NYTimes
At 17 years old, Preston Hill is known around the Fresno area as an accomplished wrestler, a leader of his high school team, the Buchanan Bears, and a potential candidate for a college scholarship in the sport he loves.
But over the past several months, Preston has been battling another opponent, the Fresno County district attorney, who has charged him with a bizarre crime: using a wrestling move to sexually assault a teammate.
According to a police report, during a July practice Preston used a maneuver informally known as a “butt drag” — which involves grabbing the haunch of an opponent to gain leverage — to roughly and intimately assault a smaller, younger wrestler on his team in retaliation for a supposed affront. [...]
At 17 years old, Preston Hill is known around the Fresno area as an accomplished wrestler, a leader of his high school team, the Buchanan Bears, and a potential candidate for a college scholarship in the sport he loves.
But over the past several months, Preston has been battling another opponent, the Fresno County district attorney, who has charged him with a bizarre crime: using a wrestling move to sexually assault a teammate.
According to a police report, during a July practice Preston used a maneuver informally known as a “butt drag” — which involves grabbing the haunch of an opponent to gain leverage — to roughly and intimately assault a smaller, younger wrestler on his team in retaliation for a supposed affront. [...]
I was on my high school wrestling team all four years. Generally speaking, the more experienced & honed the wrestler, the more physically invasive a character he tended to be. While there were a few well-bred, upstanding exceptions, that rule held remarkably well across the population at our school, and was my impression as well of the other teams we came to interact with.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I believe that according to the letter of wrestling propriety, every wrestler was advised (although not at all mandated) to wear a cup, in part to prevent a move from the standard repertoire being used against them that involved "stacking" the bottom opponent via a rather invasive gesture. "Stacking," by the way, is when the opponent is pinned to the mat with his legs off the ground, so that his torso is essentially stacked onto his shoulderblades, pinning him & ending the match. The move in question, whose name after two decades now escapes me, is one that none of us expected to occur or wanted to execute. (Hence none of us ever actually wore cups, even though we knew that technically we were supposed to.) It involved reaching down from behind & lifting the bottom opponent by pressuring his groin upward with one's hand. If uncupped, he would rise quite easily. It was--then, at least--entirely legitimate, albeit difficult & clumsy to execute (not to mention repulsive). In hindsight, it seems shocking that it was legal, but who'd question such a thing?