Worth the read

[takemtothemat]

Years ago, my son C.J. came home from elementary school, pulled a crumpled flyer from his backpack, and announced that he wanted to try wrestling.

My wife and I shrugged, saying, "Sure, why not?," quietly assuming this little sports experiment would end the way soccer, karate, flag football, swimming, and basketball had ended: with a few Saturdays spent in a local gym or park or pool with similarly bored parents drinking wine out of coffee mugs in a weekly ritual that culminated in C.J.'s declaration that "(insert sport here) isn't my thing."

I assumed, given he was always a head taller than his classmates and I was once upon a time a decent basketball player (cue Springsteen's "Glory Days"), that his hoops genes would eventually kick in.

Oh, how wrong I was.

At the time, everything I knew about wrestling I had learned from Emilio Estevez in "The Breakfast Club." My wife, the over-preparer, bought "Wrestling for Dummies" and read it, but I never bothered. This wasn't going to last. I had a karate uniform, football cleats, and a soccer goal in the storage room to prove it.

In his first wrestling match at Jesuit, he trotted out onto the mat in the "required uniform" (tights!) with a similarly spandex-ed youth. They proceeded to grapple and roll around with each other like baby elephant seals on espresso until apparently my son's opponent did something good and the ref smacked the mat, declaring C.J. had been pinned.

I turned to my wife and said, "This is the stupidest sport ever." We got up and prepared to leave wrestling behind for good. Perhaps now I could get him back on the basketball court and teach him some of my mad hoops skillz. He ran up to us, flushed with excitement. "Did you SEE ME?"

Uh oh.

C.J. enrolled at Archbishop Rummel High School and joined the wrestling team.

Over the next five years, we learned many things. We learned that, unlike football and basketball, which were played for finite amounts of time at reasonable hours, my wife or I was expected to be up before dawn to drive C.J. hundreds of miles to and from rural gymnasiums, where we would spend our entire Saturday sitting on hard bleachers, lunching on Cheetos, and watching our son get pinned and eliminated in a grand total of 60 seconds.

We learned that the smell of a wrestling practice can literally knock over a full-grown rhino. We learned to read wrestling brackets clearly designed by insane mathematicians. We learned to work concession stands selling donuts to the kids who didn't have to cut weight. We learned what "cut weight" means.

We learned about the diagnosis and treatment of exotic skin diseases like impetigo and ringworm (sadly, at the same time). We learned how long it takes to get an X-ray in the emergency room (hint: really long). We learned that leaving wrestling shoes in the car overnight effectively makes the car uninhabitable forever.

During those five years, I never saw a TV camera at a wrestling match. C.J. didn't get his name in the paper. He didn't run through a painted banner. There were no cheerleaders, pep rallies or marching bands. Wrestling is a lonely sport that attracts little media and fewer groupies.

The first time C.J. got his arm raised in victory, it wasn't because he'd won, but because the other kid failed to appear. That was wrestling's first life lesson to C.J.: Sometimes, success means just showing up.

The first time he won a match, he looked up at us in the stands with the same expression our Labrador gets when he accidentally catches a squirrel. When he had his arm raised in victory, he said he felt "like a god."

 

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In the ensuing seasons, he didn't get that feeling too often, however. For a long time, C.J. lost more than he won, sometimes much, much more. But he never quit, even when we told him it would be OK (we secretly wanted our Saturdays back). He stuck with it. "You just bought yourself another Saturday."

 

Over the seasons, kids came and went from the wrestling program like radio stations on a cross-country drive, but not only did C.J. not give up, neither did his coaches. No one wants to feel like they are wasting someone else's time, but coaches Jon Orillion, Robert Pinero and Jim Ravannack continued to push him, to support him, and to encourage him while reassuring us that win or lose, C.J. belonged.

And on Saturdays, C.J. still got beaten.

And C.J. kept getting up, shaking the hand of his opponent and praising their effort.

And on Mondays, C.J. went back to practice to start all over again.

We began to realize that wrestling was teaching our son something about life: how to win with humility and to lose with dignity. Winning, despite what we are frequently told, is not what life is about. Life is about getting back up after you've been knocked flat or humiliated. "Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place" and you'd better be ready to deal with it.

Life is as much about perseverance as talent. Probably more.

In his senior year, C.J. was now 6 feet 4 with a decidedly basketball player's body, but long hours in the weight room had him benching over 300 pounds. He was no longer the chubby little elephant seal who got pinned in his first match. The massive investment of time and faith by C.J.'s coaches and by C.J. himself had begun to pay off. He won a score of matches in his senior season, usually employing his 5-foot long arms for his signature cradle.

Wrestling had become fun for both him and his long-suffering parents, though there was a family-wide competition to see who was more nervous before a match.

At the state wrestling championships this past weekend in Bossier City, my wife and I, like many wrestling parents, asked ourselves how we ended up here, years removed from the day C.J. waved that crumpled wrestling flyer at us. High above the 10 mats on the floor of the CenturyLink Center, C.J.'s name appeared on the JumboTron along with that of his upcoming opponent. We were preparing to watch some muscular, intense young man who shaved attempt to mash our precious baby boy into the ground. Then we realized that his opponent's parents were probably somewhere in the bleachers thinking the exact same thing.

We calculated that we'd spent at least a total of a month of the past five years sitting in the car waiting for him to emerge from practice and twice as long sitting on wooden bleachers. We'd absorbed through our skin a gallon of ink from tournament hand-stamps. We'd weighed him 7,000 times to make sure the previous night's pizza bacchanalia didn't put him into a higher weight class. This weekend, it was all ending.

As his match approached, his mother slipped from the stadium, as usual unable to watch. My hands shook. They never shook in Iraq, or while shooting Super Bowls, or in the middle of hurricanes, but now I couldn't control them. I wanted to throw up. C.J.'s teammates lined the railing behind him, screaming along with the coaches as C.J. and his opponent battled fiercely.

And after six intense minutes, C.J. had his arm raised. He had won. But before everything, he offered his hand to his opponent to lift him from the mat.

Late in the day, C.J.'s wrestling career ended. There will be no wrestling scholarship, no Olympics, he has no ride to blow. He is unlikely to ever again put on headgear and the "required uniform" (I learned it's actually called a singlet). After losing for the second time, he was eliminated from the state championship.

But he got up from the mat with a big smile. He congratulated his opponent. He first hugged Coach Jon, then all his other coaches and teammates, then he hugged me. He didn't throw his headgear. He didn't blame the ref (even if it DID look like C.J. had the pin in the second minute. Just saying.) He lost but that was OK, and wrestling taught him that.

The points he earned with his win helped put Rummel into second place and C.J. hoisted the team's runner-up state championship trophy on the podium surrounded by the brothers we couldn't give him (because children are REALLY expensive.)

As the wrestlers headed back to the team buses, some with medals, some without, the wrestling parents packed up too and headed back to their wrestling shoe-infected vehicles, their season of long drives and hard bleachers finally over. At C.J.'s first match, I said that wrestling was a stupid sport. I was wrong.

When we got back home to New Orleans, C.J. hung his team runner-up state champion medal on the mantel and said, "I guess I'm retired. What's next?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bluechipper]

Love it.

[TripleB]

Awesome and very touching.

[aoberlin]

Nice!

[XCard]

Great read

[XCard]

Great read