RhodyRaybo's blog

The last few days, I got to spend some time with my wife's side of the family. They were up visiting from Florida to visit both us and my wife's sister's in-laws. It was a fun time as always. But during the last gathering with the family, something unusual happened. We were gathered with some of my wife's relatives at a picnic area on the Cape Cod Canal and at some point I noticed my nephew and my son wrestling. I went over to observe. Wrestling is nothing new to either one of them. I would "play wrestle" with both my son and nephew when they were children, but with my son being 26 and my nephew being 31, it was a different ball game. My nephew wrestled in high school and he took some martial arts, and my son has a black belt in karate, where they had frequent grappling sessions ( I always watched those and salivated). My son is very much out of shape, but my nephew is still very much in shape and fairly muscular, and HE'S the one I've been wanting to wrestle with for real for a very long time. But every time he came up for a visit, he would back away if I started getting playful with him.

Anyway, while the nephew was subduing my son, the nephew looks at me and asks if I wanted to go at it with him. I was like "are you serious???". I also have talked about him to other wrestlers and told them how much I wanted to seriously wrestle with him. I agreed to , and took my shoes off, got down on the grass and we started rolling. I was mostly doing BJJ no-gi style with him, which he was familiar with. He managed to pin me and grab me a couple times, but I managed to flip him over a couple times as well. It took a couple tries, but I managed to subdue him and get him in side control. Before I could nail him in an armbar, he tapped. He told me that I'm strong as a bull and that next time he was up, we'd roll again.

The reason this is particularly special to me, is that I have always loved this nephew and always enjoyed spending time with him during the family visits. I always wanted to take him down for real and he knew that. So this brief, 2 minute roll came very unexpectedly and meant the world to me. But also, wrestling on the grass outdoors is not a usual occurrence for me. So, I kept thanking him for the match. He kept saying "anytime". Hopefully next time I see him we can rumble some more. You just never know sometimes, you just never know.