The Finals
We've come full circle.
Two weeks after asking people questions and taking their pictures at a rodeo, I was back at the same U.S. Cellular Center to ask another round of questions-- this time to a band of cheerful fans at the U.S. Cellular Center watching several singlet-clad teens duel it out at the Iowa dual-meet state wrestling tournament.
Replacing the dirt floor of the rodeo were several mats, each holding two wrestlers trying their best to force their opponents to lie (lay? Blast it!) still in the center of a circle; and if that sounds entertaining, it was. There's something about sports where important things happen only after long periods of struggle that raises the intensity level of each victory. It reminds me of soccer, or watching the Iowa Hawkeye basketball team try to score points. I watched as two wrestlers-- both dressed, befuddingly enough, in purple and white-- fought each other for more than ten minutes, until finally one purple guy did something to another purple guy, and the crowd belonging to the purple guy who was winning erupted into cheers, and, as they cheered, I, also, became excited.
That's a sign of a good sport-- when people can be entertained without knowing what is going on.
It also occurred to me, as I watched all the wrestling matches going on below, that anyone on that floor could beat the living daylights out of me if they so wanted. Even those little elementary kids who were going at it in the lower left hand corner. You might disagree, I know-- but it'd hard to stop a four-foot kid who was determined to shoot for your legs. I would be a goner.
With wrestling in Iowa being the biggest thing since showchoir in Iowa (bringing it full circle), I grew up with several wrestlers while going to school in nearby Solon; and there is something about the sport's association with pain that I find somewhat unsettling. However, I think it is this suffer-to-succeed mentallity that also provides it part of its appeal. In a sport like football, for example, people get injured all of the time, but that is only secondary to the main goal of running the ball into the end zone, achieving fame and glory, and driving off with a cheerleader beside you and a stack of money in the backseat.
There are outside motivations to the game of cleats and pads, is what I am saying.
When it comes to wrestling, however, the only motivation seems to be victory. If these wrestlers are anything like the wrestlers I knew growing up, they starve themselves, run, practice, starve themselves, run, and then starve themselves some more-- all so they can win the priviledge of trying to make another wrestler who has starved and run and practiced submit at the center of the ring.
It is for this reason, I think, that the really good wrestlers are so intensely into the sport. And it is also why the mindset of a good wrestler, from the outside, seems so difficult to grasp.
But I've gotten way off track-- again. Full circle.
What was the question I was supposed to ask this week?
Ah.
What ties you into knots?
And how would I answer it?
I have no idea. I suppose, once again-- maybe this time more than any of the other questions-- it really depends on how you interpret what is being asked.
There's the literal interpretation, of course, but that would just be silly. Besides, it's already been done. If interpretation is brought into it, then it could mean anything ranging from what confuses me to what vexes me to what pushes me to the point of spiritual exhaustion, and the best answer I can come up with that will suit them all is just plain old, perplexing, enigmatic, stupid, silly, daily life.
Perhaps this answer is a copout, as I don't plan to really explain it, but an ambiguous question deserves an ambiguous answer.
Besides, it's the truth.
And with that, I conclude my stint as On the Street Gazette correspondent. A colleague who I had been filling in for has since returned from maternity leave, and she will now have the priviledge of once again asking people questions and then blinding them with the flash from a point-and-shoot camera.
Or maybe I'm the only person who did that...
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