Fond Memory #1 – Junior Varsity

I’ve been looking for a way to tell these two stories for a long time. I haven’t told them because I am yet again the main character and both stories are exercises in self-flattery. I keep trying to think of a way I could slip these into the record without exposing myself as the egotistical self-absorbed jerk that I truly am. I know this about myself, but I don’t want you to know that about me. I suppose that now that I’ve exposed the ugly truth about myself I might just as well go ahead and “tell it all”.

“Tell it all” is a great off-color Lewis Grizzard joke. I will leave that for another day.



Junior Varsity

Longtime readers of this blog know full well that all I ever wanted while growing up was to be a decent wrestler. As they say in the crass class of athletes to which I belong, “I’d a given my left nut” to make the high school varsity wrestling team. Alas, I was the #2 guy on the depth chart for all three years of high school in three different weight classes, and only wrestled in junior varsity (JV) meets. I’d like to make the excuse that my team was stacked with great talent during my years there, but that is all it would be, an excuse. The fact is I wasn’t good enough to beat the #1 guy in two out of three matches. I did make the varsity for a couple meets when the #1 guy was in some kind of unknown trouble I can only guess at, but it was all too rare of an occurrence.

So there was a JV wrestling meet one year against our cross-town rival, Jefferson HS, and I was wrestling this guy whose name was Mikulecky, or something close to it. Mikulecky was #2 to Dan Rowray at Jefferson HS, who was the eventual state champion in our weight class. The #1 guy at my school was #2 to Dan Rowray at state, so I suppose that is yet another excuse. More excuses. Totally worthless, which means I cling to them all the more dearly.

Anyway, it was the beginning of the second period and I had chosen the down position. At the whistle I attempted to stand up and escape, but Mikulecky lifted me off my feet, upended me, and slammed me back to the matt leading with my shoulder. I lay there in a heap of hurt holding my shoulder and the referee stopped the match.

I was too young to realize that I should be thankful my neck wasn’t broken. I was too busy clutching my shoulder, which felt like it was broken, and being ticked off that the official hadn’t penalized Mikulecky a point for slamming me to the mat. In wrestling when you pick someone up, you immediately become responsible for that wrestler’s safe return to the matt. If you injure the other wrestler while returning them to the mat and the injured wrestler is unable to continue, the injured wrestler wins the match. My shoulder was killing me, but since the referee hadn’t made the call, if I quit, Mikulecky would win the match.

From an early age athletes are pumped up with a lot of rah-rah slogans like ‘winners never quit and quitters never win’. As a result I was determined to continue the match so long as the bone hadn’t punctured the skin and my blood wasn’t making the mat too slippery to continue. The assistant coach, Kohl, came out on the mat to check me over and spent way too much time doing it. As an endurance jock I wanted to minimize the rest Mikulecky was getting during my injury time-out. So I wind-milled the arm a couple times to see if it worked, and it barely did with a fair amount of pain, and shooed the coach off the mat. The crowd applauded politely as I returned to the mat, and watched the match with renewed interest. I guess an injury adds drama. (It’s kind of like NASCAR: waiting for the next crash.) Though the shoulder continued to hurt like hell and wasn’t of much use, I did finish the last four minutes of the match and beat Mikulecky by a point.

That was the last match of my disappointing wrestling career. An x-ray revealed that I had separated my shoulder – no wonder that it hurt so much those last four minutes of the match with Mikulecky. The doc put my arm in a sling so I wouldn’t use it to lift any weight. No cast, just a sling. I dutifully showed up for wrestling practice for a couple weeks because that’s what I thought loyal teammates did, but I wasn’t contributing anything by standing there and wistfully wishing I was wrestling. So I checked back with the doc to see if I could take the sling off to run and he gave me his blessing. Of course I never told him how much or how hard I intended to run. The wrestling coach (Dave Rosenberg) gave his blessing to give up the wrestling season and begin my spring track season when I explained I had doctor’s permission to run, but not to wrestle. Rosenberg had been wondering why I was hanging around anyway.


At the end of the winter sports season the high school had an all-school assembly in the gymnasium to recognize then winners of JV and Varsity letters in the various sports. It was a big thing for jocks to be recognized in front of the entire school body. It seemed strange to me that they never had a similar assembly for academic awards, but hey, I wasn’t the Principal.

The format of the assembly called for all the JV kids in a sport to line up in alphabetic order, have their names read in machinegun fashion by an assistant coach, and receive a quick handshake from the head coach. There were a lot of guys on the wrestling team so they had to read the JV names quickly. When it came time for the varsity athletes to receive their awards the head coach stood at the microphone and spoke at length about each individual athlete and all of their accomplishments. The varsity awards were quite a contrast to the cattle-call nature of the JV awards.

So I was standing in line with all the other nameless JV guys during wrestling’s portion of the awards ceremony, listening to Assistant Coach Kohl rattle off name after name after name . . . waiting for my turn to be recognized by name, but in truth, essentially ignored due to the mind-numbing uniform treatment of all. When I finally reached the head of the line to receive my JV award Coach Kohl stopped.

I looked around to see what had gone wrong. Nobody had tripped over the microphone cable, there were no fights in the bleachers; nothing was going on. Coach Kohl was just staring at me. I hoped it was because I’d done something right. He stopped the awards ceremony to talk about me.

I cannot accurately quote Coach Kohl 41 years after the event, but I believe I can accurately recall the essence of his remarks. He apologized for holding up the awards ceremony, but felt it was his duty to acknowledge me and call everyone’s attention what I’d done during the JV match with Mikulecky. He felt that my perseverance under the duress of a separated shoulder in a meaningless JV wrestling match was a prime example of what it meant to be a competitive athlete. Excessively kind words about the nature of character may have been tossed around, but I don’t remember that for sure as I didn’t hear exactly what was being said. I was busy just trying to stay vertical while the entire school was staring at me. Fainting seemed a real possibility. Coach Kohl went on at length, almost as if I was a varsity letter winner. It was embarrassment through flattery; the best kind of embarrassment. It lasted forever, and it ended all too soon.

(I loved it!)

A fond memory

February 27, 2011