Shoney's Breakfast Buffet

For someone who ended up competing so much, I put off my first wrestling tournament for quite some time. I worked out with the team for a year or two before venturing out into the world of freestyle wrestling, which had different rules than the high school “folkstyle” version I was now used to.

One kid was already going, so he asked if I wanted a ride with his dad. I didn’t have a good reason not to do it, so I agreed.

Note the Batman shirt I was asked to cover up for this photo

Now, I had competed in team sports before, including little league baseball for 2 or 3 years and all sorts of backyard games with friends. Still, this was something entirely new. This would be just me, all alone, up against another pubescent man-child, in front of an adult referee.

This was intimidating on a whole new level.

By the time I began wrestling, I had already broken five bones, and puberty was already encouraging me to test the boundaries of my body. Wrestling was a logical and natural extension of where martial arts and technique intersected with these new feelings of being comfortable with risk.

Competing in front of other people, though? That wasn’t really something that appealed to me at all.

I wasn’t the only kid besides Chris who was headed to the tournament. Chris’s dad had a van, so several kids could pile in there.

When we were settled into the van, Chris asked me and the other kids who were headed up to compete what their records were. After everyone spoke up, he looked at me and said something like: we’re the only two who are undefeated!

This was both Chris putting his ego on the stage for me to see, and a crude attempt at breaking the ice. It was funny because I hadn’t lost due to not competing, but Chris hadn’t lost because he had beaten several kids so far, and he hadn’t lost yet.

Chris’s icebreaking worked, and we eventually became wrestling buddies and training partners. That was lucky for me, since Chris was the best wrestler on our team—maybe the best in the state by the time he was a senior.

I don’t remember the weigh-ins, but we all knew well enough to eat breakfast after we stepped onto the official scale. It would have been silly to weigh an extra two or three pounds for no good reason, so we simply waited until after we all made weight. That’s as far as I remember anyone taking weight cutting.

After we weighed in, we all felt as though we deserved a delicious and big breakfast. We headed to the only place that could accommodate a group like us on short notice, and on a budget, too.

We went to Shoney’s for their breakfast buffet.

For those of you who have never set foot inside a Shoney’s, I would describe it as a combination of a family-style restaurant and a diner. The food is a mixture of southern-style comfort food and classic American fare, so you can get stuff like hamburgers or country-fried steak.

The big feature for us kids, though, was the aforementioned buffet. Here, you could just fill your plate up with eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns; then you could eat all of that and go fill your plate up again.

I’m not here to tell anyone that eating a Shoney’s breakfast buffet before a wrestling tournament is a bad idea, but I will say that I distinctly remember feeling regret once we left the restaurant. For the next hour, my digestive system gave me the side-eye as it tried to figure out what to do with all this grease and sugar.

Blissfully, this nauseated feeling left me before my first match, which I have no memory of. I can say with a high degree of confidence that I did not return with an undefeated record that day, although I don’t think I performed particularly badly either.

My grappling competition career had begun. I would have several hundred matches when it was all said and done 25 years later, but I would never eat Shoney’s breakfast buffet again before a competition.