Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic Page B

high-school wrestling team, practicing and working out every day down in the basement of Massapequa High School. The coaches made us do sit-ups, push-ups, and spinning drills until sweat poured from our faces and we were sure we’d pass out. “Wanting to win and wanting to be first, that’s what’s important,” the coaches told us. “Play fair, but play to win,” they said. They worked us harder and harder until we thought we couldn’t take it anymore and then they would yell and shout for us to keep going and drive past all the physical pain and discomfort. “More! More!” they screamed. “If you want to win, then you’re going to have to work! You’re going to have to drive your bodies far beyond what you think you can do. You’ve got to pay the price for victory! You can always go further than you think you can.”
    Wrestling practice ended every day with wind sprints in the basement hallways that left us gasping for air and running into the showers bent over in pain, and I honestly wondered sometimes what I was doing there in the first place and why I was allowing myself to go through all this.
    The wrestling coach was very dedicated and held practice every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and I can even remember having practice once on Thanksgiving. I came in first in the Christmas wrestling tournament. There’s still a picture of me in one of the old albums in the attic that shows me with two other guys holding a cardboard sign with the word Champion on it. I won most of my matches that year. When I lost, I cried just like when I lost my Little League games and I’d jump on the bus and ride back to Massapequa with tears in my eyes, not talking to anyone for hours sometimes.
    I was very shy back then and dreamed of having a girlfriend, or just someone to hold my hand. Even though I was on the wrestling team and had won all those matches and wore my sweater with the Big M on it, I still dreamed of the day I could have a girlfriend like all the rest of the guys. I wanted to be hoisted aloft in the arms of other young men like myself and carried off the field for scoring the winning touchdown, or winning the wrestling match that brought the championship to my school.
    I wanted to be a hero.
    I wanted to be stared at and talked about in the hallways.
    â€œHey look,” said one of the kids. “There goes Kovic!”
    I was the great silent athlete now, who never had to say anything, who walked through the halls of Massapequa High School, sucking the air deeply into my chest and pumping up the blood into my arms.
    â€œThere goes Kovic,” a pretty freshman said. “Boy, he sure is cute.” And as I walked through the crowded halls I was sure everyone was noticing me, staring at my varsity letter, and looking at my wrestler’s shoulders.
    And it was also during my freshman year that I started to get pimples on my face. I remember coming home from school and seeing what looked like a tremendous blackhead on my forehead. It was right smack-dab in the middle of my forehead and it was just like the things that were all over my sister Sue’s face. The more I looked in the mirror, the more scared I got. Stevie Jacket’s face was covered with the things, he had the worst case of them of anyone I ever knew in my life. In gym I saw him once taking a shower, and his face and neck, all over his arms and back, his whole body was covered with blackheads and whiteheads and thousands of pimples. And now I was catching them, I was getting them just like Stevie Jacket and my sister. There it was, right in front of me in the mirror, a big goddamn blackhead, and after staring at it for almost an hour, I still didn’t know what to do. I remembered this girl in the sixth grade who used to have them all over her face and it looked like somebody hit her with a rake. It was awful and she used to put this disgusting filmy cream on, to