The final pay-off, my senior year, the only possible pay-off, was in who I had become. I was, even as a senior, a small man: 5’8” and 145 pounds. My frame was dense, short and thick, but the body that had always frustrated my attempts to adopt the prep school WASP style – pants that draped elegantly around thin legs, shirts that fell straight down bony chests – served me well on the mat. Over the years, I had grown taller, and my body had hardened, but the contours remained the same. I had a solid but never impressive physique. My mother was always afraid that I would be injured because my opponents, who made up for their narrower, airier frames with more impressive musculature, appeared so much bigger than I did.
What they had on me in power, however, I made up for in craft. I was a cerebral wrestler. Our coach was once quoted, in an article in the school newspaper about the team, saying of me that I was “always two or three moves ahead” of my opponent. That wasn’t true, but I was a strategic wrestler. I knew my strengths – quickness, an ability to size up my opponent’s psychology, a low center of gravity, an excellent sense of balance – and I evolved a style to both take advantage of these strengths and to minimize the consequences of my weaknesses: poor conditioning and an unwillingness to throw myself completely into any move.
I was quick from my feet, but I didn’t like shooting inside toward my opponent’s legs, because even if I penetrated well and got a good hold of one of his legs, there would be too many stages involved in bringing him down to the mat: the struggle to my feet, the effort to lift his leg high up in the air, the awkward maneuvering of his body to a position where I could trip him. It was too much work.
Instead I began by softening my opponent up a bit, smacking him on his headgear a few times to disorient him. Then I would move in with a Collar, slamming my right forearm against his chest and locking my hand behind his neck. I would suddenly drop my knees to the mat, letting all of my weight fall on my hand and through it on the back of his neck. If he was a bad wrestler, he would drop his head and torso down, and I would swim my left arm around and catch his left ankle, bringing it toward his head and folding him over like a collapsible chair. If he was a good wrestler, he would respond by dropping his knees, keeping his feet away from me, and I would have to let him up. No gain, but no harm, with little effort expended on my part and almost no exposure to risk.
If I had to shoot, I would smack him a few more times on the head to get him flinching, and then shoot a very low, outside single, diving for his left ankle. If I got it, I would spin out quickly away from his body and pick it up; often he’d fall to the mat before I even had to bother standing up, but when I did have to go the extra mile, he had so little leverage from that far out on his leg that I it was easy to jack his leg up high and then trip him.
From the top I was a technician, a point-scorer. I scored more technical pins – ahead by fifteen or more points – my senior year than regular pins. I knew how to break people down, how to chip away at their will to win as I chipped away at their limbs, tilting, rolling, squeezing, sliding, twisting. I conserved energy, giving way when my opponent pushed, turning him on the slightest fulcrum when he relented. If he tried too hard to escape, I would let him go, and then take him down again, and start all over. I was less active from the bottom. My sense of balance was good, and I could tell the difference between a move that would only waste my opponent’s energy and one that endangered me. I let my opponent mess around, blocking his moves when necessary, only exerting myself when I was in jeopardy of being turned over or saw an opportunity to escape or reverse. I could also tell the difference between a near-fall move that would only score points and one with which my opponent might pin me. I once spent the final two-thirds of the final period of a match on my back. My opponent had already collected his three points for a near-fall and I was still ahead. He didn’t have the leverage to pin both shoulder blades to the mat, and so I just stayed there and let the seconds tick away. I was, I’ve been told, infuriating to wrestle – not particularly strong, or fast, or aggressive?just slick.
At the state championships, I won without having a point scored against me. My first opponent, a freshman who had to wrestle a match just to make it into the sixteen-man bracket, was so scared of me that when we first clinched, he fell on his back, and I pinned him in less than ten seconds. In the second round, I won 13-0 against a boy from Avon Old Farms Academy whom I had beaten 8-1 earlier in the year. My brother happened to be in the locker room later in the day when someone asked the Avon boy how his match went. “I lost,” he said, “but it was Oppenheimer.” The other wrestlers, my brother told me, nodded as if that was explanation enough. I don’t remember the semi-finals match, but in the finals I pinned a boy from Choate about halfway through the second period.
I lost twice that year, the first time to a boy whom I never saw again, the second time to a boy from Tabor Academy whom I didn’t see again until the New England Championships. We didn’t wrestle there because he lost, in the semi-finals, to a boy from Moses Brown Academy. I beat the Moses Brown boy 5-2 in a slow match, scoring my points on two takedowns and an escape, giving up two points on two escapes, and spending most of the match on my hands and knees, his legs entangled in mine and him trying, with increasing desperation, to turn me over. It wasn’t an impressive victory, but it was enough. I was the Connecticut and New England champion at 145 pounds.
If I don’t linger on that fact, on the wins and the engraved bowl I was awarded at the Connecticut tournament and the engraved plaque I was awarded at the New England tournament, it’s not because being a champion wasn’t important to me. To the contrary, I loved it. I didn’t jump around and scream and gesticulate when I won – that wasn’t my style – but I walked around in a glow of contentment for the next few weeks, and at the victory party after New England’s, held at the Westchester estate of our 189 pounder, I fooled around with a girl, only the second girl who’d ever let me touch her and the first from Loomis. More than that, though, I was able to say to myself – and not infrequently to others – that I had won, that I had left nothing on the mat. I had no regrets, nothing left to prove to myself. When, in college, I saw flyers advertising a wrestling meet, I was able to pass by them with only a slight wince of regret for not having joined the team. They didn’t need me, I knew, and I didn’t particularly need them.
If I don’t linger on being a champion (though it seems as if I’m lingering, doesn’t it?), it’s because I’m uneasy about how much it meant to me. It should have been enough to grow into a good wrestler, to master the skills, to find a style, to achieve control. What are championships? I won the prep school New England’s, but there may have been a public school boy who would have beaten me if public and private wrestled together. A week or two after the season ended, I went to see a friend wrestle in the Pennsylvania state tournament, and it was clear that there were ten or fifteen wrestlers in the 145 pound weight class who were much better than I was. I didn’t beat the boy from Moses Brown decisively; on another day, he might have won, and in another year, there might have been a superior wrestler. But on that day, and in that year, I won, and that meant and still means a great deal to me, and I wonder whether it shouldn’t. I wanted to prove something to myself, and what does winning prove? That I was lucky, I guess, and that without the dedication and practice and sacrifice luck wouldn’t have been enough.
