The Day Steve Morgan Broke My Arm                                   Richard Lavallee

I was a wrestler in High School. Not because I wanted to, but my older brother had been a wrestler, and to measure up I had to do whatever he had done. As a freshman I joined the team and I soon found a close pal, classmate Bob Hawthorne. We were both skinny kids at the bottom of the lineup - 95 pound freaklings. We were more interested in polishing our Three Stooges routines in the bus on the way to the matches than we were in becoming real wrestlers, so we never got past Junior Varsity . But we had a lot of fun watching Terry Litterbrandt chew them up on the mat.

B'ville played perennial 2nd fiddle to the mighty County Champ East Syracuse-Minoa wrestling team. Year after year we came in 2nd place. But then sophomore year the team got a new coach - Leo Johnson, the legendary East-Syracuse Minoa coach jumped ship & moved to B'ville. I'm thinking Otis Sennett made that happen. Ote had been a wrestling coach before he became athletic director.

A decade later Coach Johnson took a 1200 student, semi-rural little NY town to #1 wrestling team in the state of New York against giant Long Island powerhouses. Parents would move to Baldwinsville to get their sons on the B'ville team.

But for now, skinny kids with no talent could get a spot on the team, and I stuck with it. Wrestling was good for kids who weren't tall & quick enough to play basketball or fast enough for indoor track or good enough swimmers or strong enough for gymnastics. Kids like me. But I never had the predator instinct or the moves that make a good wrestler.

Coach Johnson was brutal, funny, witty, masterfully inspiring and motivating. Failure was unacceptable and publicly humiliated by having your name added to the poster of the "canvasback club" of guys who had allowed themselves to be pinned to the mat. Johnson emphasized two things. One was physical training with commando-level routines that gave us endurance and toughness that would have breezed us through Marine Corps boot camp. Coach would make us run 20x up and down six flights of stairs at the end of practice before we could hit the showers and he knew exactly how much time we had to catch the 5 O'clock bus home so we had to run run run - one stair step at a time.

Confidence. The other thing was mental conditioning. Coach Johnson taught us that a wrestling match was decided at the face-off, when the two opponents faced each other across the mat. You willed yourself to win. You willed yourself to break out of a hold. It worked, like magic. Something I carried through my whole life.

The year Coach Johnson took over I was also involved in the school debate team with Jinx Johnstone and Lynne Fitzmorris. It meant I had to miss practice one day per week. Coach Johnson was having none of it. He told me I could not be on the team if I missed practice. I talked it over with my Mom, and she said to stick to my guns, so I did.
I went to Vice Principal Bogardus and pleaded my case. He backed me up, and Coach Johnson was forced to back down. But he never held it against me. He was a first class guy. BTW I sucked at debating, but it was fun traveling to different schools with Jinx & Lynne.

By Senior year I was still JV, and my sparring partner was Ted Snavlin, the younger brother of our classmates, fraternal twins Dick and John Snavlin. Ted was built like a smaller version of Tarzan, tremendous upper-body muscles. I could never beat him, because he was also mentally way tougher and that was the real difference.

The team was half way through the season, undefeated. One day I actually won a practice match against Ted, or maybe I executed a good move against him, "Lavallee wants to be varsity. Lavallee wants to be varsity" Coach Johnson taunted me like Neener Neener Neener. I had to chuckle.

He was right. One day Coach took me aside and told me I would wrestle Varsity against North syracuse that night. But I had to drop a weight class, because the kid in the next lower weight class was sick. That meant the sweat box. I had to put on a rubber suit and sit in the school boiler room and sweat off 3 lbs of water. I came out dizzy, dehydrated. After official weigh-in I tried to recuperate by drinking orange juice, but all day I was weak.

That night the wrestling match was at home. The hometown crowd was cheering. My weight class came up and I faced my opponent. We crossed the mat and shook hands, but the hand I grasped firmly was clammy and limp. The cold-fish handsake shocked me. A well-played trick. The whistle blew, and I could see the crowd cheering, but I couldn't hear anything. Silence. I could see Jean Snow in the bleachers, smiling, clapping. No sound. Everything was in slow motion. My opponent got the better of me and tied me up in a ball and rolled me up on my shoulder blades. I struggled in vain, and I was pinned in about a minute. My hearing returned when the referee slammed his palm down on the mat. I thought about seeing my name on the canvasback club poster next to a little gravestone cross.

My younger brother Gary would be County Champ that year at 98 pounds, but I had started to grow and I eventually reached 130 lbs. That put me in the same weight class as Steve Morgan. That year, our Senior year, Steve Morgan would be State Champion Wrestler at 130 lb. I was a poor sparring partner for Steve. One match I saw Steve break his opponent's nose, unintentionally, when he threw his arm around the opponent's head and caught the kid's nose on the wrap-around.

One of Coach Johnson's training exercises was the Wrestle-Around. The wrestlers were split between the heavies and the lightweights. 130lb was the split, so I had to wrestle the heavies, I had to wrestle against the kids in each weight class in turn, starting with the next weight class up and ending back with your weight class. This taught you the differences in technique among different weigh classes. The Unlimited weight class wrestles differently from the featherweights

i had just come back to school from having the flu, and I was weak. I remember wrestling John Mann, 160 lb, he mangled me, and Ronnie LaFrance, Unlimited, crushed me like an eggshell. Still, I could tell they were holding back some, they were not out to kill me.

Not Steve Morgan. He was always 110%. By the time I progressed through the classes and back to Steve, I was wrung out like a dishrag. Steve was smiling at me as he grabbed me by the elbow and the knee and spun me like a cartwheel. As I headed head first into the mat, I stuck out my right arm instinctively to break my fall. My outer wrist bone had no muscle support and I heard it snap. So did everyone else in the room. It was nearly a compound fracture, the bone was almost sticking through the skin. I started yelling because I was afraid someone else would step on me or fall on my arm.

Coach Johnson grabbed an inflatable balloon splint, inflated it around my arm to stabilize it, and they drove me to the doctor's office in town, He wasn't my family doctor, he was another doctor under contract to the school. The doctor looked at my arm and said he couldn't set my arm, I needed to go to St, Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse.

The doctor came back into the room with a puzzled look and said rather disgustedly that my Dad would not be coming to take me to the hospital until after he had finished eating dinner. I was not surprised in the least. Just in a lot of pain.

Within an hour or so I was in a hospital for the first time in my life. (I had been born in a maternity home near the Police Station in B'ville). After waiting for a long time, the nurse came back and explained that the surgeon would be along shortly - but not until after he finished eating his dinner.

The surgeon finally came in , grabbed my arm and snapped it back into position, and plaster-casted it. I didn't even get an aspirin. I did not sleep that night I was in so much pain. But I always knew Steve Morgan did not intentionally hurt me.

The silver lining was that I no longer had to endure those brutal daily practices. I got to be the time keeper for our wrestling matches, and I got to watch our team finally beat East-Syracuse Minoa for the very first time and become the County Champion wrestling team. I had a lot of fun being time keeper - I got to push the button that made the squawk box end the match. Because I was Student Council President, I had to lead the school in the Pledge of Allegiance at school assemblies, and my arm was set just right to have my hand over my heart as I recited the pledge. All these years later I feel proud that Steve Morgan broke my arm. He was a great athlete, a star, both in wrestling and soccer, and he went on to become an award-winning coach in the Carolinas.

After that season I never played organized sports again. When I got to college i New Yorl CIty I was able to begin exploring what I really wanted to do. Music.

But not the kind you play in a high school marching band.