LJ wrestling: Forking

Christophe Naviaux (behind), at 147

pounds, rides herd on an opponent

on day one of the Holtville tourney.

He stayed at the Chavez-Zarate

home overnight.

(Photo by Ed Piper)

By Ed Piper

Keriann Johnston, the person in charge of assigning La Jolla High's wrestlers to host families during the Holtville Wrestling Tournament Fri., Jan. 29, had some funny stories to tell about hosting wrestlers in her hometown.

"When we had wrestlers from Arizona stay with us during youth tournaments," said Johnston, whose family is heavily involved in the Holtville Takedown Club (HTC), "my husband C.J. t.p.'ed his assistant's house and forked."

That means he took the visiting wrestlers with him to carry out practical jokes in the town of 5,000.

T.p.'ing, of course, stands for "toilet-papering," the prank that involves throwing rolls of toilet paper over and around someone's property. Forking, new to this writer, involves pushing many, many plastic forks into the ground sticking up on someone's property so that each fork has to be removed one-by-one in a laborious clean-up effort.

This occurred in youth wrestling, not in high school wrestling as part of the Holtville Rotary Wrestling Tournament. The HTC the Johnstons are active in is a youth program for local wrestlers.

Mind you, no one is encouraging or authorizing this behavior to be carried out elsewhere as a result of this article. This is just descriptive, not prescriptive.

Besides placing five of La Jolla's wrestlers with the Chavez-Zarate family (see accompanying story), Johnston and her husband themselves hosted an even dozen wrestlers from Valhalla High overnight Friday. Another Holtville wrestling family hosted 18 wrestlers from out of town. Yet another one hosted seven at their home.

That means they fed them dinner Friday night after the first day of competition, then put them up overnight. Johnston says "some sleep on couches, some on the floor in sleeping bags..."

Her sister, Aimee Walker, and their mother, Maureen Strahn, have adjoining houses in Holtville. The Walker and Strahn families were hosting the Steele Canyon wrestling team. So some time after dinner Friday night, according to Johnston, one home sent over a challenge to the other homes for a dodge ball game. At 10:45 that night, Valhalla faced off against Steele Canyon for an hour of dodge ball, with weigh-in for some coming the next morning at 7:30 a.m. and another day of wrestling after that.

"Some kids never get an experience like this," said Johnston, who said that a big part of the tournament is taking part in the home stays, dinners, and other activities.

In the 27-school wrestling tournament at Holtville High School featuring 295 wrestlers, Johnston assigned exactly 164 wrestlers to stay with 29 host families on Friday night.

Johnston, who grew up in Holtville and whose parents also grew up in Holtville and still live there, said that her father Rodney Strahn wrestled in the tournament in 1972. His family hosted visiting wrestlers in their home then, so it seems the tradition of staying overnight with a local family has taken place since the beginning of the well-known tourney.