And The Winner Is…

0722blog

I had just chewed up a whole bar of ExLax and put on my yellow, two-piece rubber suit before exercising for an hour and steaming up the bathroom in my house in the process.

It may sound like a scene out of the Marquis de Sade but it was just de rigueur for high school wrestlers, of whom I was a pretty good one.

The idea was to lose weight to qualify in a lower weight class while not losing strength proportionately. It kind of made sense but it was the strategy of every wrestler so it cancelled out any advantages because we were all on the same playing mat, so to speak.

We had many creative ways to shed pounds.

Exercising in the steam of the bathroom was one technique. My mother was never alarmed with the likely bad health effects of such rapid weight loss. Her main concern was that the steam made the wall paper peel.

I wasn’t fat but I used to be like a human yo yo, dropping around 25 pounds a week for a match and then quickly gaining it all back. I can’t understand why anyone would say it was probably unhealthy; my coach never said so and in fact, he encouraged weight loss. Wrestler who didn’t make weight earned the famous “if looks could kill” stare from the coach and could expect to get splinters from the bench for the next few matches.

They called the coach “Skull” because he looked like a skull. He died about 10 years ago of cancer, a mere shadow of himself, the cancer having wasted him away. There is something perversely poetic in Skull’s weight loss.

I’m not surprised that no coach informed us of the potential bad effects of starvation. As a sign of the school’s non-concerns with the athletes’ health, each prospective wrestler had to get a physical from the school doctor which consisted entirely of the doctor sticking his fingers in your crotch and asking you to cough.

After the weigh-in, which came about two hours before the matches, we would pig out, eating and drinking as much as possible and feel like exploding, which is what I did during one match, but more on that later.

ExLax worked but the trouble was the more you ate, the more your body got used to the ExLax so the more you needed to eat and pretty soon you’re eating a full bar. But everything came out alright in the end. There was that nagging worry about the long term effects of the faux chocolate on my digestive tract.

There was the obligatory heaving. Retching in the bathroom was clearly uncomfortable but it worked. Again, we all did it so it couldn’t have been unhealthy and my mother never said,”Philip, you shouldn’t make yourself throw up. It’s not good for you.”

We also chewed a lot of gum, believing that it would trigger the build up of saliva and if we spit enough, it could add up to a noticeable weight gain. Really? Try expectorating a pound of spittle, it won’t happen.

As far as eating, I gained some lifelong habits. After practice, I could enjoy the sublime beauty of an apple and, not to waste anything, I learned to eat the entire apple, including the core. The only thing inedible was the stem but only because I couldn’t chew it. I drew the line at bananas.

We were at the home of my friend, Derek, two days before a match. Derek was a second string wrestler and I never failed to remind him that I was on the varsity so the pressure was greater on me to make the weight class.

We’d been religious about eating very, very little over the last few days but Derek’s mother had cooked up a large pot of stew that smelled exquisite and had our names on it. It wouldn’t hurt to have just a taste of stew, which, of course, turned into the whole pot as we attacked it like starving hyenas. I felt like a heroin addict who swore off heroin and wanted to have just one more fix.

After finishing off the stew, we decided to lose weight at the Turkish baths in Paterson. The first thing you noticed was the smell, kind of like a sickly cross between chlorine and vanilla. After paying the admission, you walked down a flight of stairs to a large room that was filled with billows of steam and older men wearing just towels.

So, we stripped down, got comfortable in our towels and sat on one of the benches to hopefully, sweat off the weight we had gained from the pot of stew. The men seemed odd but what did I know? I was there to lose weight; their reason to be there was their business.

So what was the point? The point was to make weight and get on the wrestling mat and win. I did that more often than I lost. The waiting for my turn was always the worst. I’d sit nervously on the bench and watch in agony as the big scoreboard clock in the gym ticked off the seconds in the match before me. I wanted to freeze the clock in time or blow it up and never have to face my destiny.

But the clock never froze and I heard the voice over the PA system announce me as the next wrestler. The day of reckoning was here as I adjusted my ear guards to avoid getting a condition known as a “cauliflower ear.” I had one. It’s when you get whacked in the ear enough times that the ear fills up with fluid and later hardens and gets swollen and deformed and looks like a cauliflower, something of a badge of honor among wrestlers, though not among girlfriends.

I hiked up my knee pads and took a deep breath before arriving at the circle in the middle of the mat, where the referee would indicate that the war would begin.

Like I said, I was pretty good but had the bad fortune of being in the same weight class as the two-time state champion from Bergenfield. He had uncanny balance and body awareness and the two times we met in the district tournaments, he pinned me. It seemed like he didn’t break a sweat and felt that the match was a mere formality and a foregone conclusion, which it was.

One match memorable for its weirdness came in college. I went out on the mat to meet my foe, who I saw had only one leg. He bounced around and wasn’t much for the first part of the match as both wrestlers stand up and try to bring the other man to the mat. But in the second part, both wrestlers begin kneeling on the mat and this is where my one-legged friend excelled as he was quite strong.

But I won and never felt particularly proud of defeating a one-legged wrestler.

As far as that match where I totally ate too much after weigh in, I’ll only say that the agonizing stomach cramps made it nearly impossible to stand up, let alone wrestle. Midway through the match it all came running out of me, through my tights, although it didn’t stop me from finishing and ultimately winning the match.

I enjoyed the physical battle, the feeling of being a gladiator in front of the drama-starved Romans who were cheering for blood. And the joy of having your hand raised in victory by the referee was an unmatched moment of ecstasy, pride and accomplishment. It also felt good to beat someone up.

The other part of being on the varsity squad was that you could get your vaunted varsity letter sweater and varsity jacket, with the logo of two wrestlers on the back, the weight class on one arm, the graduation class on the other arm and a big “P” for Paramus on the front.

The jackets were made at a place that no longer exists, called “Fordham Felt Works” in Paterson. You put your order in and waited about two weeks for the magical call that your badge of honor was ready. It was something of a rarity for a sophomore to compete on the varsity squad and I was quite proud of my accomplishment and hopeful it would help me find a girlfriend, which it didn’t.

We got the call from Fordham Felt Works and picked up the jacket. It had the wrong graduation year on the sleeve but I wasn’t going to wait another two weeks while they corrected the date. So I got my jacket and wore it so proudly and very nearly strutted to school like some big, proud rooster wrestler.

The next morning, I woke to see the jacket sticking out from under the other bed in the room. I had a deathly, sinking feeling in my gut as I pulled the coat from under the bed. The right sleeve, the one with the wrong graduation date, had a large hole torn in it, courtesy of my dog. That was the end of the jacket for a while and I was inconsolable. My mother was able to mend it but it was never the same.

As for the dog, he lived to destroy again.