Once You've Wrestled

A ref’s whistle is not swayed by how much work you put in. It cannot read the horror on your face as you step on the mat, cannot register your strong humility against an opponent’s weak arrogance. It only knows the wind from the ref’s mouth: the anxiety-ridden starts and the ego-brutalizing ends of each ruthless period.      

Coach gripped his belly and tucked it around his seatbelt so he could turn to see my bruised face in the van’s wrestler-cramped back seat.

“Could he beat you in chess?”

Hell no he can’t beat me in chess.

“In checkers?”

Coach, if I could beat him in chess, do you really think he could beat me in checkers.

“Can he beat you in school?”

You act like you didn’t hear him speak – the kid’s GPA is probably negative.

“Uh… in writing? On the cello?”

Yeah, my creative talents really helped when he was crushing my windpipe between his bicep and his knee.

“How about… how about, in social interaction?”

I get it coach – “Yes, coach, I got it, thank you.”

I decided to cut my losses and just shoot a blast double. But it was not a “shot” as shots usually go – it was more a half-assed attempt at a lunge where half my body went forward and half my body stayed put. He laughed. He literally laughed, stepped out of the way, and as my center of gravity rose again by a single millimeter, he eliminated me. Goodbye. He had me on my back, my neck in his elbow crook, pulling my shoulder blades to the mat. But I refused to quit.

I’ve eaten next to nothing in the past 24 hours. I weighed in 3 pounds underweight, stupidly. And I’m tired. I’m nervous, and hungry, but so damn nervous, about to get beaten up in front of hundreds of people, I can barely think, barely process –

For about a full minute straight, he just bullied me. He sat heavily on my back with his knee in my spine, wrenching my left arm behind my back so my left hand rested where my right pocket should be. He actually giggled as I squirmed beneath him, unable to shift my weight anywhere. I should’ve stuck to cello, I thought to myself.

I hated that whistle. It only ever blows when you don’t want it to. It blows when you or your opponent’s shoulder blades kiss the mat; and after the ref spits saliva-breath through those horrible plastic holes, he smacks the mat with an open palm, just so you’re doubly sure that you lost. Just in case your crushed ribs weren’t enough of a tell already.

The kid’s waist was invisible, and his quads looked like anacondas wrestling and suffocating one another up his entire leg. His calves somehow equaled the width of his legs. And then across from him there was me, the guy who had never squatted once, who had spent the summer exclusively bench pressing and bicep curling in the hopes of scoring girls’ attention at the beach.

Wrestling meant something more to me than those other things. It’s a different kind of pain and endurance that even the worst of wrestlers has to bear. It’s flexing every muscle in your body for six minutes straight, contemplating both your defense to his offense and your offense to his defense, considering complex techniques while your mind is drenched in adrenal-fear, your heart maintaining a steady 210 bpm, your lungs exhaling too rapidly for you to inhale – all this while you stand there as close as humanly possible to buck-naked right in front of all your best friends.

I hooked my elbow onto his. I shifted all my weight to my right, and threw our tangled bodies into a vicious sideways roll. Finally this bout was turning in my favor. I could sense myself on top, could see my points on the board – yet as we spun, I realized we were spinning too far, that he was making us spin too far, and it hit me that he had rolled my roll. I did not know this was possible.

“I’m sorry — what, coach?”

“What else can he beat you in?”

The ref smacked the mat.

I checked again for my singlet. Yeah, of course I remembered it. That’s why my entire body itches. Goddamn singlets. Wrestling itself is humiliating enough, and then they want us to do it wearing a fucking onesie.

Wrestling was good for me because I never would have learned discipline without it. As a cellist you just frantically practice to figure out some piece in order to impress the teacher your parents pay for. With wrestling you don’t practice and your skull gets caved in by some man-child taking out his childhood anger on your sorry ass. So you learn to practice.

One shift of his weight, and my neck was back in his elbow crook. Somehow my right foot was next to my right ear, and my throat let out a sad, choked-out yelp of distress. I was able to hold off the pin for approximately one second, which angered him immeasurably, pushing him to cut off my airway completely. The whistle blew.

Of course I get stuck with the number-1-ranked 182-pounder in all of New England as my first damn match of the tournament.

“Uh oh,” Coach muttered.

Alright, well… game plan, I guess, is survival.

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