Reckonings

The body coming to terms with quitting

For the past fifteen years, I’ve lied to hundreds of people about what happened to my college wrestling career. Maybe more than that, to be honest, as the full story is not really known by anyone, even the coaches or my teammates at Stanford, because I never had the courage to face it. People who don’t really care at all would ask me — people who’d never wrestled or been to a wrestling mat, friends who despised sports—and I would find myself parroting the same answers I gave to the kids I coached in the South wrestling room. The stories I told were often true enough, facts suggested to imply more than they meant, to stand in for what actually happened. I told them I’d torn my ACL, had it replaced with a cadaver Achilles tendon, that I was now part zombie. I told them I suffered from perpetual sprained ankles and thumbs, that for months at a time I could barely walk. I told them I was a match off All-American at men’s senior nationals in Greco-Roman; that collegiate, or “folkstyle,” wrestling wasn’t my strength. I told them I couldn’t get my body to make weight anymore, that the toll of starvation and dehydration got too great. I told them anything that seemed like an answer.

In the South Eugene High wrestling room, on every unclaimed space of every wall, my coach, John Scott, had stenciled in six-inch purple letters the names of every district medalist, every state qualifier and state placer, every outstanding wrestler as voted by teammates. My name appeared perhaps 15 times, over and over and over, an absurdity of repetition interring me as legend. And perhaps it was sheer force of repetition that led me to say the things I did — how we create versions of what happened that allow us to go on, that tell us who we are now. Perhaps that’s why I’m ready to tell the truth — because who I wish to be has changed and depends more than ever on having reckoned with myself.

I spent the years from the age of 12 until 22 being a wrestler — and long after that being known as one, walking the streets of the town where I made my reputation. People still talk about it: Friends at the climbing gym caution arrogant young kids getting lippy…