The Day The Cowboys Got Lassoed For A Loss

Watching Roderick at the Nationals, it was easy to see how he can instill fear and spirit in his boys. His small, hard body jerking up and down, his fists thrust forward, he was a picture of fury. Again and again he would start to climb up on the mat, his fist shaking and his voice bellowing like a wounded animal: "Do you wanna win this match? Do you really wanna win it?"

The boy would just turn and look vacantly at him.

"Yeah, boy, I sure do mean it. Do you wanna quit? Or do you wanna win it?"

Once one of his wrestlers, with contempt in his eyes and voice, turned and shouted, "Yeahhh."

Later, over oatmeal on the morning before the finals, Roderick seemed emotionally exhausted. He finished his breakfast and then arranged for a victory dinner following the finals. "We've paid the price," he sighed.

So had a lot of others, and never was it more sharply apparent than at the morning weigh-in. The NCAA championships come high, and weights have to come low. One by one, the wrestlers marched up to the scales, their faces pale, their cheeks sunken, their eyes rimmed with brown circles. They had come from the field-house steam rooms, which each morning were cluttered with wrestlers, sitting almost on top of one another, their heads wrapped in towels and buried in their arms.

In addition to the steam, some did not eat or drink for three days; tournaments are the most difficult, because the boys have to make the weight every day. Abstinence from liquid becomes almost unbearable; the wrestlers become so dry their saliva becomes powdery. A Lehigh boy lost his last four ounces by chewing gum and spitting. Another boy, trying to stay at his weight, refused to carry money for fear he might be tempted to buy something to eat.

It is, it seems, an unending job of self-deception. The wrestlers react in different ways to the punishment. Some become sullen, others seem to derive great joy from the ascetic laws of the sport. "You push yourself beyond the brink," said one happily. "And it makes you feel good inside, like you are able to keep doing what nobody else can do." No other sport—it seemed brutally evident at the Nationals—demands so much of a performer as wrestling. Physically and emotionally, he is constantly paying.

The emotional strain on a wrestler before a match was even more obvious. Some sat on benches, their eyes cast downward. Others kept jumping about, unable to keep still. A few paced up and down in the same place, looking as if they were in a private world. Only now and then did they turn to stare out toward the mats—and then only when the crowd began shrieking: "Show 'im the lights," or "Plant 'im." This is the terminology for the pin—the most personal of all humiliations in sport.

"Sure," said one coach, "being pinned, especially in the Nationals, and even just losing is humiliating to them, but one day a lot of the boys will regard having competed in the Nationals, just being there, as a victory."