Winning in wrestling is about discipline. I learned that lesson over and over again through my time as a high school wrestler and as a coach. For my junior and senior years, our coaching staff was graced by the panther-like presence of a man we called Coach Shoops. We usually had three coaches, our head coach was the middle weight, and then the assistant coaches would be split one for the little guys and one for the big boys. Shoops was big and quick. He weighed around 200lbs and was constantly carrying around a med school textbook as he studied for whatever exam was next.
Shoops had a variety of little techniques he added to my repertoire. Because he was technically sound where I was quirky, and much quicker than I, I don't remember picking up too many larger moves from him. What I did learn was a style of thinking and gamesmanship that helped me win matches.
Like I said, winning in wrestling is about discipline. The head coach, Quilty, made sure we worked hard enough to have physical discipline, and were sufficiently drilled in techniques to have technical discipline. Shoops made sure we were ready to get inside our opponents' heads and grind them into the mat. He made sure we had competitive discipline.
Some of his ideas were a little quixotic, but worked with practice. It took me a while, but eventually I managed to get good at pointing towards an opponent's shoe to make them think it had come untied, so I could strike while their attention was away from defense. One of my favorites of his was The Handshake Maneuver. If you act scared while warming up and then give a dead fish handshake, your opponent will underestimate your confidence and technique. If you are reading a book at the side of the mat and give him the double-handed nerdshake, chances are he will underestimate your strength. If you make exceptional eye contact while shaking hands, he might still be looking when the ref blows the whistle and you can strike first. The Handshake Maneuver was straight up fun for me.
The most effective and hardest of his recommendations was that whenever the whistle blew, no matter the score, run back to the middle of the mat. Some matches this wouldn't have much affect because it would only be at the end of the first and second periods. Other matches you'd be going out of bounds every ten seconds and having to restart over and over.
In those cases, you could win a match simply by running back to the middle. The first time you do it, your opponent might just think it's weird as he staggers/crawls back the 10ft to line up. The second, he might be a little irked by your unnecessary expenditure of energy. By the fifth or sixth, all he's thinking about is what it's going to take to make you break. If your whole team is doing this, you can track the morale of the other team as it sinks further and further. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to run back to the middle. It's even harder if you're losing. But if you can be disciplined enough to do it, you will win the mental battle and eventually, the physical one as well.
I mention all of this because I think if you cultivate discipline in any area, it will give you almost superhuman abilities. This doesn't take skill or money. All it takes is dedication and a desire to perform (and perhaps peers and mentors to help you get back up again when you mess up). If you want your employees to aspire to excellence, you have to teach them the basics and the techniques like Quilty did. You also have to give them the hard-knuckled fight and gamesmanship that Shoops taught.
Showing posts with label Wrestling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wrestling. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2017
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Brotherhood and Pain - A Call for Fellowship
I learned a lot through pain as a high school wrestler. That first week of practice each year was a revelation. We would start with warmups that were more intense than an entire soccer practice, drill basic techniques and more advanced counters for 45 minutes or so (never letting the heart rate fall), and then wrestle live until it was time for conditioning. That first week, it would be somewhere during the drilling that I would hit "The Wall" - my physical limit where my body said "I can't do this anymore!" and I would have to push through with mental toughness, visualization of success, and camaraderie from my mat brothers.
Each year I would turn in homework that week with a different handwriting than the rest of the year. My entire body would be so spent from exertion and musce fatigue that no matter how I sat, some portion would be holding me up and twitching from the effort.
Gradually my wall would get pushed farther and farther back. We would do less and less of the drilling and technique and more of the live wrestling. By a month into the season, we would be managing to wrestle live for more than an hour a practice. Together we would push our walls back and fight through sore muscles, head colds, parents who wanted to overfeed us, and all the other problems life can throw at you.
Each time you got your hand raised in wrestling, it brought a compelling feeling of success. Wrestling is a mano-a-mano sport where you are each the same size. Winning means you stand victorious when all you had to rely on was yourself. It is also a team sport.
People not on the team often made fun of us for wrestling. For being homos, for wearing spandex costumes, for caring so much, and for not eating whatever we wanted like the rest of the boys in high school. I had it easy (our team was state champs all four years I was in HS, so critics were kept mostly to snide whispered comments), but I can imagine how it must have felt to have those jokes amplified.
The only other team I have heard described the way I think of my wrestling team is football. With 90 players on the roster and 11 on the field engaging in carefully choreographed plays, you must place your well-being in the hands of your brothers every time the ball is snapped.
We build bonds as men together when we sacrifice, overcome hardship, and ultimately learn that we are stronger through fellowship and mutual reliance than we ever would be alone. We need more wrestling, more football, more fellowship, and more initiations into a common brotherhood.
I do not know what form this future fellowship should take for me, I only know that I am open to it. I will readily embrace the chance to build strong bonds with men in my life and to mentor those younger than I in their journey towards manhood. I am reminded here of two interpretations of manhood that I have considered seminal that lack this sense of mutuality - and hope to find one that does: If by Rudyard Kipling, and It Takes a Man by Chris Young.
Each year I would turn in homework that week with a different handwriting than the rest of the year. My entire body would be so spent from exertion and musce fatigue that no matter how I sat, some portion would be holding me up and twitching from the effort.
Gradually my wall would get pushed farther and farther back. We would do less and less of the drilling and technique and more of the live wrestling. By a month into the season, we would be managing to wrestle live for more than an hour a practice. Together we would push our walls back and fight through sore muscles, head colds, parents who wanted to overfeed us, and all the other problems life can throw at you.
Each time you got your hand raised in wrestling, it brought a compelling feeling of success. Wrestling is a mano-a-mano sport where you are each the same size. Winning means you stand victorious when all you had to rely on was yourself. It is also a team sport.
People not on the team often made fun of us for wrestling. For being homos, for wearing spandex costumes, for caring so much, and for not eating whatever we wanted like the rest of the boys in high school. I had it easy (our team was state champs all four years I was in HS, so critics were kept mostly to snide whispered comments), but I can imagine how it must have felt to have those jokes amplified.
The only other team I have heard described the way I think of my wrestling team is football. With 90 players on the roster and 11 on the field engaging in carefully choreographed plays, you must place your well-being in the hands of your brothers every time the ball is snapped.
We build bonds as men together when we sacrifice, overcome hardship, and ultimately learn that we are stronger through fellowship and mutual reliance than we ever would be alone. We need more wrestling, more football, more fellowship, and more initiations into a common brotherhood.
I do not know what form this future fellowship should take for me, I only know that I am open to it. I will readily embrace the chance to build strong bonds with men in my life and to mentor those younger than I in their journey towards manhood. I am reminded here of two interpretations of manhood that I have considered seminal that lack this sense of mutuality - and hope to find one that does: If by Rudyard Kipling, and It Takes a Man by Chris Young.
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
What is Cheating and Who am I to Judge?
As a high school wrestler I spent a lot of time saying the following sentence “Wrestling isn’t a sport, it’s a lifestyle.” While a little cheeky, this saying embodied a sentiment about the totality of dedication necessary for performing with your body at the highest level. As a wrestler I woke up standing in front of the bathroom sink holding a cup of water about to drink it on many occasions. I have vivid memories of standing in the shower manually closing my mouth because I couldn’t afford to take in the water weight of a few mouthfuls of greywater flowing down from my scalp.
I was not someone who had to cut much weight; I wrestled at or around my natural (though beefy) weight throughout all four years of high school. I know explicitly the dedication and self discipline needed to stay fit and lean by eating a proscribed diet, working out for hours a day, and never compromising, even for Thanksgiving dinner! That’s what it took for me to be a champion, and that’s what it took for me to master my body.
The mano-a-mano attitude that saturates wrestling is part of what makes it so compelling to me. There are no excuses on the mat other than that you are not as good as the human being having their arm raised while you slink off in defeat.
In combination with this respect for discipline, I have a healthy dose of libertarian notions about personal choice. I always used to say I could beat someone who is any two of the following: Stronger, Better, Tougher. As long as I could identify in which category I had an advantage, I would find their cracks and expose them through mental and physical warfare during the 6 minutes we had on the mat. I’m not trying to brag, but with a 94-18 record through 4 years, I won 84% of the time with this approach.
One of the other wrestlers on the team with me was two years older than I and much better. He had more talent, was stronger, and was really tough. I rarely if ever scored a point on him. Sometimes just because he could, he would hold both hands behind his back and brush me or others off throughout a whole period of “live” wrestling during practice with only his forehead and temples. When he graduated, he joined the military, and I believe became a Green Beret or Army Ranger, or some level of national service even beyond the exceptional dedication necessary to put your life on the line for our glorious country.
He also often reeked of vodka. He was not (to my knowledge) drinking during the day or before practice, but especially reeked when we had practices during school vacations or extra hours other than our usual 3pm-6pm Monday-Friday. The alcohol came out of his pores as his body cleaned up from his previous nights’ debauchery. I do not know how good (or how emotionally unstable) he would have been without drinking. I do know that I treated my body with the utmost respect and demanded every day that I improve my performance, and drinking or doing drugs would have inhibited that.
What does it mean to cheat? Where is the line between performance enhancing and performing at your best. Who is to say that he would have been better without his vices, and who is to say that his vices held him back? When we let rules be our guides rather than performances and facts, we lose the opportunity to express ourselves fully. I believe that systems are an integral part of how we relate to each other, and institutions should be strengthened through time. However, those same institutions should also be curated to allow us to ascertain which rules exist to restrict and which exist to enable.
I was not someone who had to cut much weight; I wrestled at or around my natural (though beefy) weight throughout all four years of high school. I know explicitly the dedication and self discipline needed to stay fit and lean by eating a proscribed diet, working out for hours a day, and never compromising, even for Thanksgiving dinner! That’s what it took for me to be a champion, and that’s what it took for me to master my body.
The mano-a-mano attitude that saturates wrestling is part of what makes it so compelling to me. There are no excuses on the mat other than that you are not as good as the human being having their arm raised while you slink off in defeat.
In combination with this respect for discipline, I have a healthy dose of libertarian notions about personal choice. I always used to say I could beat someone who is any two of the following: Stronger, Better, Tougher. As long as I could identify in which category I had an advantage, I would find their cracks and expose them through mental and physical warfare during the 6 minutes we had on the mat. I’m not trying to brag, but with a 94-18 record through 4 years, I won 84% of the time with this approach.
One of the other wrestlers on the team with me was two years older than I and much better. He had more talent, was stronger, and was really tough. I rarely if ever scored a point on him. Sometimes just because he could, he would hold both hands behind his back and brush me or others off throughout a whole period of “live” wrestling during practice with only his forehead and temples. When he graduated, he joined the military, and I believe became a Green Beret or Army Ranger, or some level of national service even beyond the exceptional dedication necessary to put your life on the line for our glorious country.
He also often reeked of vodka. He was not (to my knowledge) drinking during the day or before practice, but especially reeked when we had practices during school vacations or extra hours other than our usual 3pm-6pm Monday-Friday. The alcohol came out of his pores as his body cleaned up from his previous nights’ debauchery. I do not know how good (or how emotionally unstable) he would have been without drinking. I do know that I treated my body with the utmost respect and demanded every day that I improve my performance, and drinking or doing drugs would have inhibited that.
What does it mean to cheat? Where is the line between performance enhancing and performing at your best. Who is to say that he would have been better without his vices, and who is to say that his vices held him back? When we let rules be our guides rather than performances and facts, we lose the opportunity to express ourselves fully. I believe that systems are an integral part of how we relate to each other, and institutions should be strengthened through time. However, those same institutions should also be curated to allow us to ascertain which rules exist to restrict and which exist to enable.
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