Wrestling with Life: Stories of My Life Immersed in the Sport of Wrestling

By Phil Nowick

Phil shares his personal ecstasy and anguish in learning the lessons of life through wrestling. The vivid and intimate descriptions of his hilarious and sometimes terrifying experiences keep you wanting to read more about his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456758189

Phil Nowick

Phil grew-up with his identical twin brother, Dave, loving wrestling. He excelled in wrestling from his early school years, through high school, and in to college at Stanford University. While working as an investment banker on Wall Street and in Denver, Colorado, he found that he used many of the same skills and life lessons in his career that had helped him win at wrestling. Phil shares some of his observations of life in the insightful accounts of his humorous and amazing adventures while growing up and then later in his life while escaping from the devastation of 9-11 at Ground Zero.

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AuthorHouse™ LLC

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© 2011, 2014 Phil Nowick. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/25/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5818-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5819-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5820-2 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904889

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Story 1.   Items of Evidence

Early Years—Discovering Wrestling

Story 2.   The Kid

First Taste of Victory

Story 3.   The Astros Incident: The Lost Story

Story 4.   Welcome to New Mexico

High School Debacle

Story 5.   The Greatest State Tournament Ever

Rising as the Phoenix

Story 6.   Bad Karma and MoonPies

College Identity Switching

Story 7.   (Wake-up) Call 911

Escaping Disaster at Ground Zero

Epilogue

Eulogy

Thoughts Before Tulsa National Tournament, January, 2011

Postscript and Photographs

INTRODUCTION

I remember sitting in my hotel room in Tulsa, Oklahoma in Janurary, 2010. It was just before the finals of the Tulsa Nationals, perhaps the toughest and most prestigious kids wrestling tournament in the world. My phone lit up and it was just the person I wanted to talk to, my identical twin brother, Phil Nowick. Aglow in the accomplishment of our tiny wrestling club, I didn’t know what to tell him first. We had two wrestlers in the finals and a half a dozen medalists. Moreover, heads were beginning to turn: A wrestling club from Colorado was now standing toe to toe with the clubs from the traditionally more powerful Midwestern and East Coast states. We belonged!

My brother’s voice was solemn. He did not ask how I was or how our club fared in the tournament. Phil had been unable to make the trip to Tulsa because of an angry full body rash and what everyone assumed (or hoped) was a bad viral illness. My cancer is back, Phil stated plainly. I got a scan and it’s in my liver this time. I don’t have a rash. I’m jaundiced because the cancer’s blocking my bile ducts. I guess you know what that means.

I did know what that meant. I am a physician. The numbers, statistics and survival rates of colon cancer had long ago been drilled into my head. Phil had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2008. After surgery to remove the tumor, the initial rounds of chemotherapy had been promising. In 2009, Phil’s scans and blood tests for tumor markers had been 100% negative for the better part of a year. It meant we needed a miracle.

I told no one. I went to the tournament that night and coached the finals. The team wrestled brilliantly. Two champions! Everything Phil had worked for, the love and energy he had poured into his young athletes had come to fruition.

That night I lay in bed, barely able to move under the gravity of what my brother had told me. We had an uphill battle ahead and a gruesome one at that. There would be no promises, but we would do what a lifetime in the monastic path of wrestling had taught us: keep fighting.

Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness a vision appeared to me. A figure somewhat reminiscent of the character Q from Star Trek, The Next Generation appeared. He quickly blurted Dave, I like you so I wanted to come to tell you your brother is going to be all right. He paused wryly and said  . . . But it’s not going to look like you think it will Then Q smiled, almost laughing and disappeared.

The miracle we prayed for did come in the form of the book Wrestling With Life. As Phil’s physical form diminished, a wisdom and spiritual shine appeared. This lighthearted collection of stories could best be considered our memoires of growing up in the sport of wrestling. Phil’s boundless enthusiasm and energy; his relentless pursuit of bliss; his commitment to live loudly as his most authentic self are all reflected in the stories he depicts. I can attest to one thing. These stories are true. I was there.

The first edition of the book included six short stories. Each chapter is priceless in itself, and the collection weaves a tapestry that encompasses Phil’s humanity, his integrity and his ability to laugh at himself (and his ability to laugh at me). Not included in the first edition was The Astros Incident, perhaps THE story of the Nowick twins. In memory of my brother and the close relationship we shared, I have recounted this tale for Phil and included it in the second edition. I hope you enjoy it as Phil certainly did.

The last words Phil writes in his book are: Wrestling Brings the Light. Like most people would, I initially read this in the declarative, as a statement. However, over time I have realized that these four words are my brother’s legacy to me. They are, in fact, an open ended question, much like a question on a final exam:

Wrestling Brings the Light. Please defend or refute. Feel free to bring in personal experience, expert testimony, and factual evidence to support your answer.

My answer to Phil’s question is coming in the soon to be released film Wrestling With Life—The Documentary. One could consider this book the prequel to the film. The movie picks up where Phil’s wonderful book leaves off. It’s has a substantially different tone but probes deeper into the subject matter Phil introduces. I hope you will enjoy Wrestling With Life, the book and the movie. I know I have enjoyed the journey through both and am thankful to share it with you.

Namaste,

Dave Nowick M.D.

STORY 1

Items of Evidence

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice;

it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

— William Jennings Bryan

Let’s go back to the beginning, start on a lighter note. I firmly believe that the decision to participate in wrestling was a life-saving choice for me and my twin brother, David. It presented a distinct fork in the road through which we were able to channel our extreme abundance of combative energy, our somewhat criminal intellects, and our burning desire to find the answer to the question What would happen if we … ?.

Conversely, I have equal convictions that there currently exists a parallel universe in which we did not link our paths to the great sport of wrestling—it’s not pretty. In this alternative reality, David and I share a cell in a maximum-security prison, and we are currently plotting an audacious escape. I can’t say for sure what crime took us down, ultimately—I’m no soothsayer. I can only present the following items of evidence that preclude us from any other fate, absent a defining moment in which a discerning Little League baseball coach changed everything. I tremble when I imagine the consequences.

Item of Evidence #1: Kindergarten Chaos

What kind of kid gets expelled from school on the first day of kindergarten? What heinous act could lead to banishment prior to uttering your first letter of the alphabet? I can answer that question; so can my brother. What makes the accomplishment remarkable is the fact that we managed to achieve such a feat in less than three hours. Kindergarten at Greenwood Elementary in southeast suburban Denver consisted of half days: 8:00 a.m. to noon. The class was commanded by Mrs. Blue, a sweet, diminutive, ancient woman (she was at least seventy-five years old and stood no more than 4’ 10") who had been teaching at the school since its inception.

David and I were somewhat secluded from other toddlers during our preschool years. Our mother, Susan—a living saint—took on the bold task of staying at home with us for the first five years of our lives before returning to work to run my father’s medical practice. Compared to other mothers, Susan was not quite as concerned with the socialization of her twins up to that point. We had access to a best friend and coconspirator at all times, and we played together endlessly. We never lacked for fun and company. Sure, there had been some red flags in preschool, but who can really discern a pattern in behavior at that age? As with young jungle cats or tree gorillas, any activity with which we were saddled turned into play-fighting or, more accurately, fighting. Thus, our early childhood development resembled more Lord of the Flies than Leave it to Beaver. We had absolutely no sense of physical boundaries. It was perfectly okay for me to shove a pile of Play-Doh down David’s throat, and I similarly didn’t take offense when David would slap me in the chops in order to gain control of the last bite of a Milky Way bar.

Hence, upon entering our classroom full of happy, innocent toddlers, we took the place by storm that first day. Mrs. Blue made her first mistake sometime in the middle of the morning by lining the class up from tallest to shortest. We were placed in the back of the line—not a good way to appease a pair of five-year-old Napoleons. Our only academic assignment for that momentous day was to finger paint a crude picture with chocolate pudding as the medium and white construction paper as the canvas. One by one, we approached Mrs. Blue, who would then take a dollop of the dark-brown, sweet mix and place it gingerly upon the paper. Like obedient angels, each of the other children accepted his lot and commenced with his first ever act of scholarly imagination.

My brother reached his place in line in front of me. I was dead last and growing more surly by the second. Mrs. Blue broke eye contact with me—her second and fatal mistake—while preparing my brother’s palette. I instantaneously seized the opportunity by scooping a giant heap of pudding from the bowl and taking a long, lustrous slurp from my hand. As was common practice, I wiped the remainder on my brother’s face. He immediately retaliated, and a friendly brawl ensued. It didn’t look friendly to Mrs. Blue—she was horrified. However, because she was so small and elderly, she did not have the physical capacities to separate us. The situation escalated, and my brother gained the upper hand by grabbing my hair and shoving my head into the pudding bowl. He then began intermittently letting me up for air, a practice that resembled kind of a crude, chocolaty form of the waterboarding that has become all the rage with CIA-types these days.

I laughed hysterically as pudding spewed out my nose, but Mrs. Blue was sure I was pleading for my life. She swatted us with her purse to no avail. She was forced to leave the room to find a janitor to end the fracas. At this point, with no authority present, other children left their tiny desks and approached us in hopes of also garnering a larger portion of the confection. Neither David nor I was in a generous mood, and we quickly resolved our dispute in favor of the larger goal: defending the pudding bowl at all costs. Like pudding-covered savages, we beat back every advance. Most of these kids had been raised on Dr. Spock, time-outs, and proper play dates, and they were experiencing—quite literally —life kicking them in the teeth for the first time. Once the surge of kindergartners became too great, we opted for the tactic of hurling the chocolate mess at approaching enemies.

Finally, the bedlam subsided when the aforementioned janitor lifted us up by the napes of our necks and carried us outside by our shirt collars. Mrs. Blue had instructed him to take us out back and, as if we were fresh inmates, hose us down. The custodian abided, and we were then placed on the flatbed of his truck to dry off in the hot sun. Minutes later, Susan arrived, somewhat mortified but not surprised. Those are bad boys. Bad, bad boys, Mrs. Blue shrieked. Don’t you ever bring them back. At the end of the day, some sort of behind-the-scenes deal was cut, and we were allowed to return on probationary status. But the fun at Greenwood was just beginning.

Item of Evidence #2: School Play Mayhem

In our youth, my brother and I had dueling thespian careers that brutally collided in tryouts for Greenwood Elementary’s fifth-grade production of Robin Hood. I was prone to pop culture roles, starring as young Michael in the third-grade production of Peter Pan. My brother opted for more classical roles, starring as Macduff in the fourth-grade production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We could have coexisted, perhaps collaborated on a few projects as each of us expanded his reach. Instead, one unspeakably violent interlude ended it all. Sadly, I suppose there was simply not enough room for two creative supernovas in the same acting universe. How did it all go so wrong?

It is impossible to have identical twins each in starring roles in the same play. The audience simply won’t buy it. Inevitably, one twin wins out and the other must disguise himself heavily and settle for a measly background role. Hence, the money was on the table at tryouts in 1978 for Peter Pan. Going into auditions, David and I had learned that our older sister, Kim, had secured the lead part of Wendy, virtually ensuring that one of us would be picked as baby brother Michael. My brother went first. Mrs. Bridges, our gigantic, androgynous, Texan music teacher sat stone-faced, judging as David read aloud. He started off strong but stuttered on a couple of words, and I knew the part was mine. I stepped up to the podium, turned on the theatrical charm, and owned that part. David was relegated the role of Lost Boy #4, a plebeian part with no speaking lines.

The role of Michael was a bit of a double-edged sword, however. I had no problem with the material—Peter Pan was an audience favorite, and significant buzz radiated among the theater-going parental community as opening night approached. My lines were a bit campy—you know, cute kid stuff—but everybody has to start somewhere. I didn’t feel as if I was selling out. The costume, however, was a problem. Recall if you will that the children in the play (Wendy, John and Michael) are awoken from their slumber and wear pajamas during the duration of the play. Mrs. Bridges chose the color pink for my outfit and insisted that I tote a teddy bear throughout the entire production. Although the garb would certainly never be mistaken for macho, it was the required uniform. Anything for the show, I rationalized. If any masculinity lines were crossed, the gray area probably popped up when I learned I would be required to wear makeup. The stage lights dim your features, Mrs. Bridges told me, and I squirmed as my sister applied a light coat of rouge and cherry lipstick to my face.

The tension started at dress rehearsal. My brother maintains, to this day, that I emerged from behind the curtain looking like an eight-year-old transvestite. I don’t think it was that bad. But David and our collectively claimed best friend, John Burke (a lifelong friend who, at the time, was the only kid demented enough to