My Sports Career

By the time I reached 7th grade, I had sufficiently healed emotionally to take another stab at sports. If you have ever been an adolescent boy, you know how important sports are to your developing manhood. So, I needed to find an activity that would satisfy my inner desire to play on a team, develop skill and coordination, and most importantly, make me popular with the girls – a strange breed in which I was beginning to take a curious interest.


Though I was psychically healed from the baseball experience, I had, nonetheless, learned a valuable lesson. Therefore, I was looking for a sport that did not involve a ball of any kind. Naturally, that eliminated football, soccer (though I did briefly try this until I discovered that it was mostly running), volleyball, basketball, tether ball, and catch (although I don’t think that this was a scholastic sport. I wasn’t taking any chances, though). To my surprise, in 7th grade, my Jr. High introduced a new sport to our school: wrestling.

This was the mother lode. It met my 2 basic criteria: it did not involve throwing, catching, kicking or coming into any contact whatsoever with a ball and; it was sure to impress those strange creatures that made us all act goofy when they came around. This was the perfect juxtaposition of circumstances. Wrestling was the ideal sport for me.

Part of Saturday ritual from as far back as I can remember involved watching professional wrestling on TV. Sometimes we would watch at home, and sometimes we were at my grandparent’s house. But we never missed. My family was really into wrestling. My grandmother would get so worked up over wrestling that she nearly became another person. The first time I visited a church when they spoke in tongues, it was no big deal. Grandma did that while watching wrestling.

Actually, professional wrestling or studio wrestling was the first infomercial. “Wrestlers” would show up at the studio and there would be one hour’s worth of matches ending with a plug to buy tickets for the big show at the Civic arena. But as far as we were concerned, this was real stuff.

These were our local heroes: Lord Ethyl Layton, a former wrestler of British nobility, now emcee of the program; Killer Kowalski, Dutch Schultz, Bobo Brazil, and the one I loved to hate, Fritz von Erich. Along with these luminaries, every now and again, local viewers would be given a special treat: midget wrestling.

Mom and grandma loved midget wrestling. Forget that it was presented like a freak show that could have been at the county fair. It was great fun. But for grandma, the only thing better than midget wrestling was women midget wrestling. This combined the best of all possible worlds: there was the gratuitous violence of professional wrestling, the curiosity of watching people who were “not normal,” and the the particular form of brutality that is associated with a “chic fight.”

So, with this wealth of information gleaned from years of careful observation, I was ready to take on wrestling. I knew I could excel. I had the advantage over the other guys who would try out for the team. I was a student of the sport. I could almost sense the admiration that would come my way by the 7th grade girls, who were strangely different from the 6th grade girls they used to be. I needed to practice my moves, wrestling and otherwise.