Athletes don’t have to win to be great, but it helps.
—Willard Darwhippler, 1949 White Sox Bat Boy
I was born in 1943, the son of two bad athletes. From all early indications, my parents were not keen on having a great athlete in the family, but I don’t believe their lack of enthusiasm for sport had any bearing on my success, or failure, as a jock. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and both parents graduated from Ohio State. I ushered as a Boy Scout at OSU football games during the era of Woody Hayes and clouds of dust and the most boring football in the history of the sport. My parents never placed a football beside me in my crib or put me in scarlet and gray diapers. I did eat Wheaties as a kid, and even won a Voit football from General Mills, the only thing I ever won simply by sending in box tops. Despite eating hundreds of bowls of the “Breakfast of Champions” during my formative years, it didn’t make any difference; the championship circle still alluded me. To the best of my knowledge, there never had been an athlete that made the first team of any sport on either side of the family, so the fact that they were not conditioned to groom an athlete of any caliber, is not surprising. My father played basketball and baseball in high school, but I’m certain he didn’t make the first team in either if his knowledge of either sport was any clue, as you will read later. Both parents seemed more intent on having a bookworm nerd for a son than a shot putter, which they pretty much got.
My father was the antithesis of my mother, a woman who wandered through life as an eclectic intellectual with no discernible goals and not an ounce of guilt. She told me several times that she should have been a university professor of English or Anthropology. Instead, she never escaped the life of a doctor’s wife in the 50s, who knew as much medicine as her husband and took every opportunity to practice it when patients would call or drop by the house looking for “Doc.” In contrast, my father was obsessive-compulsive and laden with a load of quirky rituals and enough guilt for the entire family. When he came home from the office punctually at 6, he had two drinks, usually Budweiser or Guinness and shot of Irish whiskey if he had recently been to Ireland. He would drink them before eating so he got his buzz, then he finished off everything left on the stove and went to bed punctually at 8, read a few pages in weighty medical tomes on such topics as early detection of colon cancer through fecal analysis or some equally fascinating article in the Journal of American Medical Association.
The next morning in 4 a.m. darkness, he was out the door to run exactly 2 miles along the same route with the current dog, returning sweaty to my bedroom, clanking weights while I tried to sleep off a hangover. The workout seemed to get especially noisy if I had staggered in an hour before after an evening of wandering High Street, hitting all the Ohio State student watering holes looking for love. Following a shower and shave, he had his bowl of Wheaties or Shredded Wheat, and one cup of black coffee while reading The Columbus Dispatch. He was gone by 7, several hours before my mother got up. Woe be it if you interrupted that schedule or tried to make small talk with him at the dining room table. More than once, I watched with fascination the night before as he carefully laid out his pants, shirt, tie, and sports coat on the back of a dining table chair that had been pulled away from the table and left at the same angle every night. On the floor in front of the chair was a pair of dress shoes with a sock carefully rolled up inside each one. I asked him once what the meaning of this process was.
“If I don’t have everything out and placed exactly right so I can dress and eat in complete silence, I run the risk of skidding the chair across the brick floor and waking MJ, your mother. And if I do that, since our bedroom is directly above the us, she comes downstairs and starts going on about something trivial and it delays my departure for the hospital and starts my day off all wrong.” He called his wife, MJ, short for Mary Jane.
My athletic career wasn’t jump-started by being bed-ridden for two years with rheumatic fever when I was 6. When I finally climbed out of bed, I was ready for the second grade but first I had to learn to walk again. My muscles were spaghetti, and I had a damaged heart valve. At the time I contracted rheumatic fever, we lived in Findlay, Ohio, where my father had started his medical practice after the war. In 1951, we moved to Columbus because he had become weary of his patients coming in from the farm at dinner time, carrying eggs, tomatoes, or corn, still in their coveralls or with their wives in floor length plain print dresses. Gripped in their hands was usually a John Deere ball cap. They would wait in the living room, softly whistling Old Mill Stream or Polly Get the Kettle On. Everyone knew Old Mill Stream because it had been written in Findlay about the Blanchard River which ran through town.
I went through the rest of grade school and junior high school scrawny and half-blind. I saw myself as the wimp on the beach in the Charles Atlas comic book ads. I was a Boy Scout and Scouts in those days were not building 6-pack abs and buns of steel but bird feeders and out-of-control fires. I earned merit badges in citizenship, tree identification, and wood carving, not jet skiing and computer graphics. In the 9th grade, I thought it would be cool to wear my uniform to school during Scout Week. I had skipped the class that being a Scout was not the same as being the captain of the football team.
Sometime around 6th or 7th grade, my father decided that being left-handed destined me to be a pitcher. He also wanted to divert me from a sport that put undue stress on my heart and in those days, baseball players often had a plug of Red Man between cheek and gum and a beer gut hiding their belt buckle, and a few winded after running the baseline. The baseball players of my childhood would be in trouble if they had to bench press 500 and run the hundred in 10. Thus, it was a safe sport. Not as safe as ping-pong or pickle ball but still, easy on the body.
A practicing pitcher can’t get by without a home plate, so my father built one. The fact that his carpentry skills were weak didn’t stop him from and tackling a several projects around the house that always involved a lot of 2x4s and big nails, never any wood screws, which took too much time. The projects I remember were immense, some unmovable and had to be built on sight, and a few even dangerous. The ironing and folding table he made for Mom in the basement was eye-level for me and my sisters and rested on four unsupported 2×2 rickety legs, causing the whole contraption to sway if you dropped a load of wash on it. On the opposite side of the basement, he built a free-standing monstrous storage shelf system (10 ft. x 10 ft.) that occupied a quarter of the basement and was for camping and athletic gear. It was so deep it necessitated that one of my skinny sisters had to crawl into the dark interior to grab an ice chest or a bat. In the garage, I raised rabbits. He built a rabbit hutch that again was permanently in place once finished. Hundreds of pounds, but housing only four families of rabbits, and not allowing the droppings to pass through the small mesh hardware cloth flooring. Thus, unless attended to daily, the rabbits and their litters often died, buried in their own shit.
As for his sports constructions, home plate was no different than any of the other of his monstrosities, and neither was our basketball backboard. Home plate was large enough that any optically impaired kid could throw strikes all day and bulky enough to break a sliding runner’s leg. Following its’ construction, to save money, he brought out his old catcher’s and outfielder’s mitts that had languished on the mega-shelves so long that they had a powdery dusting of green mold on them. The basketball backboard he built on the garage front, towered over the driveway like a scoreboard at Wrigley Field. It lacked supporting structure, wobbled like the folding table, thus dying when a ball hit it. The net placement was most definitely over 10 feet and would have frustrated Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, let alone 4 ft. kids. We watched many B-balls die mid-court from under- or over-inflation or just plain lack of arm strength, before reaching the rim. If we did luck out and hit the backboard and even rarer, the rim, even when brand new, it would shake and rattle, like it was having backboard death throes. And indeed it did die one day a few months after erection, and came crashing to the driveway, fortunately during the winter.
For some unknown reason, he taught me to use the windmill pitching style, made famous by Cy Young in 1903, to be replaced by the modern version in 1904. I was on the mound from June 15, 1955, to June 21, 1955. My father knew better but maybe he thought all pitchers had to prove themselves at all evolutionary stages of pitching before trying out for the majors. I only cared because I wanted him happy, all I really wanted to do was read and earn a merit badge or two.
When I tried out for Little League, I vaguely remember the conversation between the coach and me as something like this:
Reading from a clipboard, “David Greegor, are you here.”
“I’m here.”
“What position are you trying out for, Greegor?”
“Pitcher, sir,” I responded.
“You and everybody else. Alright, get out there on the mound and show me what you’ve got.”
I don’t remember walking the painful 200 yds. to the mound, but I do remember starting my potent helicopter dervish, and the sidelines erupting like canned laughter in an episode of Lucy, and I do remember the pitch zooming over the strike zone with half-decent speed.
The coach stared at me for what seemed like a year, like I was some undescribed species of sea slug. When he regained his composure, he said, very sweetly but dripping with sarcasm,
“Where did you learn that? From your grandmother? A Charlie Chaplin movie?”
I returned to practices long enough to get knocked out by a broken bat sailing down the third base line.
My musical career was similarly unsuccessful. I can’t entirely blame my father because my ability to keep 4/4 time was weak. He tried very hard to make a Satchmo Armstrong out of me. In the 5th grade, like every other kid in America, we were given the choice of band instruments to play. One evening, he asked if I had a preference and I told him I wanted to play the piccolo.
He looked at me oddly and calmly asked, “Why? I’ve got a perfectly good Conn coronet that you can use. Why a piccolo?”
“I’ve always liked the size of my harmonica. I can fit it in my pocket, and I could do the same with a piccolo.”
“Just give the coronet a try,” he said with mild irritation and disgust. “It’s smaller than a trumpet, but it won’t fit in your pocket. Besides, it’s a man’s instrument.” My coronet career lasted one year. I didn’t have the chops and I hated spraying saliva everywhere, including my bandmates.
After flopping at pitching and coronet, I thought it would be cool to be a 2-sport man, so I took up track in the spring of my 8th grade year, trying out for the high jump. The 100 yd. dash and shotput required speed and muscles, so they were out. Fortunately, the javelin was not an option for teenagers or the high homocide rate would have been much higher. On the first day of practice, I got impatient waiting in the high jump line. Wanting to jump over anything, l tried my Texas roll over a 4 ft. wire that encircled the football field. I slid over but stuffed my wrist into a gopher hole, breaking it, terminating my track career.
The wrist healed fine, so that summer the local public pool supported a swim team so thinking the backstroke would draw the least applicants, I told the sleazy, smirky coach I had some experience. Here again, my father’s vast sporting knowledge came into play, but this time the windmill approach made more sense were it not for the fact that deeper water is denser, thus more resistant, and slower if you have muscle-free arms. As the last place finisher by a good lap, they launched the next heat just as I touched the wall. Coach Sleazy looked at me just like the Little League coach did—a mixture of pity and awe.
High school and 10th grade arrived too fast, and I wasn’t physically, or mentally, ready. Who is? I was still scrawny and a nerd. I made the mistake of trying out for football the fall of my sophomore year. I had zero interest in football, but I believed it would be my shortcut to popularity with all kinds of rewarding benefits. Those rewards predominantly centered around the opposite sex. From a distance, I’d seen them crawling all over anybody that claimed to be a back-fielder or receiver and I wanted them crawling on me too. Linemen tended to be like the bucks slobbering on the periphery of the herd, picking up the females rejected by the dueling linebackers and tailbacks. Regardless, I couldn’t run an entire pass route without vomiting, or straight arm some cotton candy, so I had to settle for the line.
Coach Balducci (Coach B) had played football at Ohio State for Woody Hayes. That preceding fall, my junior year, was his first year at the school as the new line coach and chemistry teacher. Not the combo I would have predicted for him. Many of us quietly thought driver’s ed might have been more appropriate for Coach B, but the head football coach and athletic director had nailed that slot. Coach B felt he had to put me and the other 10th grade geeks who had the same ill-directed, overnight popularity goals, somewhere on the field. I was worse at football than I was at track or baseball. Coach B decided I’d make to put me at center. I was legally blind and weightless, but it didn’t really make much difference as a 3rd string anything because you only got in the final play of the game when you were beating the opponent so badly that their coaches were already asleep on the bus.
Because water boys volunteered for that roll and couldn’t be assigned it by a coach, Coach B had to put me somewhere, so he reasoned that center didn’t require elaborate blocking assignments and the ass & balls snap was straightforward, if the quarterback wasn’t so scared that he started back-pedaling without the ball. It was an entirely different story when snapping to the punter or the place-kicker. I can still fuzzily see the ball orbiting over some skinny punter’s head as he vainly leaped into the air to grab it. The one time I did get to snap to the place-kicker, I hit the holder in the head. This came after a fluke touchdown because the opposing team’s coach was already on the bus sleeping, and his team had only four players on the field, all tackles.
At practice one blistering humid central Ohio August afternoon, I and several other bench-warming geeks witnessed Coach B’s darker side, at an uncomfortably close range. He was demonstrating how one is supposed to explode off the line, the adversary this time being an immense, heavy iron, loosely padded sled. He exploded all right, but with a little more ignition than he intended, and sailed right by the sled, having left his balance back at the launch pad. He landed on his big Italian nose, carving a furrow in the turf. It was really funny, and we giggled like schoolgirls. He leaped to his feet, beet-faced, with a rivulet of blood trickling down his chin. He the distance between the sled and us like a cheetah closing for the kill.
“Did I hear one of yous laugh?” There was a very long pause as he waited for a confession. “Who wants to hit da iron beast foist,” he said in a tight, moderately controlled voice. He was so close I thought I could see his heart pulsating in his eyeballs. It seemed like he was looking right at me, so being the idiot that I was, I weakly confessed.
“I believe it was all of us, Coach.”
“You’re up, then,” Coach B gritted. Instead of moving the beast, even an inch, I ricocheted off it like an errant bullet. Coach B rolled his eyes.
“Nice, Greega, very nice. The idea is to move IT, not let it move YOU!” he barked, and rolled his eyes again.
“Should I go again, Coach,” I mumbled into my jersey.
“No, absolutely not. I wanna to see what success looks like foist. Let Jerry show you and your worthless crew foist how it’s done right.” Jerry was Rodney Witlessman, an immense first-string all-state tackle, whom I had helped a little in chemistry lab when he wanted to stay on the good side of Coach B. Of course, Witlessman moved the sled without even a grunt into the next county.
“Whaddaya think, Greega? Can yous do dat?” Coach B said, with Witlessman shaking his head back and forth enthusiastically behind the coach.
“Probably not, coach,” I replied.
“Probably is not in our vocabulary, Greega. But in your case, it probably is,” he said, rolling his eyes a third time.
In Coach B’s chemistry class, I was treading on thin ice following a lab stunt pulled early in the semester. He was not a gifted chemist, and we all knew it and he knew we knew it, so there was always an air of tension in the class. His face always seemed red which we figured could be due to embarrassment or a slow burn. No one was willing to find out which, so we rarely asked questions. He read lectures verbatim from the text and generally disappeared during most of the labs. We figured he was flirting with the women’s basketball coach. Sometimes he would surprise us and pop back in unexpectedly, muscles rippling under a white, undersized lab coat, and sporting oversized safety goggles. He looked like Hell Boy
The inevitable happened one day when Coach B left the lab. I was a prankster as was my lab partner, Jeff. Jeff was a short, stocky, fun-loving guy, with a spontaneous, infectious laugh, who continuously made everyone else laugh. Jeff was the catcher on the baseball team. He even looked a little like a baseball. Jeff and I had discovered that we could rapidly fill the lab with thick, yellow sulfurous smoke and drive our classmates, choking and swearing, into the hall. When we pulled our savvy stunt, Jeff and I hung back because we were doubled up laughing our asses off. We didn’t see Coach B suddenly emerge through the yellow smoke, and bound, cheetah-like once again, in our direction. The muscles and eyeballs were both bulging. It seemed to us like he covered half the lab in one move, reaching our Bunsen burner before we could react and turn it off.
“Go see Dork,” he said, in a tight, barely controlled, voice. Again. Adolf Dork (not his real name) was our Germanic, mustached, principal, and we all believed a distant cousin of der Führer. As I recall, Dork was not upset, and tried not to laugh. Someone had called in a bomb scare the week before during lunch period, allowing everyone to disperse to various houses or the Big Boy to do whatever while fathers were working, and mothers were sleeping off martini and valium hangovers. Our crime was minor compared to blowing up an entire school.
I don’t recall how I got the desire to wrestle, but not from Friday night wrestling. When I went to my father to ask him about it, I somewhat remember his response.
“What do you know about wrestling? There is probably no sport on God’s green earth that puts more stress on your heart than wrestling. Six minutes of nonstop agony unless you get pinned quickly. As skinny and weak as you are, that is a distinct possibility,” he shouted in an apoplectic frenzy. “What was wrong with baseball?”
He was right; I knew less about wrestling than I did about any sport and that meant nothing. I thought that all the real jocks would be playing basketball in the winter, and there would be no competition in wrestling. And maybe even some girls would come to the matches. I knew the cheerleaders didn’t know we even existed. Everyone thought it was a sport of up-close and in-personal sniffing of armpits and crotches, which it was. It was assumed that boys at both ends of the weight spectrum and football lineman wrestled to stay in condition. The Columbus School for the Blind had a team, and some were fantastic wrestlers. I remember fantasizing that if everything went according to plan, I would be ripped and chiseled in a few weeks.
“Think about it, Dad, it might just build me up and strengthen my heart, too,” I replied. I haven’t a clue as to why, but he finally caved, and I joined the team in the winter of 1959, my sophomore year. The location of this scene was our high school gym.
“Don’t put ‘em away too quick,” Coach B said. “Ya gonna find dat you can play wit dez guys like putty in ya hands, but it is still gonna be a good experience. Dez guys are farm boys and have only been wrastlin’ a year. They are musclers, wit zero skills, but do not, I repeat, do not put ‘em away too quick. Have some fun before, you know, ‘Lights out, Bonzo.’” After Coach B finished his pep talk about the farm boy wrastlin’ meet, we were all prepared to score the most impressive victories of our careers. We were even screwing off and joking around before the meet when normally we would be warming up and practicing our moves and visiting the restroom.
The meet went differently than Coach B had predicted. Most of the lower weights posted clean wins. I wrestled at the 154-pound weight class, so I was near the end of the roster, there were 12 weight classes and I was the 9th in the lineup. Normally, by the time it came around to me, I was staining my tights. One meet, when I thought I was going to have to wrestle the state champ, I didn’t sleep for a week preceding the match and I had night sweats and continuous diarrhea. My opponent was a squat, little Yugoslavian gorilla with a curly black hair mat covering his body and muscles where there weren’t supposed to be any muscles, but you couldn’t see them hidden in the mat. Ivan saw my pathetic record, and chose to wrestle a weight class up for a challenge. He butchered our 165-pounder, who had previously gone undefeated. I dodged a bullet that hit my teammate. I still lost my match but I couldn’t give a shit.
I wasn’t nervous before walking onto the mat to shake hands with my opponent from the farm. I remember he was rather long, thin, and muscled like you would expect a farm kid to be muscled from spending summers throwing 100 lb. hay bales around. I assumed as Coach B had said, unskilled, but strong. No problem for a skilled wrestler.
I remembered, “Play wit ‘em and then put ‘em away in the second round.” After circling around and looking menacing for a few seconds, I dove in for my signature single leg drop to start to have some fun. Truth be told, the single leg drop was the only takedown I knee. It wasn’t that Farm Boy reacted so lightning fast and simply side-stepping me, it was more that my move was typically like always and implemented in molasses. I probably closed my eyes, a no-no, because I shot by my adversary, straight for the edge of the mat. I ended up splayed out on my belly, with my body half in, half-out of the circle, but inside enough to still be legal. My head cracked the gym floor. I don’t remember passing out because the referee would have stopped the match, but I went woozy and lost my equilibrium. Farm Boy flipped me like a dying carp and pinned me in 17 seconds – a school record. As I weaved drunkenly off the mat, I tried to not make eye contact with Coach B.
“Lights out, Bonzo,” He said, rolling his eyes.
Coach B eventually left and got into selling pharmaceuticals. He could be funny and had a good laugh, but he could also be mean. He had decided to give a varsity letter only to wrestlers who had earned sufficient points or more, regardless how many matches they wrestled. I wrestled every match my junior year but didn’t have the necessary points to letter. I think I won one or two matches that year and at the spring banquet, I was elected one of the co-captains. As far back as anyone could recall at our school, no captain of any sport had been elected to that position who hadn’t earn a letter. Getting the support of my teammates was something to be proud of, but it only embarrassed me. Besides, the other co-captain, a truly good wrestler, the only other junior on the team was despised and he had lost every match.
To add to my wrestling career misery list, at our season opener that year I was in the bleachers in street clothes rather than on the mat with the team. It wasn’t because of some practice injury but because of a huge mistake at practice. I’d gotten beaten in wrestle-offs by an arrogant little junior prick because he pinned me with some fluke tuck-n-roll, catching me completely off guard. Prior to each match, each weight class had wrestle-offs whereby a less talented wrestler in a weight class could challenge the top dog in that class. I was way ahead of Mr. Prick in points when he pinned me. I can still hear coach hit the mat with his hand. Jerry was too nice a guy to be mad, just disappointed in me. I cried in the locker room that night after everyone left. After that, when I could see Mr. Dipshit’s trademark tuck-and-roll coming, I leaped off his back, losing only a point. At that first meet, I did limp and grimace as I walked down from the stands to shake the other captain’s hand, only to return, dragging my bad leg, to my bleacher seat.
I eventually got my letter my senior year when Coach Jerry came to town that year and changed Coach B’s rules back to pre-B days. It didn’t matter because I won most of my matches, usually squeakily or in a tie.
At the season’s end of that year, I had a decent enough record to be seeded high in the district meet. Just before the season ended, I developed a “wash maid’s knee,” or technically a bursitis. My knee looked like a basketball and my leg would not flex. My father had come to enjoy the matches and was more disappointed than I to have to drop out. He came to the finals with a massive needle thinking he was going to aspirate the fluid off the knee, and I would be good to go. So he thought. It seemed like he punched the knee several hundred times and no fluid drained out. I had to forfeit, which was very good because it may have saved my life. A wrestler who had just moved from Illinois where he had been state champion, entered from stage left as an independent. In the final match, Mr. Illinois played with Larry Whatshizname, second to me in the district standings, as a killer whale does a seal. He lifted him above his head, spinning him around like the Friday night boys do, and wrapping him up like pretzel before, “Lights out, Bonzo.” Meanwhile, with leg extended in the front row of the bleachers, wrapped for the world to see, I silently gloated on the bleachers, thanking the good Lord for my good luck.
When I got to Miami University, a medium sized state school in Ohio, I thought I might just give college wrestling a shot. I believed that because I had progressively gotten better each year as high school wrestler, I would be all that much better college wrestler. I failed to consider that the school population size jumped a magnitude something like 30 times from high school to the university. Miami also awarded scholarships to athletes, including wrestlers. When try-outs were posted, I signed up and was matched with a boy from Cleveland on a football scholarship. He also had wrestled in high school, and his school typically produced great wrestlers. He and I danced around for a while and I got impatient and went for my leg drop, well-telegraphed and molasses slow. I managed to get his leg off the mat. My plan was always to hook the remaining leg with my leading leg, pushing my opponent forward, winding up on top with the advantage and two points. Between the time I hooked his back leg, and we were headed for the mat, he had reversed my advantage and had me in a pinning position. It was over in less than a minute.
Ten years later I got married and my new wife found out I had wrestled. She thought it was extremely funny. Most people think wrestling is an odd sport.
“Teach me how to wrestle,” she insisted, not long after we were married.
“Why?” I responded. “It’s not a girls’ sport. You could get hurt.”
“You don’t have to be rough, just show me a few of the easier moves,” she responded.
“Alright, but don’t squeal that I didn’t warn you,” I shrugged.
There is one position where the wrestler on top with the advantage and puts his fist and forearm under the crotch of his opponent and lifts his legs off the mat, pushing them forward fast on onto their face. Being clever, I thought I would try that move on her, trying to add a touch of the erotic to our tussle. Instead, she couldn’t stop laughing before I pushed her on her nose, rolling over onto her back, holding her stomach. I got an easy pin. After that, she asked me many times to demonstrate the crotch move in front of friends, not for any erotic purpose certainly but just so they could all pass out laughing like hyenas.
I don’t think I ever truly enjoyed wrestling. It made me nervous, sleepless, and spending much time of the porcelain white bus before a meet. I think my father enjoyed wrestling from the bleachers more than I did from the mat. He reversed his attitude because he had seen what it had done for me in three years, and I hadn’t died of a heart attack. I was about 160 pounds and fit when I left high school. I leaped to 210 after one year of college and eating dorm food, pounding gallons of 3.2 beer, and inhaling filter-less Pall Malls.
In some ways, I might have let my father down, but only briefly. I never pitched for the Cleveland Indians or played trumpet on French Street, but I did play harmonica with small R&R and blues bands. And I never went to medical school so didn’t really become a “legitimate” doctor but rather a Doctor of Philosophy.
Now I’m watching our three little grandsons, the Seattle 3, become athletes. As for my athleticism, our visits with them in a small house in rainy Seattle have required nerves of steel, agility to get out the way and ample quantities of booze. After 24 hours of their ricocheting off the walls, playing baseball and soccer or mountain biking down their halls, I find myself on a determined quest to find their parents’ liquor supply. In two years, I’ll be 80 and they will be 9 and to grapple with them would be a death wish. I’m plenty happy these days in the bleachers.
