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volunteers to sell them hot dogs, pizza, pretzels, donuts, popcorn, chips, or bagels with cream cheese. Their fathers were either elated or furious, some wearing XXL T-shirts stretched taut like drum covers over their bowling ball bellies. Mothers wore T-shirts with photo likenesses of their wrestlers.
    In that bewitching morning hour before the wrestling began, mayhem reigned on the mats with dozens of wrestlers running in circles, jumping on each other, having chicken fights, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running in place, playing tag—all of them all at once. “Eye of the Tiger” was usually playing over the loudspeakers; it was the unofficial wrestler’s theme song. If you could’ve harnessed the raw energy in the gym, you could’ve saved the planet.
    Parents chatty and amicable in the early morning settled into their stakeout sections, club teams seated with their wrestlers in the stands, stepping over McDonald’s bags and Dunkin’ Donuts boxes.The most coveted spots were in the top row against the gym wall for back support. Those wall slots filled up quickly on two sides of the gym. Some of us brought the inexpensive portable stadium seats we bought at Home Depot. If you were lucky, you might be able to find an electrical outlet for your laptop. Chances were there was no Wi-Fi. I brought dozens of papers to grade for my freshman journalism class and, in December, stacks of Christmas cards to address. I brought to-do lists, newspapers, and magazines to read. I created current events quizzes.
    “Save me a spot,” I said to Caryn, who had three wrestling sons of her own, two out of her three boys the same ages as my boys. Our youngest sons, Colin and Sam, would later be inseparable best friends.
    Usually, the matches were in a Chicago suburb perhaps thirty miles away and far outside my comfort zone; finding the high school only with the help of Yahoo! directions. Without a GPS, using only printed instructions, I often had to retrace my steps after mistaking a right for a left, trying desperately to remember where I spotted the last Starbucks in which strip mall near which bank. Sometimes I thought MapQuest and Yahoo! made intentional errors in the end of a trip—a left instead of a right, a north instead of a south, Glenbard East High School instead of Glenbard North—just to force drivers to pull into a gas station or 7-Eleven to get help from a clerk, who was hopefully over sixteen and knew the names of the major roads. I once asked a young clerk where the local high school was, and he replied that he didn’t have any idea. I asked someone in the parking lot on my way back to my car, and she motioned that it was a block away.
    “What are you doing Sunday? Can you meet for an hour for coffee or something?” my sister Madeleine would ask.
    “No; I’m watching wrestling.”
    The eight or so youth tournaments each season were on Sundays because high school gyms were used for team varsity wrestling and basketball on Saturdays. Like Weldon before him, Brendan was part of Little Huskies, an offshoot of the Oak Park and River Forest High School team and one of the organized clubs that served as feeder pipelines for high school wrestling programs across the state and thecountry. Every week about a dozen to twenty young boys from our team wrestled, many of them the tail end of wrestling families with older brothers in the sport.
    Few champions started the sport their freshman year of high school; many had been wrestling since grade school, some since kindergarten in these Sunday youth wrestling tournaments. Plenty of these boys attended supplemental private wrestling training programs twice a week all year; at some the cost of one-on-one training was one hundred dollars an hour. For groups of two to three young wrestlers, it could cost sixty dollars an hour per wrestler. I could never afford to send the boys to these elite team programs—I had neither the time nor the money to get them there. But plenty of