During the fall of 1963, the captain of our wrestling team changed my life.
I was a junior in a North Carolina high school. Ours was a textile town, owned largely by one man, and many of us expected to begin our working lives at one of his mills. My mother hemmed washcloths in Plant 1. We lived in a house built for his workers.
I was a boy trying to find his path. I was not an academically minded student, so I looked to sports as a place where I might make my mark in our small-town high school.
Earlier that fall, the head football coach cut me from the team because, he said, there were too many players. I had been on the wrestling team the previous year as a substitute, so I joined the team again.
But the more we practiced, the more I thought about quitting. I didn’t want to spend another season as a sub. Plus, as often happens to boys that age, I had become smitten with a girl. Her name was Elaine.
I had already been cut from football, feared another season of perceived failure in wrestling, and I pinned for Elaine.
Worst of all, my family didn’t own a car. So I made what seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision for a teenage boy. I’d quit the wrestling team, get an after-school job, and save enough money to buy a car. Then I’d have the means to ask Elaine out on a date.
Well, none of that happened.
AI-created with wrestling grapic courtesy West Genesee Wrestling Alumni/Friends
David Crawford and I were sitting on a concrete floor outside the wrestling team’s practice room. David was our team captain and, by far, our best wrestler. But he was more than our leader in title. We respected him as a wrestler, and respected him even more as a person.
So it made sense that I would go to David before I went to Coach Mauldin. I told him what I had in mind. When I finished, David looked at me and said four words: “But we need you.”
Of course, he said more than that. But those four words are what I heard, and (now) 60 years later, I still remember those four words. Few life moments have the power to change a life, but for me, that moment did. I stayed on the team. We were undefeated.
David graduated that year and went on to Pfeiffer College, where he wrestled. During my senior year, our wrestling team had another successful season, and David kept encouraging me. Because of his influence, I applied to and was accepted at a small state college in eastern North Carolina that David had told me about. It had a wrestling team, too. Our plan was simple: I would earn good grades, wrestle for a year, and then transfer to Pfeiffer to wrestle with David.
But my interests changed, and I decided to remain where I was. Still, David and I stay in touch, primarily through Coach Mauldin.
David and I never discussed that conversation outside the wrestling room. I never asked him why he said those four words. I never knew whether he was simply being kind or (as I have always suspected), he genuinely meant them. All I know is how those words made me feel at that moment in my life. Needed.
No one outside my mother and siblings had ever told me—or made me feel—that I was needed. But here was our team captain, someone I admired and respected, listening to me and then telling me that the team needed me. What more could a poor boy from Mill Hill have needed to hear?
Yesterday, Ron, another teammate from those years, called to tell me that David passed away earlier this week.
As I think about David, those years, and the lives our teammates and we eventually built as adults, I find myself remembering so many things.
–The practices in our small wrestling room.
–The excitement of competing against teams from other small towns like Thomasville.
–The bus rides home, with David leading us in singing “Moon River” and other songs.
–His countless acts of kindness.
–His quiet leadership.
And, most of all, those four words said to a struggling young wrestler who was trying to figure out where he belonged: “But we need you.”
David’s influence did not end when that wrestling season ended. It continued through my education, my career, my relationships and the many years that followed. Four words spoken by a teenage wrestling captain more than six decades ago still live inside me.
David is gone, but his words remain. He changed my life, and as long as I live, so too will his memory.
