Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

Benton wrestler Spencer Brown pins St. Joseph News-Press sports reporter R.J. Cooper as coach Brad Hubbard referees.

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I’ve heard most of my life the virtues of patience — usually from an annoyed authority figure — and I now know it also could have saved me from some disgrace and pain.

After just 20 seconds of circling the Benton wrestling mats with Spencer Brown, my legs burn and I’m not sure how much longer I can stay in a crouched position.

Brown is just a few feet away from me, well within my grasp, I deduce. So I lunge, awkwardly attempting some sort of two-leg grab. It’s over in a flash. Without really knowing how, I’m on my back, held in what I later found out is a neck wrench. The name is appropriate.

Six minutes of circling the mats — whatever the stalling penalty points and physical strain of staying in an active wrestling position — seems preferable to the predicament I now find myself in.

I struggle and flop around for a few seconds — like a hooked fish on the deck of a boat — before finally submitting to the pin. The whole episode lasted about 30 seconds.

For this edition of Put Me In, Coach, I wanted to wrestle a state champion. It turns out a state-qualifier hopeful was more than enough. Benton wrestling coach Brad Hubbard chose Brown for the assignment of re-arranging my skeletal structure.

Brown wrestled at 152 pounds last year, although he admitted entering our match at 165. I weighed in at 158 — most of that poor excuse for muscle hung on a 6-foot-3 frame that leaves plenty of room for a stocky wrestler like Brown to attack. Brown earned second-team, all Midland Empire Conference honors last season, and Hubbard believes Brown could compete in Columbia, Mo., next winter. The sophomore certainly made a believer out of me.

Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

St. Joseph News-Press sports reporter R.J. Cooper rest after wrestling Benton wrestler Spencer Brown.

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Living room matches with my little brothers and father aside, I hadn’t wrestled ever and only covered a few matches during the course of my journalism career. Obviously, Hubbard had an impossible task of bringing me up to speed in our 30-minute practice session.

We worked on all three positions — neutral, bottom and top. As it turned out, I didn’t have much use for the latter position.

In a neutral position, my objective was to stay low, keep my feet moving, fend off any attacks and look for an opportunity to pull one of two moves — either the single-leg grab or front head lock.

In the down position, I was supposed to tuck my left elbow into my hip, peel off the opponent’s grip with my right hand and try to stand up on my outside leg. On top, it was my job to chop the opponent’s left arm, grab his right arm with both hands and then try to score points.

Suffice to say, I never got that far.

In a society predicated on personal space, the first adjustment was just getting used to the constant contact. My initial reaction is to let go and establish a socially acceptable distance from Brown for the first few minutes. It’s only as I tried to execute the moves that I accepted you just have to get over it, wrap up your opponent and try to drive him into the mat.

Hubbard told me it takes three years, not 30 minutes, to become a solid wrestler who can string moves together. I felt comfortable with each sequence in slow motion, which gives me time to individually process each move and appropriately react.

But the actual match speed is disorienting.

The first flurry with Brown ends with me flopping out of bounds — by far my best skill I’ve decided — to avoid a pin. Before I can get my elbow to my hip in the down position against Brown, I’m on my back being choked, and it doesn’t feel great (I’m not laughing in that picture). This is where I submit to my fate.

Brown let me try the top position after his first pin. He had no trouble standing up and pinning me again, although not before I scored two points when Brown twice let me up after I resorted to my best move.

“He knew what to do next, and you didn’t know what to do first,” Hubbard told me later. “He knew what to do for his third and fourth move before he did his first move; whereas, you were having to think about what to do right now.”

I find out afterward that my head was too far off Brown’s hip when I shot at him, leaving about six inches for an easy counter-attack hook. Hubbard told Brown he couldn’t use a head lock to throw me, but outside of that the Benton sophomore said he approached this match seriously. He chose to stay back and wait for me to make the inevitable mistake.

It only took 20 seconds.