Needing a win. (In Real Life).(Brief Article)

SYRACUSE, NEBRASKA--We drove the 60 miles home with tears of frustration running down Ben's face. He'd just lost two wrestling matches, and he was mad, and disappointed, and embarrassed. Ben is 15, a high school freshman, and a delightful kid, but his freshman season of wrestling has been difficult. No, it's been awful.

There are only four kids on his team, all underclassmen, so Julie and I, along with a contingent of about four other parents, one coach, and one cheerleader (the others quit) have been traveling around Iowa and Missouri and Nebraska this winter, watching our sons spend most of the season on their backs. I think it was Grantland Rice who said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that "the race doesn't always go to the swift, or the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." In adolescent wrestling, bet on the kid with hair on his legs.

While the cool kids all play basketball, Ben decided his future lay in wrestling. So he'll never know the excitement that surrounds high school hoops: No packed gyms with a full coterie of cheerleaders and pep band. No high school chorus starting contests with the national anthem. No big spread in the local paper (especially since the son of the guy who owns our newspaper shows every sign of being an outstanding shooting guard). For local wrestlers it's just sweat and empty gyms on Saturday afternoons, and trips home bearing the sting of another defeat at the hands of someone older, more experienced, and more athletic.

We suffer through four-hour tournaments, hoping the halt and lame of Rock Port, Stanberry, and Hopkins will be wrestling in the 152-pound class. Instead, every kid who shakes hands with Ben at the start of each match looks like he just stepped out of a commercial for home exercise equipment. Sometimes they pin Ben in seconds, sometimes he lasts the whole six minutes, and a few times he's won, but every match is exhausting.

Nobody ever ...