CLUTTER

Clearing clutter, I dig into a dusty cardboard box with crushed corners and splitting seams.  Tape, no longer sticky, dangles freely from edges.  The box contains mostly junk you might find at a garage sale.  A Barry Manilow cassette tape.  A deck of cards from the defunct Stardust Casino in Las Vegas.  A stack of unused greeting cards rubber-banded together.  I wonder why anyone would keep this rubble, and then I remember that anyone, is me.

I find a wooden plaque at the bottom of the box.  It reads:  FIRST PLACE 7TH GRADE INTRAMURAL WRESTLING.  ORINDA REC. DEPT.  There is no year, but I know the plaque is mine, and I know 7th grade was 1969.  I've stumbled onto my first wrestling award from my first wrestling event.  I pluck it out.  I sit down.  I hold it gently.  My work stops.

I was terrified to step on the mat that first time.  Now, as I look back through all my years of competing and coaching, I recall many very young wrestlers who were terrified the first time they stepped on a mat, got hammered, and quit the sport.  I was fortunate, somehow scoring 3 pins in that intramural tournament (bad wrestling always ends in a pin, doesn't it?), and wrestling stole my heart.  Forty-five years later, I'm still in love.

I consider all that I've experienced in 45 years as a wrestler and coach.  Countless relationships forged through the shared bond of wrestling.  Thousands of wins.  Untold losses.  An endless supply of stories locked in my past, waiting to be told:  Championships. Disappointments.  Wrestlers.  Managers.  Coaches.  Friends.  Marriages.  Births.  Deaths. Tragedy.  Hope.  Redemption.  Love.  All things that people experience, but for me, all viewed through a wrestling lens.

A simple, junior-high-woodshop crafted plaque.  A dart-hole suffered while hanging in a den, decades ago.  An illustration of an illegal slam, as two brief-clad men battle inside the ropes of a professional wrasslin' ring.  It seems silly, on its face.  But it's not.  It represents the genesis of my life in wrestling.  On that fateful day 45 years ago, had I been the one pinned, instead of the pinner, everything would be different.

We all have clutter.  We all keep cardboard boxes filled with junk.  Some of us may even be packrats, or worse, hoarders.  Why?  Maybe we all drag our clutter through life because somehow, down deep, we know our plaque is there, waiting to be uncovered.