Free Escape Points by Michele Weldon

glee, “I’m getting it! I’m getting the ear!”
    I was mortified. I inspected it and promised I would look it up online and see how to proceed as soon as I got to work. His ear was puffy, enlarged, swollen with blood. It was gross. Midseason of his junior year on varsity and his fourth year of wrestling, he was getting it. I called Powell, sure that this would excuse my son from practice and upcoming matches for some time if not forever. He’s getting the ear, for goodness sake. The ear.
    “It’s not a big deal,” he said.
    I knew what the ear meant. His coaches all had the ear. Usually, the pair, like Powell. Misshapen and noticeably nonsymmetrical, no two cauliflower ears manifested the same way. Some were outright horrific, elfin, pointed, and enlarged—years after the trauma. Forever.
    Were athletes who played volleyball so permanently changed? Swimmers? Some ears were just rounded and reddened, like miniwater balloons. Others more grotesque, with the unpredictable crannies and bumps reminiscent of the plastic-molded models of mountains and volcanoes used in elementary school geography class.
    It was called cauliflower ear. But cauliflower was bland, pale, unremarkable. The name implied none of the mother terror it inspired, and none of the mysterious pride wrestlers associated with, well, this deformity. It scared me. And I wanted to do everything I could to prevent it.
    Would people stare? Would they consider him defective? Was it my fault?
    “You’ll want your girlfriend or your wife to like your ears,” I said to Weldon when I could think of nothing else to convince him it was not a good thing.
    “I won’t be with a woman that shallow,” Weldon responded.
    It was an acquired condition that came from repeated trauma to the ear, resulting in hematomas and a collection of blood and fluid that permanently damaged its structure. It was something wrestlers got after having their heads pulverized against a wrestling mat over and over during the course of several years, creating severe friction and a breakdown of cartilage. And for reasons I could not understand, wrestlers didn’t apologize for it, hide it, or shrink from it. They wanted to get it.
    It is what they got when they did not wear the headgear in practice that was required in folkstyle competition. They did not wear it off-season in freestyle or Greco. To me it would be like lifting a pan out of the oven without wearing oven mitts, knowing your hands would burn and blister and it would hurt, but you did it anyway because you believed it meant you were a good cook. Season after season they skipped the headgear no matter how many times their mothers made them swear they didn’t. Cauliflower ear was not for the accidental wrestler, it was for the wrestler who saw the sport as something far more than six minutes of competition in a singlet. It was for the real wrestler, the one who believed all those sayings on the T-shirts, like G O H ARD OR G O H OME , P AIN I S W EAKNESS L EAVING THE B ODY , or T AP O UT OR P ASS O UT .
    The affliction was painful and impossible to disguise. If the athlete wore his hair below his ears to cover it off-season, then maybe you wouldn’t notice. But in season, long hair was not allowed, or at least not encouraged. If a wrestler had long hair, he was required to wear a hair cap. It would seem common sense to attempt to avoid getting cauliflower ear. But like so many aspects of all three of my sons’ lives, this acceptance of the injury was anathema to me. Like the calluses on the hands of an expert shoemaker, cauliflower ear showed the world that you wrestled with everything you had, and a little thing like a permanently deformed ear would not dissuade you from the sport. Wrestling mattered; the cosmetic appeal of your ear didn’t.
    Weldon’s teammate, Peter Lovaas, a 145-pounder his senior year, earned himself the ear. He said he told women he met in college either that he was attacked by squirrels, or that he rubbed