Pivot

I decided to enter this as my own blog entry rather than to take up all of Caged Bird's post about the idea of going back and changing things about our earlier lives.

I was thinking of this a day or two ago... when I was 14 or so, I failed to make weight for a wrestling tournament. I was eight ounces overweight (it was either the 98- or 105-pound weight class) so I was disqualified from competition. It broke my heart. It upset my coach. As it was pretty much the only competition we had for the year (we had one other dual meet, in which I resoundingly lost my match to a far stronger wrestler), it didn't bode well for my future in wrestling.

I decided the following year to not wrestle (for various reasons), but I think that had I made weight that day and wrestled that I would have won the tournament. I believe, too, that that would have changed my whole outlook on wrestling; it would have given me standing with the team and quitting would never had been an option.

As you know, success as an athlete brings about an entirely different lifestyle: acceptance by one's peers is easier; girls are more easily impressed. All that...

All that to say that while I often continue to kick myself for the serious mistake of having celebrated my parents' anniversary the night before a wrestling meet (can you believe the unfortunate luck of that?!?), I don't know that I really would have wanted the different life it likely would have presented me.

Except that I really, really, really, really, really, loved wrestling!

Years later, after I'd graduated high school, and before I attended university, I began wrestling again in amateur tournaments. I competed against some seriously good wrestlers and never made it beyond the second or third round of the few tournaments I entered, but it fulfilled a certain competitive urge for me. And, after having never attended many of my baseball games as a kid (baseball was my first love), my father drove an hour to see me wrestle.

That meant more than he ever would know.