W. Bruce Cameron - Light Wrestling

When I was in seventh grade, I was a scrawny boy with no muscles, so I went out for wrestling.

My intention was to develop secret wrestling skills so that if I were jumped by a bully, I’d shout “ha!” and he’d be on the ground in a headlock.

Bully: How did you do that?

Me: I used skills.

Bully: Well, from now on and all my bullying friends will live in abject fear of you, plus you’ll have your pick of the eighth-grade girls.

Me: As it should be.

The problem was that there actually aren’t any secret wrestling skills — basically, wrestling is just a really aggressive form of hugging. It’s less like fighting and more like being overly affectionate.

My coach had a nickname for me: “String.” I asked him if it was because I would bind my opponents in knots, and he said no, it was because he was afraid if he didn’t tie me down he would lose me to the wind. I was too light to fit in any of the weight classes, so the coach invented one he called “helium.”

The other helium-class wrestler was a boy named Kevin who was always afraid his shorts were going to fall off. When we practiced on each other, Kevin constantly gripped his waistband with one hand.

The coach felt this was not an effective wrestling technique, but it was actually very psychologically damaging for me because it made me worry my shorts would fall off, so that I involuntarily grabbed my own waistband, and the two of us would wind up flopping around on the floor like one-winged chickens. Often the boys watching us would sing, “I’m a little teapot short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout.”

“They’re just jealous,” Kevin would tell me. I wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly, and anyway I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to have conversations while maneuvering to get your opponent in a secret wrestling one-handed death grip. Kevin didn’t understand this, though, and would talk to me as if we were sitting together at a lunch table. “I’m also on the Scrabble team,” he’d say. “Are my shorts still up?”

The coach’s nickname for Kevin was “Limp.”

Kevin and I won our weight class in the first four meets because the other schools didn’t have anyone wispy enough for us to wrestle. We were the only undefeated members of the team, but this did not get us as many girlfriends as we would have wanted, which was disappointing because we each only wanted one.

Before the fifth meet, however, the coach shocked us by saying the opposing school had come up with a helium wrestler of its own, a thin kid who was just recovering from mononucleosis. Kevin said it wasn’t fair because the disease would give the other guy an advantage.

The coach said Kevin and I would have to wrestle each other for the privilege of taking on the mono kid. We went out to the circle, grabbed the elastic in our shorts and, at the whistle, threw ourselves to the mat, our shoulders pressing firmly against the canvas. The coach said he didn’t know how to score a match where each of the wrestlers pinned himself.

“In all fairness, I think String won,” Kevin said. We had agreed earlier not to call each other String and Limp, but I guess Kevin felt that with so much at stake there were no one-handed holds barred.

“I think you were both simultaneously spineless,” the coach replied. This made Kevin’s eyes light up as he calculated how many points the coach would get in Scrabble with words like that.

After two more matches, the coach ruled that Kevin was less quick to succumb to gravity than was I, so Kevin went on to face the guy we’d come to call “Mono Man.” At the meet, when the whistle blew, I yelled, “Go, Limp!” which I guess Kevin took as a command because that’s what he did. The referee later said it was the fastest match he’d ever seen, but Kevin didn’t get a trophy or anything.

Meanwhile, I ended the season as I started. Undefeated!

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

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