The Wrestling Hall of Fame

Frick I’m tired. This doesn’t really have much to do with the region itself, but it does directly impact how much I want to write today. If you’ve ever tried to write while tired, then you’re aware it’s a mental battle between your willpower and your brain saying “sleepsleepsleepsleepsleep!” 

Instead of harping on that, though, I’ll write up this brief little entry about the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. Out here in the Midwest, one of THE sports to follow is wrestling. Not pro wrestling, although that would arguably make a more entertaining hall of fame, but traditional wrestling. In my entry on the Cresco Fitness Center I made mention of this, but junior high and high school students will be hitting the gym after it gets out, drinking protein shakes and carrying magazines featuring men and occasionally women who have zero body fat and enough muscles that you have to wonder what the people on those muscle magazine covers do when they’re not oiled up and posing. I have trouble seeing them in an office environment, and there just aren’t enough gyms in the U.S. for these people to run all of them. Somewhere out there is a computer programmer or accountant who you would not want to push around is all I’m saying.

Back to my point that wresting in Iowa is huge. Perhaps part of it can be attributed to frustrated farmboys whose constant chores and physical regimens make them want to see just how strong they are, and it’s either sanctioned wrestling tournaments or bar fights. But if you drive through Iowa, you can take the wrestling challenge—put your radio on scan, then wait until the evening. The odds of you hearing a broadcasted wrestling match are better than average. So it makes sense that Iowa would have a wrestling hall of fame.

Choosing Cresco as the location, though, is a mystery. I have yet to read of any compelling reason why the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame would be in Cresco, rather than in, say, Des Moines where that sort of monument to state pride would be more at home. I suppose it could have been decided by a lottery.

The Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame is located in the Cresco Welcome Center, a pleasant little gray brick building that is adorned with a dark polished stone bench out front, a gravel garden with concrete walkways and a short squat appearance. It’s very Midwest—nice but not ostentatious. Inside, you’ll find the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame is very short and to the point. It doesn’t contain memorabilia or recounts of famous matches, but instead focuses on the inductees. Each inductee gets a photo taken, along with a brief biography that includes exactly what they did to deserve a spot in the hall of fame. 

When you walk through it, you realize a couple of things. The first is that you generally become a member of the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame at a young age. All of the plaques have a picture of a man who is at least middle-aged, smiling congenially for the camera. Next to his picture is a photo of the same man in high school or college, dressed in full wrestling gear, in a standard wrestling ready position. Granted, I know as much about amateur wrestling as I do about nuclear fusion, but from the stance of the legs and the “ready to grapple” position of the arms, even a monkey could tell what it is. All these young men have a serious look on their faces, one that says, “I know you are the photographer, but if I wanted to I could detach your arms without much trouble.” It’s the look plenty of young men spend hours trying to cultivate. After about age 21, though, the chance to do something that earns you a spot in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame decreases dramatically. Amateur wrestling, like most sports, is a game in which only the young can succeed. There are no Brett Farves here. When you leave college, you also leave amateur wrestling. 

Secondly, the people that are in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame have got to be doing it for the love of the sport. As I walked the hallway of the hall of fame, I realized that getting to this level is beyond getting a medal. The dedication showed here comes from beyond winning medals, from beyond getting the high school glory and the attention. At that point, it’s less about winning and more about a drive to perfect oneself in a chosen art.

The Meat of the Matter

One of the first things that strikes me about the town of Cresco is its grocery store, of all things. Particularly the butcher’s section. Even though I grew up in a small town, I’m used to buying my meats the usual way—freshly wrapped in plastic, usually processed a day or two ago. Fresh-cut meat? It’s all done behind the scenes. Maybe you’ll have a deli shave off a half-pound of ham and wrap it in wax paper if you’re lucky.

But in Cresco there’s an actual butcher’s department. Yeah, you can buy plastic-wrapped meat but for the most part if you want hamburger, you ask the butcher for a pound of hamburger. If you want sausage, you get a pound of sausage, fresh-ground. It’s wonderful. I suppose it reminds me of the proverbial “Good ol’ days,” where people supposedly tipped their hat to you and said “guv’nah” as you passed by. Funnily enough, you never seemed to have to do that to anyone else when you passed by them. Maybe it was only the people who had hats who had to tip them and say “guv’nah.” There might be a statute about that sort of thing…

                 

Anyway, back to the butcher’s shop. I think part of the reason I like it is because I feel in control. It’s like buying vegetables at a grocery store, where you can choose the number of groceries you want and check them for freshness before buying them. With some exceptions, like pre-bagged apples and oranges, you get to test out the product before you buy it. It’s the same with meat. Plus, seeing fresh meat laid out has a very different feel than buying a pre-wrapped steak that’s already been cut and weighed. Want a pound of strip steak? You don’t have to take the pound-and-a-half or pound-and-a-quarter or whatever the supermarket has decided is the right cut. You get strip steak that weighs a pound.

                 

Maybe I’m making too much of this, but I don’t think so. It reminds me of delis, and the assurance that you’re getting something fresh. Something that was homemade. Plus, the butchers are pretty nice. They’re so willing to help that they usually ask me what I want as I’m browsing their selection. At some point, someone is going to write a comedy about an earnest salesperson and someone who shops by browsing, and it is going to be a blockbuster. At least a decent off-Broadway play.

                 

The butcher’s shop is something incredible, something that has all but vanished. When I go into a Target or Wal-Mart, there’s a decent selection of meats, but it’s all impersonal, all business-like. If your goal is to sell as much product as possible, that’s fine, but I like talking with the butcher, asking him or her about cuts of meat or if there’s a suitable substitute. Try asking the Wal-Mart employee trying to restock the cereal shelves whether flank steak is acceptable stew meat sometime and see how far you get.

                 

So if you come by Cresco, IA swing by the local grocery store. Trust me, you don’t need me to tell you the name. It’s the only grocery store in town.

First Post

Bill Bryson is a darned fine writer. He’s also the inspiration for this blog, so if you don’t like what you see, blame him. The second inspiration is my history with small towns.

I grew up in a small rural town in Michigan whose population consisted of about 3,000 people. When I was in high school, kids used to talk about “cruising the town,” which took all of two minutes. Three, if they decided to hang out in the parking lot of the local supermarket. Still, I had fun. My dad is an avid outdoorsman, and so I learned all about hunting, fishing, camping, and how to enjoy myself just by going for a walk in the country. Of course, being one of those intellectual geeky types, I’d also go into the local library and check out a book or two. Or see if the local supermarket had any new comic books. And that was pretty much it.

By the time I’d graduated high school I was more than ready to leave. When I went to college I lived in an honest-to-god city, with multi-level buildings and sirens going past my dorm room at midnight and everything a city is supposed to have—including book stores and game stores, which have since become two of my favorite addictions. Not to mention I just like living in a city, having an apartment and being part of what writer Neal Stephenson called the biomass.

Now, however, I’m back in a small town. This is mostly due to my desire to make it as a writer. Unbeknownst to me, you have to either have a job while becoming a writer or starve gracefully until you’ve proven you can write and some company takes you on when you can successfully present the façade of a seasoned professional. I chose the latter route, and after only five or six years of living on ramen was picked up by a company located in northeastern Iowa. Here’s the irony, though—the job is in a small town. I’ve got two cities each an hour away from me and a pretty decent-sized town about a half-hour to the east, but for the most part my work and my free time is spent in a small town. I pretty much resigned myself to the crippling boredom that only a small town can provide unless I traveled extensively on the weekends. Then I read Bill Bryson’s excellent book, “The Lost Continent,” in which he explores several small Midwestern towns. He writes about them with humor, but also with the understanding that small towns are different somehow. The things that affect people here are different than in cities. They’re smaller and more personal. Benefit dinner posters get put up in the windows of the local fast food eateries—the electronic town sign posts church get-togethers and VFW happenings. You get to see some quirks that would make city dwellers cock an eyebrow. Small towns may also contain surprises, things you just wouldn’t expect or people you might not expect. After all, Brad Pitt had to come from somewhere, right?

So that’s the reason for this blog. My intention, barring any unforeseen circumstances, is to write about this area, explain what makes it unique. If nothing else, it beats sitting around all day watching reruns of Mythbusters.