John Irving writes in the New York Times today about the demise of wrestling as an Olympic sport. He examines the role played in this failure by the sport's governing bodies. But the termites have eaten away at the structure of the sport for years, and the collapse of the top tiers of the structure were a long time coming, from within.
The Phantom is not shedding tears for the sport of Olympic wrestling, but there is reason to mourn the loss of the wrestling experience in the lives of American males. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then what future battles America will lose because there are no more wrestling programs can only be imagined.
When the Phantom was in high school he justified the time he spent on the wrestling team to his parents as something which might help him get into college. Even as a high school student, he was dubious his wrestling would play much of a role in his getting into an Ivy League college, but the argument seemed to play with his parents.
Of course, what the most elite institutions were looking for was a person who had achieved mastery in some arena, a state champion, a national science fair winner, something that gave their folder some pop, some tag line to identify the applicant: Oh, the captain of the wrestling team. The Phantom knew he would never be captain of the wrestling team. He had enough of a struggle to simply make it past the wrestle offs to get to step out on the mat representing his school each week.
The Phantom lettered in wrestling, but it was only later he discovered how little he knew about wrestling. The coach of the wrestling team was the Driver's Education teacher, a kindly, clueless man whose greatest achievement was having almost, but not quite making it into the National Football League. He had been anointed wrestling coach because the head of the physical education department thought this Goliath could keep control over the unruly types who wanted to join a wrestling team, and none of the adults on the faculty knew anything at all about wrestling. They needed a coach and the would be NFL tight end was close enough.
The Phantom had an unreasonably successful career as a wrestler, based almost entirely on athleticism built on swimming and running, and sandlot football. He had one advantage; his brother had wrestled on his high school team and taught the Phantom enough to make a difference. But as soon as the Phantom came across a wrestler who had actually been taught by a real wrestling coach, the Phantom was toast.
The coach realized he could not teach his wrestlers more than the basics, but he did believe in the power of conditioning. The experience of suffering through the hellfire of wrestling team work outs did bond the Phantom to his team mates. The Phantom was moderately afraid of heights, yet he learned to pull himself up a rope suspended thirty feet up, from the field house ceiling, and you had to haul yourself up there using only your hands and arms (no legs allowed) and those who made it through were bound by their common suffering just as Marines are bound by the experience of Paris Island.
Years later, the Phantom's son, age 7, was recruited for a wrestling team and the Phantom said no. The risk of neck and head injury seemed too high, and the intensity of the sport seemed inappropriate to a child of that age. As usual, the Phantom was over ruled by his wife, and his son started wrestling.
But the son was taught by real wrestling coaches, who had mastered the science of wrestling . By age 11, the Phantom's son was far advanced beyond anything the Phantom had ever seen in his own wrestling career. There were wrestling clubs and real coaches by that time, and the boys who arrived at high school had already wrestled for 8 years and were learned in the sport. By the time the son was 16, he was pleading to be driven halfway across the state to be coached by a coach of national reputation. By his senior year in high school, the son achieved a mastery which astonished his entire family. Coaching, persistence, discipline, competitiveness, a sport which helped define his own sense of himself, had made a huge difference in the formation of the son's personality.
His older brother, watching his brother wrestle, observed with perfect objectivity and characteristic humility: "He is, right now, at age 10 better at something than I will ever be at anything." The older brother was wrong about that, but he was observing the astonishment shared by parents who witnessed what their sons could be taught and how they could use what they had learned under extreme duress.
The son was recruited by Princeton, the University of Chicago and other fine colleges. The coach as Duke had been indifferent, until the son reached the final match for the National Prep School championship. After the match, the Duke coach offered the son a place on the Duke team, on the spot.
The son declined, having decided to go to a college which had no wrestling team. The son had done as much as he could ever hope to do in wrestling that last championship round at National Preps, and he turned his compass elsewhere.
The fact is, the Phantom disliked watching wrestling. Weekends spent in smelly gyms with dysfunctional bathrooms, run by dim witted adults who were running tournaments for themselves rather than for the kids involved, were a huge turn off. Wrestling eventually reformed the child club programs by the exercise of simple intelligence--bringing the light weight, young kids in to the gym in the morning and getting their matches done and bringing the older kids in during the afternoon, so the kids and the parents could have a half day for other things on Saturday and Sunday, a solution so simple it angered parents who asked why it had not been done before.
The answer was obvious: The sport was run for the pleasure and benefit of the adult volunteers who would be in the gym all day both days and saw now reason to relinquish control of their captive audience. So wrestling's organizations bred resentment among those who might have become wrestling's greatest advocates. It was a kid and parent unfriendly sport.
There were adults who liked hearing themselves speak over maximal volume amplified public address systems, adults who liked staging matches as if they were the Olympics, adults who coached kids as if they were horses they were bragging about, adults of every variety of pathology, delusion and misanthropy who crawled out of whatever holes they lived in during the week, to be very important people in the gym on weekends.
There were parents who told themselves and other parents wrestling would get their kids into good colleges, and justified the huge expense of time and energy by saying this was all for the ultimate punching of the college ticket, which in fact happened for so few kids you could name them each and count them on the fingers of both hands, and that from thousands of wrestlers in the various leagues and schools.
Colleges were cutting out wrestling programs, not recruiting wrestling stars of tomorrow. Title Nine did many good things, but one thing it did was to eliminate expendable all male teams--wrestling the most expendable-- because once you had an all male sport like football, with 80 students, you need to look for other all male sports to eliminate, to balance the need for an equal number of spots for female athletes.
In the end, a sport which ought to be a natural audience pleaser shot itself in the knees with poor management but part of it's demise was a force beyond its control.
The rules alluded to by John Irving in his article in the New York Times piece today are symptomatic of a larger picture of stupidity on an international level, which has hamstrung the sport. But the sport has eaten itself alive from the inside, from the earliest stages of childhood development, squandered the allegiance of its natural champions--the parents of the kids involved. Had wrestling had anything like the infrastructure of say, ballet, or swimming or soccer or even horseback riding, it would be on national television competing with basketball for audience share, and likely beating hockey handily.
Mr. Irving's picture is on the wall of the gym at Phillips Exeter Academy, just a few miles down the road from the Phantom's house. Obviously, the experience of wrestling was important to Mr. Irving, just as it was to the Phantom's son, and to the Phantom.
The intensity of the sport, the essential ability to endure defeat and humiliation and frustration, to continue to believe you can succeed, despite early failure, to persevere and have faith in the power of what more knowledgeable people can bring you, all those are inimical to the sport.
The Phantom has, for years, snorted in derision at those old chestnuts about sport building character, about carrying the lessons of the playing field to the classroom and beyond. But with the dementia of years, the Phantom can see there may be some nugget of truth in that old stuff. The Phantom does not believe sport inculcates toughness, perseverance and resilience so much as it selects for it. The boys who fight through the adversity simply demonstrate what they already have inside them.
One of the most searing memories of watching his son was a session in a practice room, where the son was schooled, ruthlessly and relentlessly by a wrestler who had made the same leap the son was making, from an introductory league to a high level traveling league. It was one of the greatest leaps he ever had to make, more than going from high school to college. He had been a star in his first league, but he was barely surviving in the big league. Slowly, by fits and starts, he made the transition, but it was not easy. Wrestling demanded something from deep inside him, and he responded with a ferocity and tenacity no one, certainly not his parents could have predicted.
If wrestling disappears from the American landscape, then it will be, at least partly, because the powers that be in wrestling have squandered the gift they were given.
That's a loss for everyone.
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