Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Wrestlers will lose up to a pound a minute during a seven-minute match. The training stories they tell include running in-flight "laps," back and forth in jetliners, despite the crew's protests. Then doing chin-ups in the jetliner's galley area. An old trick for high school wrestlers is to ask to go to the bathroom during every class, and then doing chin-ups on the toilet stall walls, letting the sharp edge along the top cut calluses into their hands. They talk about running up and down the bleachers, past angry fans during basketball games, in order to make their competitive weight the next day.

In 1998, Wingett says, three college wrestlers died of dehydration trying to cut weight while taking the supplement Creatine.

"I don't think there's any more grueling or tougher sport to train in," says Kevin Jackson. "By going through that, it's a humbling experience. You do get beat in the practice room. You do get fatigued running the track or running the stadium stairs."

Wingett talks about long runs in the middle of summer where three wrestlers take turns, two chasing a pickup truck that the third drives with the windows rolled up and the heater cranked.

"You get it down to a system," says Justin Petersen, who at seventeen years old has had his nose broken more than fifteen times. "You think: 'I can have this carton of milk, I can have this bagel, and I will have sweated it off by this time of the day, at which time I can have this sip of water and still make weight. You have it down exact."

Lee Pritts and Mark Strickland, a 76-kilogram freestyle wrestler with «Strick» tattooed on his arm, have brought their own stationary bikes into town and are sweating off the weight in room 232 of the Hartland Inn. A third friend, Nick Feldman, is here for moral support and to massage them when their bodies get so dehydrated that their muscles cramp.

Feldman, a former college wrestler who drove down from Mitchell, South Dakota, says, "Wrestling's like a club where once you get in, you can't get out."

"You see the other athletes in the schools, the basketball players and the football players, they'll talk about how 'wrestling's not that tough, but then they join the team, and they quit within the week," says Sean Harrington, who's been training at Colorado Springs for the past six months in order to compete in freestyle at 76 kilograms.

He says, "We always have such pride in the fact that we work harder than everybody else, and we get no recognition to speak of. I mean, there's no fans here. Most of them are parents. It's not a popular sport."

"When I was in college I cried a lot just because it was so hard, and I was never very good," says Ken Bigley, twenty-four, who started wrestling in first grade and now coaches at Ohio State University. "I asked myself a lot of times why I did it. One analogy I like to use is it's like a drug. You get addicted to it. Sometimes you know-you know it's not good for you, especially emotionally, some of those tough practices or bad competitions, but you just keep coming back for it. If I didn't need it, I wouldn't be here. You don't make money off it. You don't get any glory off it. It's just searching for the high, I guess."

Sean Harrington says, "I've been wrestling so long that I don't remember what pain was like before wrestling."

Says Lee Pritts, twenty-six, a coach at the University of Missouri, "It's kind of weird. You get in the shower after a tournament and your face is usually banged up from wrestling all day, and the water running over it gives you a little burn, but if you take a week off you miss it. You miss the pain. After a week off, you're ready to go back because you miss the pain."

The pain is maybe one reason why the stands are almost empty.

Amateur wrestling isn't easy to watch. It can be a flesh-and-blood demolition derby.

During the first minute of his first match last Christmas, Sean Harrington broke his wrist.

Keith Wilson's injuries include his shoulder, elbow, knee, his right ankle, and a herniated disk between C5 and C6 of his spine. Seven surgeries, total.

At home in a jar full of alcohol, junior-level wrestler Mike Engelmann from Spencer, Iowa, keeps a translucent sliver of cartilage that surgeons removed from the meniscus of his knee. It's his good-luck charm. He's been stitched up nine times.

About his nose, Ken Bigley says, "Sometimes it's pointing left. Sometimes it's pointing right."

A medic in an orange "Sports Injury Center" T-shirt says, "Ringworm is unbelievably common among these guys."

One of the oldest rules, he says, is that wrestlers have to get down and wipe up their own blood with a spray bottle of bleach.

"His grandparents will say all the time, 'This is nuts, " says software engineer David Rodrigues, here with his seventeen-year-old son, Chris, a four-time Georgia State champion who placed fifth in the world in the Youth Games in Moscow last year.

"There's been the injuries," he says, listing them off. "Hyperextended knee, hyperextended elbow, he had a slight tear in a back muscle, a broken hand, broken finger, broken toe, sprained knee, but we've seen worse. We've seen kids carried out on stretchers. Broken collarbones, broken arm, broken leg, broken neck. God forbid, we had a kid in Georgia whose neck was broken. Those are the kind of injuries you pray that never happen, but at the same token we all understand that's the nature of the sport."

"And my broken tooth," his son, Chris, says.

And David Rodrigues says, "His tooth broke off and it was in the kid's head, sticking out of the kid's head."

About Chris's mother, David Rodrigues says, "My wife will only go to a couple tournaments a year. She'll go to State and she'll go to Nationals, but she won't go to a lot because she's afraid of injuries. She doesn't want to be there when one happens."

Chris's front teeth are bonded now.

In a few more days, Chris Rodrigues will break his jaw in the Junior World Team Trials.

Justin Petersen says, "There's a picture of me after the state tournament my sophomore year. I had hit someone's knee with my face so one side of my face was all swollen, and the other side of my face I had mat burn. It's nasty. It seeps and scabs and the scabs keep breaking every time you move your facial muscles. And my nose, I'd broken that again, so I had a cotton ball up my nose. And I'd sprained my shoulder again, so I had a big ice pack up to my shoulder. I'd just finished wrestling my last match and someone took a picture of me."

Timothy O'Rourke, who's wrestling today for the first time in nineteen years, is here without his wife. "She doesn't want to see me get hurt," he says. "Rolling around with the big boys… She's afraid she's going to see me get hurt, so she stayed at the hotel."

For Greco-Roman wrestler Phil Lanzatella, it was his wife who first noticed his injury and saved his life.

"I was going to Sweden/Norway, and my wife was putting her head to my chest, hugging me," he says. "I'd just gotten back from the Olympic Training Center. And she's about five-three, and she said, 'Your heart sounds like it's making a funny sound. She said, 'You'd better get checked out. So I went to the emergency room."

It was a torn heart valve.

Lanzatella says, "To make a long story short, I went in on Sunday night and they told me on Tuesday of that next week that I'd need immediate open-heart surgery. The only thing they could surmise is that it was from wrestling. One of the top surgeons in the world, the one who did my surgery, said he'd never seen an injury like it in his career. If you tear a valve like that, the analogy is hitting the steering wheel of a car, head-on, at sixty miles an hour."

The heart valve was torn in three places-in a V shape, with another tear horizontally across the midpoint of the V-forcing Lanzatella's heart to pump five times faster than normal to keep up.