Making Weight

My wrestling career ended more or less as it began: quietly. In junior high school it was unlikely that there wouldn't be a place for you if you "went out" for the team. That's what I did. I "went out" for wrestling. I didn't rush in blindly. I knew a little about it from watching my older brother go through it. Many of my decisions in life have been made this way: If it didn't kill my older brother, maybe I could do it.
It was a chance to deal with the chubby-kid syndrome that I had lived with for several years. My nickname around the neighborhood was "Tuba", and not just because it was the instrument that I chose to play in band. My peers had chosen this particular epithet carefully for my maximum displeasure and embarrassment. I knew that one of the main tenets of wrestling was "making weight". On the first day of practice, I dressed out in my gym uniform and headed to the downstairs gym. I was asked what weight I wanted to wrestle. In my mind, I had pictured myself as a lumbering heavyweight, but looking around the room, I suddenly became aware that I was not the biggest kid in the room. Not by a long shot. That distinction belonged to, and I am not making up this name because it is too perfect, Wilhelm Estes.
Seeing my indecision or bewilderment, the coach lead me to the scale and knocked the balance around with his pencil. "One twenty-eight. You wanna go up or down?" This was not a tough choice at all. "Down!" I declared, and hopped off the scale. That was the beginning of my slow odyssey to lose six pounds. Six pounds? How hard could that be?
As it turns out, the first three pounds were just a matter of showing up and living through the first week of practice in a gym that was kept at a sweltering eighty-five degrees. I was amazed by the sight of some of my team mates pulling on extra layers of sweat clothes, or even insulating themselves with trash bags. I was drenched in my T-shirt and shorts. What were these guys thinking?
They were making weight. I was hanging on a solid one hundred and twenty-five pounds, and imagined myself to be in the best physical condition of my life. Where would those other three pounds come from? I had two weeks before our first match, and it had been politely but directly suggested by my coach that if I really wanted to wrestle one twenty-two's that I should consider my diet.
Hadn't I already given up my afternoons to come and grunt and sweat? Now I was supposed to give up the Ding Dongs in my lunch? I looked at the big board where the coach had plastered pieces of tagboard with our last names next to the weights we hoped to wrestle. There was a logjam at one twenty-eight, and my best shot to make A or B mat was at one twenty-two, where there were only three of us.
Hostess would have to do without my support for a while. As it turned out, I didn't make weight for the first meet, but they let me dress out and watch from behind the row of folding chairs the rest of the team sat in to wait for their matches. The following week was a lot of celery and iced tea, along with a sweatshirt during practice. I made weight, but lost my wrestle-off for B match and watched another from the shadows. Before the third meet, the kid who had been on A mat dropped a weight class and there were two of us at one twenty-two. I made B mat by default. Determined not to waste this opportunity, I practiced hard, and learned as many of the moves that I could from both the right and left hand side. If I couldn't beat them with speed or strength, maybe I could out-clever my opponent.
I didn't win a match that year. I came close a few times, but succeeded primarily in getting my nose broken (in practice) and gaining a new understanding for exactly what harsh reality is. My parents came to watch and cheer me on, but I have no memory of it. I was focused on the moments that I was on the mat, grunting and sweating. For myself. For the team. For those idiots who called me "Tuba".
Around the neighborhood, I was going to be "Tuba" for a while longer, but in the gym I was one hundred and twenty-one pounds of mild fury. That was my victory.