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Iowan Kingdom of Wrestling


The infants are plucked from bassinets spaced evenly in the corn rows, under the stalks, at the edge of dreams. The snatches are quick. In gymnasiums across Iowa the babies are cradled then lifted to shoulders and from this vantage place they watch their four year old brothers crouch. Here they listen to the referee's whistle blair while the coaches exhort their proteges to drive the opponent across the mat. The world of Iowa wrestling begins here. It ends in the Olympiad, in world sized contests that test the might of these lessons of childhood, set in small town Iowa.

Iowa is a kingdom where the best wrestlers in all the world learn their craft.

In the beginning, the child watches. Soon after he toddles he begins to grapple. In the dawn of the next season, he's born to the mat. It's a place he 'll learn to love sacrifice and sweat. The weights of the dream will be his companions, the records of historical matches his lullabies. The goal to learn about your self and what you're made of.


In the parking lot at the Pizza Hut Classic,  a frozen tundra greets hundreds of Iowans here to watch the beginnings of the wrestling dream. Pick up trucks are parked in the fresh snow, the dirty ice falls from  their wheel wells and  the decals, 'Sportsmen for NRA' and 'FFA'  splash on bumpers across a white horizon.

The long high school corridor reveals an Iowa steeped in history, from the trophy cases that include time honored champions of the past to picture framed ads of a bygone era announcing 'Purebred Chester Whites, Public Sale'. At the entrance to the Neil Padgett auditorium in Dewitt a burly grandfather leans on a cane, down on a knee, his seven year old grandson, a purple mohwak cropped tight to his angelic forehead, rapt upon the old man's advice.

The announcer notes the local ambulance service is ready throughout the tournament, the four year olds have begun to grapple. Hundreds stare at the polywogs, fresh from learning to walk, hopping and jumping at each other, going for the dive that will pin their opponent.

Elimination tournaments originate in the Olympic games of 700 B.C. Wrestling is mythologized with Herakles, said to be the greatest of the Greek heroes. In Iowa it's a religion.

Two gyms fill with parents. On the edges of the mats six and seven year olds and teens dance and shake their hands, lay prone to the floor and count push ups. They wait for their matches, watching now in somber frowns the work of four year old wrestlers. Cameras stare into the private angst of the young as it touches the learning cycle of meanings, work and focus. Today the size of each heart will begin its time upon a scale. Boys will run away with tears, others will raise their hands to glory. Ghosts of Cael Sanderson and Dan Gable may stand on a periphery, watching the rites of passage.

Sabertooth Wrestling, Champion Builders Wrestling, youth from all over eastern Iowa, youth from Illinois and Wisconsin,  come to prove their worth.

"He was beat by a girl a few weeks ago," one young mother whispered to her white haired mother. They sat in the stands five rows away from their eleven year old who shook his hands as if he could loosen the nerves and command their retreat. He twisted his neck and hopped in rhythmic dance, his energies flowing outward and quieting the vision in his head.

"The girl's father told me she was a state champ and had wrestled in national tournaments," the young mother added but it didn't make a difference. The boy had to shake it off, turn inside, watch what only he could see, his courage and his will to win.

During his first match he pinned his opponent at 1.59 of the second period. A silent roar erupted and his mother raised her fist. "Go Isaac!"


While they waited through a relentlessly tiring hour before the boy's next match the two women roamed the halls, found pizza and soda, sat in the hallway and concentrated on the trophy cases. They made small talk, brushing away the tension as it arose, seeing the boy win but unable to know it.


In the second match he came out like a whirlwind. In ten seconds he had the other boy on the mat. A pin! One more match and eleven year old Isaac would carry home a trophy and a redemption.

In the stands the children became uneasy. Parents tired. Fathers stood and glared at their progeny, mothers weeped and uninvolved grade school girls giggled. Boys who were not wrestling chased each other down the hallways. The tournament was three hours old.

No one could have promised the winners their victories to come. The great Dan Gable, once so sure his team would win its tenth NCAA championship, stenciled X on the jerseys. It was not meant to be. Even the best fall down.

Today, Isaac walked onto the floor for his third match and looked squarely into his opponent's eyes. He gritted his teeth.  He raised his hands and then he and the other went hand to hand.  Rounding the mat they fought for position. Then as desire and position would square it, he pinned his last quarry. Isaac had found the stuff of champions.

In Iowa, he became king if only for today. When his mother greeted him he smiled but his smile faded into that determined face; once again he stood on the mat and faced the inevitable opponent that is within. In his mind's eye he saw himself, looking into the distance, perhaps seeing other matches. On the high school mat in Dewitt, Iowa, this is what he will remember. His vision is that of Socrates - the most important lesson in life is about yourself.

Jim told the story about the filming of FIST and he sounded like a kid who'd defied the principal. He said it was good fun.

" I invited two of the stunt men over for a home cooked meal. Jimmy Casino and John Williams. I brought out the Old Style, the good stuff, the green bottles. They appreciated it. They were gentlemen and we had a good time. I thought they'd like some conversation and good food. I think all they ate was restaurant food for weeks."

We were walking south along the river from the lock and dam. It was an early morning , Saturday, in January, but it was warm and the breeze felt good and it touched our faces. The gulls were out and the crows were crying. The river was free of ice.

"We had a scene at Sacred Heart church, it was a crowd scene. We were all supposed to smoke. You couldn't have nonfiltered cigarettes and they passed out Camels, I think, or Luckies. Anyway, it was a group of us and we were feeling pretty good, having fun, you know. They told us, that at the cue we should all yell the word fist and repeat it, over and over again. Fist, fist, fist, fist, fist. Well, one of the guys, he thought he was smart and he started to yell, 'Pissed'. You can't hear it in the movie but, we were standing in the basement in the back at Sacred Heart and well..."

Jim grinned like a school boy. His memories of Dubuque should be chronicled into a film.

He said several local people were not fans of Sylvester Stallone but he met him while he worked at the Oky Doky store.

"I didn't know at first that it was him but then I saw people asking him for his autograph. He was gracious to everyone. I asked for the autograph and he gave it. I don't know know if I still have it or not."

One day we drove down Lincoln Avenue in Jim's old neighborhood. He remembered each corner and the name of the proprietor of all the tiny ma and pop groceries and delis and butchers. He rattled off names like Keating and Lick and others. One of the butcher shops stood on a corner a few blocks from where he grew up. The green marble trim outside the store front still hung tightly to the building facade.

"Johnny Neumeister 's shop. After he retired his son took over."


It seems impossible for a memory to light the street corners that way but his light showed off old Dubuque as a place of hard working people who cared, brightened with clarity and affection.

A bitter cold has fallen on Iowa for the first time this winter. It's been great until now; very little snow, an inch and a half, with warm temperatures.

Many years ago, during the winter of 1968, I was lost and smitten with Joan Walsh, to me a voluptuous entity of amazing proportions,  but I didn't have a car. A cold and snowy winter, not like the mountainous snows of 1967, but to a teen without a car, a worthy opponent, had dumped its heavy hand everywhere in Chicago and the suburbs. I was sixteen and a suburban kid, as much like a Huckleberry as can be imagined. Western Springs was Hannibal.

Just a few years earlier my friend Tom Fritz and I were  riding our bicycles along the dawn filled streets, to nearby Salt Creek to fish, corn cob pipes in knapsacks and poles over our shoulders.

In 1968 my good friend Tom Adams would supply me with the wheels to independence and to those curves that had knocked out my vision. He  volunteered his Corvair and this became a lifetime memory. A date with Joan (Marilyn Monroe) Walsh.

In 1968 the Chevrolet Corvair was so unlike the fresh, wind streamed muscle cars that were coming out of Detroit that it was an anomoly. It was a VW bug, of sorts, a rear engine and square bodied bumblebee of a car that was more like a Kleenex box than an automobile.

Tom Sawyer meet Sponge Bob.

I began with the stop at her door, a howdy to her folks (Nice, nice people) then an out to the stallion, the steed I thought that might transport me and my damsel to somewhere far in the future, as if that Delorean of future time would grant me my sixteen year old wish. After awkward niceties we were off to the wide world of Chicago.

I stopped first at the Shell in town,  the dependable yellow sign with the grease/sand mix on the drive a draw, setting neatly as a Currier and Ives painting,  by the Burlington tracks. Good old Benaks,  a place where half of the people I knew, knew half of the things necessary to fix a car.

I put  five bucks in the tank. Tom Adams had coached me, for my mind was somewhere in the future, as adolesecnt minds will travel, and I flipped back and forth between things he told me and being there, in the flesh, with the bombshell. Gas was about twenty five cents a gallon. I was nervous,  I tried to remember his advice  about this and that, and mostly that ( Looking at her....). His sixteen year old brain more worldly, sophisticated and wise than my paltry, fishing pole, peanut butter sandwich thinking.  I was stuck like a man in a quagmire, the small decision about how much to put in the tank a great and momentous thing.

I remember the side of the pumps where I parked, close to Benak's front door, and am still standing there, inexplicably, today, wondering what a small town bumpkin was thinking. Yet testosterone laden thoughts were the harbinger in 1968. I was driving but driven. Everything was miraculous.

The drive under the Post Office at Chicago 's own tunnel under a building, dashing from the Eisenhower expressway, a mysterious trail, to me, as if I were Indiana Jones now, and turning from the highway to the Land of Oz, added to my frenzy.

I played the night by ear for a while, struggling with conversation - she was the otherworldly knockout from another planet - but then reckoned and parked by a downtown cinema.

We saw Bullitt, with McQueen.  Him flying in that legendary Mustang over the hills of SanFransisco, me right there with Joan and all those ideas of being a swashbuckling, modern day race car driver. Again, I was standing knee deep in that swamp of uncertainty - do I put my arm around this girl - I don't know cause I can't stop thinking.

McQueen is unlike anyone else. At sixteen, he's also from another world and I'm trying to understand all of that. The automobile on screen, the babe next to me, as I was becoming a modern, urban man and so 'babe' fit, and the confounding future.


Bullitt was great. I drove home safely. I may have been given or taken a peck of a kiss, a warm touch that filled me with amore'. I walked a foot off the ground for several weeks afterward.

All Tom Adams ever said about my great adventure, was, "It's nothin' Doc. And, hey, you didn't have to put so much gas in the tank!"

It happened in a psychology course in a white walled, antiseptic basement classroom during the first week  of school. During student introductions , when the discipline is loose,  the rules less well known at this stage, instructor attitude still an unknown and the allowance for a little chaos a part of the learning process,  freedoms  expand, are tested and learned.
Inhibitions grew lax that morning.
“I like white. I hate black,” the young woman said, her oval face hidden in a shawl, her sari  covering her from wrist to forehead. She smiled.
It was at the end of the scheduled class time, the students had been asked to introduce themselves and to expand, discussing their likes and dislikes. Most had spoken about themselves, that they liked their height but disliked their habits of smoking, for example; liked their personalities but disliked their procrastinations.
A smooth faced Haitian sat in front, a dark faced mother behind , in nearby rows  were seated other black faces, friendly, outgoing, willing to try the social exercise, to attempt friendship, to try membership in the class.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m sure I didn’t hear that.”
“I like white and I hate black,” she repeated and it was clear. A breath was now amplified, black students were sitting up, craning toward the young woman in the row by the door.

I raised my cupped hand to my right ear. Noise arose from each corner. Quizzical frowns and outrage seemed to take a flight overhead. One man leaned into another. A crescendo of “What?!” began a roaring and muffled tribulation.
“You know, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you…” I told her, buffering the coming damages to chair, wall and being.
I paced.
Now she smiled and the meaning appeared as clear as the ice outside the lobby door.

“I like white,” she said, “I hate black.”

And she smiled, demure, diminutive, friendly, warm as a spring flower. The paradox jumped into the classroom , swift and cutting. 
A racist at the end of introductions.
As the noise rose it became clearer that something did not make sense and so I said again,  “I missed that. I’m sure you said you don’t like black but you like white but I don’t believe that.”

From the other side of the room someone tried to deflect the comment, to redirect the quickening pandemonium as if it was a mistake, the poor woman obviously from another country was unfamiliar with the language.

“I don’t believe you don’t like black people. You’re not a racist. What do you mean…”
The inconsistency of her fine features and clean smile did not fit the meaning the comment elicited. The tension rose and the meaning  was quickly losing its ground to the outpouring of dissent.
Besides the fact that this was beyond foolhardy it was as crazy a thing to say in a diverse class as pushing a cop on a street corner, the classroom able and ready to address and punish this.
Immediately the matter concluded with a qualification.  Colors.
“I don’t like the color of black.”

A flesh bumping “AHH” filled the room.  The class topic concerning communication had lended an unusual lesson in the innocent declaration of a young woman who didn’t like black.


http://youtu.be/68i4tMmv9F4

(Three Dog Night)

A candidate angers. He has become dependent. If he doesn't act the crowd will walk.


A man stands at a podium and he sweeps his hands out to the crowd, the head bobbing and hand waving, excitement now rolling like a wave. He has studied the crowd, observed their background, working class folk with sleeves rolled up and stern, frowns upon their brows. The depression has taken work. The assembly line lifted to another continent and  what's left -  hold on to family, to values, to what you know, what you believe, what you see and hear.

The man at the podium has studied what they believe, what their values are, whether they're for gay family, Christian family, Muslim family or simply brotherhood. He knows if they're union. He knows what the polls said about them, that they're changing, they're willing to accept some gay talk, some gray discussions about the death penalty and immigration. He knows where the vote goes with abortion.

The politician warms to them, in turn is warmed, even as he says what he knows they like. He thinks in benevolence, there is a gift, passing out the thoughts as he stands above them, there on a rooftop.

He shares their thoughts with them. He looks out across them to the horizon and he remembers the polls.

As much as he depends upon them, and each of them, while he scans their faces and later shakes their hands, he's angry. He doesn't show that. In fact, he hides that. It is this, among the many tricks that the camera and the campaign bring that will elect him or toss him to the dumpster under the gutter.

The candidate angers because he knows he depends upon them and that his very self esteem depends on what they think about him. And he has studied this, he has spent seven day weeks into the late hours past midnight memorizing and reviewing their thoughts, their attitudes and their poll numbers.

He is as dependent upon them as any newborn is upon its parent. And he hates that. He's extremely wealthy and he's learned to give people what they want. That's the nature of being connected and taking the fleece, shaking the bushes and getting back, the ring at the end of the horse race is tied by how you get along. Hey, if he can get a rung ahead, one more step to that parachute, he can leave the trail behind.

Most don't blame the sentiment.

Sincerity is somehting Groucho Marx noted about every good actor and that's his gift. He can tell that crowd about themselves and that's really the thing they need. They need his comfort, his touching story about how good they are, how they built the land and shoveled the manure and ate the dust.

People do not want a man who hides his feelings. The crowd wants a true man, a genuine man, someone who will stand and say what's real, what has value, and how to hold on, to family, to values, to what they know, believe and sense.

They do not want someone who sees that they have eaten dust. They do not want to feel his anxiety, know that his  speech is disingenuous, the coming of his anger, nor hear that he is angry about them, these assembled that he depends upon. Inadvertantly, he tells them the truth, that he has enjoyed firing them.. And that is what they hear and see.

When they understand the origins of the anger, they will walk away. Only the camera and the act can keep them.