I`Still Hate To Perform

As a person who has had a major disability: spinal cord injury(which includes head injury I have both) tends to break their life into two parts before and after trauma. I enjoy my life and all thee is too it but I have noticed the more I blog and write the more I include experiences which predate my life as a person with a disability. I am wondering if I am trying to escape to a time I may have liked more then the time I inhabit now. Where it may be true I may be trying to do this finding a more pleasant time I doubt it is necessarily to do with my being able bodied or not. It maybe be just I am and old guy now and I maybe just revisiting memories of my youth because these times were so exciting.

Today is the first of February 1 and thirty or so years ago I would be smack dab in the middle of wrestling season. My older brother wrestled in high school and I had wanted to be just like him with I was too young to know any better. Carl did pretty well as I remember and I wanted to do just as well. Boise had just started Jr wrestling the last two years I was in grade school a couple of weeks about this time of the year on Saturday mornings we were dropped off at the Old Boise High school gym where the wrestling team would coach us kids and there would be a all city meet. In the 7^th grade then I started wrestling for my Jr high where I wrestled for East Jr. High every year and I did OK. I was beat once and only once and I swear the other kid choked me.

I seemed to have had a gift for wrestling and gymnastics—the only “gifts” I recognize I may ever have had. I just seemed to be able to do things with my body useful in those two fields. Be that as it may I hated wrestling—most of the time—I hated the work outs or practices two hours every night after school uring the season, I hated “making weight” the night before every match—even though I never had a problem it was just another way to fail and I did not need any further challenges to my self esteem. I hated match night because there I had to perform, alone go forward on the mat, shakes hand with your opponent in the great circle and then at the Ref’s whistle grapple for three two minute rounds or till one of the other were pinned and the match was over. I figured that if I did not get the job over in the first two minutes I was in major trouble. So usually I charged my appointment with enough aggression I usually got the “take down” and was able to drive home the pin-using my favorite the “Cradle”. I wrestled either 80-85 or 85-90 pound range. That meant I wrestled early in the meet. So, once I was done and had my pin I could be stress free the remainder of the night. Oh,my matches were not all pins by long way. I did my share of wrestling my opponent all the way to the end of the third round and for an even matched opponent this is a grueling event.

The accident ended all of this for me; no more 4^th period stress. I still get the “nerves” especially with public speaking, testifying acting or even leading a meeting—all of which I have to do through the turn of a world. I do not know if I would wish to return to Wrestling Thursdays but the event is till interesting to ponder at this distance.