Wrestling

On the surface, the L.A. Games, a 12-sport extravaganza for 5,000 Southern California high school students at El Camino College Saturday, were simply athletic endeavors. But beneath the surface, beyond the competition and the championships, there was much more than slam dunks and 100-yard sprints. First, there is Yumi-Kalu Fain, a bright 17-year-old from University High School in West Los Angeles. Fain, who was born in Australia, wouldn't look out of place anywhere else on the El Camino campus, but she has entered a gym containing 300 sweaty boys.

STOCKTON -- In the center of a starkly lighted wrestling ring, RJ Brewer glared at the overwhelmingly Latino crowd and spread the flag of Arizona across his back. Buff, mean, white and glistening with baby oil, he snatched the microphone from the referee. "I come from the greatest city in the United States: Phoenix, Arizona!" the wrestler yelled in English. "Phoenix is the only city with a woman in power with the guts to get into the president's face and address the real problem in this country!"

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

The Supreme Court justices struggled with applying an "old law to new technology" in a case that asks whether children whose father died before they were born or even conceived are entitled to survivors benefits under the Social Security law. The justices heard the case of Karen Capato, a New Jersey mother who in September 2003 gave birth to twins through in vitro fertilization 18 months after her husband, Robert, had died of cancer in Florida....

Oklahoma State Coach Joe Seay, whose program is under investigation by the NCAA, was suspended, but vowed to fight the action, calling it "an overreaction . . . to one minor incident."

Re the Sept. 16 Morning Report item that Bruce Nash will executive produce NBC's "Exposed! Pro Wrestling's Greatest Secrets": It's great to see that Nash is taking on the world of pro wrestling after trashing the careers of many a hopeful young magician with his ongoing exposure specials on Fox. After Bruce learns the secrets of the wrestlers I know he will be comfortable jumping into a ring with a couple of the guys from Slammers Wrestling Gym....

Ed Parkinson has resigned as wrestling coach at Foothill High School for personal reasons, Athletic Director Bob Osborne said. Parkinson, a walk-on coach for the 1989-90 season, led the Knights to their first victory in a Century League match in two years. Osborne said the school is accepting applications. The job does not include a teaching position.

It is sad that in the world of journalism, while writers who are football fans report about football, and writers who are movie buffs write movie reviews, the Los Angeles Times can't seem to find a single writer who is a pro wrestling fan to write articles about pro wrestling. Did Martin Miller ever stop to think, while writing "Wrestling Reaches Out to Its Fans" (March 31), that the people reading it would mainly be wrestling fans who would not appreciate the condescending tone of his article?

Bob Hammond is the only wrestling coach in the history of Chatsworth High. Sadly, Hammond likely will be the school's last wrestling coach. Hammond, who witnessed the birth of City Section wrestling in 1972, is enjoying one of his best teams in 25 years. The Chancellors (14-2) have won three tournaments and are stocked with close to 30 wrestlers, an above-average total. "It's been so long since we've won any tournaments," Hammond said. "Morale is sky-high."

Luis J. Rodríguez has been called "a superhero in Chicano literature" for his steady output of poems, fiction and above all for "Always Running," his classic 1993 memoir about jettisoning his former life as an East L.A. gangbanger. The Dalai Lama once praised him as an "unsung hero of compassion. " His old friend John Densmore, drummer for the Doors, describes him as a curandero, the term for a traditional Mexican healer who ministers to his community's wounds. But over lunch recently in a northeast San Fernando Valley strip mall, Rodríguez offered a far more mixed self-appraisal.

Moisture, condensation, fog -- whatever you want to call it -- has made it impossible to peek through two windows on the door of the St. John Bosco wrestling room to see what's happening inside. Then the door opens, and a visitor is blasted with a burst of hot air as if a heater is going full throttle.  It's sauna-like conditions, and yet there's no machine producing the heat. It's coming from more than 20 shirtless, sweating wrestlers circling the room and trying to prove what Coach Omar Delgado means when he says, "Wrestling is a six-minute sprint.

Brock Lesnar was asked to explain the appeal of Brock Lesnar. "I guess it's because I've always done things my way," the former Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight king said on the eve of his Friday night main event against Strikeforce heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. "The unpredictability — that's the most intriguing thing, maybe. " That's brilliant insight, really. For starters, Lesnar, 34, doesn't actually need the UFC. With a career consisting of only seven fights, he's already proved capable of reigning as champion after winning the belt over mixed martial arts legend Randy Couture in 2008 and defending it twice.

Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas," one of the biggest-selling songs of all time, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Although the wistful tune soothed homesick soldiers in such God-awful places as Guadalcanal more than half a century ago, and no doubt it still plays in Kandahar today, Berlin most likely wrote what he called "the best song that anybody's ever written" somewhere in the sunny Southwest, probably while sitting by a swanky hotel swimming...

In my Inglewood neighborhood, we always tend to keep an eye out for trouble. But few things have occasioned more hand-wringing than the recent arrival of a family whose rent is subsidized by the federal program known as Section 8. "Oh, Lord," said one neighbor, a stoic, civic-minded, churchgoing woman who looked more unsettled than I'd ever seen her. "Here we go. " Another neighbor who is also religious and similarly unflappable looked deeply troubled....

The fact-based story of Matt "The Hammer" Hamill, a three-time NCAA wrestling champion and the first deaf wrestler to win a national championship, the film "The Hammer" looks to tread a fine line between appealing directly (and perhaps strictly) to the deaf community and opening up an understanding of the deaf experience to a broader audience. Directed by Oren Kaplan, making his feature debut from a script by Eben Kostbar and Joseph McKelheer, the film follows Hamill from a small-town Ohio childhood in the late-'70s and early '80s to finding his winning ways in college in the '90s.

It's been so long, I can't even remember what the column was about or how I'd drawn the ire of the reader who mailed me in response. She was — like me — black, middle-aged and middle-class, and she disagreed vehemently with whatever I'd said that week. She threw down the gauntlet with her closing remark: "I can tell; you're one of those women with a white boyfriend. " I was pleased to be able to rally back: "My boyfriend is black. " Take that. But I was also grateful that her challenge hadn't come the year before.

"This is earlier than I usually get into trouble in an interview," says playwright Kristoffer Diaz with a sheepish smile. Indeed, it's not even halfway through an amiable lunchtime chat before he's holding forth on the divide between labor and management and talking about how his play "has a problem with old wealth. " Those aren't the comments he expects to ruffle feathers, though. It's when Diaz is asked to compare his work in the theater with the often thankless toil of the professional wrestlers who are the subject of his 2009 play "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," which will have its Los Angeles debut at the Geffen Playhouse on Sept.