by Annie Scholl
Michael Copperman thought he was writing a memoir about his own life, including the role wrestling had played in his identity. But the project took an unexpected turn when an editor at Simon & Schuster became interested in a chapter about cutting weight and the story of Kenny Cox, a fellow wrestler from Eugene, Oregon, and one of Copperman’s former training partners.
“He said, ‘Well, I don’t want your memoir, but I want a book about this person. And it’s totally greenlit, 100 percent guaranteed. All you have to do is just write a few sample chapters and get us a brief proposal,’” Copperman recalled.
Copperman began interviewing Cox’s parents and close friends and soon found himself committed to understanding what had happened to the gifted wrestler he had once tried so hard to emulate. By the time Copperman returned to the editor with sample chapters and a proposal, circumstances at Simon & Schuster had changed, and the editor no longer had the discretion to acquire the book. But Copperman was already invested.
“The further I went into it, the more I realized that this was about and for honoring Kenny, but also in part about me and what had happened to me in trying so hard to be like Kenny Cox,” he said. Cox devoted much of his short life to wrestling, winning 10 Oregon championships in collegiate, freestyle, and Greco-Roman competition, as well as five junior national championships. When his college wrestling career ended, he struggled to determine who he was and how to live without the pursuit that had defined him.
A few years later, Cox walked from Oregon to Mexico and back. He then sold his house and traveled to Kauai, Hawaii, where he ventured into the wilderness and survived for 70 days without supplies. He died just weeks after reemerging. He was 31.
Copperman spent more than four years reconstructing Cox’s life through his own memories and interviews with Cox’s family, friends, former girlfriends, fans, and fellow wrestlers. He also traveled to Kauai to help reconstruct Cox’s final journey. The result, Seeking Kenny: A Wrestler’s Journey, was published June 30 by the University of Iowa Press. Copperman said reducing it to a wrestling story misses its larger purpose. “This is a book that tries to look at the human being who’s also the athlete and to think about what sometimes the pursuit of athletic glory can cost us.”
Copperman, 46, grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and was once one of the top wrestlers in the Western United States. He attended Stanford University on a wrestling scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree in English before receiving an MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon.
As a multiracial Asian American attending predominantly white, working-class public schools in Oregon, Copperman said he was bullied and turned to wrestling “as a warrior culture, as a way of being in the world.” Although the sport took him far, he eventually came to see it as an insufficient way of understanding himself.
Copperman is now an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. His memoir, Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. While in Eugene on book tour, Copperman talked with The Sunlight Press.
How did you find the structure for your new book?
It was the first time I had really thought about structure before beginning a book. Even so, the structure emerged as I worked. I would talk with someone and then write the stories that came out of that conversation. I knew I wanted to break up the adventure narrative and use it as a kind of back-and-forth seam throughout the book. Readers first come to understand my connection to Kenny’s story, and then the book traces his journey to Baja and back, and later into the wilderness of Kauai. I wouldn’t say I knew exactly what I was doing from the start, because I didn’t. But I did have a sense of the book’s structure from the beginning.
What did you learn about interviewing people who had loved Kenny?
I hadn’t realized that if I wanted someone to tell me their most intimate and cherished experiences of a person they loved, they needed to hear from me first. They wanted to know what the project was about, what my relationship to Kenny had been, whether I cared about him, and what I was going to do with the things they told me. I had to earn their trust and help them understand I wasn’t there to mine their memories for profit.
Were you concerned about how Cox’s family would respond to the book?
I was really worried they weren’t going to like the book or that the family, including his sisters, might feel they hadn’t been represented fairly or well. I always made it clear that this was going to be my version of Kenny. Their versions are theirs. My take on what happened or didn’t happen was going to be different. I would remain independent and be true to the different people I interviewed. Ultimately, I think they see the book as a way of indelibly remembering and celebrating Kenny, and as being as true to who he was as I could make it.
Your book faced a long road to publication. What kept you going?
Persistence and process are two fundamentals of wrestling that I took and applied to writing. I also applied them to the doggedness it takes to keep pursuing a publisher for a book, even under really difficult circumstances.
It took me about four and a half years to write. Finding an agent took nine and a half months, and I had 13 requests for the full manuscript by the time somebody said yes. Then it was 18 months on the market, and it was looking very, very bleak until I got a yes from University of Iowa Press. This book is about someone who fundamentally would never give up. To give up on a book about Kenny Cox would have been a betrayal of him, so I found a way to follow through.
What do you tell your students about writing and publishing?
I talk with them about the industry. I talk with them about divorcing their sense of self-worth from rejection. I tell them it’s a long road, that writing is a practice. The rewards may be more about their sense of self — recognizing beauty in the world and helping to create it — than about commercial validation or fame, which is unlikely. I also teach them that writing happens in a community. It’s nurtured by generosity and the coming together that happen in many places.
Why do you write?
I think I’ve always written because I want to understand something about the world and something about myself in it that I couldn’t otherwise figure out. It’s not just navel-gazing. It can be turned outward as much as inward. It comes from the impulse to look at the world, to consider my place in it and the lives of other people, and to try to understand them better. That has always been my guiding impetus, and I think it continues to be.
Image: “Vintage Typewriter” by Memphis CVB via Flickr
This is a wonderful story and it rang a bell for me. I’m a book collaborator/ghost, and Copperman’s turn to wrestling reminded me of one of my clients. He’s a child of Chinese immigrants who grew up in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn NY and was constantly picked on by the other kids. Then, when he was 14, he saw a photo of Arnold Schwartzenegger. It was a revelation. “If I looked like that,” he thought, “I’d never get picked on again.” He started to train, put on muscle, and suddenly all the tough kids were his friends and wanted advice about training. He went on to be a champion bodybuilder, graduated from Columbia and became a physical therapist, then developed a body therapy practice of his own, which is what his book is about. A very different path from Copperman’s, but similar in the way both derived meaning from warrior culture as a way of shaping identity.