” The room exploded with laughter.
What I said wouldn’t have been clever anywhere other than in a wrestling room, or maybe a ballet studio, but I had stumbled onto one of the fault lines of wrestling. To be fat, to be “overweight,” is in wrestling both the most objective and the most subjective of realities. A wrestler is fat, is overweight, if he’s an ounce above the limit for his weight class. A wrestler’s beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the mechanisms of the law-giving scale. His fatness is objective, defined, undeniable. But his fatness is also relative, subjective. When I wrestled in the 112 pound weight class, I weighed 110 pounds, and so I was light. A week after I was displaced from the 112 pound class, and had made it down to 105 pounds but not yet to 103 pounds, I was fat.
Fatness had little to do with how much we weighed, everything to do with how much we weighed relative to our weight class. And even the weight classes we found ourselves in were somewhat arbitrary, often dependent less on our natural weight than the weight distribution of the team. Also, and this was the irony that as a novice wrestler I was more aware of than my older teammates, none of us was fat to the world. We were, by any other standard, thin. I was able to make my joke – “I’m a fat fuck” – because I hadn’t yet internalized the sport’s idiom. I hadn’t spent enough time on the scales to become fluent in the language of wrestling, to forget what “fat” otherwise meant.
What I proved to myself that season, at best, was that I could endure a season of wrestling – with its weight losses, mat burns, deep bruises, strained muscles and lost matches – and persevere. And that I could belong. If nothing else, I didn’t give up, which was something. But not enough. I needed to be good, and it would be a while before I was any good.
