James Cook: Wrestling teaches life-long lessons
Jan. 23—Last Sunday's tournament wrestling tournament in Boyne City stood out for a myriad of reasons.
The first all-girls high school wrestling tournament in northern Michigan drew 25 teams, all the way from the upper peninsula to almost Michigan's southern border.
The sport, in general, is one close to my heart, and with it so quickly expanding with an exponential pace in girls participation, it's great to see.
It's a truly unique sport.
The very first Olympic sport is one where kids of all sizes can compete. One you don't need rich parents for. One that teaches a person a lot about themselves.
There's nobody there to help you on the mat. There's no timeouts. It's all up to you. You decide how good you can be.
Outside of perhaps volleyball, it's the one athletic endeavor that many general sports fans possess the least in-depth knowledge about. Not that many dads even know what a cradle is, nonetheless how to execute one. Let's not even get into the "potentially dangerous" part of the rules.
Watching Sunday's tournament brought a lot of memories flowing back.
Wrestling was my sport in high school. I wasn't big enough to play football or basketball, and I got cut from the baseball team twice, likely for the same reason. A 5-foot-4 shy kid around 100 pounds isn't going to overpower anybody with his "fastball."
But in wrestling, I found a home. Rather, it found me.
One day in my typing class (yes, they had those back in the day), Mr. Bruce Train came into Mrs. Avis Jensen's classroom and asked if he could talk to me in the hallway. I didn't know Mr. Train at all, aside from his son in the same class as I was the running back for the football team.
He explained that he needed someone for the wrestling team. Central Montcalm, a school of around 600 students, had to forfeit a weight class in all of their early-season duals.
"You are the only one in this school who can make the 98-pound weight class," he explained.
He promised nothing more than I'd get my butt kicked a lot at first. He wasn't kidding.
We had two kids somewhat close to my size to face every day in practice, Brian Thomsen and Greg Pilkington. Both were returning state qualifiers.
My first varsity match came with only a couple weeks of preparation. My opponent? The defending state champion, Kacy Datema of Carson City-Crystal.
He put me in a move called the guillotine — twice. For well over a minute each time. The name "guillotine" says what you need to know. It's a move designed to make the opponent give up. I spent almost the entirety of the second and third periods in it.
Walking off the mat after my defeat, Mr. Train greeted me happily. I was taken aback. "He beat me 15-0," I said, sore and exasperated.
"Yeah, but you didn't get pinned!" he said. "You saved us a point!"
Starting on varsity for four years, eventually things got better. The lessons learned from Thomsen and Pilkington in practice and an unorthodox approach to the sport (since I didn't know any better) helped a lot. I wasn't faster than most. Not stronger than most. But, by the time graduation rolled around, I was in the top 10 in school history in multiple categories, including escapes and reversals.
That brings us back to last Sunday.
You could see the lessons wrestling taught me — self-reliance, work ethic, confidence, determination — being earned out on those three mats. I even caught myself instinctively leaning here and there, somehow trying to coax wrestlers into the right positioning while taking photos for the paper. "Lift your head up," I heard myself murmur softly at one point during a match, as if coaching from the corner.
It all came back. Good memories, not-so-great ones, and everything in between.
Wrestling is a great sport. So if your kids — no matter whether they're boys or girls — aren't playing other winter sports, let them give wrestling a try.
Odds are, you won't regret it. I didn't.
Follow @Jamescook14 on Twitter.
