Wrestling Left Its Mark . . . Often

My memories of high school wrestling are inglorious enough.

How does one ever forget mat burns, the hideous marks left on a wrestler’s face after it has been dragged across a rubber surface for yards at a time?

A mat burn is wrestling’s equivalent to a canvas shoe screeching to a halt on an asphalt court. Only in wrestling, the shoe is your face.

Your average burn is a two-inch, hickey-like brand from hell. A facial skid mark, if you will, as if pimples and crooked teeth and white legs weren’t enough for any 17-year-old going through life’s changes.

“Hello, Cindy? Hi, this is Chris. Yeah, that’s right, the guy with the mat burns. Hey, listen, I was uh, you know, wondering if maybe you weren’t busy. . . . what? Sure, Cindy, they’re gonna go away. They’re only burns. . . . Anyway, I was uh. . . . huh? Well, yeah, you can put Neosporin on them but listen, about Saturday. . . . No, not at all. I’d say the one on my chin looked more like Italy than Baja. Forget it, Cindy!”

Wrestlers are loners. Our mothers could never understand what possible joy could be found being locked in a seedy room with 50 other foul-smelling guys, all for the privilege of gouging and grabbing each other in areas we previously thought sacred.

I don’t think any kid really goes out for wrestling. You kind of just end up on the team one day. If you were me, you were cut from every other sport you cared about. You cursed the football coach who wouldn’t make room on the roster for a strapping 110-pound offensive tackle like yourself.

After the tears dried, you went out for wrestling.

It remains the last refuge for 98-pound weaklings, the place to go when all else fails. You can prove yourself a man in a wrestling room, even if you need a foot-boost to pop a quarter in a vending machine.

Wrestlers are proud, if nothing else.

For three torturous years I wrestled at Sonora High School, all the while wishing I was the team’s quarterback.

There was only solace in knowing I could not be legally removed from the squad on a coach’s whim; that I could lose my varsity spot only if someone stripped me of the title.

For this honor a wrestler lived with the pain, the sweat and the ungodly odor.

For three wrestling seasons, our heavyweight, Mike Mosher, wore the same green shirt to practice each day. It was yellow when he bought it.

His locker was strategically positioned above mine so that he could “accidently” drop the wretched thing on my head every day while I laced up my wrestling shoes.

Mike was quite a guy. And his was quite a shirt. It was 30% Dacron polyester and 70% mold.

After three years we could take it no longer and finally dumped Mike and his shirt into the pool and then raced to phone the board of health.

Some guy in a surgical mask finally took the shirt away on the end of a stick.

I think about wrestling every time I close my left eye and see a goodly portion of what was once a perfectly straight nose.

I have to thank for this some lug-head from Esperanza High, who hit my proboscis with his forehead doing about 40 m.p.h.

So now I wheeze out of one nostril. When my allergies are just right, I can belt out “Oh! Susanna” with my mouth shut.

The thing that still bugs me is the guy never said he was sorry. Not a card, flowers. Nothing. If you’re out there, pal, me and my nose are still waiting for that Hallmark.

You don’t go out for wrestling and expect to get girls, because no sooner than you make the team does the coach put you on a diet. For the good of the squad, of course.

There’s this insane notion among wrestlers that the less you weigh the better you’ll wrestle.

You get so caught up in team spirit that you eat up every word. It’s the only thing they let you eat.

I was already so skinny that, when I inhaled, I could see my own heart beat. But it seems I just wasn’t skinny enough.

Wrestling at 140 pounds my junior season was no sweat. The mistake was in later getting a summer job making milk shakes and sundaes at a fast-food place. I ended up gaining about 15 pounds of what should have been company profit.

I showed up for wrestling the next year looking almost human. I tossed out the watch band I had used for a waist belt.

I think the guys named me captain only because I was crazy enough to think I could lose the 15 pounds and wrestle at 140 again.

I was crazy enough.

For weeks I existed on a menu of carrots and water. For fun, we’d turn the heat up in the wrestling room to a cozy 110 degrees or so and then wrestle in 30 pounds of gear and sweat suits.

Then after practice I’d run, chewing big wads of gum and spitting along the way. You’d be surprised how much spit weighs.

The whole idea of dieting was made all the more unbearable by the presence of our heavyweight Mike, ol’ green sleeves himself, who had to (get this) stuff his face every day to meet the minimum heavyweight division requirement of 195 pounds.

His lunch bag was packed so tightly that there wasn’t enough bag at the top to make a fold.

Usually he’d pull a porterhouse steak out of that thing and wave it in front of your face before inhaling it.

His mom would cut an entire package of Oreo cookies in two and put one half in his bag.

Mike, of course, would torture us dieters by smashing cookies under his feet or eating the creamy middle and throwing out the rest.

Once a week, with our will powers waning, Mike would throw a cookie or a Ding Dong as high as he could in the air just to watch four or five of us guys fight for it.

Of course, the great thing about being 15 pounds underweight is that you’re immediately on the hit list of every viral strain that moves its way north from South America.

I was so sick before one match that the weight of an opponent’s breath nearly knocked me over. But hey, I made weight.

Never will I know as much pressure as there was in wrestling, where you are matched alone against another guy who weighs the same but always appears to be larger.

In wrestling, there are no teammates to blame. It’s both the joy and the hell of the sport.

And never again do I want to know the pressure of wrestling Gary Figueroa, a childhood buddy who had moved away in junior high school, only to reappear in my weight class at Brea Olinda High School during our senior years.

Gary was a grammar-school terror, a real problem child.

At my fifth-grade birthday/ slumber party, Gary stole the Kentucky Fried Chicken and ran around the block. Then he locked my mom out of her own house.

There wasn’t a kid in the world that she hated more than Gary.

And there I was, years later, clutching arms with a kid on my own family’s most-wanted list.

I’ll never forget my mother’s last words as I left the house for the match.

“If you lose to him, don’t bother to come home,” she said.

So there I was circling the mat staring at goof-ball Gary, and all I can think about is him running with the chicken and my mom chasing him with a rake.

There weren’t enough prayers to be said after my 7-3 win, though Gary would swear a year later the score was 4-3.

It’s a triumph I’ll carry to my grave. It was a sport designed for personal successes and defeats. That’s what makes wrestling equally wonderful and painful.

Don’t try to understand what moves wrestlers. We will forever walk alone, if only because we smell differently.

After all these years, when I see an anorexic-looking 10th-grade kid with mat burns instead of side burns, I want to put my arm around him and tell him that I understand.

Then I want someone to do his laundry.