Ask the Wrestler

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

and not that WWE crap either. Real High School and NCAA collegiate wrestling. I’ve basically dedicated my whole life to it, loved it, hated it, but undeniably the biggest learning experience I’ve ever had.

I come from an area known as D-7, in the heart of Pittsburgh which has been and still is today the hot-bed for High School Wrestling. Multiple Division 1 NCAA Champs every year and even olympic champions come from there. It’s what I know best so I basically went to college because of it – Pitt-Johnstown, a small but successful division II school in the middle of the state.

I don’t mean to brag, but I think wrestlers have a passion for their sport that goes unmatched by most other athletes. Most successful wrestlers are absolutely fanatical about the sport. It literally is a lifestyle.

Now that it’s over for me, I’d just like to share and reflect. I’m already rambling too much here anyways. Ask away!

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2

How high did you place? Win any championships?

What’s your favorite move to pull off?

3

I was a W.P.I.A.L. champion in High School, that’s probably my top finish. I made it to the finals in a Penn State Open tournament my senior year in college and won another tournament in Wilkes-Barre.

My team in college however consistently placed in the top five in the nation each year I was there.

My favorite move would have to be a sweep-dump, because it just drops a guy flat on his face.

4

Have you ever hurt anyone in a match, and if so, how did it affect you?

I wrestled for just one year in high school. In my first match I performed a legal takedown on my opponent, which unfortunately broke his arm. Since the move was legitimate, I was given the win because he was unable to continue. It was my one and only win.

After that, I didn’t do so well. In hindsight, I think I was freaked out by causing an injury. Ever have anything like that happen to you?

5

Yeah actually in a match in college I was wrestling an opponent, shot in for a takedown and heard something crack or pop. He stopped wrestling and was obviously in some pain and the match ended in about thirty seconds. I won.

I was kinda pissed about it because it was a home match and I wanted to wrestle the whole thing in front of the crowd. I guess I felt a little bad for the other guy but I got over it pretty quick.

As far as injuries go for my teammates, I’ve seen everything from broken arms to torn knees, to cracked ribs. I always felt bad for these guys cause they were in some real pain but it is the nature of the sport.

6

Some TMI questions:

On the modesty scale, it appears some wrestlers are at about a 1. The singlets can be quite revealing. I have heard that some wrestlers wear little or no protection because of the “binding” issues.

have you ever wrestled anyone with obnoxious BO?

7

Until our son showed an interest in wrestling, I thought it was the most homo-erotic sport out there and, since I had never been exposed to it ( our Catholic school…where the priest wrestle the boys didnt have a team) I was extremely hesitant about the entire sport. All I knew of wrestling was the fake stuff on TV.

He got into a club and WE TOTALLY FELL IN LOVE WITH THIS SPORT. The parents, not so much.

There is one winner and one loser. Watching a Last Years State Champion get his but whipped by some fairly new kid who is having a great day is nearly as exciting as watching some girl wrestle her ass off against some boy in her class and that is nearly as exciting as watching two evenly matched kids just wrestle the shit out of each other. sometimes you have a great couple of matches, sometimes you don’t. There are no " Everybody is a WINNAR’ crap. and I like that.

He wrestled two seasons (age 8 at Lt heavyweight: 95 pounds/ age 9 lt hwt at the same weight. ) making it to states both years. ( Not too terribly difficult in his weight class. It was the same 6 kids over and over again. And lost to a girl his first year who’s dad is a wrestling coach.)

He didn’t want to wrestle this year, despite every one of his friends and buddies being in this sport and it was harder on us then him. He had no one to play with at all from November - March. THAT SUCKS. He went from being in great shape from football to El Couch Potato.

This year we are going to possibly pull rank on him and tell him he has to do practices and a couple tourneys (11 years old, 110 right now) ( not every weekend, that is a bit much.) just to keep busy. He’s just a brutishly strong kid and should be a starting center in football this fall.
What words of encouragement do you recommend?

( It still is the most homo-erotic thing I’ve ever seen.)

8

Notfrommensa I don’t even know what you mean by protection, like a cup? that would be terribly uncomfortable with some of the positions we’re regularly in and believe it or not you don’t really get hit in those spots too often. As far as modesty goes, yeah I’d say most of us have a problem with that on and off the mat.

As far as B.O. goes, yeah, a lot. At first you notice it, but in an intense match some senses like that just go away. The ABSOLUTE WORST though is in practice, a room already too hot and full of odors, your breathing heavy from the work-out, and someone farts! It lingers forever and makes you wanna throw up.

Shirley Unjest, my advice, pull rank. When I first started, at age 8, I lost every single match except one (and that was to a 6 year-old). I hated it, hated practices, hated tournaments everything about it. My dad still took me though, every weekend too lol, and each year I became more successful, and started to like it more and more until I loved it.

It’s a real tough demanding sport and maybe thats why your son doesn’t like it. Honestly, not to be insulting, but a sport like wrestling can toughen up any kid. Not only that the skills he’ll learn will only make him twice the football player. An anecdote; Stephen Neal, Starting Center for the Super Bowl Champion New Eangland Patriots didn’t even play football in college, he wrestled.

9

A what? Yes, I know I could google the acronym, but that comes without an explanation attached.

Sports are treated in an extremely different way in the US and the rest of the world. Other than (if I understood correctly) access to fellowships which you wouldn’t have been able to get without it, what other indirect benefits did you derive from the sport? (Being in shape is direct, about everything else is indirect) Do you think that you or your teammates ever got treated differently from non-athletes in your schools? Not necessarily better, just different.

At UM us TAs were required to let athletes make up any class missed due to training or matches, while people who’d been sick or had to go to work unexpectedly weren’t supposed to get make-up at all. Since we all came from cultures where sports is “something you do after class” and not “instead of class,” we offered make up classes to people who’d missed one for non-sports reasons as well - but this flew directly against school policies.

Can you explain the tryout process and how the sport fit with/around your classwork? And what is that “letters” thing I sometimes hear Americans talk about?

How much was your ability to become a succesful wrestler influenced by your genetics, and how much was your body’s growth, adult shape and physical ability (reflexes for example) influenced by your wrestling?

10

NAVA

W.P.I.A.L. stands for Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Leauge, and is what you would consider a region or district. It’s composed of 70 or so schools and basically consists of Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. It’s in all sports in this area too, not just wrestling.

An anecdote to explain W.P.I.A.L. Wrestling. Pennsylvania has been and still is today the premier spot for High School Wrestling. The W.P.I.A.L. is the toughest in all of Pennsylvania. So it can be argued that Pittsburgh hosts the best high school wrestling in all of America. There is even an annual all-star match held at the Fitzgerald Field-House where the top seniors from Pennsylvania face the top seniors from all over the country. In the latest bout, Pennsylvania actually beat team U.S.A. 30-21http://wrestlingclassic.com/2009/index.htm
(you can find me on the 2004 W.P.I.A.L. team :slight_smile: )

As for special treatment in school, sometimes. If we missed classes we weren’t penalized for it but this was more due to school policy though and most teachers frowned on it.

One of the biggest benefits was the respect and pull our coach had. Almost annually, some of us got in trouble. Our coach, a very powerful and intimidating man, would flip on us behind closed doors. Outside though, he would do anything he could to get us out of trouble, and sometimes it worked. On a social level, it was pretty sweet. Very much like joining a frat except you didn’t have to pay for it and we had a team goal in mind that went beyond drinking and partying every weekend.

The letters you are thinking about are probably AA or All-American. These awards go to the top 8 in the country in their respective weight classes and divisions within the NCAA.

My ability as compared to my genetics is a tough one. I’m short, even for my weight class (125), so I was stronger and sometimes quicker than my opponents. This made me good in the standing position because takedowns a lot of times are about explosive moves. But I’m terribly unflexible and this hurt a lot in the top/bottom positions because these often had more to do with controlling your opponent. Difficult to explain, but basically there is no one type of wrestler which is best.

I feel I stunted my growth in high school due to wrestling. I wrestled 103 as a sophomore. In the beginning of the year, I made the weight with not much problem. As the season went on it became more difficult and this was even with a two-pound weight allowance granted half-way through the season (meaning I could weigh in at 105). Basically I was having a growth spurt, but was cutting weight at the same time. So I like to think I might have had an inch or two more if it wasn’t for wrestling. Umm, I’m a better dancer probably because of wrestling. Oh, and I have two cauliflower ears, but thats a whole nother story.

11

How much summer freestyle/Greco did you do, and how important do you think it is to developing young wrestlers?

12

How much does perspiration affect your grips and holds? Do wrestlers do anything to try to “make themselves slicker” like put vaseline or something on their skin?

13

How prevalent is the use of perfomance enhancing drugs (steroids, etc.) and how much pressure is there to use them?

14

Ace309 - I wrestled freestyle from about 7th grade to the 10th grade summer. They didn’t have it in school, so I had to go to a nearby club, and in Pennsylvania they had a couple of these.

Anyways, I think it’s one of the best things a young wrestler can do to develop his talents, and all the top guys I knew were doing it. It exposed you to so much more. The main focus of freestyle was to not expose your back and this translated well into collegiate wrestling. Also, from having many new and different practice partners and opponents, to being coached by Olympians and Hall of Fame Coaches at nearly every camp I went to. It’s simply something that many wrestlers need to get ahead. I don’t know why I ever quit, wish I wouldn’t have.

FoiegrasIsevil - I can’t say that ever happened. The singlets sort of allow for a grip around the waist, which otherwise is difficult. Legs, arms, neck are never a problem. Never seen that once in my day though. Although, my dad said back in the day an opponent of his used vaseline on his arms and it did it make it difficult for him.

Furious_Marmot - I’ve never used steroids and no one I know has either. I thought about it, a couple of times, but I don’t know if wrestling would be the type of sport that steroids would be a big advantage.

15

Steroids aren’t generally seen as an advantage at the highest level because they run counter to the goal of zeroing in on the lightest weight class you can make without sacrificing technique and strength. Truth be told, there’s probably some convex function that could optimize steroid use and weight-cutting, but most of the guys I wrestled with in high school who cycled on for football cycled off during wrestling season.

There was a 2000 Olympic medalist, Leipold of Germany, who was stripped of his medal for a banned substance (the American, Brandon Slay, ended up taking the gold in his stead), which I vaguely recall being some sort of steroid. However, a lot of the guys I wrestled with who used creatine or andro weren’t responsible about it and ended up ballooning at least two weight classes.

16

Two questions came to mind immediately, and then I saw this:

So what is the most weight you’ve ever cut, and in what time span?

Is there a way to prevent cauliflower ear that you know of? I think I heard Bas Rutten mention something about draining fluid from your ear as a preventative measure, but I could be making that up. Once you have them, they stick around though, right?

17

What do your ears look like? I have a good friend that was a state champion and a D2 All-American, and he’s a good looking guy, but his ears are all cauliflowery.

18

Ace - That is true about Brandon Slay, I don’t know why I didn’t remember that. I just always thought steroids would be counter-productive in wrestling, making you big, bulky, and slow.

MeanOldLady - The most weight I cut was probably from about 115 to 103. I was pretty good about it, unlike many of my teammates, and did it over a month or so. Usually I would cut anywhere from 4 - 6 pounds the day before the match. After that season though, lets just say I went from about 105 to 117 in a couple of hours.

The easiest and actually only way I know to prevent cauliflower ears is to simply wear your headgear. You are right about draining your ears, and I’ve had it done to me before. From what I understand, when your ear gets badly damaged it fills up with blood. The doctor simply pokes it with a needle and sucks all that blood out. This can take two or three times. It’ll go back to normal though after that. If you don’t get it taken care of though, yes they will stay that way.

Lamar Mundane - One ear is folded over at the top. Kind of shriveled up, pretty ugly. The other is blown up some at the top and in the inner part, not as noticeable. Everyone always refers to them as “dog-chew toys.”

19

Totally serious question here
First of all, do you watch MMA/UFC?

If so, as a wrestler, do you think a pure wrestler such as Brock Lesnar (who granted had been training MMA for at least 3 years) can beat Frank Mir, a Brazilian Jujitsu black belt at UFC 100 on Sat?

20

cgg419 - Yes, I watch MMA/UFC occasionally. and Yes, I absolutely think Brock Lesnars going to beat Frank Mir. First off, Lesnar is just a behemoth of a man. He dwarfs Mir. That alone is going to be enough for Mir or anyone else in the UFC to handle. Secondly, you have to realize that although Lesnar might not be a black belt, he is NCAA champion. He trained just as much as Mir, if not more, but just in a different style.