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HOPE AND GORY
(from Gear Magazine)
 No glamour. No groupies. No money. At the Olympic wrestling trials,it's blood,sweat and pain. Especially pain. By Chuck Palahniuk
It takes a couple of hours before you notice what's wrong witheveryone. It's their ears. It's as if you've landed on some planetwhere almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted andshrunken. It's not the first thing you noticeabout people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see."To most wrestlers, cauliflower ear is like a tattoo," says JustinPetersen. "It's like a status symbol. It's kind of looked on with pridein the community. It means you've put in the time.""That's just from getting in there and brawling, getting in there andgetting yourears rubbed a lot," says William R. Groves. "What happens is as you ruband rub and rub, the abrasion, the cartilage separates from the skin,and in that separation, blood and fluid fills it up. After a while, itdrains out, but the calcium will solidify on the cartilage. A lot ofwrestlers see it as a kind of badge of wrestling."Sean Harrington says, "It's like a stalactite or something. Slowlyblood trickles in there and hardens. It gets injured again, and alittle more blood trickles in and hardens, and it's unrecognizableanymore. Some guys definitely feel that way, that it's a badge ofhonor."Petersen says, "I had one teammate who, before he'd go to bed, he'd sitthere andpunch his ears for 10 minutes. He wanted cauliflower ear so bad.""I've drained mine a lot," says Joe Calavitta. "I got syringes, andwhen they blewup, I kept draining them. They fill up with blood. As long as you keepdraining them before the blood hardens, you can keep it down, prettymuch. You can get it done by a doctor, but you'd have to go in all thetime, so you get your own syringes."Petersen, Harrington, Groves and Calavitta. They're amateur wrestlers.What happens on this page isn't wrestling, it's writing. At best, thisis a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meatcomes from. From the North Regional Olympic Trials, the first stepwhere for $20 any man can compete for a chance on the U.S. Olympicwrestling team. The Nationals are over, so are the other regional. Thisis the last chance to qualify for the finals.These men, some are here to wrestle other high school "Junior" levelwrestlers now that the regular season is over. But for some others,
 
ranging in age from 17 to 41, this will be their last shot at theOlympics. As one USA Wrestling official says, "You're going to see theend of a lot of careers here."Everybody here will tell you about amateur wrestling. It's the ultimatesport, they'll tell you. The oldest sport. The purest sport. Thetoughest sport. It's a sport under attack from men and woman alike.It's a dying sport. It's a cult. It's a club. It's a drug. It's afraternity. It's a family. For all of these people, amateur wrestlingis a misunderstood sport."You don't have the cheerleaders running around, confetti falling fromthe ceilingand Jack Nicholson in the bleachers," says former college and Army teamwrestler Butch Wingett. "You might have a bunch of grizzled old guyswho might be farmers or were maybe laid off from the John Deere plant."Wrestlers are just misjudged a lot," says Lee Pritts, who wrestlesfreestyle at 54kilograms. "It's actually a classy sport. And a lot of times it's kindaconsidered barbaric. It gets a lot of bad publicity.""People don't give the sport its respect because they think it's justtwo guys rolling around," says three-time NCAA wrestler Tyrone Davis,who competes in Greco-Roman at 130 kilograms. "It's more than just twoguys rolling around. Basically, wrestling's like life. You got a lot ofdecisions out there. The mat is your life."When you fly into Waterloo, Iowa, the city looks exactly like the mapon itswebsite: flat and cut with freeways. At the Young Arena, near the dry,empty downtown, all day before weigh-ins, wrestlers stop in to ask ifthere's a sauna in town. Where's the scale? The Young Arena is whereelderly 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.Storiesthey tell include running in-flight laps back and forth in jetlinersdespite the crew's protests. Then doing chin-ups in the jetliner'sgalley area. An old trick for high school wrestlers is to ask to go tothe bathroom during classes and then doing chin-ups on the toilet stallwalls, letting the sharp edge along the top cut calluses into theirhands. In 1998, Wingett says, three college wrestlers died ofdehydration trying to cut weight while taking the supplement creatine."You get it down to a system," says Justin Petersen, who at 17 has hadhis nosebroken about 15 times. "You think, 'I can have this carton of milk, Ican have this bagel, and I will have sweated it off by this time of theday, 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, bring their own stationary bikes to town and aresweating off the weight in room 232 of the Heartland Inn. A thirdfriend, Nick Feldman, is here for moral support and to massage themwhen their bodies get so dehydrated that their muscles cramp.Feldman, a former college wrestler who drove down from Mitchell, SouthDakota, says, "Wrestling's like a club where once you get in, you can'tget out." "When I was in college I cried a lot just because it was sohard, and I was never very good," says Ken Bigley, 24, who startedwrestling in first grade and now coaches at Ohio State University. "Iasked myself a lot of times why I did it. It's like a drug. You getaddicted. If I didn't need it, I wouldn't be here. You don't makemoney. You don't get any glory. It's just searching for the high."Sean Harrington says, "I've been wrestling so long that I don'tremember whatpain was like before wrestling."Says Lee Pritts, 26, a coach at the University of Missouri, "It's kindof weird. You get in the shower after a tournament and your face isusually banged up from wrestling all day and the water running over itgives you a little burn, but if you take a week off you miss it. Youmiss the pain. After a week off, you're ready to go back because youmiss the pain.The pain is maybe one reason why the stands are almost empty.At home, in a jar full of alcohol, junior-level wrestler Mike EngelmannfromSpencer, Iowa, keeps a translucent sliver of cartilage that surgeonsremoved from the meniscus of his knee. It's his good luck charm. He'sbeen 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 isunbelievably common among these guys." One of the oldest rules, hesays, is thatwrestlers have to get down and wipe up their own blood with a spraybottle of bleach. "His grandparents will say all the time, 'This isnuts'," says software engineer David Rodrigues, here with his 17-year-old son, Chris, a four-time Georgia State champion who placed fifth inthe world in the Youth Games in Moscow last year. "There's been theinjuries," he says, listing them off, "hyper-extended knee, hyper-extended elbow, a slight tear in a back muscle, a broken hand, brokenfinger, broken toe, sprained knee. But we've seen worse. We've seenkids carried out on stretchers. Broken collarbones, broken arm, brokenleg, broken neck. God forbid, we had a kid in Georgia whose neck wasbroken. Those are the kind of injuries you pray will never happen, butby the same token, we all understand that's the nature of the sport.""And my broken tooth," his son, Chris, says.
 
David Rodrigues explains,"His tooth broke off and it was in the kid's head, sticking out of thekid's head."
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