RhodyRaybo's blog

Those of you who have wrestled with me in the last couple years know that I had a very nice 6 X 12 foot mat that had been given to me by a former wrestling opponent who had to quit wrestling because of health reasons. When he asked me if I wanted the mat, I told him "absolutely" and went to his place and brought it to my former "site B" in North Attleboro. It went perfectly in the living room and was the perfect setup. You can see many of my matches on that mat in the majority of videos I have posted in the last 2 years. Well, in April my wife listed the house in North Attleboro, and despite the fact that we still haven't closed on the house yet because of one issue after another, we had everything cleared out of the house including my wrestling mat. I brought the mat home to use in my basement. Surprisingly, the mat fit in the space in my basement. However, storage was a huge issue. The mat didn't roll up easily and getting it through the door from the storage room in the basement into game room the was a huge hassle. Putting back in the storage wasn't much easier. Recently, I decided to invest in an easier and slightly smaller option. I recently purchased a foldable mat from Amazon that is 4 X 10. It's a tad smaller than I would have liked, but it folds and stores very, very easily. After using the new mat with Wrestling Beast this past weekend, with some supplemental puzzle mats that Spiro45 had given to me a while back, I knew I could now get rid of the old mat. Seeing that the mat was given to me, I felt the need to give it away as well. I put an ad in Craig's list and got a few inquiries, but no followup. I then put an ad in Facebook Marketplace entitled "FREE Wrestling Mat". I got about a dozen inquiries in the first 10 minutes. To make a long story short I answered about 6 or 7 inquiries at the same time saying "the first one to get to my house tonight, takes it". The winner was this petite, attractive young woman probably in her early or mid 30's.

When she showed up and I loaded the awkwardly rolled up mat into her Chevy Tahoe, she explained it was for her 5 year old son. She kept thanking me and told me that her son had recently taken an interest in watching wrestling and MMA and very much wanted to do it and had been wrestling with his friends on his bed. As a parent who raised 2 sons, I can understand the type of catastrophe that can cause. She told me that she had told her husband they should set up a wrestling type of ring in the basement and that she would look for some sort of mat. So when she saw the ad, she quickly responded and happened to be just five minutes away. She drove away with my old mat, and now the mat will be used to help nurture a future wrestler, or martial arts expert, or mma fighter, or whatever road he goes down in relation to his interest. So I'm glad I could donate my old mat to help a child develop his interest in wrestling and maybe someday, he'll have a profile on Meetfighters.

Peace out and God bless!!!!