The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (29 page)

"No."

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Can you hear okay?"

"What?"

She looked down, counted the change into my palm, made eye contact with the next customer.

The folds of skin and cartilage that make up the external ear are what got damaged. The external ear is there to protect the eardrum, collect and guide sound waves into the ear canal to the eardrum. It's an intricate system designed to catch sound waves. It did its job of protecting the middle and the inner ear, those delicate internal mechanisms where the eardrum passes its vibrations to the middle ear (ossicles), then on to the hammer (malleus), then the anvil (incus), and then on into the labyrinth where eventually the sound passes through a liquid chamber where nerve impulses transmit to the brain.

The internal mechanisms of my ear are intact.

I can hear just fine.

People ask: Can you get plastic surgery?

I ignore it.

In Japan where they have a cultural respect for martial arts it is seen as a badge of honor. Here, people just think it's ugly.

Medical sources refer to it as a deformity, prescribe treatments: ice, drain, and pack tightly.

 

What I hear is my father's story about wrestling in the national finals in Laramie, Wyoming. It's 1958—a year before I was born. Thirty seconds from the end of his final match, he's winning and he has a vision of himself stepping to the top of the awards podium and accepting the national championship plaque. The image floats there for a moment and then it's gone. A last-second takedown erases his lead and he loses 7–5.

The vision, born in the old gym on the high desert plateau of Wyoming, blew east, across the western plains, and midwestern cornfields, and caught up with me when I was a boy in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Pennsylvania. It hovered above me until it became my dream. One day at my elementary school, the principal announced that the youth association was starting a wrestling team. I couldn't wait until the end of school. When I got off the bus that afternoon, I ran all the way home, clutching a sign-up sheet, and sat on the front door step until my father got home.

 

It took me a long time to learn that wrestling was nothing but a fight with some rules to make sure nobody gets killed. It's a painful lesson, not just physical. I want to make my father proud, but early on, I get beat, and beat badly. I'm on my own.

My father made a wrestling mat out of vinyl and foam rubber and vinyl tape he got from Knoll's design and development department. We rolled it up against the wall in our living room. We would unroll it twice a week to practice, my father putting my younger brother, Eric, and me through drills. He was an expert at the side roll and bottom wrestling in general, techniques that were nearly lost as American folkstyle later got closer and closer to freestyle—an international style. One night I got angry because I felt he was unfairly using more strength on me while letting Eric, who was younger and smaller, execute his moves with ease. I was about 12, a skinny kid. I weighed 75 pounds. We got in a flurry and I caught him off balance and shoved him into the wall, then I jumped up and threw a wild punch that grazed his head. He shook it off and then launched me into the air—my head skimmed the ceiling and my legs were moving before I hit the ground, and they didn't stop moving until I was up the stairs and in my room. A few minutes later, I was back on the mat, finishing the drill.
Don't lose your composure
was all he said. My ears burned with anger and the constant abrasion from the vinyl mat.

It was just the beginning. From the time I was nine years old, wrestling hijacks my imagination. I dream of moves in my sleep. I walk through the days picturing my next match. I wrestle through elementary school and junior high school. Eastern Pennsylvania was a hot bed of wrestling and every weekend I faced opponents who went on to successful college wrestling careers. I got better, and then I got good. I started winning, but I was never a dominating wrestler, never did someone say: Man, that guy is great. That sort of notoriety eludes me, but it doesn't matter. I loved it. At first, I would make the finals of local tournaments, but end up second. Finally, I started to win.

All that mat time primes the ear. It's a matter of repetition: a head butt, an elbow, bang, bang, bang, agitate the skin and the cartilage. All it will take is one solid hit and then: the big blowup. The ear as it was previously known will disappear.

The ear isn't the only body part that takes a beating. I break my nose at least four times, tear ligaments in both ankles, snap my ACL, and tear cartilage in my knee and rib cage. I break my thumb—the same thumb I also dislocate—a dislocation so bad that when it happened all I could see of my thumb was the end of it with the fingernail sticking out of the other side of my palm. I almost puked. I held my hand up and my assistant coach snapped it back into place. Then my palm blew up to the size of a baseball. At the medical center, they shot my hand full of painkillers, and then a doctor cranked my thumb around in a full circle like it was the hour hand of a clock. "Yeah, I'd say you're done for a while," he said casually.

 

One night freshman year, overheated and starved from trying to cut to 129, I stick my head out of my dorm window into a starless Michigan night and open my mouth to catch the snowflakes that sift silently to the ground.

I once told my father I was going to Paris because I wanted to write and Paris was the place to go if you were young and wanted to write. He looked up, and squinting his eyes as if he was sighting a distant object, said: "If you want to write, go to Bayonne, New Jersey." Then he picked up a shovel and returned to tending his garden.

His words have stayed with me all of these years although he had forgotten them long ago. At one point in the intervening years, I asked him if he remembered them; he said no. Clearly, he never gave the significance to those words that I did. They were a kind of sphinx's riddle to me, and I sensed that if I could grasp their meaning, I would have unlocked the secret to artistic success. I worshiped my father in the way that some sons do, so his words—not frequently or carelessly issued—had the gravity of important things.

 

My wife, who is studying acupuncture, has a poster of an ear with all its acupuncture points hanging on a wall in our home office. In another picture in one of her textbooks, the image of a baby—a curled-up embryo—is superimposed over an ear. All the acupuncture points in an ear apply to the rest of the human body. Picture the image of a tiny baby tucked in your ear with its head nestled in your earlobe. There are hundreds of acupuncture points on the ear. You can treat the whole body through the ear. The ear is like some mystical spiral that unfolds into an entire body, everything flows through it.

"Ear" is even part of my name—Pearson. I've seen it spelled other ways too, Pierson, and Pehrson, the Swedish version. The name made its way from its Nordic roots to Scotland, down through England, and then on to the States when my father's parents immigrated here from the border of Scotland and northern England in the 1930s.

 

The lights flash in my eyes and leave spots. I blink, blink, blink, bridge, bridge. I'm skidding across the black mat on my face. The arena is upside down. I see feet, legs of chairs, then people sitting in them, my coaches. They're screaming something at me, but all I hear is my heart pounding in my ears, intermittent yells, thuds, my own strained breathing, an opponent clamped tight to my chest, breathing in my face. I'm wrapped tight, fighting off my back. It can't end here, I think—in a pigtail match at the Big Ten's.

How'd I draw the pigtail? Loser is out of the tournament, no chance to wrestle back. I twist, arch, drive with my feet, punch my hand across my chest, and I'm on my stomach, but two minutes have expired. A minute to go in the first period and I'm already down by five. 0–5. No time to waste. What happened? He was in on my legs. I tried to throw some junk move, but not the way I usually did it. I hipped to the side instead of rolling straight back and kicking him over me.

Five years of my coach yelling: "Don't throw that crap," so I went a different route. Bad time to experiment. I should have known. I get a one-point escape at the end of the first period to cut the lead to four. In the second period, I start to score, first an escape, then a takedown, but he escapes for one point. He has riding time from the eternity I fought off my back in the first period, and he scores just enough to stay ahead by 5–4 going into the third. He escapes in the third, to go up 6–4. He still has riding time, but I rode him enough to cut it down.

I get over-aggressive, as the clock winds down, and he scores a takedown, I'm down by five again, but I escape, score a takedown, run down his riding time. He's too hard to turn, so I cut him loose, but before I can score, time expires. I lose 9–7, and my college career is over.

 

Walking down the hall one day to teach a class at the University of Georgia, a middle-aged man, gray hair, squat, crushed nose, paused as I passed and asked:
Where did you wrestle ... what college?
I had been lost in thought, reviewing the day's lesson, and his voice sounded alien in the polished corridor.

As he spoke, I heard the familiar singsong dialect of the Pennsylvania Dutch—the rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Living in the South, I had nearly forgotten it. He was a coach from the athletic department, arranging a tutor for an athlete. When I told him I wrestled at Michigan, he said:
You don't see many ears like that around here.

 

I go to the acupuncture clinic for the pain in my hips and knees, residual effects from wrestling. The Chinese doctor sticks a needle into my hardened, thickened ear. It burns and I flinch. "Your ear is very special," she says. She seems to think it's congenital, some miraculous sign from a blessed birth, not from a violent blow to the head.

"It's from an injury," I say.

She nods, but I'm not sure she understands that there are wrestlers, boxers, rugby players, and others walking around with the same injury caused by some similar brutal collision. There's nothing miraculous or strange about it. It's a brutal trademark of a sport I sometimes love and sometimes hate. For days after the treatment, I can feel the place where the needle punctured my ear. It's a vague burning that makes me reach up and rub it. It feels too thick, almost alien, and reminds me of the past.

 

One day, I see a Knoll sign in the window of a furniture store. I turn the car around at the next intersection and go in. Max Pearson is my father, I said to the store manager. She seemed mildly amused.
We sell lots of your dad's chairs,
she said.

I look around the store and see the furniture we grew up with. We had prototypes from the different designers in our house. Saarinen's pedestal table was our dining room table. At some point, the works of Pollock, Shultz, Platner, and the other icons of modern furniture design drifted through our living room.

It feels strangely like home—the hillside home in Pennsylvania, where I heard the names of the other designers nearly every day. The same living room where we wrestled on the wrestling mat my father made out of vinyl and foam and rolled up against the wall, so we could practice whenever we wanted. In the humid, urban Houston environment, I realize how far I am from those cold winters in rural Pennsylvania. In the end, when it was clear I wasn't there to buy, the manager seemed to care that I was Max Pearson's son as much as those kids I wrestled against when I was a boy.

 

Another barber sees the ear.
You've got a broken ear,
he says with an accent that sounds Middle Eastern, Iranian, or perhaps Turkish. "Me too," he says pointing to a pair of flattened ears.

Broken ear,
I said to myself. I'd never heard it called that before. I liked it. The name seemed so simple, so true—much better than cauliflower ear. I'd always thought of it as more stone—fossil even —than vegetable. We talked about the sport that deformed our ears. He was from one of the places where it was an honor to have a broken ear and he spoke fondly of his days in the sport.

 

My father doesn't remember anything these days. He's deep in the throes of Alzheimer's. The last time I saw him, he didn't know who I was. For a while he used to take out his old wrestling scrapbook, and look over and over at the pictures and the headlines. "Did you see what they gave me?" he said once about his outstanding wrestler award from the Big Ten's. "I must have been pretty good."

But he's stopped doing that now. He spends his time running his fingers over chairs and fabric. In his mind, he must still be designing furniture. I read somewhere that in his final years, when he was suffering the final blows of Alzheimer's, they used to put Willem de Kooning in front of a canvas and he would go to work just like he always did.

My father isn't designing furniture anymore. The little workshop that he built out of trees that he felled in the backwoods of our house has fallen into chaos. He lives in a nursing home now. It's painful to see him that way. He'd always striven for independence. He always had a copy of
Walden
nearby. For a long time, he kept exercising. When my oldest daughter was seven, he raced her up the hill behind his house. When he was well, he used to bike and run, hike, and paddle his kayak on the Susquehanna River. One day he walked off into the woods and they found him in the darkness eight hours later, walking across a field at three o'clock in the morning. There were 125 people and a helicopter looking for him. When the paramedics checked him out, they said he was in amazing physical condition for a man his age.

But the exercise has stopped now. The last time he got lost in the woods seemed to take more of his life out of him. Even in his emaciated physical state, it seemed his body wouldn't quit on him. It compelled him forward, just like it had done 50 years before in the NCAA championships, pushing his opponents purposefully into overtime, where he knew he had an advantage. There was no advantage now, just some stubborn impulse to keep moving, to stay alive.