Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories) Read online

  The woman grabs hold and drags him off the stage.

  The old men sit on logs, drinking beer and throwing rocks at the fiberglass porta-potties where the women pee. The men pee anywhere.

  By now the parking lot is paved with crushed beer cans.

  Inside the Rock Creek Lodge, women crawl under a life-sized statue of a bull, to kiss its scrotum for good luck.

  On a dirt track running down one edge of the property, motorcycles race in a "Ball Biting" contest. Sitting on the back of each bike, a woman must snap her teeth on a hanging bull testicle and tear off a mouthful as her male driver races over the course.

  Away from the main crowd, a trail of men leads back into the field of camp trailers and tents, where two women are getting dressed. The two describe themselves as "just a couple regular girls from White Fish, with regular jobs and everything."

  One says, "Did you hear that applause? We won. We definitely won."

  A drunk young guy says, "So what do you win?"

  And the girl says, "There's no prize or anything, but we're the definite winners."

  Where Meat Comes From

  It takes a couple hours before you notice what's wrong with everyone.

  It's their ears. It's as if you've landed on some planet where almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted and shrunken. It's not the first thing you notice about people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see.

  "To most wrestlers, cauliflower ear is like a tattoo," says Justin Petersen. "It's like a status symbol. It's kind of looked on with pride in the community. It means you've put in the time."

  "That's just from getting in there and brawling, getting in there and getting your ears rubbed a lot," says William R. Groves. "What happens is, as you rub and rub and rub, the abrasion, the cartilage separates from the skin, and in that separation, blood and fluid fills it up. After a while, it drains out, but the calcium will solidify on the cartilage. A lot of wrestlers see it as a kind of badge of wrestling, a necessary badge of wrestling."

  Sean Harrington says, "It's like a stalactite or something. Slowly blood trickles in there and hardens. It gets injured again, and a little more blood trickles in and hardens, and slowly it's unrecognizable anymore. Some guys definitely feel that way, that it's a badge of courage, a badge of honor."

  "I think it's very much a badge of honor," says Sara Levin. "You know somebody's a wrestler. It's another one of those things that makes someone else an equal to you. And a bond. Part of the grind. The ears. It's just part of the game. It's the nature of the sport, like scars, battle wounds."

  Petersen says, "I had one teammate who, before he'd go to bed, he'd sit there and punch his ear for ten minutes. He wanted cauliflower ear so bad."

  "I've drained mine a lot," says Joe Calavitta. "I got syringes, and when they blew up, I kept draining them. They fill up. They fill up with blood. As long as you keep draining them before the blood hardens, you can keep it down, pretty much. You can get it done by a doctor, but you'd have to go in all the time, so you just get your own syringes and do it."

  Petersen, Groves, Harrington, and Calavitta, they're amateur wrestlers.

  Levin is the Men's Event Coordinator for USA Wrestling, the national governing body for amateur wrestling.

  What happens on this page isn't wrestling, it's writing. At best, this is a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meat comes from. From the North Regional Olympic Trials, the first step, where for twenty dollars any man can compete for a chance on the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team.

  The Nationals are over, so are the other regionals. This is the last chance to qualify for the finals.

  These men, some are here to wrestle other high school «Junior» level wrestlers now that the regular season is over.

  For some of these men, who range in age from seventeen to forty-one, this will be their last shot at the Olympics. As Levin says, "You're going to see the end of a lot of careers here."

  Everybody here will tell you about amateur wrestling.

  It's the ultimate sport, they'll tell you. It's the oldest sport. It's the purest sport. The toughest sport.

  It's a sport under attack from men and women alike.

  It's a dying sport.

  It's a cult. It's a club. It's a drug. It's a fraternity. It's a family.

  For all of these people, amateur wrestling is a misunderstood sport.

  "Track and field, you run from here to there. Basketball, you put the ball in the hoop," says three-time world champion Kevin Jackson. "Wrestling has two different styles, as well as folkstyle and collegiate styles of wrestling, which gives you so many rules that the general public cannot follow it."

  "You don't have the cheerleaders running around, confetti falling from the ceiling, and Jack Nicholson in the bleachers," says former college and army team wrestler Butch Wingett. "You might have a bunch of grizzled old guys who might be farmers or were maybe laid off from the John Deere plant."

  "I think that wrestlers are misjudged a lot," says Lee Pritts, who wrestles freestyle at 54 kilograms. "It's actually a classy sport. And a lot of times it's kinda considered barbaric. Wrestling gets a lot of bad publicity."

  "Right now, people just don't understand the sport," says Jackson, "and if you don't understand something or know who might compete in it, you won't watch."

  "People don't give the sport its respect because they're, like, 'Oh, it's just two guys rolling around, and I think that's wrong," says three-time NCAA wrestler Tyrone Davis, who wrestles Greco-Roman at 130 kilograms. "It's more than just two guys rolling around. Basically, wrestling's like life. You got a lot of decisions out there. The mat is your life."

  When you fly into Waterloo, Iowa, the city looks exactly like the map on its website, flat and cut with freeways. At the Young Arena, near the dry, empty downtown, all day before weigh-ins, wrestlers stop in to ask if there's a sauna in town. Where's the scale? The Young Arena is where elderly people go on weekdays to walk around and around the air-conditioned indoor track.

  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 school
s, 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.

  This was in February of 1997. Phil Lanzatella had qualified for the Olympic trials every year since 1980, when he was on top, still a teenager, but already a world-class wrestler, dating Water Mondale's daughter and headed for the Olympics in Moscow. The Olympics we boycotted that year. Now, for Phil the options were a mechanical valve, a pig heart valve, or a recovered human valve. The recovered valve was the choice that would let him still compete.

  After that, he started helping coach at local colleges and high schools. He started feeling good, getting a little more active.

  "I didn't tell my wife. I came home one day and said, 'Hey, Mel, what do you think about me wrestling? and she said, 'Yeah, okay, if you want to be single. I'm not going through that again. But she got used to the idea."

  They've been married fifteen years.

  Finally, Melody Lanzatella said, "If you're going to do this, then you're going to win."

  So far, Phil hasn't. He didn't make it in the South Regionals.

  "I took tenth in the Nationals, top eight qualifying, in Las Vegas. In Tulsa," he says, "my hotel van broke down, and I missed weigh-ins. I got stuck on the highway. So this is really it. This is it, literally."

  So for Phil Lanzatella, thirty-seven, this is his last shot at the Olympics after decades of training and competition.

  It's the last shot for Sheldon Kim, twenty-nine, from Orange County, California, who works full-time as an inventory analyst and is here with his wife, Sasha, and their three-year-old, Michaela, and who is busy right now trying to drop two extra pounds in the last half-hour before weigh-ins are over.

  It's the last shot for Trevor Lewis, thirty-three, the comptroller at Penn State with a master's degree in engineering and architecture, who's here with his father.

  It's the last shot for Keith Wilson, thirty-three, who has a baby boy due in two weeks and practices two or three times every day as part of the army's World Class Athlete program.

  It's the last shot for Michael Jones, thirty-eight, of Southfield, Michigan, whose first film project, Revelations: The Movie, is about to begin production.

  Jones says, "My body just can't go through another four years of wrestling guys like this. Like I say, my knees are starting to buckle. My back is starting to really get to me now. I don't want to get to around fifty years old and be bent over with a cane. This will definitely be my last Olympics."

  It's the l
ast shot for former college wrestler Timothy O'Rourke, forty-one, who last wrestled in 1980 and says, "I saw something on the Internet and thought, 'What the hell, I'll give it a shot.»

  Despite everything at stake, the mood is less like a fighting tournament than a family reunion.

  Keith Wilson is here from the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to compete as a 76-kilogram Greco-Roman wrestler.

  "I don't hold anything in," he says. "I'm happy all the time. And if I get stressed, I have an okay outlet. I can just come here and beat the shit out of someone and I won't get in trouble for it. When you wrestle, it's for blood, but when you walk off the mat, you're friends again."

  "It's almost like a family," says Chris Rodrigues. "You know everyone. I know everyone. You meet people you know, and everyone gets to know each other, hanging out at the big national tournaments. The Junior Nationals and the Nationals, every year. It's like a big connection to everyone. I know people in Moscow and Bulgaria. I know people around the world."

  His father, David, adds, "That fraternity he's part of, when he goes to Michigan and gets a business degree and maybe goes out, and maybe he never wrestles another day in his life, but he'll run into a guy who wrestled during the same period of time he did, and that camaraderie will always be there."

  Sean Harrington says, "When you meet another wrestler that you don't know, say you're on a trip, it's like you hear about people who own Corvettes, you always wave to each other. It's the same thing with wrestling. You have a camaraderie there because you know what the other guy's been through."

  "It's just focusing the energy for the match," says Ken Bigley. "When we're on the mat, we want to just beat the piss out of each other, but when we're off the mat we know what each other's going through because we've been there. As much as you focus on beating your opponent up, as much as you're enemies on the mat, as hard as you're going to hit him, once you're off the mat we're not violent people, we just like a violent sport."