Wrestling With The Past

I wrestled my old teammate Sean today, I was tired but refused to sit at the side. My leg rides still kinda work on him, they work on most every Warren Wrestler. But Sean’s good, former Varsity 145’s. However, apparently he was never part of the Nicole Basher’s Club.

“C’mon Nicole, come on, keep going,” he kept encouraging. I kept struggling….

“Remember Huizar?” That did it. I started going. “Remember Heredia?” I kept going. “Remember all those bastards that used to make fun of you? C’mon Nicole.” I went till the end of the round and practice ended.

I remember Huizar. The Varsity 160lbs High School All-American. Tall and ectomorphic with stringy muscles that were too big for his small bones and looked like they’d been thrown on a coat-hanger, but in spite of his body type he was buff. I learned how to leg-ride by watching him. I watched how he would wrestle in a way that was completely different from the way I’d seen everyone else wrestle. He would use his legs as opposed to his arms to expend less energy and wear his opponents down without moving much himself. He’d be glued to his opponents backs like a turtle shell. He was a master at the guillotine, the move where you pull their arm behind your head and lock up their legs with your’s so that their back is on the mat and they have no way to move. Devastating.

I remember how I picked up Huizar’s style in high school. I was trying to break my partner down to his stomach from his knees by chopping his arm like Coach told us too. That wasn’t working and it was starting to piss me off. Finally I said fuck it and just jumped on the guy and somehow hooked my legs in. The guy flattened out and I became a leg-rider, a prestigious title to have in the world of wrestling because only a small number of wrestlers actually leg-ride, and the one’s who do it good are among the elite. Iowa University, the top wrestling school in the nation, teaches a lot of leg riding. Brazilian Jiu jitsu, the submission fighting style that I came out of, is exclusively leg-riding.

I remember when I started pinning guys with leg-ride half nelsons in high school. It was really cool when I started winning in the room. My legs became things of power to be feared, but they were also shaky planks easily taken down (darn being tall). I also remember Huizar telling me to stop leg riding because I wasn’t any good at it. What did he know? He never wrestled me. I never got my match against him. The Team Captain.

Huizar graduated, I dropped out, both class of 2005. He went onto Columbia University to become a sports agent; I went onto Cerritos to be a journalist. Maybe someday I’ll be in some exotic place writing for National Geographic and he’ll be sitting in a desk bored with his life, or maybe someday he’ll be signing the biggest names in the NFL and I’ll be sitting in a desk at a publishing co. bored with my life. Who knows. Huizar never accepted me, and therefore no one accepted me. He pushed all my friends on the team away from me because he kept saying they liked me, and everyone knew he was doing it, but no one said anything.

Watching the guys on the Cerritos team beat each other down and then pick each other up is encouraging though. In high school, no one cares if you fall. No one pushes you while you’re running, no one helps you if you’re stuck, and no one yells at you to move your ass unless they’re going to get in trouble if you don’t. Here, you jog with your head down, and in a few moments someone will inevitably slap you on the back and tell you to keep your head up. It could be just the fact that I’ve only been on the team for a few weeks, but I think a lot of people on the Cerritos Team have similar stories to tell from parts of their lives. Stories where they too were beat up and pushed down and humiliated. At this level, wrestlers have to be not just tough, but hardened. Hard lives make hard athletes, I have a feeling we can secretly all relate to each other.

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