In
between tournaments in the rather longish debate season I heard a
call for open wrestling tryouts and I thought I could wrestle. It
turned out that I was able to wrestle better than anything else I had
tried in high school sports because I made the team instantly. That
was mainly down to the fact that everyone who showed up was on the
team. The coach said that he liked my can-do attitude for coming out
and trying to wrestle when I was 17 and most of the other boys had
been wrestling their whole lives since they were 4 or five. I didn't
know the rules or the moves but I did know how to go full blast for
six minutes of grappling and that turned out to be enough to get onto
the varsity team and win four of my 18 matches. This once again was
not so much a commentary on my innate ability to wrestle so much as
the really pathetic squad we were fielding my senor year. We were loo
sign wrestling matches by thirty, forty points and that is almost
unheard of. Many of the kids I was there practicing with were only
there because their fathers had insisted or bribed them and they gave
little to no effort. Because I was
doing so well against the ragamuffins in and around my weight class
with the one exception of the kid who was in the class closet to my
natural weight I thought I would be some pretty big trouble for all
those who would have to face me in the squared circle of the
wrestling mat. I was almost entirely wrong excepting cripples, the
violently ill, and in a particularly low point, a cancer patient.
