Scott C. Jones

Let me tell you something about being a hero: It’s really a lot of fun. You walk around feeling great all the time. You have this terrific sense of purpose. You feel like John Travolta at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever, only minus the can of paint. Once, when I spotted two ninth graders having an argument outside the cafeteria, I walked up to them and very calmly told them that this was no way to settle their differences. “Are you the guy who won the wrestling match against Little Falls?” one of them asked. I told him, somewhat sheepishly, that I was. “Now, go on and shake hands, then go your separate ways,” I said. And, to my surprise, these two kids actually listened to me. Only later on did I learn that they met up again at the bike racks after school, where they had traded blows until a social studies teacher spotted them and broke it up. More…

The Little Falls wrestling team was, at best, mediocre. On paper, we were easily the better team; our wrestlers had the better records, we’d performed better at tournaments, etc. But things began to go wrong for us that night right from the start. As soon as the match began, a fan in the Little Falls bleachers produced an air horn. Within the concrete and wood confines of the gym, the air horn’s bleats echoed endlessly, bouncing from floor to ceiling and back again. The more the bleats bounced, the more they seemed to gain in power, until, finally, they achieved an almost deafening roar which sounded as if Godzilla himself might be about to lift the roof off the gymnasium and peer in at us. More…

The best wrestling team in the Tri-Valley league, by far, was Canastota. Canastota, for the record, is a small town located just off the New York State Thruway in Central New York. It’s where the International Boxing Hall of Fame is located. Our wrestling team had not come close to beating Canastota in 20 years. We referred to Canastota as “the onion pickers,” because of a series of robust onion fields that grew just outside of their town and because this was the best zinger we could come up with. More…

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…