Hearing him use that word, hearing him confess that for twelve years before today no one had ever come out point blank and asked him about it, had made my blood pound in my ears. Our surroundings -- an unspectacular Midwestern restaurant whose name and food I will be doomed to forget the second I walk out -- had disintegrated before my eyes.
Because of course I am here to talk about "the scandal."
That's why I have driven sixteen hours across state lines. That's what has moved me to take repeatedly to the telephone, stretching my powers of persuasion to the limit. It has all been to broker this sit-down with a man I once knew as my hero. And who now, thanks to more than a decade's passing, apparently doesn't know me from Adam. Nor, I suppose, will he be able to realize how the part he played in that concluded but unforgotten drama -- one in which I had a bit part, but a part nonetheless -- affected me.
What he tells me next shocks me almost out of my seat.
Wrestling. It's no secret that it was the sport of choice where I grew up, in the corner of what some people condescendingly call "Flyover Country." And it's an old story, but one still going strong: the stock people place in high school sports in these towns that string out along the plains and the low, rolling hills. To become a successful athlete in this heartland country is to bestow a genuine kind of greatness on a person, on a family, even on a whole town. Greatness on the field of sport (or conversely, failure) has the power with each passing season to make and remake not just the individual's sense of self but also that of the community whole.
So it was not exactly metaphysical predestination that had kids like me wrestling almost the day we had graduated from diapers. It was the chance, real or symbolic, to tie fortune, pride and prosperity not to the realm of chance or the fickleness of nature, but to a contest unfolding at the level of men.
And in the specific place where I am from, there was something else that pulled young people like a gravitational force to wrestling. There, we had a near legend among us: a high school coach with records and reputation unmatched by any other in the state. This was a man with a twenty-year dynasty. If asked he could rattle off, like Methusaleh marking great-grandchildren, the names of the outstanding wrestlers he had helped navigate to victory. And with this talent -- both his own and that of the athletes lucky enough to earn a place under his wing -- had come the state championship titles that had elevated him all but to demigod status.
The power he wielded at the school reached even into the academic schedule. Where other teams were forced to wait for the ringing of the afternoon's final bell to authorize their activity, this man presided over a mid-day "class" -- "Jogging Sports Theory" -- to gather his athletes together. As students who were mere civilians ground through chemistry or U.S. history in the classrooms that flanked ours, Coach would be stealing time to make his team a Team. Whatever the other faculty's opinions of this, they turned a blind eye. But I would not be surprised to discover their support was willing.
A decent wrestler can be made out of almost any kid with a temperament for hard work and a heart for commitment. Unlike, say, basketball or football, the sport does not discriminate when it comes to body type. It will accommodate all colors, all backgrounds.
And I would venture further that, even more so than in other sports, in wrestling it comes down to the coach to make a great athlete out of a decent athlete. That was the ruling wisdom of my town's wrestling culture, anyway. And coming up through the ranks as I did from childhood, the allure of being one of this coach's pupils wound its way into my dreams and ambitions.
Joshua J. SmithThe stars, I was sure, were aligning in favor of destiny when I actually did make team. But there was a catch. Coach sidelined me in his office, and explained that I would only get my spot on the varsity roster if I were to wrestle at well below my normal weight.
It's close to impossible, I would say, for outsiders to know the first thing about wrestling without also knowing the importance of weight. After all, a growing teenage athlete at war with his own appetite gets very hard not to notice.
But I wonder if those without real experience on the mat can actually appreciate the difference that even five pounds can make in one wrestler's advantage over an opponent (which is tremendous). Maybe they think the meticulous sorting into weight classes is irrational, or the lengths wrestlers will go to stay in lock-step with the system over the top. But "making weight" is critical to preserve the fairness of the contest. And the athlete who fails to do so, and who is then shut out from competing in a match, scuttles his own opportunity and endangers the chances of his team. Everything that is great about sport -- not just the glorification of physical ability and discipline, but also its fusion to the principles of honor, fair play, and teamwork -- is captured in, and only possible with, the wrestler who abides these rules.
For the vast majority of Coach's career (and, of course, my own) weigh-ins were conducted the following, no-nonsense, no-brainer way. They were held under the strict supervision of neutral referees, with opponents getting weighed on the same scale, side by side -- and typically in the late afternoon hours right before the start of a match.
But this method of doing business was not to last. It had hardly been lost on parents, teachers and school administrators that athletes would often dangerously go without food or drink, sometimes for days at a time, in the name of making weight. Under this kind of caloric deficit, it was not unheard of for young men in the prime of their physical lives to faint. And their schoolwork? Their ability to stay awake in class, never mind perform up to snuff on a test or a class assignment? That those things suffered was as obvious as the shortening days and the freezing winter temperatures.
So, the squeaky wheels got their grease. Weigh-ins would be moved to early mornings before school itself, as much as nine or ten hours before a match. That way, breakfast and lunch could actually be eaten, and the perils of low blood sugar shown the door.
Enter the law of unintended consequences. Now, with weigh-ins taking place near on to six in the morning, there was no sensible, convenient way to bring opposing teams together for mutual turns at the scales. Let alone disinterested, third-party officials to shepherd the process.
So the state athletic commission monkeyed around with the rules. Without referees, the duty of safeguarding fairness went to each school's athletic director, or A.D. Ideally, this individual would conduct the weigh-ins, note each wrestler's weight on a sheet, sign it and forward it to referees later that day when matches actually took place.
But, as I came to later know, our school's A.D. was not a morning person.
Here I was, at my first varsity squad weigh-in, and there wasn't an A.D. in sight. Coach's word, after all, was bond. It was discreetly -- and illegally -- left to him to conduct the weigh-ins. And when the A.D. came yawning his way onto campus sometime later, his signature on the form became nothing more than a rubber stamp.
When Coach had asked me to wrestle at far below my normal weight that day in his office, I guess I had started wearing my anxiety on my sleeve. Instantly, I was looking down the barrel of a loaded gun of nonstop worry -- and the starvation dieting, dehydration, and harsh, relentless effort to sweat out that last bit of water weight that would come with it. Apparently, Coach had picked up on this right away. He must have seen the look on my face that said I am never going to be able to do this a hundred times before. Maybe he even inwardly chuckled at it.
"Just do your best," was his advice. "Concentrate on winning." And then, the words I would later realize were the smoking gun that had been invisible to me at the time.
"Leave the rest to me."
The season that began with my grand promotion to the varsity team turned out to be everything we, our families and our neighbors could have asked for. Our opponents? They could not stand up to us. Like a distant drumbeat gaining in volume and advancing ever more steps closer, the glory of our win after win after win became the soundtrack of our days.
But underscoring all this momentum was not just our team's blood, sweat and tears. It was also a morning weigh-in scale that, under Coach's lone supervision, had become suddenly and surprisingly friendly to our cause.
I was making my weight. At least, according to our gym's scale, I was.
And so was everyone else on the team.
The upshot of this, I am confessing now, was that I was competing with about a five-pound weight advantage over every opponent I faced. It was amazing how, just by not allowing myself to think too much about what we all knew was really going on, I now had a state ranking, and the taste of a state championship tempting my palate.
Then came the day of the all-important regional tournament, the last stepping stone to the only place I had known all my life that I wanted to go. Still in the shadows of a long winter night, without even the hint of the false dawn above the silent school parking lot, I arrived at five a.m. for the weigh-in. On my way to the gymnasium door, I noticed -- but didn't quite think twice about -- an unfamiliar car, its headlights off but the deep mumble of is idling engine, some yards in the distance. Two adult men, as grave as two headstones, filled the front seats. The burning cherry of a cigarette passed from a mouth to a cracked window, and for some reason I took this as my cue to stop staring and get on with my morning.
The encounter, if you can even call it that, was long gone from my memory by the time -- after another weigh-in without the guiding light of the school's A.D. -- my teammates and I were carpooling off to the local diner and the mission of cleaning out its walk-in freezer and an entire poultry farm's harvest of eggs.
When you're seventeen years old, and in the thick of a raucous breakfast with an entire wrestling team, you're ahead of the game if you can even hear what song is on the jukebox, let alone the ringing of a diner's house phone over the uproar. But rang it must have. And the usually doting, divorcee waitress -- the type who would be a clich� in a movie or TV show, but was nonetheless a bonafide feature of our town -- came over with a puzzled look.
The team, all of us, were being summoned back to school for what was being described as an emergency.
Back at the gym, blood ran cold at the sight of coaches of the team we were to go up against later that day. They were confronting our coach with the revelation that they had been in the parking lot since four in the morning, keeping track of the license plate numbers of every vehicle that entered.
The athletic director's was not one of those on their clipboard.
The state athletic commission had been contacted, and the coaches of the opposing team were glibly awaiting Coach to forfeit the match. Within a day's time, their allegations would be fodder for newspapers, radio and even big-city TV news broadcasts. But in the moments after their gauntlet had been hurled, Coach, stinging from word that he had been placed on immediate suspension, coughed up the excuse that this had been a one-time mistake.
Did they buy it? No. There was blood in the water. And as unflattering as it might be for modern American civilization, the accusation that we love tearing our heroes and celebrities down just as much as we enjoyed installing them in the first place fit perfectly in this circumstance. Now, there was talk of picking apart not just the results of this year's season, but those for many of the prior seasons as well.
Coach kept his mouth shut, but in the end it was his assistant who did him in by coming clean -- probably as a result of the top coaching position being dangled as a carrot in exchange for his testimony. I am not playing games when I say that Coach was run out of town after that. The legend was, practically overnight, null and void. That there had been fifteen years of legitimate triumph, of tough-love mentoring teenage wrestlers, no longer was seen to matter. Coach had taken advantage of the system, and that was that.
Which brings me back to this restaurant in a neighboring state, all this time later. No doubt that all of us live with certain questions why this happened or that happened to us, and the grim knowledge that we will probably never know. But whether we are somehow granted them, or have the temerity to try and make them for ourselves, sometimes there are opportunities to ask that question, why, out loud.
It's a puzzle probably best left to the psychologists, but for some reason I could never put this question why away. Why Coach, the moral compass of generations of wrestlers in the place I came from, cheated.
The day came when the mystery crossed a line within myself, and I had to know. Or at least, ask. With some help from the internet, I found Coach.
I have no idea how she could have known, but Coach's wife seemed to have some sense of what I was after simply by asking if he was home. There was a worry, a certain hesitation, a strain in her voice when she replied that she would go get him.
When I had his ear, I told Coach the truth, if not the whole truth: that I was a filmmaker writing a screenplay about a high school wrestling coach, simply wanting to interview him for the sake of research. After some convincing, he finally agreed to meet me in a week.
As he tells me what he has to say about the "scandal," I can't help but flash for a moment on the slowed-down and hunched-over, now elderly figure whom I had picked up in front of his house not an hour ago. My heart doesn't want this image of him, small and feeble and cowardly. But there it is: the weathered core of a man who I now get to thinking is the real Coach. Not the laughing, joking character of twenty minutes, ice broken, eyes lighted up after I have shown him some yellowed news clippings harkening back to his glory days.
Because he swallows, leans ever so slightly in to me, and makes a startling claim about the scandal.
"I'm here to tell you," he says, "I'm innocent."
I feel gut-punched.
"Coach, I'm here to tell you something," I very nervously admit. "I was on your team that year. I was present at all the weigh-ins. I never saw the athletic director there. Not once."
He's not as taken aback as I thought he would be. It occurs to me that I'm probably far more transparent than I thought.
"He was there," comes another astounding reply. "You just didn't see him."
These words don't compute. They're a dodge of responsibility and accountability worthy of a five year-old.
Before he has a chance to truly get worked up, to feel snookered and walk out on me, I back way off. There is still information I would like to have from him for the screenplay I'm writing and the movie I am going to direct. I don't know whether it's a testament to my amateur journalism skills or his own wish to revisit times past, but Coach opens up again.
He tells me how rough it has been since he was fired. His wife has wanted nothing to do with their wrestling past, even going to the (to me, unthinkable) extreme of incinerating all his photos, his trophies, and his scrapbooks. Everything. I learn that his being here is in violation of a promise she had wrangled out of him never to even speak to anyone from my hometown, ever again.
I realize that to his wife, Coach is a martyr. She blames the town. It can only be that he has never even told her the truth.
And now, there is nothing left for me but to feel sorry for him. This is a man who has managed to convince himself, to delude himself, that he is innocent.
I drop him off at his house. He asks me if he can keep the newspaper clipping I have brought. I gladly give it up, a keepsake snatched out of the furnace of his memory.
Does not having the answer to the question I came to ask matter? I drive away, reflecting that I no longer really think so. I may not know everything, but after a decade of adult life in my chosen profession, I know far more about storytelling, writing and filmmaking than I did when I was that experience-starved teen, in awe as he watched the 1980s wrestling movie Vision Quest. No film, before that, had had the distinction of combining my two steering passions, wrestling and the movies. And it's a comfort and a privilege to realize now that there is an opportunity to revisit the world of high school wrestling since Hollywood's wandering eye last fell on it.
You probably cannot boast of having been "behind the camera" a few times without sounding just that: boastful. But the short films, the trips to film festivals, and the awards I have been lucky enough to stake my name to so far, I would like to think of as qualifying matches for my own equivalent of making weight and joining the varsity squad.
I thought meeting with Coach would give him a chance to set the record straight. Perhaps even to grant me my hero back.
But if Coach is going to have the happy ending I have always wanted for him, it dawns on me as I point my car down a westbound, snow-blown interstate, I am going to have to write it for him.
Joshua J. Smith is a filmmaker from Los Angeles, California. His film, CARTER-145 which is based on the story you have just read, is currently in the fund raising stage. If you would like more information on how you can get involved with the film visit WWW.CARTER145.COM.
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