Escape Points (15 page)

I
volunteered to make sub sandwiches to sell at the first dual meet of the season. I picked up the ten extralong baguettes from the bakery and went to Costco for the rest of the ingredients. I moved my cart through the cavernous aisles, stopping for sample bites of chimichangas or chocolate truffle pieces offered by smiling hair-netted women with thick ankles. For two youth football seasons I made subs for the Little Huskies home games; all the profit for the team went into helmets and pads for the kids. We always sold out of the subs I packed in coolers marked T
URKEY
or S
ALAMI
.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I worked from home in the morning and then spent about three hours making eighty sub sandwiches—ham, provolone, salami, roast beef, lettuce, and tomato. My hair, my hands, my clothes, everything smelled like a corner deli; the sweet tomato scent mingling with the salty roast beef juice and the spiced aroma from the thin, sweating slices of salami. Caryn came over to help. Two hours into it, I remembered why I never wanted to work in a restaurant as a teenager. From the time I was fifteen,
I worked retail, preferring to sell cheap jeans and trendy T-shirts rather than serve someone food. I stacked the wrapped sandwiches in empty boxes and Weldon helped me get them to the car.

“Leave some for us,” Weldon pleaded.

Powell called this first night of the wrestling season the Huskies Alumni/Wrestling Family Reunion, and close to six hundred former coaches and wrestlers, as well as parents, friends, and classmates, cheered from the stands in the field house. Weldon was home for Thanksgiving weekend from school and would be on the sidelines to help coach his brothers through each of his matches. This was Brendan’s last season in high school; he was wrestling at 171, moving from junior varsity to varsity at times since the seniors on the team stacked pretty deep at that weight.

The week before Brendan won one wrestle-off match against another 171-pounder for the varsity spot and lost the final wrestle-off for the varsity position. Brendan would be co-captain of JV as a senior, and he was fine with that. Colin was wrestling in his first high school meet at 119 pounds, the same weight Weldon wrestled as a freshman. It was my sixth year in those wrestling stands.

This first night of the season hummed with possibility and anxiety. Tonight, everyone’s record was 0–0. As a member of the team, it was exciting to have so many fans, but unnerving; no one wanted to mess up in front of such a big crowd, a crowd easily three times the size of a regular home dual meet.

“It’s balls to the walls,” Colin said.

The stands began to fill just before 6
PM
; parents of former wrestlers waved hello, hugged other parents of wrestlers and alum wrestlers, brothers here for younger brothers. You knew the loss for your son would weigh heavy or the win would make him ebullient. You also knew he would be sore and exhausted and maybe sport a fresh black eye from an errant elbow or a purposeful jab. You would wash the singlet quickly and you would talk late that night with him about the smallest details of the match, second by second it seems, recounting each shot, takedown, crossface, cradle, illegal hold, and referee mistake. And together you would go over not just his match
but the match of everyone on the team. And if the team won, you would celebrate.

“Did you see Ellis pin that guy?”

And yes, I did.

Between matches moms chatted about Thanksgiving, who was having what at whose house, making lists of what to buy or bring or cook for the next day.

“I’m not on until Saturday,” I reported. That was when my family got together. I was scheduled to pick up a twenty-six–pound fresh turkey the next day. It looked eerily like a sleeping toddler when I unwrapped it and placed it in the enormous roasting pan. I was making sweet potato soufflé for the party at Paul’s house.

It was a good thing to have our family Thanksgiving dinner delayed to either Friday or Saturday after the actual Thanksgiving—for years the boys couldn’t eat much at all on Thursday; they wrestled on Friday and Saturday and needed to make weight, even with the two-pound allowance for midseason. But it was a tradition started by my mother, decades before there were wrestlers in the family. My mom said she despised the stress of hopping from family to family on holidays with six children in tow, so when Mary Pat married Ken, she declared we would begin a new tradition and have our Thanksgiving on a different night than Thursday.

Both junior varsity teams wrestled first on two mats. Brendan won his match 9–3; Weldon was crouched at the edge of the mat, shouting to him what to do next, cheering him on. Brendan looked strong, dominating all three periods; the only points scored on him were escape points.

“Let’s go, B,” his teammates shouted.

“Go, Brendan,” the parents on our team yelled from the stands.

That is one of the things I loved about wrestling—escape points. You maneuvered out of a hold, you came back from a down position, you got a point. The folkstyle wrestling point system worked the way I wish life did; it was a pragmatic and judicious approach. If your opponent exhibited any of the following sins: unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct, stalling, illegal holds, or tech
nical violations, you earned a point. I liked that the competitor’s transgressions worked in your favor. In a sense, you were rewarded for not behaving badly, for playing by the rules. And your opponent was punished by you earning points.

You had to keep trying, you had to keep wrestling, no stalling, waiting out the clock or running away from your opponent. That could get you a stalling warning and eventually could earn your opponent a point. If you consistently backed out of a hold or tried to just get the heck out of bounds before you got pinned, you were stalling and your opponent scored. And you must be a good sport. I have watched boys head butt, shove too hard for an escape, head slap, pull on the other wrestler’s headgear, or trash talk. They were penalized. If the referee didn’t see it, the fans screamed until he did.

It was reassuring to have a traditional, centuries-old sport that regularly monitored civility and proper behavior. Even if it seemed as if the physicality was brutish, there was a higher sensibility and civilized requirement to the sport. The wrestlers shook hands before the match. They shook hands after the match. At the end of the final period, each wrestler went to shake the hand of the opposing coach. Sometimes the wrestlers hugged each other. Colin did this at times; especially if he knew his opponent from youth wrestling.

Nothing personal, sorry I pinned you, it’s just wrestling.

The sport accommodated time to bleed; five minutes a match per wrestler.

“You got to love a sport with blood time,” said Tom, a father of three wrestlers.

Blood time was the official pause so a trainer could gauze up a wrestler’s nosebleed or cut and the staff could wipe down the mats and the other wrestler with antibacterial spray and treated wipes handled with plastic gloves. Up front it was an acknowledgment that you might get hurt and that regulations allowed for some brief medical attention. So you had time to be patched up, the blood wiped from yours or the opponent’s arm or leg or face, and you got right back to it.

The referee blew the whistle to stop wrestling for a potentially dangerous hold or a stalemate. Wrestlers couldn’t keep hanging on
each other in what we sometimes called the heavyweight dance, standing head to head, arms gripping arms, feet slowly moving across the mat. You had to make progress, keep moving. Do something. Stand up. Wrestle. Shoot.

Of course, pinning was the whole point. That was when a wrestler had both shoulders or shoulder blades of his opponent flush to the mat for two seconds. The referee lied flat on the ground, whistle clenched between teeth, inches away from the wrestlers, trying to see if both shoulders were touching the mat, sometimes trying to swipe a hand between shoulder and mat; and if it was not possible—bam—he slapped his hand on the mat and the pin was complete, match over.

You loved to hear that sound if it was your son pinning the opponent or your teammate pinning the other side. It was deafening if the mat pound signaled you were pinned. Your team won the most team points—six—for an individual’s pin. So you were not just winning your match, you were propelling your entire team to victory. Pins were good. If you were the pinner, not if you were the pinnee. What I most liked about pinning was that no matter what the score was or had been for the entire match, even if you were losing 14–0, you could pin your opponent and win. A pin trumped the score. There was at every second the possibility of redemption; there was always hope. A pin was also called a fall, and it had a literary Roman gladiator ring to it, like fallen soldiers, fallen heroes, fallen angels. A fall from grace.

You could also get out of a near-pin, maybe not so much a cradle, when your opponent had you chicken-winged and bent, his arms locking you in a hold that had you trapped and immobile. And for that your opponent could earn more points: for a near-fall, three back points earned if he held you there for more than five seconds; two points if he held you for two, three, or four seconds.

“Wouldn’t that be awful to be trapped like that?” I said to Caryn at a meet a few weeks later.

We were watching boys other than our sons, and one wrestler had his opponent twisted and bent beneath him in what looked like near suffocation.

“Yes, it would.”

But yet no matter the circumstance on the mat, the system was designed to reward effort and enterprise. You could earn two points for gaining control of the match, a reversal; you were down and then you were on top. It was an underdog way of looking at the world. You could win at any moment, no matter the score. There was a limit to a scoring disparity. The wrestling stopped with a fifteen-point lead; a ceiling on the humiliation. You may lose, but you would never be too big a loser. Or too big a winner. It was a system that cushioned for arrogance. There were no ties; a winner must be declared, a decision made, even if it took three overtimes. Someone would win. And someone would lose.

And if it could not be decided in three two-minute periods, there were bonus points—the overtime periods when you could prove yourself again, come back stronger, show what you had. Prove yourself. Change the outcome. Win.

At the end of it all, no matter what the decision, both would leave it on the mat and walk back to the team and take a seat. If you didn’t behave properly—say, threw your headgear or stormed off the mat, your team would lose points. And if you did, you would humiliate your coach. It meant your coach did not teach you how to be a good sport. It meant your coach, well, your coach was an ass.

Your coach set the tone of the team. If your coach was a stand-up guy, the entire team was respected. How you behave mattered; it affected everyone else. Powell was respected throughout the country. It seemed every high school wrestling coach around the country knew Powell. A clip of his 1994 high school victory was on the overhead video screens in the arena at state. His interview about what it meant to be a wrestling coach was also on video. When his face came on screen, so many cheered.

When all the JV matches were finished from 103 to 285, the freshman team was seated on the metal team stands dressed in gray-and-blue Huskies sweats. The varsity team burst from the wrestling room above the field house, running down the center stairs to applause and shouts.

“Here they come,” parents shouted, standing and applauding.

The orange-shirted wrestlers ran in single file around the blue mat with the orange center circle, each wrestler wearing new orange-and-blue wrestling shoes.

“Go Huskies,” we stood and cheered.

It was a corny nod to pageantry, this practice of emerging from the wrestling room like warriors descending from on high to the coliseum. But it was part of what Powell had built, a team of boy-men extraordinarily loyal to their coach, ranked first in the state before the season even began, thirty-first in the country.

Colin was called to the check-in table for his weight class. Colin and the freshman 119-pounder shook hands at the start of the match, both upright. Weldon knelt at the side of his mat, cupping his hands to his face and shouting at Colin what to do. Colin scored two takedowns and back points, winning 7–0 with a pin. The ref hoisted Colin’s arm in the air. Five years later, Colin looked so much like Weldon on the mat, wearing the Oak Park blue singlet, the shape of his legs lean and gangly, his strong shoulders, and his tousled blonde hair bursting outside the blue-and-orange headgear. Colin was smaller than Brendan, with his large shoulders and broad back, but they all had the same oval-shaped face, blue eyes, and fair skin. And they all had the same shape legs; and the shape is not the same as mine.

After tonight there would be thirteen more tournaments, invitationals, or duals for Colin in the season; fifteen for Brendan. Weldon wrestled when he came to Huskies practices to help Coach Powell. Weldon had quit the Wisconsin team during his first season. The biggest reason was the December of his freshman year he won a prestigious scholarship to study at the University of Oslo and travel throughout Scandinavia for ten weeks—the Viking Scholarship. His wrestling coach advised him not to go; it would interfere with his wrestling, because he needed to practice and wrestle all summer to stay in shape. He needed to wrestle every summer, no study abroad ever.

Weldon called Powell often to discuss it. We went back and forth about it; I would ask questions, Weldon would answer curtly, or he
would not answer at all. He quit the wrestling team, the most difficult decision he said he ever made.

“Are you done having your hand raised in the air?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said.

I had bought the Badger paraphernalia. Weldon didn’t see himself going to the Olympics. As he reminded me, some guys on the team had been four-time high school state champions. He was a high school state qualifier twice, a placer once.

The August after his trip throughout Scandinavia, I was waiting for him at the airport’s international terminal. I held high a W
ELCOME
H
OME
balloon, standing shoulder to shoulder with the dozens of other mothers, fathers, siblings, and lovers of travelers. Moments before Weldon emerged from customs, members of the US Olympic team walked through the crowd, fresh from a flight from Beijing, China. Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, sporting the Olympic gold medal around his neck, was met by a throng of admirers. Young women in USA warmup suits rushed into the arms of family. We all cheered. Weldon walked into view, and at that moment I loved him so fully I thought I could float. He looked like a man. And he also looked like my little boy.