For
a couple of years my wife and I lived outside of Chicago. My wife introduced me to an interesting
guy at her job named Pat Botts.
Growing up Pat lived next door to Bill Murray of SNL fame…quick side
story:
Bill
Murray’s sister used to babysit for the five Botts kids. One night Bill came over to “help.” Just before Mr. & Mrs. Botts came home; Bill had
the kids put ketchup all over their faces, and necks. Then he had them lay out all over their front porch steps as
if they had been massacred.
(Brilliant, even at a young age)
Pat and I had one thing in common from our pasts, we both wrestled in high school. Pat told me about an over 30 league that he and some of his friends were messing around with. They actually had sanctioned tournaments. This is about the time a guy named Dave Schultz, (In his late 30s) was one of our USA Olympic hopefuls. We’ll forget about the fact that a multi-millionaire was funding Dave and his team so they didn’t really need day jobs. Nevertheless, at this point if you were standing next to me you could probably see smoke coming out of my ears as I’m thinking, “I’m in my late 30s. All I need to do is get some serious practice time in, win a couple of tournaments, and I’m on my way.” We’ll forget about the fact that I hadn’t stepped on a mat in over 15 years. Probably the most amazing thing about this thought process is that I wasn’t even drinking.
So
now it’s time for the first practice after work at a high school
gymnasium. I show up, look in the
gym and see a bunch of amazingly well put together YOUNG men. They were mostly kids that had just
graduated college and were PE teachers.
Even the few guys that were my age were buff and by looking at them practice;
I could see they had stayed current.
Reality has now come rushing back to me. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see; maybe I was hoping
to see a bunch of old men with long gray beards and canes. Now I’m thinking to myself, “Were you out
of your @#$%& mind!?!, you are about to get Annihilated.” I can’t even run away at this point
because Pat has seen me and I can’t have him report back to my new bride that
I’m a Fraidy Cat. Of course
that’s a judgment call. It was either
that, or have him report back I had been totally humiliated for 90 minutes.
It’s
Go Time: For an hour I hang on a
lot better than I had thought I might.
We’re doing take downs now from a standing position. At one point a 22 year old shoots in on
my legs and I’m able to fight him off by putting one of my legs between his
two. That’s not important, but
what was, is that he picked me up off the ground and the two of us came
crashing to the matt; me first on my side and him on top of me with his knees on
my rib cage. We both heard a crunch
and he immediately got off me. I
spring to me feet figuring the worst, check myself out and to my amazement, no
damage… We
continue wrestling for another 20 minutes and then everyone calls it a night. As I sat on a locker room bench, I swore I’d rather be lit on fire than
do that again. This won’t be an
issue.
I
get home; sit on the bed and reach down to untie my shoes. Mind-bending pain shoots through my
upper torso. For three weeks my
wife had to put on and take off my shoes and socks.
About 3 or 4 years later, I’m in a New Jersey YMCA. I walk past an exercise room and there are two large individuals who are literally beating the cr@p out of each other. I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked them what they were doing. They said it was Brazilian Wrestling, and asked me if I wanted to try. There was no problem fighting off the urge. In a microsecond I was transported back to my poor man's Foxcatcher experience. Then Fraidy Cat quickly came to the rescue.
