Escape Points (5 page)

Colin weighed 123 at the beginning of his freshman year, having started in youth wrestling at 80 pounds. He wrestled his freshman year at 119 and sometimes bumped up to 125 depending on what holes the team had at what weight. A few times he wrestled at 112. Almost immediately after his sophomore varsity season, Colin weighed 140 pounds. His junior year on varsity, he wrestled at 130, sometimes 135. Before wrestling season began, he weighed 142. At times he would drop up to eight pounds in one week.

This severe yo-yoing was not something I could do quickly or chronically. I spent several months in Weight Watchers a few years ago and lost seventeen pounds. I have kept most of it off, but with enormous effort. My boys could lose seventeen pounds in a week to ten days. Every season. During wrestling season weight was a daily conversation centerpiece in our house, as was the protein and caloric measure of every morsel of food. It was an odd contrast from the abundance of food they required the rest of the year. After season, they could each eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with a spoon while standing.

“Don’t eat that, man,” Brendan would say to Colin.

“What? A grapefruit doesn’t weigh much.”

“The water in it is heavy. Have a grape. Tuna.”

And on and on the arguments went. Over almonds and ice cream and pasta, the virtues of protein shakes and the evils of chips.

The boys each said they could tell how much anyone weighed by looking at him or her. Feeling unusually confident, I asked the boys once how much they thought I weighed. They were excruciatingly right, but I did not let them know that; some numbers a mother prefers to keep from her sons.

For years I believed my sons went through all of this as a vainglorious attempt to prove something to other people, to show them they each earned their victories without nepotism or favoritism. But I have come to believe they did it all for nobody else; not for me, not for the coaches or the crowds in the stands. I believe they did it not to exorcise anger or frustration or to prove their worth as athletes. I believe it was to prove to themselves that they could maintain self-control and perform alone without anyone else’s intervention—on a treadmill, in the weight room, on the mat against one opponent, or at the dinner table facing a steaming Thanksgiving buffet.

As their mother, watching weight-cutting was like watching each one climb into a wooden barrel and throw himself off the edge of Niagara Falls. It was counterintuitive; I was here to provide them sustenance. As their mother I wanted them to be full—of life, of food, of love, of dreams, of laughing memories. So it was hard for me to step back and let them do this. But I did. I understood deadlines and I tried to apply that personal sensibility to their weight-cutting. They had to meet the weight requirements on deadline, just as I had met my word requirements on deadlines for almost thirty years.

A long time ago I held each son in my arms as a newborn and nursed him; it felt so daringly, secretly complete. The process was universally enormous and personally miniscule at the same time. It was me, just me, in this perfect symbiotic exchange with each one of them, and each of us was fully sated. What I had for them was what they wanted and needed. It made me feel real power, not power I had over them, but power I had from them. No one else could give them that, and no one but my sons could give that to me.

Every few weeks, then months, I would take each son to the pediatrician for a checkup and he would be measured on the same kind of scale they use to weigh tomatoes or eggplants at the farmer’s
market. And he would always be bigger. Gained two pounds. Gained three pounds. The nurse would remark on how great that was and he must be nursing well, congratulations. It was good for him, it was good for his immune system, keep going.

Thankfully, that equation got intensely more complicated with each passing moment of their lives. The world began to fill them up; it was no longer that simple equation of two. I would never step back in time to that era, not even for a millisecond, nor do I miss it. But it was disorienting years later knowing that each son got on the scale every day before and after practice, trying to get smaller and weigh less, and working that hard to make a certain wrestling weight. But it is what they did. They did it for themselves, for the team, yes. It was about asserting self-control. Yet, a side effect of all the training and making weight was earning the respect of Coach Powell. They did not want to disappoint him.

I
called Coach Mike Powell and asked him to help. I had the high school head wrestling coach on speed dial, as did most parents of wrestlers on the team, all of the wrestlers, and many of the wrestling alums. By 2007, he had been Weldon’s coach for the last three of four years, and Brendan’s for the last year. A few nights earlier Brendan had pulled a stupid teenage stunt and I was at the end of my mother rope. It had been eleven years since my divorce, and about that long since I was able to ask for any paternal backup. Besides, their father had been living in Europe for three years by then.

“I’ll drive over in about an hour to talk to him,” Powell offered. “Have Colin there too. He should hear this.”

When Powell—that’s what we called him around our house, just one word like Cher, Madonna, Elvis, or Usher—arrived at our house that June night in 2007, straight from a workout, he asked for a glass of water.

“Don’t hug me, I’m sweaty,” he said when I answered the door.

Weldon and I sat on the couch with Colin. Powell was perched on the edge of the red Chinese Chippendale chair; Brendan sat across from him in a matching chair. Although he was in his early thirties, Powell looked at least ten years younger—baby-faced with dark eyes underneath wire-rimmed glasses, sporting a dark mustache and goatee. On his head were outbursts of jet-black hair; it had grown out since he shaved his head bald with the team just before Thanksgiving—an annual team ritual that made for rotten family holiday photos. The wrestling season haircut is why we posed for holiday pictures in the summer.

Powell talked for close to an hour, his voice deep and low, forceful but not punitive, looking directly at Brendan. And Brendan looked straight at him and stayed silent, nodding, listening, not lowering his eyes or walking away, the way he did when I confronted him. With Powell it was eye-to-eye.

“It doesn’t matter in the end what kind of wrestler you are,” he told Brendan. “It matters what kind of man you are.” He paused. “I love you no matter if you win or not. But the point is to be a good man.”

And then he left.

“Good to see you in practice,” Powell wrote on a brochure for wrestling camp he sent to Colin as an eighth grader when he worked out with the team off-season.

Colin broke his collarbone on the first night of that summer’s wrestling camp; a much heavier boy slammed into him against the wall during a game of tag before wrestling even started. Powell called to tell me to get to the high school right away and take him to the emergency room. Later that night, Powell called to check on him.

“Let me talk to him,” he said. “I feel so bad.”

In a photo in his bedroom, Weldon is wearing his blue-and-orange singlet, still donning the blue plastic headgear, just having leapt off the mat into Powell’s arms after winning a key match at state in February 2007. He is shining with sweat and Powell is cradling him.
The grin on his coach’s face is best described as gritty, solid joy. This one photo reminded me of all I ever wanted for my children, a moment when I knew they were loved fully. Look, see, he is loved.

Powell was almost godlike to my boys, and not just to mine; almost every parent on the team had what we called Powell stories. He drove immediately to the home of one boy who was a victim of a violent crime; Powell talked to him for four or five hours.

“Powell was the only one able to calm him down,” his mother said.

When Peter Kowalczuk, the heavyweight cocaptain of the team with Weldon, made it to the Olympic Trials in Las Vegas in 2008, Powell was there coaching him and cheering him on. Sometimes I thought I must be idealizing who Powell was and how much the boys depended on him. And then Powell did something Powellish—like have the wrestlers sandbag the local Des Plaines River all day because of threatened flooding.

Powell called if a wrestler missed weight lifting to see what was wrong. If nothing was wrong, he chastised him but was never demeaning. If Powell heard rumors of a boy drinking or getting in trouble, he called him into his office and told him he had to stop or he would be off the team. The boy would stop.

“You can’t lie to Powell; he knows when you’re lying,” Charlie Johnson, another wrestler, told me. The four other wrestlers in my family room one Wednesday night nodded.

There was no deterrent for any of them stronger than the disfavor of Coach Powell. A mother or father could threaten taking away driving privileges or a cell phone, even grounding indefinitely, but nothing mattered more than the possibility that Powell had lost respect for the boy. In five years, no wrestler had been reprimanded at the school for a violation of the code of conduct. You couldn’t say that about members of the other sports teams.

Whatever Powell said held a hundred times the weight of a parent, teacher, anyone. The boys craved his approval. They would do anything they could for him. I was sure it was one reason he was
named Coach of the Year in 2009, a statewide honor for all high school coaches.

“About damn time,” he said half-kidding.

It was the start of the 2008–2009 season, and I was waiting for Colin to emerge from the field house at about 8:30
PM
after practice. I congratulated Powell on his award as he headed to his car, the end of a normal fourteen-hour day for him.

“Colin looked real strong tonight, real good,” he said. And when Colin got in the car a few minutes later, I told him.

“Powell said that? He did?” Colin smiled ear to ear.

In the daily practices the boys said they worked harder than they ever thought possible, with a half hour of jogging around the wrestling room followed by more specific wrestling drills, followed by almost an hour of live wrestling—intense matches between wrestlers of similar weights. Two and a half hours of practice without breaks every day, each wrestler dripping with sweat; Powell and the coaches too. My sons would come home with their practice shorts and T-shirts in tied, plastic grocery bags. When I opened the bags to throw the clothes in the washing machine, they would be soaked through as if they had been dropped into a lake. A few times Brendan left his workout clothes in the trunk of the car in the winter, where they froze as solid as bricks.

Sometimes Powell would tell the boys practice was going to be short that day, and when he pushed the boys harder, he smiled and said, “I lied.” Later he told Brendan, “If you want to be a badass on the mat, decide you are a badass. That’s the difference.”

About five feet ten, Powell weighed about 180 pounds, not much heavier than his high school and college days. He was in peak shape, muscular and cut, able to wrestle with the boys and able to beat all of them any day. At the wrestle-offs for the varsity spots before the 2008 season, an exhibition parents attended, Powell wrestled Ben Brooks at the 189-pound spot. It was close, and Ben won.

I congratulated Ben immediately after. He looked up and smiled, “He gave it to me. He let me win.”

It was Powell leading the other coaches to push the pace, wrestling with some of the upper weights himself, demanding they keep trying for takedowns, keep sticking it out. At least one wrestler broke down in every practice, crying or fighting with another wrestler, but Powell told him to keep wrestling. And he would talk to them in his own code, “You dig?” he would ask; or “Legit,” meaning one of them did something that won his approval.

“You go through hell in that room,” one wrestler said. “He makes you want to do it. I work that hard, we all do, just so he could say to you, ‘Nice job.’” He added, “You keep sticking it out because you know you’re going to be a badass. No one on any other team has a warmup even close to us. They’re all gassed. It makes you feel so good about yourself.”

The first two and a half hours of practice were the workouts; the last hour and a half was Powell talking to them about life. They called them “Powell lessons,” and he told them about mistakes he made, how “he screwed up,” all in a way that the young men could hear. “He would give you a rib shot and then give you a dead serious talk,” one wrestler said. “He tries to be our friend and coach and mentor at the same time,” another said.

I remarked to one of Brendan’s teachers at the parent-teacher conference in his senior year how much Brendan liked and respected Powell.

“All those boys think Powell walks on water,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I am not so sure he doesn’t,” I said.

Before every match began, he embraced Ellis Coleman, a nationally ranked wrestler who eventually became an internationally ranked wrestler aiming for the US Olympic team, and kissed him on the top of his head. Ellis eventually made it to the Olympics—London 2012. Powell was there. Both Weldon and Colin were there in London to watch Ellis as well.

Powell drove Ellis’s older brother, Lillashawn, to college his freshman year and moved him into the dorm. He advised all the young men on the team on everything from strength training to nutrition to girlfriends.

“No fake sugar.” He said it so often, the wrestlers wanted T-shirts made with the slogan.

One summer night in 2008 Powell drove to Peoria—about 170 miles each way—to pick up Ellis and Lillashawn, both wrestling in an off-season tournament, after their grandfather had died suddenly. Their mother couldn’t make the trip to retrieve them.

Powell contacted all the team members and caravanned with the boys to the wake a few days later. When another wrestler’s father died from a long-endured brain tumor, Powell was there, rallying the boy’s teammates to his father’s wake and later funeral. Two boys who quit the team in their junior year came back to the team a year later.

“I’m sorry, Coach,” Powell said Jake Venerable told him on the phone.

“What weight will you wrestle this year?” another coach asked Ellis about his varsity plans for his senior year.

“Whatever Coach Powell tells me,” was his answer.

In weekly e-mails to the team’s families, Powell saluted the boys by name for specific victories or struggles and signed each e-mail, “In relentless pursuit.” One e-mail read, “The coaches could not be more proud of our guys. The athletes have really dedicated themselves; working hard, sacrificing, displaying courage daily. What a great group of young men.”

“I was always defined as a wrestler,” Powell said. His nickname as a kid was Mikey Powerful.

As a kid, Powell said he was high-energy and tried karate as a way to deflect some of that nervous velocity, and also Boy Scouts, but neither outlet worked. His father, Bud, started him in youth wrestling when Powell was a forty-five-pound first grader; the next biggest wrestler was almost twice his weight and in fourth grade. Powell stood his ground. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he says it was wrestling that got him through it.

I was hoping wrestling would do the same for my sons.

After winning the Illinois high school Class AA state championship at 171 pounds in 1994 as a senior at Oak Park, Powell went on to be an All-American at Indiana University. Following graduate
school, he began coaching and teaching at his alma mater. His father volunteered alongside him for every tournament, victory, and major team event.

He hosted team members to live with him and his fiancée (later his wife), Elizabeth, if the wrestlers were having a tough time at home and needed help with homework or staying out of trouble. Even after he was married, he spent as much time as ever on the team; he had barbecues for the boys in his backyard and arranged for fundraisers like the June car wash or a community trash cleanup to get them better equipment or fund a trip. He set up tutors for team members if they were doing poorly in school.

“My job doesn’t have boundaries,” Powell said. “With these kids, the more you invest emotionally, the more you see is there,” he said.

On New Year’s Eve each year, he made sure one wrestling family hosted a party for all the wrestlers so no one could get in trouble and attend a party with alcohol or drugs—which would result in a dismissal from the team. Weldon’s teammates started a Facebook group their senior year, WWMPD, standing for What Would Mike Powell Do. During season he brought the team to Bikram Yoga classes on Sundays. He taught them how to breathe deeply to relax. He talked about the environment.

“Next year we’ll be sure to have environment-friendly ink on the team shirts,” he said.

Powell followed up and followed through, more than you would think possible for a coach who met these teenagers for the first time when they walked into his wrestling room the first day of practice. He talked to them like a friend, not a youth minister. He spoke their language, cursed sometimes, didn’t hold back, didn’t preach. On the Huskies wrestling website was the tagline, “In Powell we trust.” He was almost too good to be true.

“He invests his everything in us,” one wrestler told me.

Powell brought the team from not being ranked in the state to being team state champions, undefeated for the season in 2009. The team was awarded a trophy with all the wrestlers’ names engraved on the front. It was the first team championship for the school in more
than a dozen years for any sport, and the first ever for wrestling. They came in second in 2012 as a team. In 2014, the high school team was ranked first in the state. In January 2015, the team was ranked number one in the country.

Before the team drove to the individual state championships in 2009 at the University of Illinois, the boys got their money together to buy Powell cigars to celebrate the victories they knew would be theirs. They collected enough money from each wrestler to buy a cigar for everyone on the twenty-one-man roster plus the coaches. Brendan drove to buy the cigars, bringing with him his glass change jar filled with pennies, nickels, and quarters. They were still little boys, now doing big man things.

“Call Powell and tell him,” I said when Weldon told me the news that he won a prestigious scholarship to study abroad the summer after his college freshman year.

“I called him first,” he said.

Weldon even walked like Powell; the wrestler’s walk, spine straight, shoulders pressed deliberately back, head held high, arms poised just slightly away from his sides as if he is wearing an invisible holster—
High Noon
meets the Olympics. He walked with motion generated from the hips, not bowlegged exactly but with his legs pushed outward from the knees and his upper body held still—
Riverdance
on Muscle Milk. A lean, taut confidence.