I remember the day I first got asked the question “so why do you wrestle?” It was at a basketball game for my brother. My mother had been looking through pictures on her camera showing them to a family friend, and wrestling pictures came up, and the family friend then asked to me “why do you wrestle?” I didn’t quite know how to answer. I simply replied “because I love it.” My Mom then chimed in “it’s a great sport.” The subject was then dropped but the question rang in my ears for years.
It was truly a valid point. Why would anybody wrestle? It’s so much work for such little reward. Extra workouts after you had already been wrestling for three hours, seven days a week of nonstop wrestling and 24 hours, seven days a week of cutting weight dropping 10-20 pounds in a matter of days, running five miles every morning and night, working through injuries -- no other sport would dare to even try with a sport as physical as two busted shoulders and a broken wrist would. These are just a few injuries I sustained in my career and yet with all of this work, it did seem like such little reward. I would never have hundreds of people in the stands at a dual as my brother did for his football and basketball games. It would never be the sport the cheerleaders wish they cheered for instead, and it was just a fact of life that we would never be held to as a high of esteem as the basketball, football, hockey or even baseball teams. We weren’t the “studs” of the school; we understood this fact of life.
So the question still stood. “Why did I wrestle? Why did I love it so much?” I’ll tell you why wrestling is the greatest sport in the world. There’s this old saying one of the greats Dan Gable said: “Once you’ve wrestled, everything in life comes easy.” Not many truer statements have ever been stated. From wrestling, I learned determination, confidence, leadership, hard working mentality, team work, to not be afraid of whoever steps in front of me, and to go after every single opportunity like a junk yard dog fighting for meat. Life doesn’t give out hand outs and wrestling taught me that if I want something, I better go and earn it because nobody gives a damn what I want except for me.
Dan Gable said “once you’ve wrestled, everything in life comes easy.” I can’t tell you if that’s true. I haven’t seen everything life has to offer, but I’ll tell you that so far, everything life has thrown at me, I can take in stride a lot easier than that first day I ever stepped on a mat.
