It’s not every day that you volunteer to be humiliated, abused, and laid on by sweaty adolescent boys. Maybe you do; I don’t know your story. The point is that I personally wasn’t a huge fan of any of these things separately, let alone all in one wrestling practice.
If you asked me in middle school how I would look back on my wrestling days, and how those days would develop me over the years, I would have shrugged. That’s a confusing question, I can’t see the future, and who are you to be asking the questions, huh? If you instead asked me now, hypothetically interested reader, how I think wrestling affected me, (besides the obvious brain damage) I would have a different answer.
I showed up to practice 15 minutes late, two weeks into the …show more content…
As I said earlier, wrestling was my first real exposure to something real that I didn’t succeed at right away. School, people, life—it had all been easy. This was a new challenge. It took me twice as long as the average guy on the team to learn a new move or drill. I was an anti-prodigy. Because of this, matches were brutal. Most of the time I was pinned in the first minute. Match over. I didn’t survive the first round in a single match until the second half of the season. I didn’t win a match until even later. When I finally did, though, it was an indescribable …show more content…
I do remember that the other wrestler was absolutely awful. I could tell he was different from the gorillas I was used to losing to by the way he stood. He was nervous, like me. He didn’t want to be here, in this moment, wrestling me. We were both reluctant wrestling victims. But once I saw that fear in his eyes, my attitude changed. I was going to win this match. We rolled around for a while, me scoring occasionally, him breathing occasionally. My newfound determination did not change the fact that I was a sucky wrestler. There 's no doubt in my mind that we had one of the saddest matches the tournament. Fellow wrestlers probably giggled and nudged each other, dads subtly turned off their video cameras, and mothers politely showed interest in the gym ceiling. I was later informed that a top-notch documentary crew had assembled and mobilized when they heard descriptions of our match, hoping to catch some inspiring footage of a quadriplegic wrestling a brave boy with early-onset Parkinson’s, but were sidetracked by another film opportunity when they stopped to grab breakfast at McDonald’s. Three rounds dragged by. A whistle blew somewhere close to my head, and it was all
If you asked me in middle school how I would look back on my wrestling days, and how those days would develop me over the years, I would have shrugged. That’s a confusing question, I can’t see the future, and who are you to be asking the questions, huh? If you instead asked me now, hypothetically interested reader, how I think wrestling affected me, (besides the obvious brain damage) I would have a different answer.
I showed up to practice 15 minutes late, two weeks into the …show more content…
As I said earlier, wrestling was my first real exposure to something real that I didn’t succeed at right away. School, people, life—it had all been easy. This was a new challenge. It took me twice as long as the average guy on the team to learn a new move or drill. I was an anti-prodigy. Because of this, matches were brutal. Most of the time I was pinned in the first minute. Match over. I didn’t survive the first round in a single match until the second half of the season. I didn’t win a match until even later. When I finally did, though, it was an indescribable …show more content…
I do remember that the other wrestler was absolutely awful. I could tell he was different from the gorillas I was used to losing to by the way he stood. He was nervous, like me. He didn’t want to be here, in this moment, wrestling me. We were both reluctant wrestling victims. But once I saw that fear in his eyes, my attitude changed. I was going to win this match. We rolled around for a while, me scoring occasionally, him breathing occasionally. My newfound determination did not change the fact that I was a sucky wrestler. There 's no doubt in my mind that we had one of the saddest matches the tournament. Fellow wrestlers probably giggled and nudged each other, dads subtly turned off their video cameras, and mothers politely showed interest in the gym ceiling. I was later informed that a top-notch documentary crew had assembled and mobilized when they heard descriptions of our match, hoping to catch some inspiring footage of a quadriplegic wrestling a brave boy with early-onset Parkinson’s, but were sidetracked by another film opportunity when they stopped to grab breakfast at McDonald’s. Three rounds dragged by. A whistle blew somewhere close to my head, and it was all