Читать книгу Wrestling with Angels - John Hanrahan - Страница 8

ALL-AMERICAN BOY

I was a child of the sixties, growing up in a large Irish Catholic family. My mother was kind, my father no-nonsense, my older sisters caring, and my younger brother the kid I needed to protect.

Born in the Bronx, my dad left home at seventeen, joined the Marines, and fought at Iwo Jima and Saipan. After the war, he married my mom, earned his PhD in electrical engineering, and got a job at the Naval Research Laboratory working on top-secret projects during the beginning of the Cold War. But that was hardly extraordinary. Our Falls Church, Virginia, suburb was just over the bridge from Washington, DC. Everyone knew someone working on some top-secret government project during the Cold War. My dad had lost his father at a young age, and the thought of losing the security that he provided was unimaginable.

Like other families in the 1960s, we cried in shock over the Kennedy assassination (which I barely understood) and while watching the DC riots (which I couldn’t understand). Like every kid I knew, I had accidents, illnesses, run-ins with my siblings, prayed with my family, went to church, and hated school, especially the strict Catholic school I started in first grade and the nun who taught my class. I was painfully shy and constantly fidgety, which drew the Sister’s ire, and that only made me more self-conscious.

Where I wasn’t self-conscious was on the playground. I played “football” with the boys on the blacktop with a tennis ball, and it quickly became the only thing I wanted to do at school. I loved getting physical and discovering what my body could do. I got nicknamed “Powerhouse” because I could continue carrying the ball with five kids piled on me. My mom was constantly patching my Zaire-blue trouser knees after I dragged them along the asphalt. Every hole made me feel more complete, more like myself.

I graduated to organized football later that fall. Mr. Stevenson, our neighbor who ran a Texaco filling station, would pile kids in the back of his pickup truck and take us to the local high school to play on a boys’ club team. By second grade, football had given me all the confidence that I never had in school. I acquired a reputation for breaking the facemasks on my helmet because I hit with my head so hard. I never got to run or throw the ball, but I didn’t care about that, or that the coaches’ kids got to play glamour positions like quarterback and running back. I played the line on offense, running guys over, and on defense tackling the other teams’ glamour boys. I was happy in the trenches. I was happy hitting people hard, and when they passed around the second grade boys’ winter club flyer at school that fall, I rushed home and told my mom I knew exactly what I wanted to learn next: boxing.

Oh, honey. Why don’t you try wrestling?

But I want to do boxing!

She took the flyer, looked it over, and shook her head.

No, honey. Not boxing. Try wrestling.

I pleaded my case, but she held firm, telling me how she had attended a college wrestling match on a date at the Naval Academy and loved it. I pushed, but I could tell Mom thought wrestling was a higher-class sport than boxing.

Mom was right, of course. I might have had nothing more to write about if I hadn’t relented and started wrestling when I was seven years old.

Wrestling was everything football wasn’t for me, and I took to it immediately. I had felt confident on the football field but never super comfortable in that boys’ club. Everyone else always seemed to know more about the game than I did. Coaches spent less time explaining plays and strategies to the line and more time telling us what not to do so the players who mattered most could score. What they told me was something like what you tell the Hulk. Hanrahan smash!

Maybe it wasn’t just me. It seemed a lot of fathers tutored their kids in football even by first grade. Not my dad. He wasn’t an athlete or into sports. He was tough as nails as a Marine, but he was a mathematician now. He wasn’t even at many of my games. From the moment I started elementary school, he did not like the idea of me wasting study time playing ball, while I had already made up my mind I was not going to waste time studying when there was ball to be played. I brought schoolbooks home just in case he asked to see them. I tried to trick him into giving me the answers to my homework so I could get back to playing faster. I would come into his den and ask him about questions I hadn’t even looked at, thinking I could quickly get all the answers. Instead I ended up spending mind-numbing amounts of time listening to his insights into what the problem really was about or what a book could teach me. I learned to avoid his den. Somehow, I still managed to get good grades.

But wrestling? Wrestling was something I knew I could learn—something I wanted to learn. No one needed to tell me to study harder. Even in second grade, I easily grasped the objectives in front of me—take your opponent down, put him on his back, and stay off your own back—and longed to do it the best I could. The only thing I didn’t like about wrestling at first was the way my knees felt on the mat. I had no kneepads, so I wore an old pair of jeans to practice.

That problem solved, I moved onto the bigger problem of the club coach. He knew nothing about the sport and had never wrestled a day in his life. He taught every rule and move from a book. He wasn’t going to give me what I needed, and neither was my dad, so I developed my own instinctual methods to knock opponents off their feet and pry them onto their back. This was too much for most of the other club kids, whom I took down one after another. My team even named a move after me: “The Hanrahan Special,” in which I grasped my opponent’s far ankle while simultaneously trapping his far elbow, sinking my chest back below his torso, and bulldozing forward to knock him on his back. The tackle I had perfected in football served me well too. In wrestling, they called it a double leg takedown.

Wrestling became my own little universe. It gave me everything football, school, and my father could not. From my first matches, I understood the power of imposing my will against another human being. I was a winner. I was unstoppable. I went through my second-grade season the undefeated league champion.

And then in third grade, I lost for the first time—to Matt Ruffing, the son of the league commissioner. Matt didn’t pin me, but he beat me in every other way. He was well trained and always steps ahead of me as we fought through positions I did not know were possible. I remember it was loud and I felt like everyone there was against me. My lungs were burning. My mouth was too dry even to spit. The buzzer sounded, reverberating off the gym walls, and that was it. I rose to my feet and stood there humiliated as Matt Ruffing’s arm was raised, tears streaming down my face.

That Matt Ruffing and I continued to tangle and I later had my share of victories against him did nothing to undo how I felt that night. I felt alone. Because I was alone. In wrestling, there are no teammates to hide behind. My father was in the bleachers, but that was no comfort. I had no idea what the word vulnerable meant then, but that’s what I was, standing there in defeat for the first time. I already knew fear. I began having night terrors when I was seven. My sister Teri would come to me in the middle of the night and calm me down by rubbing my hands. Feeling this vulnerable was worse. I had no control over what I saw in my dreams, but I had control over how I performed on the mat. Now I had a new fear, the fear of losing, and I would do everything I could to ensure it never happened again.

Because wrestling made me feel alive. Complete. Like a winner. Smart and capable of learning from my mistakes. Powerful. I bought a set of weights with the money I’d saved up. My dad shook his head disapprovingly. He thought I would just lift and look at myself in the mirror. He saw it as ego. I know he only wanted to make sure I was doing things for the right reasons, but it hurt that he didn’t understand me. I was on my way to becoming a state champion—I knew it and had the record and work ethic to prove it. Still, he made me explain my motives.

The last thing I want to do is lift weights, Dad. But you know what? I want to be the best wrestler I can be, and this is part of the equation.

Dad walked away, which only made me push harder. By my eighth-grade season, I was a junior champion and had an open invitation to the varsity wrestling practice. It was tortuous and painful, but I figured it built character—something the coach always talked about. Besides, I desperately wanted to be a part of his team and wrestle under the spotlights for the Falls Church High School Jaguars. They had a great wrestling tradition, perennially ranked as one of the top teams in the state, while the basketball team sucked. The school packed them in for home meets to capacity crowds all winter long. As the varsity team prepared to enter, the houselights would shut off and the spotlights flared up the circle of the mat as the Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water” would echo through the gym. The team would bang the double doors loudly and then burst into the spotlights. There was nothing cooler in my mind.

Wrestling: what men do during boys’ basketball season. This is where I’m meant to be, I thought. At the same time, I literally got a whiff of what else was to come. Because just after I became a junior champion, I smelled drugs for the first time.