Billybeat Island was a bed. A sagging one, in a bedroom in Camden, New Jersey with five boys in it. The floor around it was lava.
Gerry made the rules. He drew a map of the island in crayon, red for the volcanoes, green for the safe zones. No dirty socks. No stomping. Nobody sets foot on it without permission. Then he defended the border every night against his own brothers, who came over the lava screaming and did not respect the map at all.
His brothers had rules too. Do not cry. Do not run. If you are going down, take somebody with you. Randy added that cheating was fine as long as nobody caught you. George held that if you were losing, you should at least make it hurt.
That is chapter one, and most of the book is already in it.
A wrestling family that had never wrestled
Nobody in the family wrestled before that generation. Gerry says it plainly: five boys in one room with too much testosterone and not enough space, who invented the sport for themselves.
Len went first. Ten years older, out of the room and into a gym before Gerry reached grade school, calm and calculated. George followed and won RL Turner its first gold medal. He came home to a pep rally. What Gerry remembers is George not smiling, finding him in the stands, and holding the look.
Randy is the one you remember. One leg, two crutches, and the dirtiest fighter in the house because he had to be. He used misdirection years before anyone taught him the word for it.
What the book is
A wrestling memoir that runs from that bedroom to a state championship in Texas and then well past it.
The family moved from Camden to Malvern, back to Haddonfield, then to Texas. Gerry wrestled for RL Turner High School under a coach named Mickey Martin. The program won the school its first state title in any sport.
His father’s line, drilled in during backyard games, was that Meccas do not quit. A teammate named Tommy Jennings wrestled with Tourette’s. Gerry watched him on the bus one day and worked out that Tommy was not fighting the condition. He was moving with it.
The coaches
Paul Aubrey ran the junior high room with a stopwatch and a clipboard. Randy lost a match to a bigger kid and shrugged about it. Aubrey told him at least he did not quit, then dropped to the mat and showed him the exposed shoulder that lost it. Nothing to do with strength.
He caught Gerry watching from the bleachers at twelve. There is no such thing as just watching, he said. You are learning or you are wrestling.
Mickey Martin came later. He phoned out of nowhere before Gerry’s senior year and asked what he had been doing all summer to get ready. In the room he barely spoke. One word changed the speed of everything. When somebody made a mistake he said negative, which meant rewind three seconds and find where it started. That is a different instruction from try harder.
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The chapter the book turns on
Three days after a lake party he should not have attended, Gerry’s father knocks on his bedroom door before seven in the morning. Coach Martin is in the kitchen.
Gerry is certain his season is over. He puts on jeans and a T-shirt with his hands shaking. Martin is standing at the window with his back to him.
What happened was that his teammates went to the coach the day before and vouched for him. Martin does not throw him off the team. He makes him run twenty-five miles.
Sports books usually build toward a win. This one builds toward a coach who forgives him and then makes him pay anyway, and that is a better story.
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The antagonist
Danny McGiboney was a teammate. A hundred and eighty-five pounds of antagonism, and for most of a year he made Gerry’s life miserable. It started with taunting out a car window during an evening run and escalated to something that nearly ended his season.
Three weeks later, at the Paul’s Valley Invitational in Oklahoma, Gerry pins his man in the final. His teammates carry him up. One of the first pairs of hands under him belongs to Danny, who tells him it was a hell of a match and means it.
Looking down from up there, Gerry decides Danny was never a villain. He was a teammate, and both things had been true the whole time. Most memoirs keep the enemy an enemy. This one does not.
Team victory, personal defeat
The state tournament is at the University of Texas, six matches running at once in a gym built for combat. His team wins the championship. Gerry loses his final to Clarence Laster and takes silver.
Then the all-sports banquet, which he attends only because his mother makes him. He wears the letterman jacket with the new patch. He drives the same beat-up Plymouth station wagon that carried his celebrating teammates home. He has spent eight weeks replaying one match.
And they name him high point scorer for the team he feels he let down.
A school’s first state title in any sport, and he calls it hollow. Anyone else writes that night as the triumph. He writes it as the emptiest night of his life, and that is why the book is worth reading.
What comes after
Wrestling was his laboratory. Preparation does not guarantee a win. Going in unprepared guarantees a loss. He took that into software and into running teams, along with the harder edge of it: a man who commits completely expects the same from everyone else and gets difficult when they fall short.
The chapter on life after high school opens with the questions arriving before the sweat dried. What are your plans. Which school. Would you like to talk to our program. He folds a singlet for the last time, thinks the Olympics sounds like a decent goal, and admits he had no idea how to turn four years of discipline into a life.
Most sports memoirs stop before that. This one is about legacy, not medals, so it keeps going.
There is also a good deal here that has nothing to do with the mat. A childhood friendship in Haddonfield with a girl named Candy Baker. An afternoon on Crystal Lake that ends with Gerry going through the ice.
About Gerry Mecca
Mecca has spent more than forty years in enterprise technology. His work has run from Fortune 500 boardrooms to private equity carve-outs. He has an MBA from Baylor and executive credentials from Wharton.
He also teaches. He runs IT seniors through capstone projects at the University of Texas at Dallas and coaches kids in the Texas Rangers MLB Youth Academy program.
The book barely mentions any of it, and that is the right call. The wrestling is where he learned the things he later used in the boardroom.
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