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Chapter 3: Wrestling
I remember the first day I ever wrestled.
It was at old Wake Forest High in North Carolina, and it was early in the morning I recall. You could smell the autumn leaves, and the occasional chill that stroked up one’s spine, making them aware that, yes, Father Winter was coming on time as always. It was where you could feel the cracks in the asphalt call your name, whisper songs of glory that few could ever hear. I heard them though, and that day my life was changed forever.
Me and my father met up with a woman, and she told us of her three sons and a dream to one day create a wrestling program for the school. I was six at the time, and was excited, felt a pulse in my heart for something thrilling. The room was a car garage, and the mats were filthy, coated in grime and the exo-skeletons of dead insects. It was like a torture chamber, and you literally had to push the engineering class’s car out of the garage to lay down the rest of the mat..
But that didn’t matter.
I guess, now that I look back at it all, wrestling is something that gets in your blood, whether your father did it before you or not. Nothing is more thrilling then watching a man pin another man down, physically holding him to the ground until he gives up before a crowd of screaming fans. Never will you see a crowd stand up faster than at a wrestling match, for it is the ultimate in sports, the oldest of combats. I believe the spirit must be alive in someone to choose the brutal path of the wrestler, for it is brutal.
The first time I stepped out on a wrestling mat, I recall feeling nothing, only the cold grip of my opponent, are heads bashing together like something of mythology, an ancient art reborn through me as I grappled wildly. I was taken down, but I never gave up. I had something in me, a flare that ripped me up to my feet and into this other boy, an animalistic drive to kill him, annihilate him completely. I lost that match, and since then a fire brewed within me that couldn’t be quelled, propelling me through one of the most successful AAU careers in wrestling North Carolina has ever seen, or so I think.
But victory was not simply earned through doing nothing. Hours upon hours of working technique and training my cardio, of improving my strength and breaking my will, only to build it back up again. At some practices, children my age would begin to cry, break before the breaking was a good thing, and never come back the next day. But I always came back, hungry for more. I loved the thrill of combat, of smashing another boy into the mat, making him bleed. I lost very rarely when I was younger..But when I did, it was as if my honor had been spit on, and my glory was extinguished temporarily. At these times, I have wept like a man should when confronted by loss, for nothing is more heart wrenching then one’s victory taken by another man. Who can one blame on a wrestling mat?
No one but themselves.
And so, from wrestling, I became a man.
I’ve now wrestled for over 14 years, accrued multiple state championships in freestyle and Greco style wrestling, and was, at one time, the 160 pound state champion for NC high school athletics.