Even if a person I’m interviewing doesn’t say anything about it, I can always tell when someone is 100% committed to playing his or her dream sport.
That counts for sports as popular as football, and as niche as baton twirling. I had an experience with the latter last week, when I interviewed several people involved with the Patriots Twirling Corps team. The women in charge, Barbara Patrick and her daughter, Lynann Hudson, have spent almost all of their lives twirling and teaching the art of twirling. The young competitors I talked to, Morgan Boykin and Brittany Nesbitt, were quick to tell me how much they love twirling. The sport has even taken Boykin to college, where she now competes as a member of the University of South Florida’s team.
“It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, my whole life,” she says.
Personally, I applaud anyone who’s set a goal for themselves early in life, and never hesitates to make it happen. I think — and I’m not complaining — that many of us wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing right now if we had had such a mindset, and who knows where that could have taken us?
When I was young, I wanted to be Spider-Man and save downtown Buffalo, N.Y., from evil. I soon realized that that’s impossible, so I moved on. When I got to first grade, my friend and I discovered professional wrestling and got really into it. When I moved away, in third grade, I moved to a neighborhood with four other kids who loved what was then the WWF — and whose parents owned trampolines.
We would watch RAW on Monday nights, then run to the nearest trampoline after school on Tuesday and make up our own “shows.” In the winter, when something called lake effect snow would make trampolines unusable, we would lay down old gym mats in the basement and jump off of an old nightstand — the best turnbuckle we could find. We had all of the action figures and toy rings, but it was just way more fun that way.
In fifth grade, though, my best friend and I decided that we were ready to learn how to wrestle “for real,” which would start us on a career path leading straight to the top of the WWE. I loved “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, he loved Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and we both probably felt that we were some of the best workers on the neighborhood trampoline circuit.
So, we signed up for the city’s wrestling club team, which at least one of my classmates was a member of. We had no idea what we were in for, even when we had to go buy singlets and traditional gear. After all, Kurt Angle always dressed like that, and he was a main eventer.
We immediately realized that Greco-Roman wrestling looks nothing like the rasslin’ that’s done on television two or three nights a week, and that we wouldn’t ever learn proper chair-swinging form. Still, we figured that even the big stars had to start somewhere, and we trained enthusiastically for a month.
At our first big scrimmage — which the two of us were late for, thanks to a snowstorm —we finally got to put our skills to the test. The moment we had been waiting for.
We got our butts kicked.
I had made up my mind after the first match, when I took a cheap shot to the diaphragm and had the wind knocked out of me, that this was not what I had signed up for. I wanted to do what I was watching on TV every week, to take what I could already do on a trampoline and apply that in the ring —not roll around on the ground for a few minutes and hope that someone gives me more points than the other guy to win.
As for my best friend, he fared a little better than I did. But, at the end of the scrimmage, we looked at each other and knew that we were on the same page. We never went to another practice or scrimmage again, but still got invited to the end-of-season banquet. I won a rolling cooler in a raffle that night, which is still the only thing I’ve ever won in a contest.
Do I wish I would have stuck with traditional wrestling? Kind of, even though I’m about as uncoordinated as all get-out and probably wouldn’t have made it in the WWE. I’m glad I chose to explore a different career path later in my life, but my story really makes me appreciate anyone with the drive to grind it out from the beginning.