Wrestling with My Father

The snapshot of my father was a focal point in the house where I grew up. At least it was for me. He is wearing a singlet and standing in a row of brawny, short-haired young men. My father has more muscles than all of them. He looks straight at the camera (fig. 1). I stared at that photo often when I was seven or eight. I thought: That will be me someday.Wrestling was my first love, at least according to my baby book. My mother wrote under Age 2 and Favorite Saying: “Let's wrestle, Dad.” I cannot remember these early matches, but I must have enjoyed them. I would surely have tried to overpower this mightiest of men.Even if he did not let me, I would still have won: My father would have embraced me while pinning me. Or so I imagine. For otherwise, I do not have a single memory of my father hugging me—much less kissing or holding me on his lap. He never said he loved me. I took what I could get. And wrestling gave me a lot.When I told my mother decades later that I thought Dad never loved me, she showed me a second photo. My father is lying on the old, garish, green-striped sofa in his parents’ house, me in front of him. He is embracing me and smiling sleepily at the camera. When my mother showed me that photo, the day came back in a flash. I would have been twelve or thirteen, with my father in his late thirties, soft around the middle but still intimidating, still Big Dave. We had just arrived at my grandparents’ house. My dad, who worked hard, felt the comfort of home and beelined as always to his boyhood sofa to nap. After he fell asleep, I took my chance and jumped him, worked a headlock, and got him for the first time ever in a pin. But the giant woke, reversed me, and cinched me in that body lock. My arms are wrapped around his. I am not trying to escape but am instead tightening his hug. My glittering eyes say it all. I had won (fig. 2).Years later, I read the story about Zeus wrestling his father, Cronus. The myths say that Zeus did this to win the throne, but they never mention why Zeus would not just have picked up a spear for this purpose. Oedipus kills his father with a sword, and heroes from ancient Babylonian, Hindu, and Norse legends commit patricide with weapons. Cronus himself used a sickle to castrate his own father. But Zeus chooses something more modern, something we would later call sport—something that allows the loser to walk away alive. And, significantly, he selects that most intimate of sports: wrestling. As the Greek philosopher Plutarch put it, runners aimed to increase distance between one another and boxers were not allowed to clinch, but wrestlers always embraced. This gave wrestling its Greek name (palē), issuing from to draw near (plēsiazein) and be close (pelas).1Wrestling produces a nearness that we normally expect only from love. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God—as in God the Father. Jacob ostensibly does this to force God to bless him, but the text suggests that he wants more than just a benediction. God said, “‘Let me go, for day is breaking,’ but Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go.’”2 Painters from Rembrandt to Delacroix to Bonnat have depicted this all-night hug. We see not just a wrestling match or even an ultimatum for a blessing. We see the demand for physical evidence of love (fig. 3).Did Jacob and Zeus wrestle their fathers for the same reason I did: to steal a hug?By the time I snuck that cuddle from my dad, I was already working hard to be a great wrestler, not least to win his admiration. My father saw my greatest victories, including winning the large-school Section 2 Championship in New York (fig. 4). And he witnessed my failures, especially after I got into Harvard and had to face Division I opponents. At the end of my freshman year, he happened to be working near Annapolis, Maryland—the site of that year's Eastern Wrestling Championships. He came to watch. I told him not to expect too much.The next morning, when looking at the brackets, my coach leaned over my shoulder and said, “Oh no, not Reilly,” and I saw that I had drawn Jim Reilly—not only the top seed, but a two-time All-American and one of the best 167-pounders in the country. “Just try to survive the first period,” my coach said. I looked up into the stands at my father. He had his nose in the program and a pen in hand, filling in the names of the winners of the lightweight matches. I remembered sitting next to him as a child at baseball games, watching him diligently keep score. I wished my father would look at me and let me know that everything was going to be all right. But he did not. He needed his “program” in moments like these. I wished I had one too. For things were definitely not going to be all right.I survived the first period. But early in the second, Reilly pinned me with a suffocating reverse half-nelson. I got up slowly, gasping, and looked to my father. He was bent over his program. Was he now writing “Reilly, pin, 3:15”?I do not remember the conversation with my dad when he left, but I am sure that we said goodbye in our usual way. He would have talked about how early the spring had arrived in Maryland—“they already have buds”—and I would have said that I would see him at Easter. I am certain that he did not say he was proud of me.After he left, I continued his work: sitting on the edge of the mat, watching the remaining bouts, and registering the results. I recently found the second edition of that 1984 program in my attic, with the early rounds already typed in. For the remaining rounds, the handwriting is either mine or my father's. I can't tell, for I have modelled my script on his. I write like him, am a wrestler like him, and have learned to contain my disappointments in his way.That Christmas following the Championships, I was home for break and sitting with my parents and two younger brothers around the tree. Somehow, my father and I began nudging each other, and the next thing you knew we were facing off on our knees, in our robes, elbows in and hands out as at the beginning of a match. We tied up hard at our necks, causing the ornaments on the Christmas tree to jangle, just as Gilgamesh and Enkidu had shaken the marketplace in Uruk: They seized each other at the door of the wedding house,in the street they joined combat, in the Square of the Land.The door-jambs shook, the wall did shudder.3My mother and brothers backed away. I was still cutting down to 167 pounds, so Dad had a forty-pound advantage. But I was in the best shape of my life, and although I was not having a great college career, I was still a Division I wrestler, and my dad was forty-six with a belly. He bent my head down, and I ducked under his arm and got halfway behind. He turned into me with such force that my back hit the tree.“Stop it,” my mother yelled. I smiled at Dad, but he did not smile back. He moved in for a bear hug, and I turned to hip throw him but only halfway; I was thinking of the tree and of my mother and of everything except winning this match. My father charged into me, and I fell to my side, then on my back, among the presents. My brothers clapped and hollered. My robe had fallen open when I landed, exposing my underwear. I remember giggling. The memories of hugging him while wrestling felt ancient. I was confused and ashamed that I had lost, and angry at myself for not fighting harder.After my college wrestling career, I started judo—Japanese grappling. I was pretty good because of my wrestling skills, and in a few years had my black belt and victories in a couple of local tournaments. Our coach maintained that three things made a good competitor: physical talent, technique, and fighting spirit. He referred to the latter as kiai, which has two meanings. On the one hand, it is the scream that martial artists use to produce energy from their diaphragms—mistranslated in Hollywood as “hi-ya!” This scream reveals your kiai in the word's second sense: fighting spirit.Wrestling did not have such sophisticated diction for this spirit but knew it in the rawer form of channeled rage. Heracles used this when squeezing and suffocating the giant Antaeus to death.4 A rival irritated Krishna so much that Krishna found the strength to smash his skull with one blow.5 The first hero of English literature, Beowulf, applied a wrestling armlock on Grendel, then became so “enraged,” “fury-filled,” and “furious” that he ripped Grendel's arm from its socket.6 This strategic wrath also appeared in the legends of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, who described two wrestlers meeting and seizing each other in “mutual rage” till they strangle each other, rip out large tufts of hair, and cause profuse bleeding.7I had always struggled to produce this fighting spirit. “You need to get mean,” my father would say, starting from when I was eleven and playing youth football, into my late teens when I was on the varsity football and wrestling teams. As a child, I had loved how anger transformed the frail Bruce Banner into my favorite superhero The Hulk, who had green eyes like mine. In high school, going crazy in the heat of battle helped my football teammates Zeke Zilka and Dennis Pokrzywka, and my wrestling opponents Reinaldo Garcia and Todd Mabb; they went from ordinary athletes to overpowering humanoids. Fury was their fuel, rage their performance-enhancing drug. When my father told me to be more like them, I asked him how I could throw myself into a rage on command. “It's not easy,” he said. “I could never do it.” Then why, I thought, have you always acted as if you could?Around the time I started judo, I also started therapy. I told my therapist that I thought my father never loved me. “How do you know?” he asked. “I just know,” I said. More than criticism, I remember getting nothingness from my dad. On the long rides to my sport competitions, he would say nothing, which would have been fine if I had known that he felt something deep down for me. But all I sensed was a void, the absence of matter. There were no electrical waves in the space between him and me. When I told this to my therapist, he asked me how it made me feel. I surprised myself by saying, “How do you think it makes me feel, you idiot?” Looking back, I guess this was the birth of my fighting spirit. I spent weeks screaming at my therapist—then at my father, in absentia.After that, I thought about my dad's childhood: his philandering, alcoholic dad and resentful, icy mother in an Appalachian mill town. For the first time in my therapy, I was not only angry at him. I felt empathy. My father once reminisced that his father had always told him to “get mean” while playing football. He did not recall this bitterly but as if it were good paternal advice. I realized that my father must have loved me, and when my mother told him decades later that I thought he did not, he even said the words.But he did not love me when I was young in a way that I could feel. He did not withhold on purpose; he did not intend to hurt me. He had never seen a parent love a child, so did not know how to do it. I felt sorry for him, but no amount of understanding could make me forgive. Even if his father had criticized him year in and year out, that was not an excuse for disappearing on me. I was irate and vowed not to be the “good boy” anymore.How had I kept this geyser of wrath plugged until age twenty-six? It felt now like an essential part of me. I wished I had had access to it when playing high school and college sports. Ironically, my father was getting what he wanted: a son who knew how to get mean when he needed to, but with that anger directed at him.Around that time, a black belt named Mike showed up at our judo club. He was my weight and beat me in most practices and in a tournament. We were both now headed to the East Coast Championships. I had been working on my conditioning, but Mike's was still superior, as was his technique. We were equal in strength and speed, so my edge had to be in fighting spirit. We both lost our opening matches that day at the Championships, then won our way back through the consolation bracket to meet for third place. We stood on opposite edges of the mat. The judge waved us to the middle. I threw Mike for a waza-ari (half point), and he threw me for one. Only one minute remained and Mike was coming at me like a machine. I tried to access a second wind, but nothing was there. The judge warned me for stalling. I was about to lose and felt myself giving up.Just then, I felt my rage rising. Therapy had brought it so close to the surface. No more good boy. I shook Mike's head and neck the way my father had shaken mine beneath the Christmas tree. The judge said nothing, so I did it harder. Mike looked at me, and I smiled. I slammed him on the back of his neck so harshly that he lost balance and fell forward on his face. What I was doing was not illegal but on the edge of legality. When Mike rose, his right eye was swelling. He still had the lead, so focused on defense. Because he never tired, his defense was great: constant motion, pushing, and coming in tight as if to attack. None of this bothered me, for I was now seeing red—or green, with my Hulk eyes. I was angry at Dad, and Mike was going to pay.I feinted a forward throw then attacked behind his right leg with an osoti-gari. Mike tried to yank his leg back, but my heel had already hit the hollow of his knee—the same spot where Odysseus nails Ajax in the Iliad. Drunk with fighting spirit, I dug my heel in, millimeter by millimeter, then ripped it toward me, together with Mike's knee. I twisted his head, neck, and shoulders backward. Mike fell to his side—not a pretty throw but still a yuko (quarter point). I landed on top of him and howled the loudest kiai of my life. The match ended a few seconds later. Some black-belted strangers congratulated me afterward. “What a fight,” they said. “Amazing judo.” What had felt to me like dirty sport seemed to outsiders like fighting spirit.I rode that spirit to a few more good finishes in local tournaments, then gave up competition. I never tried out my newfound kiai with my father. He was in his fifties by then. His fighting days were over.Years later, my father wrestled lightly with my young son, Charlie, and always let him win. I was jealous of this gentleness but happy that my father did not feel the need to defeat him.Charlie and I grappled often when he was little. It drew us close in every sense. I let him win but soon had to fight harder to keep pace. He was not afraid to engage his kiai with me. When he started wrestling in clubs, he won matches with an aggressive grit that I had never had. I wondered if he could unleash this because he knew that I loved him; I made sure to tell him. And because he knew that I did not want to defeat him. And because he had the father I never had.Now sixteen, Charlie just won his second Toronto City Championship and finished third in the province of Ontario. He is taller than me, weighs almost the same, and likes to push at me playfully in the kitchen. One time the pushing got serious. He pulled me in with his vicious arm drag and body-locked me from the side. I felt how strong he was, how he might truly defeat me. Was it a mistake to help him develop this fighting spirit? It was now coming at me like death. I felt fear rise in my throat. I imagined how my father might have felt that Christmas in 1984. He might have dreaded me destroying and replacing him, as Zeus did with Cronus. As Charlie was certain to do with me now. My own kiai kicked in. I underhooked to face him, twisted myself free, and snapped his head down toward the floor, as I had done so long ago to Mike. I spun behind him and locked my arms around his waist, but he quickly tore my hands apart and turned to face me.We charged at each other again, attacking each other in a bear hug. As I held him, I felt us both soften; it is impossible to say who went first. I embraced him hard and felt him melting. He giggled, but not with the same confusion and shame as I had done in my father's grasp. I held him tighter and wondered if our link was the one that finally broke free from my family's dysfunctional father-son chain. In that instant, I reconsidered whether I had really “won” by stealing hugs from my dad, or “lost” by losing with dignity in college, or “won” against Mike at the edge of legality. No matter. Now, with Charlie, I knew that in losing I was winning big.

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