Scott C. Jones

Our wrestling team was very good that year, with my fellow wrestlers piling up enough wins and points over the course of our matches against other schools that my own personal results–whether I won, lost, or hyperventilated–had no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the team. By the time we got around to my bout, which was always the very last bout of the match, the score was usually so lopsided in our team’s favor that my bout was a formality, and nothing more.

That year I lived in fear of just one thing: that the outcome of a match against another school would, at some point, come down to me. More…

[Welcome, friend. Come on in and warm yourself by the fire. Oh, and get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.]

My least favorite part of wrestling, by far, was the tournaments. They were typically all day affairs, always held on Saturdays, at some faraway school no one had ever heard of before. We’d leave by bus in the pre-dawn dark, then spend several hours traveling across treacherous, snow covered roads, all in the name of going someplace I didn’t want to go, and doing something that I didn’t want to do.

My artistic interpretation of today's level.

Me, I liked staying home on Saturdays during the winter. I liked watching a monster movie in the afternoon (on Saturday, there was always a monster movie on). I liked eating tacos. My mother often made tacos on Saturday night.

When we’d finally arrived at the school, we would immediately inspect the tournament brackets. I’d see my name written up there on the white board in the “heavyweight” bracket–JONES–already paired off with another name. The sight of my name always made my stomach turn. Because with my name already on the board, there was no way out of this. And, at tournaments, there was never a chance of collecting a forfeit. At tournaments, I had no choice but to wrestle.

Sometimes I’d draw a fat guy in the first round and score an easy win. But mostly what would happen is this: I’d hyperventilate my way to another embarrassing loss, then spend the rest of the day mooning around the gymnasium, waiting for the rest of my team to lose so that we could go home. More…

I continued to hyperventilate my way through the wrestling season. I hyperventilated in Cortland, hyperventilated again in Waterloo, then hyperventilated again at Holland Patent. (They nearly called an ambulance for me in Holland Patent.) Along the way, I had the opportunity to perform thorough inspections of the rafters of all the gymnasiums in the Central and Eastern New York State areas. Night after night I stood next to referees who raised my opponents’ arms. The thing they never tell you about the arm-raising thing is this: the referee not only holds up one guy’s arm, but he also sort of holds down the other guy’s arm. I despised having my arm held down like that. It always seemed completely unnecessary to me. More…

The night of my first wrestling match I walked out of the locker room wearing my singlet and my robe, wondering if there would be any Rocky-like theme music to accompany my entrance. (There was not.) The gym had never felt colder, never seemed quieter or more cavernous than it did that night. The rafters seemed impossibly far away. In the center of the gym was a large blue wrestling mat with a white circle painted on it. More…

I survived the terrible wrestling practices–which remain, without a doubt, among the most painful events I have endured in my lifetime, bar none. I survived the ubiquitous nudity. I survived the terrible locker room smells. And, on the day of our first match, I survived the weigh-in, which took place in the morning, in the dark, before school started, because, as the coach explained to us, people for some reason always weigh less in the morning than they do at any other time in the day.

Weighing in was a mere formality for me. I weighed 190 pounds, but I was wrestling as the school’s heavyweight, which had a weight limit of 225 pounds. I could have kept on my winter coat and snow boots when I stepped onto the scale, and still been underweight by a good 20 pounds. More…

I quickly discovered that wrestling was a much more intimate sport than football was. Instead of going outdoors to a breezy, hundred yard-long field for practice, you went into the school’s smallest, darkest, most claustrophobic room. Instead of wearing a uniform that was so bulky and dehumanizing you needed to iron the names of the players onto the back in order to tell them apart, you wore a thin piece of spandex and cotton (a singlet) that left nothing to the imagination.

When the equipment manager handed me my singlet for the first time, I felt like a showgirl in a movie who’d just been handed her new “costume,” which, of course, always turns out to be a tiny piece of lingerie on a hanger. “They expect me to wear this?” she says without fail. More…

[New here? Get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.]

There was a brief period of time–one week, maybe two–in high school when I was known as “The Hero.” ”Hey everyone, here comes The Hero!” people would say. Or, “Make way for The Hero!” Or, “Ha, ha, The Hero is having spaghetti for lunch today!”

No kidding, people said these things to me. And when they weren’t saying these things to me, they were slapping me on the back, or delivering high-fives, or stopping me between classes so that I could recount the event–or rather, The Event–that had temporarily transformed me from a mortal into into a minor god. More…

[If you're new here, 1. welcome, friend, 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.]

The overheated lobby of the Holiday Inn Express at three in the morning smelled like a ghost had just finished smoking a cigarette then promptly peeled and enjoyed a mandarin orange afterward. Now that I think about it, that’s one more descriptor I’d like to see in advertisements for hotels: “clean,” “simple,” “no bulls***,” “you will not get bedbugs,” and “no cigarette-smoking, orange-eating ghosts live here.”

I gave the tired eyed woman behind the front desk my credit card, then took the elevator up to the second floor to my room. By the smell of things, the cigarette-smoking ghost had apparently been haunting up here as well, despite the fact that there was a large no-smoking sign prominently displayed on my door. More…

[If you're new here, 1. welcome, friend; 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I'm playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days. You good? OK. Let's move on.]

The plane finally reached the gate in Syracuse at around 2:30 in the morning. After the majesty of the United terminal at O’Hare in Chicago–the soaring glass and steel ceilings, the bona fide brontosaurus skeleton, the Coach leather goods store which sold handbags which cost as much as a used Honda–it was difficult to reconcile where I’d been two hours earlier with the threadbare carpeting and boiled-hot dog smell of where I was now: Hancock International Airport in Syracuse, New York. And I wasn’t the only one having trouble with this transition. Everyone exiting the plane appeared to be frowning at the low ceilings and malnourished ferns. More…