my earliest memory is my dormmate jeremy jumping up and down on the black wrestling mat, yelling "come on!". we were taught some very rudimentary rules and told to simply go at it. neither of us knew what the hell we were doing, and we were simply flailing about and exerting a lot of effort pushing against each other. but i remember thinking it was pretty fun, and in particular i enjoyed the fact that i was competing against someone my size. and i vaguely (and quite possibly mistakenly) recall that i had held my own.
this memory stuck, and in my second year of high school, i tried out out for the team. wrestling was one of the few official team sports that did not require prior experience - any other skill sport, my classmates had been practicing for years and i did not stand a chance. moreover, the coach informed us that the simple rule was that if you didn't quit, you made the team. i couldn't believe my luck, and perhaps because of that simple rule, i "made the team" for the remaining three years of my high school.
but, it was not that easy. in fact, i often wonder why i lasted more than one season, and still came back. i was truly a terrible wrestler. i had no sense of how leverage and control should work. my first year, i must have wrestled in perhaps ten or fifteen matches, and i won exactly zero matches. zero. every time i went out, i took a beating. even today, i can't fathom what had been going through my mind and why i kept going. perhaps i couldn't bear the indignity of quitting? but wasn't getting beat down every single time worse? wasn't it unbearable to be known as probably the worst wrestler on the entire team? i really have no clue.
losing in wrestling isn't like losing in any other sport. as the loser, i got my face dragged across the mat, my body twisted into positions that my yoga teachers would have trouble imitating. all this, in front of tons of people. sometimes a few dozen, sometimes a couple hundred. the loser doesn't just hit a lot of missed balls or runs a bit slower than the other guy. the loser in a wrestling match is at the receiving end of a very public beatdown, and gets physically abused.
there is nothing quite like it - two boys, in skimpy singlets, crouched in a wrestling stance, standing toe-to-toe in the middle of seemingly giant circle. you know all the eyes are on you, and there's me, the mat, and my opponent. there's no one to save me. there's no backup plan. shit's happening right now.
(the first win, did come, finally, in my second year. i was terrible, but i suppose there were even more terrible wrestlers out there. more interesting things later in my short-lived wrestling career, but more on this in future.)
so yes, i kept at it, even when i had zero wins. it might be something to laugh about now, but it was no trivial matter then. it totally sucked. losing was the worst feeling ever, and losing in such spectacular and humbling manner that was simply part of the sport.
and damn am i glad i kept at it. wrestling has taught me more things than i could ever list. it wasn't even that hard work pays off, because it didn't. it was that failure really was ok. sure, losing a bunch of wrestling matches is incredibly silly compared to any real life challenge, but to a fifteen year old, having zero wins seemed like the end of the world, but look, the world actually did not end.
and now i think about it, that was perhaps the first time i realized that what other people thought of me was probably less important than what i thought of myself.
