The sport of wrestling has never been mainstream, and — especially in this age of interconnection and aggregation, in which everything is sanded down and repackaged in the service of optics and shared judgment, glamour and entertainment — its simplicity and bluntness push it ever further to the margins. Wrestling shapes identities around ideals of strength, toughness and sacrifice, traditionally masculine traits that now, with the exponential growth of women’s wrestling (the fastest-growing sport in the country at the high school and college level), are not confined by gender. Wrestlers risk their pride and sense of self-worth against the possibility of being tossed ass-over-teakettle and then pinned helplessly in front of a cheering crowd. You can’t hide body or spirit behind a few ounces of spandex and the public spectacle of combat — and despite the lavish display of hubris, where latent gifts of speed and strength can, for a time, conceal failures of will and practice and even dedication, a wrestler’s weakness will be eventually exposed. A match is less a matter of judgment than an occasion of immediate and often violent revelation.
Wrestling is not an urban sport; it thrives where there’s more land and sky than people to build fences and houses. It takes hold in rural agricultural towns surrounded by vast fields of corn and hops, in the barren expanses of the rural West and Southwest at one-gas-station towns off two-lane highways where tumbleweeds provide most of the traffic or in logging towns atop mountain passes that mark the gateways to timber country.
Wrestling shapes identities around ideals of strength, toughness and sacrifice, traditionally masculine traits that now, with the exponential growth of women’s wrestling, are not confined by gender.
In Oregon, wrestling runs deep in the rural mat meccas of Crook County and Newberg, the blue-collar coastal fishing towns like North Bend and Marshfield, the snowy basin of Crater. Wrestling favors cowboy hats over rasta caps, tall-tired pickup trucks over luxury sedans, American flags over peace signs. There are no marching bands or cheerleaders, no bright and dirty lights, and little television or newspaper coverage; a few low-traffic blogs and websites keep the rankings, and there is the collective memory and immediate gossip of loyal fans, the parents and families and friends of wrestlers, the timekeepers and scorers and referees, the coffee-makers of the tournament hospitality rooms — the keepers of the faith.
It is a sport for folks who have enough space in their lives to care about bragging rights and state championships, who have a need to recall small victories and enshrine them in trophy cases and story to lasting glory. Wrestling state champions who grow up leave behind names and portraits on the walls of high school wrestling rooms, with maybe a golden statue locked in a glass case outside a gymnasium; somewhere there’s a cluttered corner of childhood home full of gold and silver statues, a clutch of medals hanging from ribbons, a stack of tournament brackets bearing a beloved name.
Wrestling is people, places, sounds, sense-memory: weigh-ins in icy locker rooms, pale boys lined up in briefs awaiting the judgment of scale, with perhaps one boy encased in heavy sweats and down, still jumping up and down, trying to lose those last few ounces. It is chugging bottles of Gatorade to rehydrate and shivering after weigh-ins, three or four PowerBars choked down in the hopes of restoring starved muscles. It is team meetings on faded layers of mats laid like tablecloths over dusty gymnasium floors, bodies sprawled and packed tightly for warmth and privacy in rooms golden with morning light through barred windows, where a grizzled old coach mixes threats about bad behavior with inspirational anecdotes about the battles to come. It is butterflies in the belly as the harsh gymnasium halogens flutter on, the staring at handwritten brackets pinned to a wall in search of your fate, the first slow circles jogged on the stiff, cold mats. Still-drowsy crowds fill bleachers with a murmur of life while referees and scorekeepers set up tables with cards and sheets. There are slow stretches and jumps and sprawls to start sluggish muscles, teammates partner up for drill, followed by the stutter and squeak of shoes and kneepads, the intermittent thud of bodies to the mat, at first gently, then aggregating, an entire room of bodies rising and falling and rising again.
No one knew high school wrestling better than Kenny Cox. He was a five-time national champion, the Asics Tiger All-American chosen for the nationally distributed Asics promotional poster his senior year. The boy featured on the poster is a short, stout, muscular young man wearing an Oregon National team singlet and (of course) Asics shoes. Blond ringlets escape from his white headgear, and though the young man attempts a serious look it fails to make him look intimidating, as there is a playful glint in his lively blue eyes. The poster was tacked to the bulletin board by the water fountain at Club Oregon, the university’s wrestling room where I trained with Kenny Cox three nights a week all through high school. I would leave the mat, where he’d just taken me down five straight times, and drink while he beamed back at me from the poster with that charming, beatific smile. He was my role model and hero, the living embodiment of who I thought I needed to be.
In most sports Kenny Cox, standing a generously assigned 5-foot-2, would have been doomed by the laws of mass and leverage. Weight classes helped mitigate some of these obstacles, but what set him apart on the mat was the extraordinary effort he took. This sounds cliché because it is cliché, though there was nothing ordinary about the extremes to which Cox took his devotion. Coach after coach at wrestling camp after wrestling camp told him to give his all, to leave nothing behind — but they were preaching to a boy already primed by the Christian gospel of family and church, which held that if your commitment was complete, it would bear you to grace, purify and sanctify your sacrifice. Early on, Kenny’s father, George, wrote a poem to inspire him: “When most people stop because of the pain / Kenny keeps going, seeing only the gain … may God grant you the strength to give the glory to Him!”
He was extraordinary — his advantage was heart.
At a young age, Kenny Cox had already demonstrated this willingness to push beyond ordinary limits. It was the quality that allowed him to win footraces against boys a foot taller, to complete a marathon in eighth grade running at his father’s pace, to do pullup after pullup when at first he could do no pullups at all. Yet wrestling is unique because of its sustained anaerobic nature, which can narrow a one-on-one match to a battle of endurance and will. In high school wrestling, eventually every young athlete gives in to exhaustion no matter how superior their ability or talent. Kenny’s wrestling style was all forward-rushing fury, a peripatetic flurry of pushes, pulls and level changes that was difficult to match; each movement required reciprocal response or else the opponent would be driven backward, out of bounds, at which point Kenny would sprint back to the center and crouch low in his stance, resting as he waited to begin again. In many victories against equally skilled and talented opponents, Kenny simply endured more pain than his opponents could bear; he out-suffered them. He was extraordinary — his advantage was heart.
Such sacrifice began before competition started. At Club Oregon, where we trained, Kenny would win nearly every sprint, though these were tighter races against the best of three counties; some boys drove 50 miles to be there. The sprints would finally end, and we’d all sink to the wall exhausted after the second practice of the day — everyone except Kenny, who kept his feet and kept running and running. Sometimes some of us would refuse to be outdone; we would stand, though we were beat, and run as long as we could, running less with him than after him. He took our attempt to join him as a challenge, though, and would push past us and then begin to lap us. Ultimately, he would be coming as we were going, going as we were coming, so that we were always wall-lengths behind him. Eventually we would all quit and leave him there still running, his breath coming in loud ragged gasps, as we unlaced our shoes and changed our gear. Sometimes, he would still be going as we left, the cold air pouring in the front door for a moment. We could still hear the pounding of his feet on the mats and the choking wheeze of his breathing, and then the door would close, and we would leave him to himself.
Kenny never changed the scale or intensity of his devotion. His father tells of watching Kenny finish a 50K (31-mile) race on the McKenzie River trail at age 25, long after he was done with competitive wrestling. He took on the race with little training or preparation, but he still managed a full sprint as he came across the finish line. He kept his finishing pace after, went another 50 or 100 yards past the crowd and turned into a small wooded area where he kept running in place, hands and feet chopping the air faster and faster for as long as he could stay on his feet — perhaps another five or 10 minutes at top speed, until he was wheezing for breath, while bystanders and other runners watched, perplexed and concerned.
His father remembers this incident fondly. It reflected Kenny’s habit of always doing more, “giving extra,” no matter how artificial the finish line was. It was certainly in character, but six years later Kenny would be dead, having gone farther still — a trek on foot along the coast from Oregon to Baja, dumpster-diving for food, then 70 days scavenging off the land in the deep wilderness of Kauai’s Na Pali Coast. He emerged from the jungle shriven and harrowed — and died of exposure and infection months later. He was a wrestler, and so could never go far enough.
In the years since he passed, I have interviewed his family and friends, coaches and teammates, traced his story from coastal Oregon and California to Baja to Kauai, trying to uncover what happened to him and what drove him — what Eden he sought. I do this in part to celebrate his life, but also because I spent so many years trying to be like him. Now I follow him still, hoping that I will be able to find the way to turn back.
