During my run the other morning I watched “free style” wrestling at the Olympics. This is close to our collegiate wrestling, maybe it’s the same.
I have always enjoyed the sport. Union had a decent team, and a guy who lived next to me my freshman year wrestled… and we would always go to the gym to cheer him on.
You know it’s funny how things work out. I love basketball… and yet I think I saw fewer than five games my entire four years at Union. And yet, I don’t think I missed one wrestling match in that same time.
Paul wrestled at Union. He never competed in it at Hopkins. But the Coach at Union saw him lifting weights one day and recruited him. His wrestling career was marked by one feat… he was never pinned. He would often be inserted into a match just for that reason… he might not win; but he wouldn’t be pinned. Sort of like giving up a field goal and not a touchdown.
Paul had this thing with me… I would be his guinea pig. Our home at 25 Alston was a “Center Hall Dutch Colonial”… it in fact had a center hall… upstairs and down. And the upstairs hall must have looked like a small workout room to Paul. It would be there where he would take me to practice his wrestling moves… which in this case only involved par terre: the position where one wrestler is on the mat (par terre) and the other wrestler is on top.
He would practice his escape moves… and then we would reverse the roles. He was 20 at the time and I was 9. We were different weight classes back then. I was no more than an animated dummy.
He would also take up Judo (went on to a black belt)… After his lesson with Mr. Yamasaki, I would be pressed into dummy service again… put on the guinea pig suit.
Then there was the day he came home from school… proud of a new skill. He could throw a curve ball. So we went to the front steps (it, as everyone knows, is the perfect backstop if you don’t have a catcher handy) & Paul marched an appropriate distance away, and then began throwing me curve balls with a tennis ball. Now he was very, very proud of this… and I was not a good baseball, soft ball, wiffle ball player. No matter. I took my cuts with a thin wooden wiffle ball bat, and in fact launched a mammoth shot that took off on a parabola that cleared the Polasky’s house across the street. It think he was just as proud of my hit as he was of being able to throw a “deuce”.
Paul taught me to play chess. I was not good at it.
One time he came home with an acoustic guitar. He had taught himself to play… or maybe strum is a better word. This was back when “folk singing” was a big deal. We would go upstairs to our room (we shared the bedroom now that I was out of Mommie Soph’s room) which was off the “work out room”, and he would practice for me… struming thru Kingston Trio songs… and things like The Good Ship Reuben James.
His playing was not good, his singing was worse.
In our backyard basketball hoop he would meet his match. No, I could not jump higher than him, nor would I ever be able to. But it wasn’t long before my hands were better able to control the ball. I could reverse layup… he could not.
So, my big brother is a grandfather now… and I guess that makes me a great uncle (of sorts).
It was nice seeing him on Sunday… nice being close to the family…Seeing the next generation added to our family ladder. It makes me feel proud, it makes me feel good.
And it felt pretty good watching the American show that Moldavian a thing or two on the wrestling mat that morning… just as Paul did to me in our upstairs gym some 44 years ago.
Anyway… just a couple of thoughts that got kicked around in the “attic” today.