Opinion Column– “The Importance of Wearing Singlets”

When I was 13 years old, several of my friends and I were coerced into joining the middle school wrestling team.

Aside from the occasional living room throwdown with my two younger brothers, I had little experience with combat sports. However, the defensive coordinator of our middle school football team ceaselessly attempted to recruit his football players for the wrestling team, and I eventually relented.

This defensive coordinator and wrestling coach, the ever-quotable Buck Shiver, embodied the machismo of yesteryear in the most charming ways imaginable. He was roughly 65 years old at the time, but he possessed what many would call “old-man strength.” He was sinewy, bald and goofy with a southern accent that provided excellent impersonation material for my team.

Buck played linebacker at Georgia Tech, and his medium height and advanced age belied his strength. To this day, I would pick him to win a fight against most 20-somethings who cut their teeth in the cushy, air-conditioned gym environment of today. Despite his hard-ass background, though, he always treated us kindly and understood the low-stakes nature of middle school athletics.

All this to say, we respected the man, so when he insisted that we join the ranks of singlet-clad teenagers, we did so without rational levels of hesitation.

At 13, no one would have classified me as physically imposing. I weighed about 85 pounds soaking wet and consisted primarily of skin and bones. Fortunately, unlike football, wrestling did not force me to square off against pubescent, 170-pound giants, as the sport divides its athletes into weight classes, which helped level the playing field for me. Couple that with the padded mats, and I believed I could avoid injury or humiliation.

Unfortunately, this was a miscalculation.

Despite my diminutive stature, I would not have classified myself as “soft.” I did not fit the archetype of the psychopathic small kid with a chip on his shoulder, constantly picking fights to prove his toughness, but I never complained about getting crushed on occasion.

Wrestling, though, really takes a toll on a young man. The matches themselves were exhausting, and new wrestlers, myself included, inevitably had their asses handed to them in the early going.

Eventually, competitors even less impressive than I allowed me to notch a couple of wins, and my confidence began to grow. That is, until the fateful evening that cut my wrestling career short.

It was a standard wrestling meet, and when I checked the schedule, I saw that I was wrestling a young man named Timmy.

After some investigation, I visually identified Timmy as a rare 85-pounder who somehow managed to appear fat. He was built like a fire hydrant, and facially, he resembled Ham from “The Sandlot.”

When Timmy and I finally squared off on the mat, I was caught off guard by how low his center of gravity was, and thus we spent the short match tugging back and forth at each other from a standing position. It was from this standing position that I lost my balance.

When I felt myself beginning to tumble, I instinctively outstretched my right arm to break my fall; instead of breaking my fall, all 85 pounds of Timmy’s condensed body landed atop my locked arm, hyperextending it and breaking my elbow.

In this moment, as I yelled and writhed in pain on the mat, I found myself deeply loathing Buck Shiver’s salesmanship abilities. I loathed his abilities even more when I made a frigid, humiliating trip to the ER in a glorified leotard during the dead of winter.

When the ER nurse asked me if I had come from a gymnastics event, my pride plummeted to all-time lows, and I realized that returning to the wrestling mat no longer interested me.

During my time in a cast—time that spilled into lacrosse season, initially deepening my frustration—I began to analyze the benefits of my situation.

For one, I got to ride out wrestling season on the sideline with a legitimate excuse. But more importantly, I learned to take myself less seriously.

In middle school, nearly everyone feels insecure most of the time, and nearly every misstep feels like the end of the world. This moment gave me an opportunity to suffer through what felt like a disastrously embarrassing event and come out unaffected on the other side. . . If I don’t count my elbow, which still clicks today.

Without Buck Shiver’s deeply convincing wrestling propaganda, it could have taken me much longer to understand the values of self-deprecation, and I would still be equipped with the boring, silent elbow of a kid never forced to go in public wearing a singlet.