i used to wrestle.

i'm pretty sure that i've mentioned that before, mostly because every once in a while it pushes itself to the forefront of my mind, like over the weekend for example. this past weekend was the ncaa division 1 wrestling championships. the tournament was in st. louis, so there was really no chance that i'd be there. in fact the likelihood of me making it to one while living on the west coast is slim, pretty much because amateur wrestling isn't nearly as big here as it is in the midwest and there, comparatively, aren't nearly as many quality college programs here as there are in other parts of the country, so they don't stage the tournament here. all that is a shame because if there's a single sporting event that i'd choose to go to year in and year out, i think that would be the one.

anyways, i didn't wrestle in college, let alone for a division 1 program, so my interest is relegated mostly to hobby/fan status. so saturday afternoon/evening, the championship finals were on espn2, and while i was watching them, i got to thinking about that silly six degrees of separation game, and i'm happy to say that in the process, kevin bacon didn't cross my mind a single time. back to the point, however, i was thinking about how there were several guys wrestling in that tournament who i didn't wrestle myself, but who had wrestled someone that i'd wrestled, who were in my second degree, as it were.

i really don't know why i'm going on about this, maybe it's just a personal inventory sort of thing, or maybe i take some perverse pleasure in telling the world about how this one guy i wrestled in high school slaughtered me on more than one occasion. see, my connection was specifically through this one guy i wrestled named tom grossman. this guy was an animal in high school, three time state champion, didn't surrender an offensive point his last two years and ended up getting a scholarship to the university of oklahoma at a time where pretty much nobody recruited texas for wrestlers. anyways, i wrestled this guy twice, once in the semi-finals at the north texas open, and again in the finals at the grapevine duals.

now imagine yourself a halfway decent wrestler, which i was, rolling along, winning your first couple or three matches to make it into the semifinals or finals of a tournament, making it to that round and subsequently getting your innards handed to you in less than two minutes. or worse yet, when i wrestled him at grapevine, the tournament was set up in a round-robin format, and i had to win eight matches for the privilege of getting destroyed by him in the finals. normally, going through all that just to get it handed to me in the finals of a tournament would be a cause for tons of frustration and consternation, but since i knew going in that without the aid of a loaded nine, which i'm not certain would have ensured victory anyway, i was going home with a silver medal, it didn't bother me so much.

so anyway, this guy grossman, for as awesome as he was and as bad as he beat me, didn't make all-american while at oklahoma, which makes me respect all the more what the guys i was watching over the weekend were able to do and understand the level of competition at that tournament, and sorta works to keep me humble.

that silver medal still hangs from my car's rear-view mirror

feeling: old
thinking of: my old knee brace
music: "monkeys at the zoo" charlie peacock