Wrestling - the refuge of the nearsighted

SWCS wrestling squad
Originally uploaded by Brite light photos.

JAMESTOWN, NY - My mother was always puzzled why I went out for the Southwestern Central wrestling team.

After all, in 9th grade, I weighed 120 pounds and was already 5 feet, 10 inches tall. (I grew another half inch by graduation, not that it matters.)

And strong was not an adjective anyone used in regards to me at that point in my life.

'Why not basketball?' my mom always asked. 'You're tall and you can run fast.'

True, but the truth was, I couldn't see the basket well enough to put the ball through the hoop - even with my glasses.

But on the wrestling mat, all the action was done virtually by braille so the disadvantages of myopia were not as pronounced - but they were still there.

At the beginning of a wrestling match, when the opponents face each other, there's a period when sometimes you are simply standing, waiting to make a lunge at your opponent. When I lunged, the opponent usually wasn't there by the time I got across the mat, though they always seemed to be able to yank my ankles and drop me on my butt fairly easily.

That might have been a coordination issue and not near-sightedness, now that I think about it.

But the wrestling team was good for me because in the middle of the Jamestown winter, I spent afternoons grappling, stretching and sometimes lifting weights, the alternative to which was sitting home eating Chunky candy bars, drinking ginger ale or Coca-Cola and watching black & white television.

We had our wrestling practices at the now-demolished Lakewood Elementary School which was a pretty grim place downstairs in the locker room. We would take over the gym for a couple of hours, skipping rope and practicing. And just before each match, we would go through a ritual called the 'wrestle-off' to see who would get to represent SWCS against another school.

These wrestle off matches were as vicious as any inter-school contest. And to lose to someone you had to then see at school the next day, well, embarassing doesn't quite cover it.

I never made it to the big show, but at most matches I wrestled in the pre-match 'exhibitions,' frequently against people that weighed more than I did. Coach 'Flash' was trying to give me experience, he said.

It did.

I was thrown across the mat from Gowanda to Salamanca to Falconer, though I won a few matches when the guys were within 10-pounds of my weight class.

I used to think that I never made it to the big show because each of the four years I wrestled, we had guys in my weight class who were almost undefeated.

The truth is, as Flash once told me in front of most of the team, wrestling requires lots of muscles (which I was a little short of), great coordination (already covered, see paragraph 9) and an intangible, immeasurable quality called heart.

Only Flash didn't call it heart, he called it dee-zire. You have it, or you don't, he would say.

While I never made much success of the wrestling, his dee-zire lesson did stick and when I went into the newspaper business, I finally understood it as I pursued stories and tried to change the world with that same tenacity exhibited by many of the guys in the photo with this blog who pursued their opponents across the mat.

Dee-zire, you have it, or you don't.