Funny Little Man

Screw Your Letterman Jacket -A High School Wrestling Rant

You have seen it time and time again. The jocks and their letterman jackets. You might see these guys walking through the halls in high school with the same jackets on. A big letter sticks out on the front (a “G” in my school), and they might even have some various pins sticking in said letter. Then, on the back of the jacket you see the person’s name across the back. You were the man if you had one of these jackets on, and you were really the man if it had all kinds of pins sticking out of your big “G.” They had all kinds of pins, and depending on what the sport was, and how well you did, you might get one. They had the obvious football shaped pin for varsity football. They had a person running for the track team, and then they had, for my sport, two dudes humping each other. Clearly, there was one guy on all fours and another guy “mounting” him. As it turns out, there are not in fact “humping,” but they are actually in a high school wrestling position. But, if you ask anybody, they were “humping.” So, why was it so important for me to get a letterman jacket with my name across the back, and my pin for “humping?” (Varsity humping, that is.)

I’m not, nor have I ever been an athlete. I’m the disabled kid that has Cerebral Palsy and Scoliosis in his back. An athlete wasn’t in my gene pool. I come from a long line of “not athletes.” Granted, to my knowledge I don’t have any athlete relatives that I can think of offhand. Aside from my aunt being a cheerleader (which is a sport, a very hard one at that), but I can’t dance or cheer, but I do look nice in a miniskirt if I do say so myself. Now, on my mother’s side of the family, the men are born knowing how to fish (I can fish, but I can’t bait my own hook), hunt, play pool and fight. I can’t do any of that, but then again that’s not high school sports, I’m just babbling on about how uncool I am. On my dad’s side of the family, (good people) they aren’t the sporting type as far as I know. I did have a cousin who played football now that I think about it, but unfortunately, we are talking about me. I’m more likely to fix your computer than to give you a trophy to put on the shelf. Hell, I can’t build a shelf either. But you get the point. I can’t throw a football to save my life. But, I can Hail Mary on Madden for the Xbox all day long. I’m a regular, “Whoever-is-an-quarterback-nowadays.” But, anyway, I’m trailing off.

I always wanted to wrestle in high school. What got me into that was pro wrestling (which is awesome, and I have some very talented friends that do it for a living). And when I found out they had wrestling in high school, I knew what I wanted to do. Ever since I saw A.C. Slater dominating the poor Valley High shmuck that was unfortunate enough to be in his weight class.

(And by the way, wrestling matches are not big deal like in this video, at least it wasn’t where I live. Usually, the only people that showed up to the matches were friends and family of the team, which is a shame. Everyone worked hard to be on the team.)

So, I knew that I wanted to be a wrestler. If I can be a wrestler, I can finally call myself an athlete and get girls. Or, so I thought at the time. So, years went by as I watched my favorite show (at the time, now I’m sick of it, but I still watch it from time to time) “Saved By The Bell” with hopes of seeing Slater stomp some ass. I also noticed that the “Saved By The Bell” crew had no idea what the actual rules of high school wrestling were. And, I gotta be honest, sometimes they made it seem better. I can’t believe it’s illegal to German suplex someone. Well you can throw them to the ground, but not slam them into oblivion.

So, as the years went by I got to high school. I was jazzed to say the least about joining the wrestling team. I have never been on a team before that didn’t consist of me kicking a ball (kickball). But, I’ll save that story for another time. So, I go off and join the team. My two good friends (who I’m still friends with today) joined as well. My one friend, I have no idea why exactly he joined, and my other friend, who I will not name, joined because he had the wrong idea about wrestling. He thought that high school wrestling was the same as pro wrestling. Which, isn’t that big of a mistake. Killer Kowalski, (if I’m not mistaken) legendary pro wrestler, beat the hell out of people before he found out that wrestling was staged, or predetermined. So, my buddy was in for a surprise when he realized he couldn’t chop people and put people in the dreaded figure four leg lock.

I found out something really quickly, as did my friends, when we joined the team. We learned that wrestling at our school was the sport that nobody gave a shit about. We wouldn’t be getting girls by being wrestlers. We had to depend on our “game” to get girls, which, unfortunately we (us three) didn’t have. We also found out that wrestling was one of the toughest sports there was. The coach claimed to have varsity football players, who were in peak shape, walk out of practice, especially during the dreaded “hell week.” And, he was right. I watched football players that were in great shape drop like flies. So, here I am at 145 pounds, the handicapped kid, in one of the toughest sports you could sign up for.

I found out real quick, that everything the coach said was true. No girls, no glamour and recognition. And practice was rough to say the least. I thought I’ve worked up a sweat before…nope. We would not only have to roll out the insanely heavy mats that took the whole team to roll out, but we had to do conditioning. Stretch and stretch, then if my memory serves me correctly, we had to do some cardio, which consisted of pushups, up downs (if you don’t know what those are you don’t wanna know) and jogging. Sometimes we even did some Military exercises. Then we had to run from the school to the football stadium, which was I forget how many miles. Then, when we got back we wrestled and did drills and rolled the mats back up and changed. Sometimes the order of that changed, and that was practice. Watching people throw up (me included) was usually an everyday thing. I watched a guy take his sweaty shirt off after practice and throw it against the wall, and it stuck. That might have been the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen at the time. Then, “hell week” started.

He week included all the things of regular practice, with more of everything added in. Not to mention, “Hell Week” ran on Saturday. So, everything was the same, but push ups were a ridiculous amount I believe we did 100. Sit ups, and up downs, we had to do I think about 200 if not more. Then we did drills. We did everything from leapfrog each other to carry each other, which with my CP and my back, I couldn’t do. But, I always did my part, the coach came up with something for me to do. Instead of leapfrog, I had to run around people and hit the ground so they could leapfrog me. Then we had to do spinning drills until he (coach) told us to stop which would be forever sometimes.

Then, I believe, we would go running to the football stadium. When we got there, we would have to do more push ups and up downs and things like that. Then we played a game the coach liked to call “Powerball” which was just football with a Nurf ball, but we had to run in places the whole time, even in the huddle, and every time a team scored (we were in two teams) the other team had to do up downs. Here are some up downs if you don’t know what they are. Do 100-200 of those a day and see how bad you hurt.

So, not to mention the fact that we are running all the time, but one team has to be “skins” (no shirts) and trying doing all that running and up downs in like 20 degree weather. I got “skins” every time. After we were done with that we had to run the concrete stadium bleachers up and down several times, which I again couldn’t do because of my CP, so I had to run the steps. The steps weren’t as high to step up, but there were twice as many than there were bleachers. Then we usually ran back to school, and either we ended practice because of the time or continued if it wasn’t late. Keep in mind, this was only during “hell week.” This was the “make or break” time to “weed out” the ones that didn’t need to be there. I’m proud to say that I made it both years I did “hell week,” and so did my two buddies. Believe me when I say it was grueling, especially for me, the handicapped guy. But, if I can do it, anybody can. It eventually got to the point to where we were not so run down every practice and we could even make it through the tougher practices with no problem.

We were a big family. Even people I never got along with or, people I didn’t ever talk to because they might be in a different social group were my friends now. I ended up spending more time with my new (and old) friends on the team than I did with my own family. Good people, and some I miss dearly.

So, before I went on a rant. All I ever wanted to do was be an athlete and get that glory that I was never gonna get, because I picked the wrong sport for glory. I just wanted to be a somebody for a change and not a nobody like I always felt I was. It was cool having people that never gave you the time of day come up to you and talk to you like you were always friends. Especially, varsity football players that were like 6’7 and ripped, come up to me, 5’3 and 145 pounds soaking wet. The kid that was usually picked on for walking funny, or for tripping over his own feet. And they give you props for sticking with something they couldn’t handle. It was cool and it made me feel like I was a normal person, and not some weird mutant that people just laughed at. But, what I really wanted, like I said before, was a letterman jacket. That was the identifying mark of an athlete. You could have a jacket made, no matter what, but it was like blasphemy to have one made when you didn’t earn your letter. So, the rule was if you wrestled three varsity matches in the school year you automatically get your letter and your wrestling pin (the humping pin), then you could put it on your expensive jacket you had to buy. Well at the first tournament, everyone wrestled two matches, as it was a double elimination tournament. So, my first match, this was the most entertaining match I’ve ever had. I got destroyed by this ripped black dude, who just all around kicked my ass. He was jacked up on some adrenaline or something because he was all over the place. He got behind me and had me in a waist lock. I immediately start trying to spin around him, because I don’t wanna get dunked on my head. So, there I was in my spandex singlet, and my headgear getting slung around like a rag doll. In the midst of all this running around, he bumped my headgear and he slid off and went over my face, so I couldn’t see anything. So I scramble to get it off, and finally I get the damn thing off and it falls to the ground. I don’t wanna trip and fall on it, so I quickly reach down and pick up the headgear. I sling it out of the way, and in the midst of being slung around, I guess I slung it too hard, and it flew out of my hand and hit the poor time keeper in the face! As I look mortified, the guy I’m wrestling slammed me down hard (AC Slater style) and landed on top of me, just as hard. He pushed on my stomach so hard I farted. (I honestly did. It happens.) I laughed so hysterically, that I get pinned no problem. My first loss due to my own flatulence. Round 2. I draw the state champion from the year before. Ha! I came up to this guy’s belly button. He was huge. He beat me before I even realized what happened. So, I was out of the tournament before I broke a sweat. Well, me and my buddy were eliminated in the same fashion. Not to mention, we were already in trouble with the coach because we were eating donuts in the hosting school’s cafeteria while we were supposed to be wrestling the first time, so we missed out on our first matches, and had to have them rescheduled. So, even though we were eliminated, we had to still come and support the team. Well, something happened and we had to wrestle again for a third time. I wrestled this skinny guy with a pony tail, he slammed me, beat me with easy. I must have pissed him off, because when I “pie faced” him with my hand, he bit me. Asshole. But, nonetheless, me and my buddy had our three varsity matches under our belts. We were winners. What a tournament that was. Believe me, I didn’t try to embarrass myself on purpose.

So, with three varsity wins under my belt, I was happy. I was gonna get that jacket and be a somebody now. But, since we were fill ins on the third matches in the tournament, and we were already technically eliminated, those matches didn’t count. So, we only had two official matches. Only one more until I got my jacket. But, unfortunately, we were placed on the Junior Varsity (JV) team and those matches didn’t count at all. So, we did the horrid JV matches. Two pieces of mat taped together to make a makeshift wrestling mat. I’m wearing sweatpants and my old middle school gym shirt. No singlets, just regular clothes and headgear. Nobody really gave a shit about JV wrestling. So, me and my buddy were stuck on JV. We always had to go to the varsity matches as alternates, just in case someone was unable to wrestle for whatever reason. And one night, I can’t remember where we were, a guy didn’t show up. The rule is if you don’t show, you don’t wrestle. No exceptions. You need to be there by the time the team does their “run out.” The “run out” was just the fancy walkout the team did before the matches. The team ran out in a line, ran in a circle, side stepped in a circle, and slid into the center all at the same time. Everybody slaps their hands on the mat while reciting some chant that slips my mind at the moment. So, the guy never showed up. I was in my singlet, my warm up suit, I did the fancy entrance and everything. I even had one of the most embarrassing moments of my life happen during the entrance. Everything went fine, but when it was time for everyone to slide in on their stomachs and slap the mat, as I went to slide, my chunky knee pads caught on the mat, and as everyone was laying on their stomachs, there was one lonely ass sticking in the air all by itself…mine. Anyway, after that I was sitting in my chair waiting to wrestle. The guy finally shows up 45 minutes late, and the coach had the nerve to ask me to go change, and give the dude my singlet, so he could wrestle. Not to mention, my match was next. Rules are rules, unless the coach wants a “for sure” win. I was pissed! The coach was asking me to do something that he wasn’t allowed to ask for. I was there on time, and I didn’t even have a match to go to. I’m sure the guy would have wiped the floor with me, but I wanted to try. I thought I would be something if I won the match for the team. But no, the rules get bent for a guaranteed win. I honestly don’t remember if the guy who took my gear won or lost. I was too pissed off to care. That could have been my one shining moment, that was my letterman jacket. The guy that was late already had his jacket, that was the shittiest part of the deal. So, I wanna say that the guy lost, but again, I’m not sure. I do know people said he smelled like crap all night, because I farted in the singlet and gave it back to him. Apparently, smell lingers in a singlet.

Now, I will go on record and say that I never won a match at any of the matches we had. I won a few times at practice, but that’s it. I honestly think that I wasn’t given the full training that the other guys had gotten. Not making excuses or anything, but I honestly don’t think any of the coaches knew what to do with me. One, of the coaches said that I should put my bad leg in the back, and let the guy trying to take me down, take my good leg. Seriously. I was showed how to do things one way, and not multiple ways. I should have wrestled the way I knew I could, instead of listening to how the coach suggested. I don’t blame him, he did the best he could with me. With all my problems, I’m sure I could be more of a burden than helpful, but to his credit, he never treated me differently, aside from at times finding me alternate exercises, because I physically couldn’t do some of them, but I did all the up downs and push ups and things like that. I even got pretty good at lifting weights. I could work out regularly with 280 pounds on the bench press, and even managed to bench 300 pounds one time. Which is impressive on it’s own merit, but considering I can hardly lift things with my left hand, I think it really shows if you work hard enough, you can do anything. I did things that I never thought I could do. My doctor told me that I shouldn’t be wrestling, but I did. I made some life long friends, and it was an experience I will never forget. I didn’t get my letterman jacket, neither did my buddy who couldn’t make weight. My other buddy got his, so at least one of us got it. Come to find out, my buddy didn’t even put his letter on a jacket. He didn’t even want a jacket. That’s hilarious. We got wrestling certificates instead. My “G” was on paper rather than a jacket, but hey, I’m proud of it. I found it the other day. I think I’ll frame it.

Lunatic Fringe

Today is Thanksgiving. Today is a day to stuff yourself with turkey and all that other good food. But, Thanksgiving isn’t what seems to stick out this month to me. The thing that sticks out is the day after today, Black Friday. A one day only sale that retail stores have, where items are listed at highly discounted prices just in time for Christmas. People line up in front of the store extremely early, sometimes days in advance to get in line to get the first “crack” at the good deals. But is the discounted price worth the trouble?

To all the people that have camped out for Black Friday, you are all insane. But, even I have participated in this adventure. But, some people really just show that the human race will  just end up in the toilet if any of them ever get in a position of power. That’s right, the lunatic shopper. 

I have worked at Walmart on Black Friday and I have seen people knock each other down and hit each other. I have seen people ramming other people with shopping carts. People have even gotten trampled. So, for all the people that act like lunatics that have no morals, and will do anything to get something cheaper, I hope you enjoy your discounted flat screen televisions. Remember, you can’t take it with you when you die, and if you act like a maniac, then hopefully, it will be soon. To all the people, who are going about things the right way, be safe. Do your last minute training and drills, get out safely. Think Vision Quest.

I don’t expect anyone to get this. I wrestled in high school. Vision Quest is such a kick ass movie. When I was on the wrestling team we had to watch this movie. Vision Quest is one of the greatest pump up movies ever (Rocky as well). So, train hard and get out fast.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy your holiday, and shop online for Black Friday, you won’t even have to redo your belt.

Not enough Red Rider? Well, I agree.

(Source: youtube.com)

Living My Life Confined To a Wheelchair…Sometimes.

I was at my grandma’s house cutting her grass (with a push mower) for her, and I saw a girl walking by. The girl waved at me, and I waved back to her, not thinking anything of it. I went back to cutting the grass and went on about my business.  After I was done, I rode with my grandma to get something at the Kmart. I was rummaging through the horror movies when somebody taps me on the shoulder. It was the girl that was walking by me when I was cutting grass in my grandma’s yard. I remember that I went to elementary school with this girl, and we were in a few of the same classes. I never really talked to her, but she was nice when I did. I also remembered seeing her because she used to live in the neighborhood at the time I lived in my grandma’s house. Then, we proceeded to have one of the dumbest and most entertaining conversations I have ever had.

She said, “Hi.” 

“Hello.”

 ”I know you, I went to elementary school with you. What’s your name again?”

“Yeah, we did. My name is Chris.”

“Oh yeah, you were the one that walked with a limp.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Why do you walk with a limp? What’s wrong with you?”

“I have Cerebral Palsy.”

“Oh yeah, my brother has that.”

“Oh he does?”

“Yeah, isn’t that like cancer?”

“Uh, no. It’s just damage of the motor skills part of your brain. I was born with it. It’s absolutely nothing like cancer.”

(Keep in mind, we are just standing around talking to each other.)

“Oh ok. Are you confined to a wheelchair?”

(I’m not a mean guy, but this kind of took me by surprise. She just saw me mowing my grandma’s yard.I look down at my feet for a moment, and look back and her, still waiting on my answer.)

“Yes I am. I just wasn’t feeling it today.”

(I was kidding. I thought she would start to laugh or something…nope. Dead serious.)

“I’m sorry you have to live in a wheelchair. Ok, well let me give you my number.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

Then, I walked away.

Now, I have never claimed to be the smartest guy. I can be quite the dumbass at times, but I do know if people are standing up, they aren’t confined to wheelchairs. Now, I know some people use wheelchairs when they need to, and they can also walk. But, confined? Man, that really makes me question the elementary school I went to. Does that make me a ass for just walking away?