What's Your Favorite Sport?

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My favorite sport is golf.

Just kidding. It’s totally cool if it’s your favorite sport though.

My favorite sport is actually table tennis.

Also kidding. But it’s cool if it’s your favorite sport. No judgment. (Okay, a little judgment.)

With the Olympics in full swing, I think it’s fair to discuss sports. I feel justified in this light hearted topic despite all the controversy surrounding the Olympics (which I have discussed here).

Wrestling

My favorite sport is wrestling. You probably guessed that from the title of this sub-section as well as the image at the top of this entire post.

One of the main reasons that I am a fan of wrestling today is that I was a wrestler in my youth. I will always be glad that I grew up as a wrestler. I make that comment entirely independent of how much skill I may or may not have had in the sport.

I began wrestling at age 12. I was below average when I began but a few years later I was a fairly decent wrestler by North Carolina high school standards (there are plenty of states out there with a far more competitive high school wrestling architecture than NC). I did not win championships. I didn’t even compete at the collegiate level. Yet, I count my qualification for the state tournament my senior year as one of the proudest physical accomplishments in my life.

I learned a few very valuable lessons that I’ve carried throughout life. I’ve listed just a few below.

1. Toughness

2. Physical Fitness

3. Individual Performance

There are other words that people may use in an attempt to get away from using the word “toughness.” Why? It’s not a scary word or a scary concept. Toughness is an essential attribute to success. It is absolutely a life skill. It extends well beyond the physical domain and requires a strong mind. In fact, being physically tough almost always requires mental toughness as a prerequisite. Toughness allows someone to work through pain, deal with adversity to achieve a goal, and cope with defeat. I learned a lot of lessons in wrestling and some of them came the hard way. On any given day of practice or a match, the chance of true injury is low (though they do occur), but there will certainly be significant bumps, bruises, and soreness that take their toll. It requires toughness to endure the grind and still go on. I credit wrestling for developing within me the toughness and determination that was so crucial in life moving forward.

Physical Fitness is not the same thing as toughness, which itself is not entirely physical at all. The two are related, however. Fitness is important in wrestling and in life. We live in a sick society in which the majority of the people are unfit and unhealthy. I feel fortunate to have grown up involved in various sports, though none required the comprehensive fitness profile of wrestling. To be successful, wrestlers must be strong and conditioned, quick and agile, balanced and flexible. Because the physical demands of the sport are so significant, practices must be intense, which is one reason why toughness and physical fitness are related. To a large degree, wrestling built within me a physical base that prepared me for my later service in the military.

Individual Performance is what matters in wrestling. Wrestlers train in teams and, to a degree, compete as teams. But this team concept is more limited in wrestling than in other sports. Individual wrestlers step on the mat alone and engage with their opponent one-on-one. The victor of the individual match earns points that are then tallied to his team. During each individual match, the two wrestlers compete head-to-head, and while they may hear the cheers from the coaches or teammates, they either win the match alone or lose the match alone. In so doing, they earn all the glory as victor, or harbor all the shame in defeat. It is what it is.

As a fan, I got away from wrestling for a long time. I began practicing jiu-jitsu in the local area and naturally found myself opting to watch more jiu-jitsu competitions and MMA fights. In doing so, I gravitated away from watching wrestling or following the sport at the collegiate level at all.

After approximately twenty years of no real interest in the sport at the NCAA level, I happened to catch a match on tv during the 2020–2021 season. Immediately, my interest in the sport was re-ignited. Even though I never competed at the college level myself, I could still identify with the athletes. I knew what it was like to cut the last few pounds to make the established weight limit for a match. I knew what it was like to warm up in the minutes before competing and deal with the jitters naturally associated with the approaching match. Watching the match on tv, I could almost smell the mats and the cleaner used to disinfect them prior to each match. Memories flooded my mind of a hundred high school matches from my own competitive past.

Being 25 years removed from my high school wrestling days, I have a different perspective on sports now than I did at the time I competed. I certainly appreciate the competition for its own sake, but there’s a more transcendental aspect to it as well. I can readily see how athletic competitions serve as a metaphor for life.

This concept isn’t new. Anciently, sports were seen via their relation to war. Even today, it’s easy for us to appreciate the analogy. Contestants pit their physical skills and mental tenacity against their foes in a pitched struggle in which only one side can emerge victorious. With wrestling, the proximity to combat is even closer than with other sports. Two opponents seek to physically subdue the other quite literally. (The same could be said about jiu-jitsu, boxing, and a few other sports as well).

Stepping onto a wrestling mat alone to grapple against another human can be a daunting endeavor. It can feel almost self-sacrificial to walk onto the mat to compete against a far more highly skilled opponent. And yet it must be done. The Goliath must be confronted even if, unlike the Biblical story, the match ends with David flat on his back in crushing defeat. It takes a special type of courage to face a stronger, more technical opponent and actively try to win despite clearly overwhelming odds.

I began wrestling in seventh grade. A few weeks into the season, I quit the team. I’m sure I had excuses as to why I did so. I probably even justified it to myself at the time. I was the smallest wrestler on the team. I wasn’t very good. Practices were very hard.

But the reality is I quit.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. I joined the team again in eighth grade and didn’t quit. Then I wrestled all through high school and performed at a reasonably successful level (by my own moderate standards). But the story doesn’t even end there. I then went to the United States Military Academy at West Point — by no means the easiest place in the country to decide to go to college. It was a very tough place to go to school. Upon graduation, I entered the Army. I volunteered to attend multiple training schools that were extremely rigorous.

As is common in life, lessons come our way and we choose to learn, or we reject the opportunity to learn. In my mind, it’s not a stretch to say that I successfully made it through these training courses in the Army because of the foundation of toughness and fitness primarily built through years as a wrestler. I might also add another thought. Perhaps it’s not that I made it through those courses DESPITE the fact I had quit the wrestling team in seventh grade but BECAUSE of it.

I’m not proud I quit the team when I was twelve. I’m still a bit embarrassed. Had I exhibited more discipline then, perhaps I would have had the same successes later on (or greater successes). My point is that I learned from my shortcoming. Even at that young age, I had the introspective ability to tell myself that quitting was not okay. I had to tell myself that I did indeed want to be a wrestler and that I was willing to endure hard practices and humiliating defeat and whatever else was part of what it meant to be a wrestler. As I mentioned above, lessons come our way in life, and we can choose to accept or reject the lesson. I think in this case, I learned, and it made me a stronger person throughout life.

That’s why I showed up the next year and joined the team. It might make a much better story to say that I was a top performer that following year, but that would be untrue. Luckily, that’s not the only metric of success that I use to view my own life (though performance itself is definitely an important metric of success).

A few years later, when I was a high school senior, a teammate who had graduated the year before came by practice while home over the Christmas break. He had joined the Marine Corps after high school and had recently finished boot camp and happened to be in town for the holidays when he showed up to one of our practices. I asked him about boot camp and how hard it was. All I remember from our conversation was him confidently stating that “I’m a wrestler” as if it were the most natural explanation as to how he endured the rigors of his recruit training.

I know exactly what he meant by that and I’m glad that I too can credit wrestling as a factor in the successes of my own life.

As we now enter in the wrestling portion of the Olympics, I’m excited to watch these young athletes compete and, from the comfort of my chair at home, will in some small measure share in their triumphs and shortcomings. Though every single one of them is a far better wrestler than I was, I’ll still reminisce about my own days of wrestling and reflect on what the sport means to me as an athlete, a fan, and a man in general.

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