The Legend of Enos Hooper

Posted by Jew from Jersey
13 July 2025

Behind Hickman High School stood a small corrugated metal building with no windows. At times it got as hot in there in the winter as in the summer. This was the Hickman wrestling room, where boys from the town of Hickman had been wrestling for generations. The walls were covered in graffiti, some of it humorous, some it extolling the virtues of hard work in fulfilling one’s goals. But the largest and most prominently placed display was the wall of fame listing all of the wrestlers from Hickman who had won state championships. It was several dozen names long, going all the way back to WWII. Some names appeared more than once, for those wrestlers who had been champions in multiple years. But the name that appeared more than any other on that list was, and I’m pretty sure still is, the name of Enos Hooper.

Enos Hooper’s was also the last name on the list. The first time I saw that name was when my son first started wrestling. He was in first grade then. At the time, Enos Hooper’s most recent championship victory was maybe five years in the past, the letters of that last line on the list still freshly painted. As the years went by, the paint faded somewhat and the walls got yellower. My son wrestled on the Hickman team for seven years. During all that time, no new lines were added to that list.

Every year, new kids would join the team, usually in the youngest age group. But regardless of age, a kid new to the sport would typically lose almost every bout for months on end before he began to figure things out and managed to eke out a few wins. Losing in wrestling is particularly unpleasant because in addition to the ordinary taste of loserdom, one is also subject to being physically dominated, turned over on one’s back, and pinned to the mat against one’s will, all in plain sight of a crowd of onlookers that includes one’s friends, parents and other relatives, and assorted adults. Physical injuries are rarer than you would imagine. Most of the tears cried and exclamations of pain heard in junior wrestling events are due to what is undoubtably the most common type of damage incurred in this sport: the fractured ego.

But the parents are the worst. Any kid who wrestles has a multi-generational brood of relatives assembled around the mat all getting very worked up and barking conflicting instructions at the child. And through this cacophony and emotional pressure, the kid is supposed to follow instructions from his coach, who is required to be there per junior wrestling regulations.

The moms are the most outwardly emotional about their babies. A shirt often sold at such events reads: “Wrestling mom, can’t hide my crazy.” Another, styled after the iconic “Keep calm and carry on” posters, reads: “Can’t keep calm. I’m a wrestling mom.”

But anyone who’s seen youth wrestling up close for any length of time knows it’s really all about the dads. Even for the few girls who wrestle, it’s about the dads. The dads are emotional, too, and not just in the knee-jerk way out of concern over the physical well-being of their progeny. For the dads, it’s about their souls. Theirs, and the kids’. For the dads, it’s like they’re reliving their entire lives. And for the dads, the drama doesn’t end when the bout ends. The moms will hug their baby, relieved that he’s safe and sound, but for the dads, the reckoning has just begun.

Each dad has his own way of making a way bigger deal about the outcome of each bout than could possibly be necessary. Some will attempt to explain to the kid how he could have won. Some reprimand the boy in public for losing, as if the kid didn’t feel bad enough already. Some sign him up for all kinds of clubs and camps or anything else they think will give him an advantage. Some strategize about what competitions to enter him in to get him better exposure. Some have already crafted specific college scholarship plans. I even heard of one boy who was made to repeat the eighth grade solely so he could rack up a more impressive wrestling record by being that crucial extra year into puberty ahead of everyone else in the pre-high school division.

Only about half of new wrestlers will return in the following year. The ones that do eventually improve and some become very good wrestlers. But almost all start out weak and have to go through that same trial by fire their first year.

A wrestling bout can be over in as little as ten seconds, but wrestling events typically go on for many hours. The result is that you spend the day watching hundreds of bouts, although your child may only get on the mat once or twice for a minute or two each time. Junior wrestling includes all pre-high school age groups. Because the number of wrestlers in each age cohort decreases sharply with each year of age, you can expect to spend most of the day watching very young children wrestle.

During one of the last junior wrestling tournaments I remember attending in Hickman, in the high school gym, I remember watching a very small boy on the Hickman team lose repeatedly. It was a common sight. My son and his friends were much older by this point and I didn’t know the names of the many younger children on the team. There were so many of them and most them would not be back the next year anyway. This boy was six or maybe seven years old and quite small. All day, every time I looked up for any reason, I seemed to see this same kid getting beat.

The fourth or fifth time I saw him lose, I realized there was something unusual here: there were no relatives crowding around the mat when he wrestled. No one was yelling or goading him. Only the coach sat in his corner. When he lost, the coach would speak a few words to him as was customary, then move on to coach other kids.

But at some point I noticed that someone was watching this unskilled and quiet child. The boy’s observer was as quiet as he was and like him was of small stature, a man not yet thirty, leaning against the folded bleachers on the far wall of the gym. It was strange to see someone watching so intently and yet not approaching any closer to the mat. But watching intently he was, examining every move on the mat with keen interest. Even stranger was that he was following a wrestling bout so closely and yet remained so completely silent. Not only did he not utter a word or make a sound, he didn’t even reveal any type of body language. Who else but a parent would watch a child so dedicatedly? And how could any parent not involuntary rush to be closer to the mat and not flinch and jerk about to see his child mauled so? But this man made not the slightest sound or motion, even as all of his attention was absorbed by the action on the mat.

At some point in the day I saw the young loser’s name on the roster: Enos Hooper, Jr. Then I understood how that man could maintain such a cool and disciplined distance: He knew what it was to be a multi-year state champion. And then I understand why every other dad in town shouted and gesticulated, and couldn’t control himself from acting out in public when his son lost: Because none of them had ever been champions of anything and they knew that they never would be.