My little brother, Steve Gonzales (top), who'll be competing for the 103-pound state wrestling championship this weekend at Conseco Fieldhouse.

This weekend, Conseco Fieldhouse will host the IHSAA State Wrestling Finals. I imagine most of you couldn't care less, and I can't really blame you.

Unlike you, though, I never had the luxury of ignoring this ostensibly primitive, plodding sport. I was born to a family of wrestlers.

I imagine growing up in a wrestling family isn't too much different from growing up in, say, a skeet-shooting family: As a youngster, you're surrounded by people -- your dad, grandpa, uncles, brothers -- who talk as if skeet-shooting is the best, most important sport in the world. You eat and breathe skeet-shooting. You learn about and become fascinated by famous skeet shooters. You read books on skeet shooting. You even watch it on ESPN at 2 a.m. on Sunday mornings.

And then one day you realize that skeet-shooting is looked on by most everybody else as a curiosity at best, and, at worst, an almost occult-like, past-its-prime pastime.

So I grew up in a wrestling family, and for better or worse, I learned to love the sport. I still watch Olympic wrestling and college wrestling on TV when I can catch it. And I still keep up with which Indiana high schools are dominant in the sport (Evansville Mater Dei is a perennial beast). And I still abhor people who think all wrestling involves a boxing ring, HGH-enhanced meatheads and chairs breaking over backs.

Unfortunately, unlike my brothers, I wasn't any good at the sport. At all. I spent most of my time on the mat impersonating a fish out of water, fighting to stay off my back. I was too lanky, too weak, too physically immature for my age to compete with other wrestlers, and by 10th grade, I gave it up.

But I've been following my brothers (all of whom were or are damn good wrestlers) for years, and this weekend, my youngest brother, a freshman at Delta High School in Muncie, will compete for the state championship in the 103-pound weight class.

While I certainly don't expect to convert anyone -- least of all people who spout stupid stereotypes w/r/t wrestling ("It's just dudes rolling around in tights!"), I encourage true sports fans to give it a chance. Like tennis and boxing, wrestling is a mercilessly lonely sport for the competitor: There is no one to bail you out when you're losing, and no one to blame when you've already lost.

When the competition gets tight -- as it no doubt will this weekend -- the best matches will come down to single moments, briefer than the blink of an eye, when one wrestler discovers inside himself that extra ounce of determination or strength or smarts (or some combination of the three) that his opponent lacks. Wrestling, like all great sports, is intensely dramatic from a spectator's point of view. And the more you watch, the more you'll learn that like skeet shooting (I suspect), it's far more complicated -- and enjoyable -- than you'd ever suspected.