Little Stud

When wrestling season began my eighth grade year I had a new coach named Brad Bucknell.

Coach Bucknell reminded us to all be sure to wear a jock so our manhood wouldn't be spread out all over the mat. He said no one wanted to see how big our equipment was.

I don't think Coach Bucknell cared much for the sport of basketball. He referred to the basketball players as the "bubble bouncers". So from junior high on, my fellow wrestlers and I always called the basketball players "bubble bouncers".

Sometimes we wrestlers referred to ourselves as grapplers. I guess we adopted that word because newspaper reporters sometimes used it in place of the word wrestlers just to make their articles sound cooler I guess. I now know that grappling refers to any type of ground fighting. We liked the word. It sounded cool. I always thought of martial arts as being Karate or Kung Fu or other similar disciplines. I now know that wrestling is also a martial art.

Coach Bucknell informed us that there were three main styles of wrestling in the United States--folkstyle, freestyle, and Greco Roman.

He taught us how to do a Granby roll to warm up our necks.

I learned more and more moves and techniques. I worked up the courage to try some new things like arm bars and quarter nelsons. I began to really like arm bars and quarter nelsons. I was pretty good at double leg takedowns by then.

One match stands out in my mind from that season. We were wrestling the Sumner Aces and I had to wrestle a little muscle man by the name of Tracy. My friend Todd laughed when he found out I had to wrestle Tracy. Tracy had beaten Todd before. But, I wasn't worried. I looked at it as a good challenge.

I kept going through my takedowns on the practice mat and focusing on getting the first takedown until my match started. When it was time for me to wrestle I walked onto the mat and took Tracy down immediately with a double leg. I kept the pressure on and won the match in dominant fashion. I think my friend Todd was shocked. My coach was impressed. After the meet was over I walked over to Coach Bucknell and he said, "You wrestled a hell of a good match. Hmmph, so much for that little stud."

The next day in homeroom our school principal walked into the room and asked to speak with me. We walked off to the side of the room and he said, "I just want to tell you that you wrestled a great match yesterday and did a fine job of representing our school."