Ray Brinzer

In the spring of 1986, when I was 15, my coach, Gus DeAugustino, took me down to the “Dapper Dan” coaches’ clinic in Pittsburgh. They always got some of our top wrestlers to do the instruction, and that year one of the featured clinicians was Nate Carr, who’d just won the World Cup for us in freestyle a month or so before.

After the instruction, Nate put on a demonstration: a long line of people formed to wrestle him, and he began taking them down, one after the other. He and I were of very similar weight (though very different proportions), so I got in line.

As I waited, I watched him. Nate was about 165 pounds of solid muscle: short, broad, and very explosive. Some of his challengers were considerably bigger than he was, but only a few lasted longer than 10 seconds or so. Now for my age I was a decent wrester; I’d just taken 5th in the state, which is fairly unusual for a freshman. Still, the problem was clear: Nate was faster, stronger, more mature, and a better technician than I was. I was going to get killed.

So I studied his wrestling, and tried to come up with a plan. Read more »

I didn’t realize until the other day: the junior world team is training with the Olympic team, so I get to coach the Olympic training camp. w00t!

Should be fun. I fly out Sunday morning.

Since I was a child, I, like so many others, have been the victim of a sinister conspiracy.

The bad flavors of freezer pops always outnumber the good ones. Are we to assume that the people making these things don’t know this? That they actually believe that banana and coconut are as good as lime and cherry, or that they don’t notice how many more of the former they’re making than the latter?

Coconut. Really, who thought that was a good idea?

Don’t mind me, though. I’m behind on posts, and I set out to try to do one a day. What you want for nothing, a rubber biscuit?

After fiddling with a few alternatives, I’ve enabled threaded comments via the WordPress Thread Comment plugin. The result seems very adequate, thus far, though I’ll keep tweaking it.

A “threaded” discussion, by the way, is one in which you can reply directly to specific replies, rather than only to the original message. The alternative is a “flat” discussion, where all replies are listed chronologically. I hate flat discussion fora — I find them messy and confusing.

One of the first things one learns, wrestling in the United States, is that the full nelson is illegal. It wasn’t always, but it has been for a very long time. We consider it to be so dangerous that, when a wrestler has a half-nelson, and the far hand so much as touches his opponent’s head beneath the armpit, action stops, and a penalty point is awarded (or worse, if it’s not the first or second such penalty).

Interestingly, however, the hold is legal in both freestyle and Greco-Roman, where the rules refer to it as a “double nelson”. There are several limitations:

• They must be executed from the side without the use of the legs on any part of the opponent’s body
• They’re illegal in women’s wrestling
• In the United States, they’re illegal at the Cadet and lower age groups

Now, from the time that I started freestyle and Greco, in 1985, I have neither seen nor even heard of an injury resulting from a full nelson. I’ll try to remember to ask around USA Wrestling next week, and see if they have any statistics on this… but I’ll bet the incidence of injury is close to non-existent.

Requiring that the hold be applied from the side, without leg involvement, really is vital. I strongly suspect that the injuries which prompted the original rule change in folkstyle occurred with the top wrestler riding directly from behind (sometimes, likely enough, with a figure-four on the body), forcing the bottom man’s head directly under. Even a roll-and-stack situation, which would be much more likely to occur in folkstyle than in freestyle, would hardly be different than what is currently legal (and safe) with a chicken-wing and half, or near-wrist and half.

The evidence of many years of freestyle and Greco-Roman should be enough to make us reconsider our folkstyle rules. If the full nelson could safely be made legal under limited circumstances, and called potentially dangerous under the rest, it would be a big improvement to the sport, lessening the influence of the referee and allowing action to continue with fewer trivial interruptions.

I believe a trial year for a legal full nelson at the college level is justified. Whether such a change should ever make it to the high school level, I’m undecided. But there’s strong reason to at least test the waters.

Pointing out that Colonel Jeff Cooper was a good writer shouldn’t be necessary; however I cannot ever recall meeting someone who knew of him that was not a gun enthusiast. There is a great deal of interest in his work beyond the nature and use of small arms (on which he was one of the world’s great experts): Cooper’s writing is about competence, confidence, self-reliance, and courage.

Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries are an easy start. They comprise 13 years of monthly newsletters, each a series of short reflections, and are available for free online. They’re exceptionally interesting, and follow no particular order — picking a random starting point and spending a bit of spare time reading is always rewarding.

It’s difficult to choose a characteristic quotation; most of the entries are quotable. So I’ll conclude with one which will be useful to me a few years hence:

We can debate at length about a boy’s first gun. There are all sorts of opinions about this and many of them have merit, but in my view, the kid’s first firearm should be a single-shot 22 fitted with aperture sights and a butt-cuff. If the boy is a respectable citizen, intelligent and well disciplined, he may be turned loose with a single-shot 22 (by himself) with perfect safety, as long as he has memorized The Four Rules. I do not think there is any reason to assume that all children are idiots. That many of them are is more of a reflection upon their parents than upon themselves.

Circumstances required us to be back in New York today, so we made the drive last night.

Near midnight, when we were nearly done packing, Felabi reminded me of the Echinacea, or “purple coneflower”, we were given by a parent at the Angry Fish picnic the night before. I hadn’t planted it, yet, and it seemed too large to survive long in the plastic pot it came in, so out I went.

Our yard was pitch dark. The moon was full the night before, but it wasn’t going to rise for awhile yet, so I went back inside to look for my flashlight. No luck. Instead of my spiffy little light, powered by nine white LEDs, I found Johannes’ green triceratops. I squeezed the handle, it roared, and its mouth dropped open to emit a weak beam. And again, out I went.

(Stock photo from Little Tykes)

I found the spade, and headed for the raised stone garden ring in the middle of our yard. The light went out. It seems that the critter has a timer, so that kids don’t kill the batteries the first time they leave it on. So I squeezed the handle again, it roared, and I fetched the purple coneflower.

Now, there wasn’t a good place to put the dinosaur, so I shoveled one-handed, holding the light in the other. I dug the hole, set the flower in, centered it, and filled the dirt back around the roots; all the while the triceratops watched, roaring every two minutes. I had the amusing feeling that he was my familiar, and we were after “root of hemlock digged i’ th’ dark”. I should probably name him.

Mission accomplished. As a bonus, I saw a firefly… one lone fellow, first to the party this year, signaling to no one in the wet grass.

Someone recently pointed out to me that a friend of mine, whom I have not seen seen in some years, is now an artist (in particular, a photographer) with some interesting stuff online. One of her projects is called, “Please Mark Only One“; it expresses her annoyance, as a lady of mixed race, with forms which require her to choose a single ethnic designation.

Now, my own heritage is an exotic mix of German and Irish, with dark hints of Welsh, English, and even stranger things lurking in the family tree, so, naturally, I sympathize. But my greatest frustration with such forms is that the option I crave is never there — for the group with which I most strongly identify is, “None of Your Damned Business”. And I would very much like to let the folks who collect such forms know that.

In fact, that’s the missing option on most of the long-form census (PDF) questions here in the US. Does my household have flushing toilets? How did I get to work last week? Am I able to climb a flight of stairs? I should be only too happy to tell you, Dear Reader, if you asked nicely and didn’t threaten to fine me if I declined to answer. But I’d like to cordially invite the various levels of government, quasi-governmental entities, et cetera to go pound salt.

Anyway, though, the artist is an exceptionally nice young lady, and it’s good to see what she’s been up to.

The cherry tree in our yard is full of fruit. It’s somewhat hard to photograph, however, as most angles (and all good ones) present green-on-green.

The cherries are still very sour. I’m hoping they’re good to eat before I leave for Colorado Springs, for the Junior World Team training camp at the end of the month.

I have to think the odds are against it, though.

Back in college I was an enthusiastic potter, and spent a lot of time around the ceramic studio. One day we had a workshop, featuring a very famous artist (within the field; ceramic artists aren’t known to the general public). Looking him up now, I find that the fellow is classified as an “abstract expressionist”, and that he’s since died.

Now clay is a demanding medium, in the sense that you can’t just do whatever you want with it and expect it to work… and this fellow really was exceptionally skilled. He used a lot of clever tricks to get the effects he wanted — for instance, he’d trace a crooked line in a thick slab of clay with a fettling knife, and then press the slab over wooden pins, causing seemingly-natural cracks to erupt just where he wanted them.

The resulting works were extremely rough, asymmetric, chunky renditions of what would once have been utilitarian pieces. One of the important aesthetic ideas was not to hide the character of the clay, but to emphasize it. Machines, these days, produce much better traditional pottery than a potter can, so that sort of thing is dead if you take the standpoint that art expresses ideas, and needs to make progress.

After about two hours, I slipped out as quietly as possible, and wound up laying down in the grass along the riverbank outside the studio. I watched the clouds, for a bit, and found them a great deal more pleasant and interesting than the art being produced inside. I decided that this made for a good test: if a piece of art isn’t more interesting than looking at the sky, it isn’t worth my attention.

The bar is set somewhat higher at night, when the stars are out.