time through. By the fourth grade, I was getting pretty decent at it. The meaning of wrestling began to make sense to me. There was something about the one-on-one competition that felt tailor-made for me, even if my kid brain couldn’t explain it or fully understand why. I have two vivid memories from my childhood sports teams that led me (somewhat indirectly) to the mats. The first was with the local youth soccer team in the third grade. It was late October, and we were having typical Wisconsin weather for that time of year—rainy, shitty, cold. I wasn’t an all-star soccer player by any means,
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