The Weekly Screed (#616)

The wrestlers’ cruel exclusion
By David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — In my last year of high school, I became a fan of wrestling — not the Killer Kowalski/ Hulk Hogan TV hippopotamus ballet, but the Greek Olympic version with weight classes, singlets, Onitsuka sneakers and cauliflower ears. I went to all my high school’s wrestling matches, then followed the team through a gauntlet of regional and sectional eliminations that pared the field for the State Tournament at the vast, venerable University of Wisconsin Field House.

My companion through this picaresque was Jillsey, prom queen, head cheerleader and the second most beautiful girl in school, but NOT my girlfriend. (I’ve always been one of those nebbishes that desirable girls feel “safe” with, a distinction that kept me largely girl-free throughout high school.) Jillsey, to her credit, has a guy’s grasp of sports, which made her the ideal sidekick for a series of wrestling tournaments held in chilly high school gyms in the dead of winter. We huddled together on the bleachers, talking knowledgeably about near-pins, predicaments and wrestle-backs while boys from the host school peeked enviously at the luminous blonde, all of them wondering what in God’s name she saw in me.

By the time Jillsey and I reached the sectional tourney, the last hurdle before “State,” much of our team had been eliminated. But this was OK because we’d fallen head-over-heels for the 138-pounder from Beloit. His name was Phil Byrd, and he was one of those rare virtuosos who uplifts sport from mere sweat and testosterone to an exercise in style, a piercing one-sentence character sketch, a Shakespeare soliloquy, a grand jeté across the boards.

Phil Byrd was an effortless showman in a purple leotard and an incongruous venue. During warmups, when all the wrestlers were sprawled, stretching and grunting on the mat, Phil would emerge quietly, upright and princely, like a ram among ewes. He hung slightly off to the side, his head rolling in slow circles, his eyes closed, his hands dangling restlessly at the ends of his arms, his fingers playing an invisible keyboard and his feet… well, he was dancing, to a tune no one could guess. The dance step was his invention, subtle and silky, his heels never touching the floor, a little Bojangles, a touch of Astaire. He was numb to all and everyone around him. He levitated weightless in a sort of Zen coma until — toot — a whistle summoned him to battle, where, almost inevitably, he floated like a butterfly and stung like a field of nettles. But the best part of each match came between periods. While the other wrestler flopped gasping beside the mat, a coach barking into his ear, Phil Byrd took himself away to a quiet corner. And danced.

And if there was a pause, an injury to his foe, Phil danced. And in his last test, the match to decide if he would go to State or just go back to Beloit — against a kid who was his peer in speed, cunning and strength — Phil, with seconds to go, broke a tie with a reversal, collected his two points, and… let go. He stood up. His opponent, whose “escape” earned him a useless point, rose to his knees and gaped, at Phil… dancing — a little Bojangles, a touch of Astaire — ‘til time ran out.

A month or so later, Jillsey and I met Phil at a track meet. We presented a plaque we’d had engraved, out of gratitude for his unparalleled panache. It read: “Phil Byrd, Coolest Wrestler in the World, 1967.” We were surprised — and humbled — by Phil’s reaction. He was a poor kid from the toughest part of a Rust Belt border town, so we expected stoicism, or perhaps even a note of sarcasm. We expected him to be cool. But as he shook both our hands, we saw tears in his eyes.

I thought of Phil this week when the International Olympic Committee announced its decision to drop wrestling from the Games, apparently because the old, old men who run the Olympics think wrestling lacks the sort of “relevance, modernity and youthfulness” of hipper sports like team handball, modern pentathlon and the Games’ “new” sport — 40-year-old white men playing golf.

Phil Byrd wasn’t Olympic caliber (he didn’t survive the second round at State that year), but his art linked him backward 2,700 years to the first Olympiad. Wrestling was the first form of gracious battle ever conceived. It embodies the Olympics perhaps better than any sport, because each wrestler is so alone in his “cruel study.” No other sport is so grueling to the body while demanding so much of the mind. The cost of a split second of inattention is not a setback or a lost point; it is defeat in the most demeaning pose, face pressed flat to the ground, forced to say “uncle.” (Or, nowadays, forced to hear the ref slap the mat and say it for you.)

The modern Olympiad, under Baron Coubertin, mimicked faithfully the Greeks’ pure focus on the individual competitor, naked and alone. But Coubertin compromised his ideal by allowing the name of a kingdom on each athlete’s chest. Each event then became a an implicit exercise in tribalism. Inevitably, group sports,  beloved by rabid masses, elbowed into the Games — soccer, hoops, volleyball, hockey — flag-draped and cheered by fans for whom logo (national or corporate) stirs more rageful joy than the nuance of the sport or the ordeal of the athlete.

Further stoking the nationalism now are the “performance” sports beloved by television — figure skating and gymnastics, especially — whose outcome lies beyond the athlete’s grace, skill, perfection or power. It falls instead to a nameless clique of tribal aesthetes, “judges” whose personal tastes and national loyalties shade every outcome and mock the competitors’ sacrifice.

Complicit with the arbitrarians of gymnastic scoring, the geezers of the IOC have judged that wrestling is senescent. Even the introduction of women’s wrestling in 2004 couldn’t save it — probably because the girls didn’t wear bikinis, and there was no Jell-O involved. Among the candidate “sports” to replace wrestling is waveboarding, which is very modern because, well, there’s no race, no match, no opponent. It’s a performance.

Ideally, in bikinis.