Wrestling with being a caregiver
My two sons are paragons of physical fitness, deservedly, if ordinately, proud of their rippling muscles, attained by countless hours of training and body building.
I, on the other hand, have always been a flabby wimp.
When I was a boy of about six, back in Georgetown in around 1958, I wanted rippling muscles more than life itself and wrote away for mail-order body-building devices. I wanted to look like the wrestlers whom we watched religiously on piped-in American broadcasts: Dick”Bulldog” Brower; Lord Athol Layton; “The Sheik”; “Sweet Daddy” Siki; Gorgeous George; Bruno Sammartino…hero or villain, they were all titans to me.
I wanted to pump iron to sculpt my guns, for purposes of bulking, of hulking up.
I kept a scrapbook, in which I sketched all of my heroes or enclosed their clippings.
In my basement at 7 Elizabeth Street, my parents kindly placed an old mattress where we aspiring WWF champions could practice our techniques.
I will never forget the peppery smell of sweat that pervaded this den of inequity where we emulated our tv idols, trying out all of their acrobatic kicks and crushing holds… injuring ourselves in the process, much to our great chagrin and mystification, for the guys on tv never seemed the worse for wear.
https://www.thesportster.com/wild-wrestling-characters-gimmicks-1960s-forgotten/
A few years later, Georgetown played host to a vast array of professional wrestlers, the dudes we had only seen on tv.
http://www.thegeorgetownvault.com/memories/wrestling
Stealing money from my rare coin collection, I bought ringside seats.
What a disillusioning experience! All the smoke and mirrors, all the pulled strings and devious fakery were clear for all to see.
Believing in the integrity of wrestling, it turned out, was like believing in Santa Claus.
Wrestling was really fixed, except in our basement…
( My Slovak father-in-law never accepted this verdict: From the time that he arrived in Canada as a refugee in 1968, his favourite North American broadcast by far, for which he always allocated his very valuable weekend time, was wrestling. Eyes bulging, Father writhed and flailed as he watched, imitating the colossal struggles unfolding before his eyes; he cheered on the heroes and disparaged the villains in paroxysms of love and hate. When family members tried to convince him that wrestling was fake, Father staunchly defended its verisimilitude. “To neni vôbec pravda”… “Ach, I not can believe you,” he would assert.)
I Am Your Father – Robert McBryde
Wrestling – fixed or otherwise – haunted me throughout my high school days.
My gym teachers, including a terrifying fiend known as “Madman,” had no patience with non-muscular, under-achieving wusses. Contemptuous mockery and physical intimidation ruled their pedagogical waves. They used to routinely slam weaklings and ne’er-do-wells into lockers. So I quaked and quailed, spending sleepless nights before each gym class, in anticipation of absolute humiliation.
In Grade 10, I got my first big break. The fresh-faced boys of our homeroom class did gym with a group from the tech program, where the hard-bitten guys all looked about 30 years old, with whiskered countenances and rippling muscles. They drove vehicles adorned with oversized phallic fins to their daily encounter with higher learning where they were being primed for the workforce in a short couple of years. When wrestling was the gym flavour of the month, each student had a partner with whom to sweat and grunt. My counterpart, whom I secretly dubbed Gronk, was a tech guy built like a Mack truck. In our inaugural skirmish, he picked me up as if handling a wriggling crustacean and flung me to the cement-like mat, totally shattering my right elbow. In spite of the blinding pain, my eyes filled with tears of unadulterated gratitude. “Thank you! Thank you!” I stammered to disconsolate Gronk as I was led out of the gym by the school nurse. I already knew that the injury was so serious that I would never have to do phys ed, let alone wrestling, ever again.
For many more images to go with this story, please click here:
Them’s the breaks: Industrial arts and gym classes, London, Ontario 1964-1969 – Robert McBryde
Nowadays, as the primary caregiver for my wife, who is afflicted with terminal brain cancer, I’m actually developing the musculature that enables me to hoist her up and to lug her about.
And I’ve learned that life’s titanic struggles, with which we must wrestle so valiantly, are really fixed.
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
