Wrestling like Rocky boxed
High schools that host wrestling events often kill bright gym lights to drop a light bulb hooded by a metal shade over a single mat. This adds a fight club feel to varsity or qualifying competitions, but not in the gratuitously violent underground sense.
Competitors shake hands in this circle of light as gentlemen or gentlewomen moments before their hand-to-hand power struggle, called a bout, tests them through three two-minute periods.
The referee steps back after the handshake, blows the whistle, and the clock starts. Skilled wrestlers then go to work as if wearing a suit and tie, not a skin-tight singlet.
It’s business.
They circle and focus in a state of tight tension, like brokers studying a volatile stock market with lots of money on the line just before the last bell. Internal risk calculators spin, and these wrestlers tap instincts honed perhaps by many seasons of juggling the interplay of force and physics to pin or otherwise outscore an opponent.
Last weekend, a family friend on the Berthoud High School varsity wrestling team — Donovan Mann, 16 — competed in the Colorado High School Activities Association’s regional wrestling tournament for his division at Eaton High School north of Greeley.
During a break in his bid to clinch a spot for this weekend’s annual CHSAA state wrestling championship at Denver’s Ball Arena, he took a seat with his mother and me in the bleachers.
The wrestler he needed to beat — a stocky, swaggering heavyweight who beat him the last time they wrestled — paced the sidelines.
“Now I know where the phrase, ‘heavy handed,’ comes from,” Donovan said, studying his opponent. “There can be so much force in them.”
So, for all the scrambling, dives, snappy takedowns, reversals, spins, and repositioning moves, wrestlers often work like boa constrictors, like human vice grips applying heavy pound force per square inch guided by a sense of the physics in play.
That’s why wrestling teammates and fans sometimes shout “Squeeeeeeeeze!” during close bouts.
Just before Donovan’s high stakes bout came up, his coaches massaged his shoulders and shook out his brawny arms as he stood on deck lost in thought.
My eldest son, Carl Vanden Berg, 17, wrestles on Erie High School’s junior varsity wrestling team. But he joined Donovan’s mom and me that afternoon to see if his buddy could win that bout — his ticket to competing with the best wrestlers statewide this weekend.
Carl and Donovan became friends in seventh grade after Carl invited him to join the Erie Middle School wrestling team. So, when Donovan’s opponent at regionals tried rolling out of bounds several times to reset under the heavy offensive, Carl looked over at me with a wry smile.
“See that? Donovan’s got him on the run,” he said.
By the end, our wrestling favorite got a bloody nose that somehow sprinkled red drops across the back white part of his singlet. His face looked battered, his longish hair matted, and his energy depleted.
But he did it! And Donovan’s patient, dogged tenacity triggered an auditory memory for me of the trumpeted theme song from the 1976 Academy Awardwinning movie, “Rocky.”
Though a boxer, not a wrestler, protagonist Rocky Balboa stirred fighting spirit in audiences then who celebrated the story of the uneducated debt collector by day and small club boxer by night winning the world heavyweight boxing championship against all odds.
Rocky, a fictitious character created and played by Sylvester Stallone, inspired us to put in the time to shine by how he hustled up steep steps in his gray sweatsuit alone at dawn and punched a speed bag for untold hours.
Rocky modeled this message: don’t throw away your long shot.
Donovan took it, as did Carl’s Erie High School varsity wrestler counterparts. That propelled them to the state wrestling championship underway now.
Such fanfare acknowledges the effort each wrestler invested during the season to cut weight, build skills, and sportsmanship. What a season!
Very few of us will compete on that stage. But most of us still can relate in a meaningful way. We, too, know what it feels like to have a good fight on our hands as we wrestle to build a business, nurture children, support those in need, battle an addiction, grow a ministry, tend to a marriage, volunteer in disaster relief, etc.
All of these off the mat bouts demand focus, strength, engagement, and the drive to squeeze — to apply the kind of pressure that eventually transforms what you’ve got into something better. And shooting for better as a daily value never steals thunder from best — it builds toward it.
Congratulations to all of Colorado’s high school wrestlers — boys and girls — competing at the state wrestling championship!
For more information, visit:
chsaanow.com.