Seven Minutes on the Mat: What It Means to Wrestle in Iowa

If I’m from anywhere, I suppose it’s Iowa. I was born there but left when I was two, my father hauling my mom and my older sister and me across nearly 1,000 miles of interstate to Wilmington, Delaware, where he took a company job selling industrial tools. It would be almost four decades before I returned. Any memories of the Hawkeye state cast during those early years must have been ousted rather swiftly by generic pastoral renderings, the likes of which adorn the glossy calendars in pharmacy checkout lanes. For me, John Deere tractors and autumnal corn mazes have always come to mind, hugged by rolling plains in a landlocked state where metropolitan life – to the relief of its residents – is well beyond reach.

It wasn’t until August 2013 that I moved back, this time with my own family, to enroll in a doctoral program at the University of Iowa. During this second stint I acquainted myself with the term “flyover state,” Iowa City’s status as a UNESCO city of literature, tornado sirens and the region’s propensity for flooding. My older daughter and I also searched the campus and downtown areas for statues of Herky the Hawk, the university’s black and gold mascot. And, over time, I came to learn about wrestling.

In Iowa, the culture of wrestling is often equated with the palpable – head gear, a singlet, a deft sweep of the legs. The University of Iowa has won 23 NCAA wrestling championships since 1975, more than triple the number of any other university during that period. This element, too, is palpable, undoubtedly in the form of dusty polyester banners in a gym, hanging high above from steel rafters. But this fame extends beyond the sport – it figures prominently, for instance, into John Irving’s 1974 novel, The 158-Pound Marriage, whose myriad subplots include two partner-swapping couples, their children, and a wrestling prodigy from Iowa. In this respect, Iowa’s successes on the mat have forever imbued the state’s image with a roughneck romanticism that twins nicely with the farms and tractors. To me it seemed the equivalent of a full-body cultural tattoo, and I was determined to learn more about it.

Weigh-In

I set up a meeting with Bill and walk into his office. We’ve hung out before – both in the two courses we’ve taken together for our respective doctoral programs and at a bar over an occasional pint – but this is different. This time I’m in his office with an agenda; I place an audio recorder on his desk and jot down notes as I survey the space. 

Bill’s office looks like one. He’s afforded sunlight through his lone window, and his desk and chair face it for a view. Metal shelves, stocked with books on science and education, flank the walls. A vanity license plate hangs behind the door. A collection of rocks and fossils sits next to a fax machine, and a cardboard box of tiny glass jars hems the side of a table. There’s no sign of wrestling anywhere, but then again, the culture I’m exploring is not something I can see. 

Bill speaks of his wrestling history, and I am surprised at how far back this goes. He talks about his grandfather, a native of Waterloo, who won a team national championship with Cornell College in 1947, and went as an alternate to the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. He also relays stories he has heard from his mother.

“My grandpa and my grandma were the epitome of the movie Grease,” he begins. “My grandfather was a badass with a black leather coat and greasy hair living in the tough part of Waterloo. My grandma was a blue blood from the East Coast. I think he grew up in a pretty rough world and then he met my grandma and married her and learned etiquette and all of those fun things, manners.” The etiquette has rubbed off on Bill, but so has the wrestling. It has become a part of his lineage, passed on from his grandfather to uncles and brothers.

I want to tell Bill about my own experiences with wrestling: how I went out for the team not because I thought it was a good idea, but because a friend I looked up to planned to try out. I stuck with it for three years, losing much more than I won. A week prior to my meeting with Bill, I asked my father if he could unearth some of my old photos from the attic. I showed one to Bill, a black-and-white print from me in 9th grade, circa 1989: my body contorted, my face swollen with regret. Not only am I losing badly, but badly in Delaware, a state as likely to produce a national wrestling champion as Iowa is a seaside resort.

Our interview continues, with Bill educating me on wrestling history in Iowa: Frank Gotch, who is credited with starting it all, and Dan Gable, the man who took it to another level and put Iowa on the wrestling map. 

“When Gable started wrestling, he wrestled at Iowa State, won three national titles there,” Bill says. “The only match he ever lost in high school or in college was his very last match. At national finals. He went on to win the Olympics without giving up a point, and then became Iowa’s head coach and won 15 national titles, including nine in a row. Gable took Iowa wrestling to a totally different world.” 

When Bill says this, I’m mesmerized. I can’t imagine the intensity or the dedication you’d have to dredge up to become that competitive, that successful, and for failure to have such a lasting, damning impact. I tuck my little wrestling photos away; at that moment, those photos are akin to telling a war vet I could relate because I had watched Platoon.

First Period

A few weeks have passed. Bill picks me up and we head from Iowa City to North Liberty. It’s early March and winter is still in full swing: we pass brown lawns and bare trees beneath a bleak white sky. But there’s excitement in the air. This weekend, the University of Iowa is hosting the Big 10 NCAA wrestling championships.

After swinging by Bill’s friend’s house to pick up tickets, we make our way to Rocky O’Brien’s Public House, an Irish pub in the middle of a strip mall. Inside, we meet Bob and Katie. Bob is a fellow wrestler and doctoral colleague of Bill’s. Katie is in high school, and a friend of the family whom Bill has known since birth. As manager of her high school wrestling team, she films matches, cleans mats, and does other sundry tasks.

I’m sitting across from Bill and Bob, which gives me a chance to take in their countenance. The clothes they don don’t deserve more than basic description – jeans and winter jackets over sweatshirts, outfits that help you blend in just about anywhere on a Saturday afternoon in Iowa – but their faces catch my attention. I know they’re in their forties, as am I, but at times they look older: for the better part of two decades, their faces were dragged across a few hundred miles’ worth of wrestling mats. And then I see their ears. These are not the ears of two guys in their forties. They look less like ears, in fact, and more like two doughy bread knots affixed to the sides of their heads.

I ask them about this – their perichondrial hematoma, or cauliflower ear. It looks soft, as if I could knead it back to its original form. 

“Can I touch it?” I ask Bill. He nods, and I reach across the desk. “Wow, I thought it would be soft.”

“You can’t bend that damn thing,” Bill responds. I ask him if it hurts, if it will worsen. “Doesn’t hurt. It solidifies. You could cut it open and pull it out and your ear would be back to normal.” 

Bob’s upper ear looks just like Bill’s, an amorphous mass that’s artfully hijacking the canal. It’s an ear that forces him to maneuver his phone so he can hear his mother better, an ear that allows him only one angle when posing for family photos.

Cauliflower ear forms from repeated blows to the head – perhaps from a hit to the mat, or shooting in and colliding with an opponent’s knee or hip. This separates the cartilage from the perichondrium, depriving it of nutrients until it hardens and dies. Though wrestlers may have long forgotten the hits that caused their cauliflower ear, they fondly recall the stories of dealing with it. I imagine these are the stories that keep mothers up at night.

Bob tells of how he and his roommates at college – also wrestlers – forged identities as stopgap physicians to drain the fluid from each other’s ears so they could return to practice.

“We’d keep a syringe in the freezer, and we’d rub an ice cube on someone’s ear. Then we’d take the syringe and stick it in there and pull the fluid out and squirt it down the drain.”

Bill’s cauliflower story is equally pretty. His wrestling career was effectively over by the time he finished high school – he didn’t complete a full season of wrestling in college – but the damage had already been done. 

“During my senior year, I had to put my head on a couch every day before and after practice. My uncle, the coach – his brother’s a surgeon – would send some 16-gauge needles down and shove one into my ear on both sides before practice and suck the blood and pus out, and then I’d go wrestle, and then we’d do it again.”

I conclude two things about cauliflower ear. I share my thoughts about the first point with Bob. “It’s the lone sport where the injury is identifiable to one sport and one sport only,” I suggest. “You can look at some guys with bad knees, it could have been basketball, it could have been football, it could have been baseball…”

“Yep.”

“But cauliflower ear, at least until mixed martial arts came around, was unique to wrestling. I can’t think of another sport where there’s an injury that is unique to the sport, and it’s visible.”

“Right. Absolutely.” Bob pauses before adding that times have changed. “Up until about 5 years ago, anytime I went around people would automatically say, ‘Oh, you’re a wrestler, huh?’ But now the question is, ‘Who do you fight for?’”

I have also come to regard cauliflower ear as a badge of honor. It is the equivalent of a platoon tattoo, the scar of a cancer survivor. I have earned the right to be a member of this club, it says.

Bill affirms that cauliflower ear is indeed a badge of honor, but also considers it a warning. “It’s one of those things, if you’re thinking about starting a fight with somebody, I’d suggest you look at their ears. If their ears are mangled, I wouldn’t go there.”

We finish our drinks and settle up. It’s time for the big event. As we put on our jackets and walk out, I turn to Bob, look him straight in the ear, and ask him if he thinks he’ll ever have it repaired.

“It’s been forever, so why would I?”

Second Period

The basics of wrestling, as I remember them: Two wrestlers, donning singlets and headgear, walk to the center of the mat. They crouch, shake hands, and wait for the whistle to blow. The ref circles them, flicking raised fingers to the people who post the score on an electronic board. If a match runs its normal course, the wrestlers, after three 2-minute periods, approach the center of the mat, exhausted and glazed with sweat. The ref raises the hand of the victor.

Between the first and last whistle, wrestlers engage in a hybrid of intellectual and athletic diplomacy as they struggle to harmonize what they want to do to their opponent with what is being done to them. Scoring is measured by a network of moves – takedowns, escapes, reversals, near falls. These moves – the fireman’s carry, the whizzer, and the guillotine, for instance – conjure up images of covert military operations more so than grappling techniques.

The basics of wrestling extend beyond the mat as well. There’s a scene from the 1985 film Vision Quest in which the lead character, Louden Swain, a high school wrestler played by Matthew Modine, gets a nosebleed. It comes out of nowhere, much like a sneeze. Louden wipes it away – and the others that follow – considering it part and parcel of wrestling. He writes off the drastic weight loss and meager diet that cause the nosebleeds as constituent sacrifices in achieving his goal.

At one point during my interviews I ask Bill and Bob about these “basics,” or sacrifices – what only they, as wrestling insiders, are privy to. From experience, I know about the weight loss: Running in thick winter clothing to sweat more. Spitting constantly. Coveting others’ meals. But the tales I exhume hint at dimensions of wrestling I couldn’t have imagined. Bob tells of coming home late from practice to glimpse a home-cooked meal on the dining room table. His mother had steamed green beans and made chicken in the healthiest way she could. But Bob had weigh-in the next day, which meant he’d be skipping dinner. 

“She tried her ass off, but I didn’t come from a wrestling family, so she didn’t know,” he recalls. “And I’m like, ‘I can’t eat anything, Mom. I can’t drink water.’ So then I would leave, and she would just bust out bawling.”

Bill shares a similar story about the time and dedication that wrestlers put in, but this time he talks about his brother, who in high school was at one point the #1 ranked wrestler in the country for his weight class. 

“He would put the stair climber on as long and as hard as it could go, and he would run the whole thing. He’d be pissed that the machine had to be reset to do it again.” This didn’t seem so tough to me; I imagined myself running full-speed on a stair master for 2 minutes – or even 6 minutes – of cardio torture.

“So he would run on the StairMaster for the length of a wrestling period?” I ask. Bill smiles, as if to say, How cute for you to think that’s all it would take.

“No. He would put it on for 20 minutes. That’s how long the setting would go. Then he would just run it. He would hammer that goddamned StairMaster into the ground. He worked out 7 hours a day. Two in the morning, an hour at lunch, two for practice, and two that night.” I try to imagine myself doing a sport – any sport – for 7 hours a day. I come up with nothing.

I think back to the days of my youth and the sports I tried. Three years of wrestling. A year of track. Ten years of swimming. Fifteen years of soccer. But what stands out most is all the other things I did – the studying, the household chores, sleepovers at friends’ houses, neighborhood hijinks. These events form a series of memories that – when cobbled together – embody a childhood of fractured dedication. My interests were largely akin to glass breaking on the floor – they’d spangle in all directions and screech to a halt before I knew it.

A story I’ve heard Bill tell on more than one occasion is my favorite. He’s about ten, his brother a few years older, and for the first time in his life, he’s got his brother in a headlock he can’t get out of. He holds him there until his mother tells him it’s time for dinner, but Bill won’t relent. 

“He’d have killed me if I let him go,” he tells me. Two hours later – two hours – Bill released him. I’m amazed at this dedication, but cringe at the thought of being in a headlock for so long. It’s exactly the kind of adolescent trauma that would have inspired me to find another interest.

Third Period

Once we leave Rocky O’Brien’s, we wend our way down rural roads towards Iowa City. We pull into a hilly neighborhood cloaked in trees and park in the driveway of Bill’s uncle’s house. From there we hoof it through the dark, passing swing sets and storage sheds as we teeter down neighbors’ property lines. A minute later and the four of us – Bill, Bob, Katie, and I – are standing before a six-lane highway with a throng of others who have materialized in the darkness. A swarm of headlights passes, and we dart across the highway to a short street that leads us to the arena parking lot. Hundreds of people merging from all directions follow suit.

An usher tears our tickets and we walk in. The scene is electric. This is not like Iowa basketball games, where the crowd noise oscillates with the team’s fortunes. Here, at the NCAA Big 10 Wrestling Championships, with four simultaneous matches on the four wrestling mats that cover the hardwood floor, a constant buzz of screaming fans fills the air. The stands are a human pinwheel: shirts of each school’s colors – blue for Penn State, black and yellow for Iowa, red for Maryland or Rutgers or Indiana – streak the seats. The 15,500 seat capacity of Hawkeye Arena is nearly full.

I head to the bathroom while the others find their seats. I stand in line. Cauliflower ear marks three generations of males. This is the first time in a long time I’ve had to wait for a urinal. There are few women here.

A few minutes later I find the gang and sit down. I’m on the right, seated next to Bob. We’re in the nosebleed section, far from the high-definition spectacle afforded by the front rows. It’s 6pm, and the consolation matches are in full swing – these matches are for wrestlers who have already lost, and are now in the unenviable position of missing nationals if they lose again. The national tournament will be in New York City this year, Madison Square Garden; Bill tells me it’s not uncommon for Big 10 champions and runners-up to meet each other again at nationals because the Big 10 is the best all-around conference in the country.

Each wrestling mat is a swath of jet black emblazoned with two concentric yellow circles. When linked, the four mats resemble the wheels of a locomotive. The mats, however, are deceptive: their simplicity belies the backbreaking path wrestlers must take to get there.

The distance from our seats to the mats cheapens the intensity of the matches, but allows me to better soak up my surroundings. A large digital scoreboard in the back displays the scores of the four simultaneous matches with different colors and logos for each school. Right now, there are matches between Northwestern and Rutgers, Illinois and Minnesota, Indiana and Penn State, and Purdue and Ohio State. The scores for individual matches fringe the mats and display three numbers: the time remaining in the period, the score, and the match number for the day. What look to be judges or Big 10 reps line each side of the mat. Gatorade coolers are tucked back in corners. Coaches sit or stand inside tiny sequestered triangles that flank the corner of the mat. These borders of the triangles are striped yellow, just like the concentric circles that hem in the wrestlers. The coaches yell from here; some struggle to restrain themselves from walking onto the mat to show the wrestler just what they want of them.

The overall school scores – what counts towards each school’s efforts to become the Big 10 Champion – are displayed high above everyone’s heads. At the moment, Penn State is in first place with 82 points, Nebraska with 81.5, Iowa in a somewhat distant third with 72.5, followed by Ohio State, Michigan, Rutgers, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Purdue, Indiana, Michigan State, Maryland, and Northwestern with a measly 4.5 points.

At 7:30pm on the nose, as the semi-final matches begin on the two center mats, the crowd becomes more raucous. These winners will wrestle in tomorrow’s finals matches, all but assuring them a spot in the national tournament.

Up to this point, Bill and Bob have talked to me and some of the fans surrounding them, but now they are more focused. They form a dual gaze towards the wrestling mats, and begin yelling at the wrestlers, just like the coaches from inside their yellow coaching triangles. This match pits Iowa’s Thomas Gilman against Penn State’s Nico Megaludis, two of the best wrestlers in the country in their 125-pound weight class. Gilman is a three-time All-American and ranked #2 in the country, while Megaludis is ranked #3.

“He keeps blowin’ the goddamned whistle,” Bill says. “Ooh, he almost hit that cradle. Yeah, lift it. That’s stalling. He can’t ride him for a minute, can he?” The crowd boos as the ref blows his whistle for stalling. “Another caution,” Bill says. “Then blow the goddamned whistle. Watch it, watch it, hips. He’s got the 30. He lost it.” The argot is lost on me; Bill might as well be speaking Danish.

“That’s alright,” Bob responds. “That’s a good start to some riding time.” The match intensifies as one wrestler wraps around the other wrestler’s leg and works to bring it close to his body. Bill and Bob take turns screaming at the wrestler from Iowa, as do hundreds of others in the arena.

“Yeah, come around it! Come around it! You’re alright, you’re alright. Keep circling. Finish it! Finish it!”

“Not yet, not yet, he’s got a wizard. He’s got a wizard. He’s got a wizard deep.” 

Fans are on their feet, now yelling at the ref more than Gilman, in an uproar over two points that haven’t been awarded yet. Megaludis is now in a full split, something I never want to achieve, by accident or by design. He is trying to place the entirety of his body outside the outer bounds of the yellow circle. If he achieves this, the ref will blow his whistle, at which point both wrestlers will let go, stand up, and head back to the middle of the circle where it all starts again.

“Gotta drag him back in!” Bill yells. “That is some serious splits. Right there, that’s a cradle. Lock in the cradle on him!”

“He’s got nothing yet,” Bob interjects.

“Just lock that goddamned cradle over his head. There. Pull it, pull it, pull it, watch your ankles!” The crowd is in a frenzy – booing, clapping, and screaming – hoping that one of the two wrestlers will pull off what they’re rooting for.

“Damn, that’s some flexibility. You’re gonna wrestle for a minute from the splits?”

Towards the end of the match, Gilman goes after a few extra points – an unnecessary and greedy move, Bill and Bob tell me – and ultimately concedes those points, and consequently the match, to Megaludis.

“That’s alright,” Bill says. “That’ll take him to nationals.” Gilman would indeed advance to the national finals, where he would again lose to Megaludis, this time in the national championship, 6-3.

***

As the semi-final matches wind down, the stands thin out. Fans head for the exits. But many will return tomorrow for the Big 10 finals. Some will fly to New York City for nationals, like Bob. Most head to New York City for New York City, a place I called home for nearly 7 years. There are the landmarks – the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building. There are the neighborhoods – Harlem, Tribeca, Greenwich Village. And then there is everything else in between, that for generations has come to make NYC one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world – the buskers and celebrity sightings, the Cyclone at Coney Island. But Bob, amidst the fever pitch of collegiate wrestling, will head to NYC for the first time in his life to see who is crowned national champion. The intensity for wrestling, I conclude, lives on long after the athletes leave the mat for the final time.

Overtime

Neither Bill nor Bob has trained for wrestling in over 20 years. Cauliflower ear is a telltale sign of their athletic past, but there’s an internal element to it as well. I ask both of them what they’ve taken from the sport. Bill recalls the intensity of the workouts, grappling for two hours a night in a 100-degree room, the control of weight loss and proper dieting. 

“A wrestler,” Bill says, “can hyper focus on things I don’t think normal people are capable of. Your body will go a lot farther than you think it will.” He analogizes it to life’s daily chores. “If my dad calls today and says I need to shovel something, you just shovel. You get to the point where your body breaks through those walls of fatigue. You break through the walls of needing water. You break through the walls of, I have to eat or I have to rest. Because you have to.”

Bob concurs, but applies what he’s learned from wrestling to something different. “No one in my family ever went to college. No one! So the fact that I’m getting a PhD is the most ridiculous thing in the world, for a first-generation college kid. But once you’ve wrestled, once you’ve really poured yourself into it, there’s no challenge that you feel is too much to overcome.”

“So you’re able to push yourself,” I say.

“Right, right,” Bob responds.

As the evening comes to a close, I reflect on these words: So you’re able to push yourself. My statement is obvious, and probably doesn’t begin to reveal how much these guys have learned to push themselves. To test limits and go beyond them. Bob nods, but adds that such motivation conceives a lifelong itch that, sometimes, cannot be scratched.

“It’s a double-edged sword because you’re always looking for that next thing. It’s almost like you live in a world where you’re never content. But that’s what I love about it – you’re always looking for, how can I do more? How can I do better? It’s a mindset to have in life. And all the extra work that comes with it is great. Like I just hope my son does it, and loves it, and works his ass off for it too.”

And with that, I imagine, a new generation of wrestlers is born.

Warren Merkel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His other creative work has been published in Hippocampus, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Raven's Perch, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Eclectica Magazine.