(Adapted from "A NEW AMERICAN FAMILY: A Love Story," Published by the University of Arizona Press, 2011)
(continuing…)
Finally we come to John’s story, which is characterized by extremes in every direction. Pat and I knew from John’s infancy that his extraordinary energy would have to be channeled constructively, and fortunately his natural capabilities enabled him to excel on many fronts, most notably in the sport of wrestling. John was winning state championships in New Jersey for his age group and weight class soon after his introduction to the sport as a member of the community wrestling team Pat and I coached in Park Ridge, New Jersey when he was a boy. He continued his winning ways in high school, winning a Pennsylvania state high school championship in his junior year. John was a fierce competitor; he took on every challenge and almost always won his matches. The ultimate indignity for a wrestler is to lose his match by a pin, and in all his years of wrestling John was never pinned in competition.
Despite all the triumphant moments that I savored as an old wrestler cheering for his son, the most memorable of John’s wrestling matches tells more about his character than about his athletic abilities.
Before our Park Ridge youth wrestling team scheduled a match with a team from another town, the coaches conferred in detail, trying to arrange a positive wrestling experience for every kid who wanted to participate. We didn’t keep team scores, but individual matches for dozens of kids were won or lost.
A compassionate coach in a neighboring town asked if our 75-pound wrestler would wrestle a mentally challenged boy who had never wrestled before, just to give him a positive experience. Our wrestler agreed to do it until he saw the boy, who was visibly clumsy in his movements and obviously slow in other ways too. With the gym full of people, our 75-pound wrestler couldn’t face the embarrassment of going out there with “that retard.” John had just finished his match at 65 pounds and he volunteered to wrestle again.
The match that followed was a beautiful demonstration of the purest spirit of our son as a competitor. John made the wrestling feel real to his opponent, falling down with the boy on top, rolling around for dramatic effect, and finally going to his back to be pinned for the first (and only) time in his life. Both boys had a great experience that day. I have never been more proud of my son. His compassion for that mentally handicapped boy is particularly meaningful to me in retrospect; when John much later in life became mentally impaired himself, he was not always shown the same respect.
After his dramatic success at the state high school wrestling tournament in the spring of 1986, the bottom dropped out for John. As his proud parents, we felt that the bottom had dropped out of our lives as well. Always vigilant, Pat discovered a marijuana pipe in John’s back pocket, which we found shocking. John was too dedicated an athlete to smoke cigarettes and initially he seemed no more likely than I had been to get into trouble with alcohol. We did however find disturbing John’s drinking alone, using alcohol as a sedative, as in the following example: One afternoon Pat appropriated from John a large glass of “grape juice” that he was drinking in the living room while watching television, endangering the new carpet; she was astonished to discover that the glass held red wine.
When Pat found the marijuana pipe in John’s jeans, she confronted him angrily. He seemed unconcerned. John accepted our insistence on counseling, and he left his counselors puzzled. They saw John as a good kid with fine values, but he persisted in using alcohol and marijuana. In retrospect, we see that John’s psychologist offered a clue that we did not catch; he said that there was something going on within John that he could not identify.
John escalated within a few months to snorting cocaine, which seemed to the people who thought they knew John as totally out of character. When Pat and I took John for the first time to a local hospital for drug detoxification, we both came down the elevator in tears.
John spent thirty days in an upscale rehabilitation center under the professional care of psychiatrists, nurses, social workers and counselors. Within a week of his return he was using again. He spent ninety days in a tougher environment in Erie, Pennsylvania that was essentially run by recovering addicts, and he returned home with every promise of staying away from drugs. He re-entered high school, led his team to the state tournament and graduated with a wrestling scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. He entered Pitt for the summer session to begin his freshman year and when the wrestling season began he made the starting lineup immediately. He seemed to be on his way to the realization of all his promise. However, before Christmas he relapsed again. The Pitt wrestling team rescued him from the dangerous streets of Pittsburgh, but his promising wrestling career was over. Pat and I took him back to our home in the Lehigh Valley for further treatment.
(To be continued in subsequent blogs.)
Peter Likins
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