The Faces of College
Wrestlers
By Reid Singer
Photograph
by Benjamin Lowy
The college wrestlers at the N.C.A.A.
championships, which took place last weekend at Madison Square Garden, tend to
compete year-round. Most qualified for this year’s tournament by placing in an
earlier conference meet, while others were voted in by committee, based on
their performance during the collegiate season, which runs from fall to early
spring. This is followed by Greco-Roman and freestyle tournaments,
including nationals, world championships, and Olympic-team trials. Many
spend the off-season coaching at summer camps.
This
constant training causes young wrestlers to look haggard but phenomenally fit,
a contradiction that the photographer Ben Lowy captures in his
post-match portraits from the weekend’s events. The athletes are required
to wear headgear during collegiate matches but not during practice, and the
repeated bruising leaves their ears permanently thick and lumpy, their faces
bony and hollowed-out, with cheekbones so high their eyes swell like a boxer’s.
Long sprints make their legs lean and explosive, tightly muscled and dense.
Thanks to endless rope climbs and pull-ups, their arms are often thicker below
the elbow than above—the “Popeye effect.” “It is not a beautiful body,” John
Irving wrote of the Olympic wrestler Dan Gable, in a 1973 article
for Esquire. “It is no more pretty than an axhead. It is no more
elaborate than a hammer.”
At the
Garden, wrestlers on deck paced the area between the press room and the
tournament floor, wearing shorts and warmup jackets, listening to music on
earbuds, hoods pulled over their heads to block out the constant din from the
announcers and spectators. (The Garden sold out three of six sessions, and
attendance surpassed nineteen thousand during the finals. Regular-season duals
can be bigger—last November, a meet between Iowa and Oklahoma State drew more
than forty thousand fans.) Coaches would occasionally massage shoulders and
necks, but most would leave their athletes alone until seconds before a match,
when they would slap their hands or discreetly smack them in the face.
The only
times the wrestlers seemed to smile, or even speak, were in the minutes immediately
after a victory, when they were approached by reporters or photographers. By
then, they had lowered the tight straps of their singlets, had put their
T-shirts and jackets back on, and were struggling to catch their breath. “I’ve
been doing this for fifteen years,” Bo Nickal, a finalist in the
hundred-and-seventy-four-pound weight class from Penn State, said. “After a
while, you realize there’s never a point in focussing too much on your last
match. You just get ready for the next one.”
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