My son was recently thinking about sports. I guess this isn’t unusual for many teenagers but it certainly is for anyone with the last name Zerr. We aren’t, now how should I say it, exactly sporty. At best we were all mediocre in sports, except for my oldest brother who lettered in track in high school.
His choice of sports were all over the place: basketball, soccer, lacrosse and wrestling. I was moving right along with his list, until he reached the last one.
Wrestling. I remembered wrestling from my days of being an indentured student in middle school and then high school. I hated PE, largely because I wasn’t built for sports, well, most sports, and the teachers loved to make me their pet project, figuring that extra laps or push ups would magically convert me into a jock.
They didn’t. Eventually, my mother got me out of my last year of indentured studentude when she wrote the school board to tell them that she thought PE was a waste of my available school time and wanted me to pursue academics instead. Thanks to mom, I only had to endure one year of PE in high school instead of two.
There was only one sport I excelled at in PE – flag football. I was a pretty good defensive back and could find the guy with the football pretty quickly, often while still in the backfield. Looking back, I wasn’t really that good. I don’t think anyone bothered blocking me because I wasn’t a threat.
The same was true on offense. No one would block me. It was then that I realized this was the very thing our team needed. One day on successive plays, I told the quarterback to throw the ball to me. He thought I was nuts. But several times in a row, I found myself alone in the end zone, not covered. Before anyone on the other team knew what was happening, the ball was sailing through the air, right into my hands. This really pissed the other guys off, to the point where once Paul Hague, a member of the Freshman football squad, turned flag football into tackle football, decking me in the endzone, driving me face first into the mud. I didn’t mind. I was our new secret weapon, scoring virtually at will whenever a new team played us.
I wasn’t as lucky in the other sports. Eventually the weather turned bad and we moved indoors. That meant basketball and then wrestling. Basketball was easy enough for me. I would just foul everyone I could find and then sit on the bench for the rest of class. I also discovered I could get tagged just for standing in the key, wherever that was.
Wrestling was far more difficult. I didn’t like wrestling, largely because of its, well, intimate nature. I was talking about this very thing last night and I thought Jan was going to keel over from laughter. I guess her ex was a wrestler in high school, which is just about the oddest sport anyone could come up with for teenage boys.
Let’s think about this for a moment. The starting position requires one guy to wrap his arms around another guy who is in the doggy position. You get points for pinning him to the mat anyway you can and if you’ve ever looked in the Kama Sutra, it has all the basic men’s wrestling positions in it. The only thing missing is actual coitus.
I wanted my son to think about all this before he chose a sport. So I explained it in age appropriate terms, using my own experiences. “I didn’t really like having my face this far from the guy’s sweaty nuts,” I would say, pressing my hand up against my nose. “And of course, there’s the times you accidentally grab his butt or his you know what.”
By this time Parker’s eyes were growing as big as saucers. I could see that he was putting himself into the wrestling ring, manhandling his opponent just so that he would drive him to the mat and pin him and the only thing missing is a little hokey-poke-me.
To really make the point, I showed him photos from my high school annual of men doing one another on the matt. I know that 50-something year old men didn’t think about how these photos would play years later, but in my more than capable hands they were used to teach my son that whatever he does in high school will continue to haunt him the rest of his life.
There are few if any sports that approach the level of intimacy that men’s wrestling does. I know this because years later I regularly engaged in similar moves, only with a woman. We would start in the Neutral Position. I would put my initial move on her, perhaps trying a Leg Ride or a Leg Setup. She would counter with a slick defensive move and execute a well timed escape (2 points). Next I would try a straightforward takedown and she would do a little reversal and escape again (2 points). Before I knew it it was match over and I hadn’t scored at all. The story of my life.
I guess I should have paid more attention in wrestling class, although at the time I didn’t know that the moves you were so similar.
Don’t get me wrong. The outcome would have been the same. Even with a weight advantage I just can’t seem to get my moves down. I end up hesitating for just a moment and by then they’ve slipped from my grasp.
Suffice it to say that my son is no longer interested in going mano a mano in men’s wrestling. I think he’s figured out that it requires a level of close combat that is just, well, a little too freaky.
The last time I heard, he was going to go out for lacrosse. Still, I have my concerns, especially after looking the sport up on the Internet. It seems a bit odd to me that there is a sport where 20 men chase their balls up and down the field with long sticks. There’s just something so… well… I can’t quite put my finger on it, and when it comes to balls and sticks, I’m not sure I want to.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wrestling with my conscience, which seems to be losing again,
– Robb