Coleman Ruiz

And a few kids were going to junior college and coming back and wrestling in college and coming back.

There were three or four guys I remember specifically in eighth grade because I started, at least in the junior high ranks, I started to take off my second year.

These guys would abuse me in the wrestling room.

They were seniors in high school.

I was 112 pounds or 132 pounds my freshman year.

And they would just, in my eighth grade year, and they would just abuse me.

Define abuse.

In all the legal, normal wrestling ways.

Like, there's the...

Wrestling gets broken up, obviously, by weight.

You got the heavyweights on one end of the room, the lightweights on the other end of the room, and the young kids stay with the young kids for the most part.

And a few of these guys would drag me down to the varsity end and I would wrestle with the middleweights and they would beat the shit out of me.

And...

Eventually, you get to the point where you're like, fuck this.

I had enough.

And that's when sort of things started to turn.

But I think that wrestlers are different.

And my peer group, one or two of my really good friends wrestled.

But most of them played other sports.

And so – but in every sense of the word, life got better for me because of that sport.