|
POINT AFTER
Wrestling's Dirty
Secret
The NCAA should be called on the mat after three collegians
died trying to shed
pounds
by David
Fleming
Posted: Tue December 23, 1997
He died crawling to the scale. Glassy-eyed and pale, his legs too
weak to hold him after he had shed nearly 17 pounds in
three days, Jeff Reese collapsed and expired on the cold
floor of a locker room in Crisler Arena on Dec. 9 in Ann
Arbor.
Reese, a junior at Michigan trying to make weight in the
150-pound class for a wrestling meet against Michigan State,
spent the last two hours of his life in a plastic suit,
riding a stationary bike in a room in which the heat was
cranked up to 92°. He was the third college wrestler to
die in 33 days.
Billy
Jack Saylor, a freshman at Campbell
University in Buies Creek, N.C., and Joseph LaRosa, a senior
at Wisconsin-La Crosse, died in November while cutting
weight. Though the official causes of their deaths varied,
Reese, Saylor and LaRosa died of the same
thing: the self-inflicted
torture
of drastic weight loss, college wrestling's ugly
secret.
For me—as for most former or current college
wrestlers—Reese's death serves as a horrible reminder of
the many times during my career I peeled off my plastic
suit and slumped near a scale, too exhausted to move. Once,
after
cutting 16 pounds in two
days much the same way Reese
had—
through
starvation and
dehydration—I was hospitalized in Rochester, N.Y., with a
clogged salivary gland that had swollen to the size of a
grapefruit. To prevent
that from
happening again, my coach said upon my return to campus that he
was putting me on the Jesus Christ diet. "Forty days
and 40 nights in desert conditions without food or
drink," I
remember him saying. "That ought to get you down to
weight."
Dangerous weight loss has long been the norm in college
wrestling. In fact, the amount of weight you can cut is a
wrestler's warped, macho badge of honor. During my four
years at Miami of Ohio,
I saw wrestlers using laxatives and diuretics, while others
suffered from bulimia or starved themselves. It was not
uncommon for some of them to work out to the point of
delirium. The only time
I witnessed a coach supervising wrestlers' cutting weight, it
was my impression he was there not as a precaution but to
make sure we kept working
out.
In its wrestling rule book, the NCAA strongly recommends
that such practices as fluid deprivation and the use of
diuretics, impermeable suits and hot rooms "should be
prohibited," but it
doesn't ban any weight-loss techniques. That fecklessness,
coupled with a shrinking number of scholarships (in the
last
15 years, 48
Division I schools have eliminated wrestling) and an already
intensely competitive sport, fosters risk taking. Reese, a
natural 170-pounder who was a highly successful high school
wrestler in Wellsburg, N.Y., hadn't been able to break into
Michigan's lineup this
year until a spot opened at 150 pounds. So he killed
himself trying to make that
weight.
A week after the third death, five organizations active in
wrestling, including the NCAA and
USA Wrestling, did the typical public two-step. They held a
21-person conference call during which a joint committee
was formed to address weight management in
the sport. (A day later the FDA decided to look into whether
the use of the dietary supplement creatine played a role in
the deaths.) This lack of immediate action is cowardly.
It's time to admit that if wrestling didn't all but
encourage participants to
exercise and diet to exhaustion, all three of these young
men would still be
alive.
For starters, the NCAA must ban plastic suits. Also,
college wrestlers must no longer be allowed to weigh in 24
hours before matches, as opposed to the day of the match,
because having a day to recover from excessive weight loss
only encourages them to
lose pounds in less time. Finally, the NCAA should institute
random specific-gravity urine testing at weigh-ins, which
can detect
dehydration.
For the most impact, though, the
NCAA should follow the lead of some state high school athletic
federations. In Michigan, for example, all high school
wrestlers must have their body fat calibrated before the
season. Then, using a medical formula, a
wrestler is given the minimum weight at which he is allowed to
compete. Schoolboy wrestlers in Michigan are no longer
emaciating themselves. The sport is
thriving.
On the other hand, college wrestling is gradually
disappearing. If schools continue to drop wrestling at the
current rate, the sport
will be finished at this level within 15 years. I used to
think that
would be a tragedy. But if wrestling can't do a better job
of protecting its own, then maybe it deserves to perish.
Better an
entire level of competition than one more college
athlete.
Issue date: December 29, 1997
Tell us what you think. Sound off on the CNN/SI Message Boards.
Past Editions of Point After
|
