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Professional wrestling is about as authentic as Spam. The real warriors are the amateurs; those who compete for the love of the sport. They are the ones gritting it out in sweltering practice rooms, training relentlessly and religiously. Not only do they have to deal with the physical rigors, but they must maintain the mental discipline necessary for weight control. How well do you train when you're constantly hungry? There is no purer form of competition between two human beings. No equipment, no one to blame but yourself for losing, none but you to bask in the glory of victory. Strength gets you far, technique further, but the bottom line is this: the one with the most heart, the one who wants to win the most, the one whose spirit will not be dominated will win. And for those who still think it's just some weird thing where you roll around on a mat with another guy while wearing tights, perhaps Gary Kamiya's description will enlighten. What freestyle wrestling really is is war. Compared to it, all other sports feel somehow secondary, derivative. You can't get any more primal, more man-against-man, than this: Two guys who are probably the cardiovascular kings of the entire Olympics (wrestling is like sprinting as hard as you can with every muscle in your body) grappling, grabbing, slapping, squeezing, working with violent precision against a slab of obscenely plastic, angry clay, until one moldable angry slab gains mastery and the other is utterly, completely defeated, annihilated, dragged by the heels around the gates of Troy. When you are pinned in wrestling, you have lost.-Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor. |
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