Meatheads Unite!

My main sport in High School was wrestling. It's pretty big in the Midwest and was particularly popular in my school. We had top quality gear, uniforms and facilities. We even had cheerleaders. Of course, it didn't come close to the support for football and basketball, but given that it's a nasty, lonely, and exhausting sport, I couldn't complain because I also had a great coach.

I learned some things from him that serve me well today. Maybe the best thing he taught me was how to get up after getting the living sh*t kicked out of you. I got my nose broke and shattered my ankle which took years and a lot of surgical hardware just to walk normal again. Then I broke my arm and jaw. All told, I learned to keep getting up...or maybe I wasn't smart enough to stay down.

So like I said, wrestling was a nasty sport. You're sweating and sometimes bleeding all over some other guy you don't even know and then groping each other for survival [insert gay comment here]. But there's something pure about it all. It's just you and another guy giving it everything you got for six minutes. True Roman arena stuff - which is why it's so lonely. When you loose, it's pretty clear who's to blame.

As for my team, we were real tight. A bunch of salt of the earth midwestern guys. But we were also a bunch of salt of the earth High School meatheads. My best friend and I were team Captains. That gave us the authority to pick the music the team listened to. There was only one band and only one album that could inspire a bunch of meatheads to unite and conquer - AC/DC's Back in Black. We'd crank it loud and proud in the locker room and before matches. It was pure gospel music for the meathead choir. A whoop here and holler there then a "fu*k yeah" everywhere. Innocent boys will be boys stuff or just plain pathetic? You decide.

I was reminded of this memory after I saw the album cover to Back in Black in earlier versions of this blog. Just a flash of the cover and I instantly thought "wrestling back in Nebraska". If you can't relate, simply plug in Black in Black then play it loud. If by the third song you don't feel like getting a little wild, you better check your pulse. Meatheads Unite!