This is my fond account of my long relationship with wrestling. The relationship really began when I was a young (17), tall (6-feet 5-inches) but slender – very unwrestling-like – basketball player as a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles 47 years ago. (I actually saw smog inside the gym that year.)
The weight-lifters, whom I associated with burly wrestlers, would come out of the weight room adjoining the gym at Oxy to take a break and relax their muscles between circuits of lifts. We would engage in bang-’em-up pick-up games of basketball that I really enjoyed. Contact can be very kinesthetic, for people who enjoy it.
Anyway, from there a handful of years later, after I had graduated from college in journalism, I served as sports editor of a tiny daily newspaper in Goleta, next to Santa Barbara. The wrestling coach at nearby Dos Pueblos High, Mike Hart, all 5-feet 4-inches tall of him, and I hit it off. Sometimes, opposites attract.
Mike soon asked me if I was willing good-naturedly to face two of his wrestlers headed to a wrestling exchange in Japan, even though I had never been a wrestler. I said sure. One of the two, Scott Thomas, a 167-pounder to my then 205 pounds, reached out and yanked on my head, and I pulled back. I have had problems with a pulled muscle on the left side of my neck ever since.
After the two high-schoolers loosened me up and tired me out–all in front of the entire assembled team, all of whom were enjoying the spectacle immensely – Hart stepped out onto the mat.
Now, this was a veteran wrestler from BYU who knew technique. He began to roll me, over and over, his muscular 5-feet 4-inches frame wielding my 6-feet 5-inches build, on my back on the mat. Just as soon as I would get up, game for another attempt at resisting him, he would effortlessly toss me over again. The Charger wrestlers were roaring in laughter.
I can be pretty malleable, easy-going by nature. I didn’t mind at all furthering my career as a sports reporter/participant a la George Plimpton in “Paper Tiger”, his book about his experiences trying out for the Detroit Lions football team.
Fast-forward to my move to San Diego many years later and my friendship with the family of Timmy Cundiff, a stellar wrestler at La Jolla High. Through my photo-taking and coverage of Timmy and his teammates, who copped the Western League title, I built a relationship with the team and Coach Kellen Delaney.
My wife asked me the other day, “Why wrestling?” She didn’t know me in my (long-ago) basketball days, nor my earlier youth baseball days. But despite my spending my third year in a row at the two-day Holtville Rotary Wrestling Invitational near El Centro, she knew very well that I never had any skill at that sport.
Walter Fairley, Jr., the long-time (now retired) administrator at LJHS, as well as Kellen and other members of the program are part of a relational, friendly system in which I have been allowed to carve out a role as reporter/photographer/blogger and friend. At age 64, no longer a participant journalist!