Posted on 31 March, 2017<\/p>\n
(Amended on 30 May 2017)<\/p>\n
4 March, 2011<\/p>\n
Wrestling season comes to a close. My last high school wrestler has finished his course.\u00a0 Both my sons have gotten from the sport what I had hoped they would get.\u00a0 The sport is a wonderful means of character development.<\/p>\n
Mack Remington, writing for ezinearticles.com<\/em>, reports in an article on the Navy Seals that \u201cWrestlers are viewed by many as the toughest athletes in the world and it is not surprising to members of the wrestling community that their peers enjoy great success during Navy SEAL training and while serving in operational SEAL units.\u201d<\/p>\n My oldest son has endured the toughest training courses the Army offers. There is no dispute about the benefits of the sport for those who pursue such physically and psychologically demanding exploits.\u00a0 The next one, ten years younger, expects to continue to wrestle in college.<\/p>\n You play basketball. You play baseball.\u00a0 You play football.\u00a0 You don\u2019t play wrestling.\u00a0 You wrestle.\u00a0 The same could be said of other physically demanding sports.\u00a0 You swim.\u00a0 You run track.\u00a0 You work; you don\u2019t play. In these ancient competitions, the athlete presses himself to surpass his own limits as well as those of others.\u00a0 If he leaves his competitors behind, he races against himself, ever onward, to beat the clock.<\/p>\n And yet, like boxing or the more popular team sports, in wrestling there are the variables in the unpredictable movements of an opponent. The singular opponent brings his own factors into the contest.\u00a0 The differences in strength, speed, style, and stamina bear reciprocally upon the pair of combatants and influence their strategies for victory.\u00a0 The grueling and lengthy time of preparation ends with a very short and intense contest.\u00a0 Just six minutes in high school.<\/p>\n Chuck Brown, an ehow.com<\/em> columnist and former coach, teacher, and business owner writes:<\/p>\n Wrestling, real wrestling, not the fake, carnival silliness called ‘pafeshnal rasslin,’ has been around since earliest recorded Olympic history. It is, at its core, one-on-one, close-quarter human chess. This sport requires more maximum, sustained effort and energy expenditure than any other. While the actual match total time may not seem all that long to those who have never wrestled, three 2-minute rounds, any wrestler will tell you those minutes are thoroughly exhausting, win or lose.<\/p>\n The author of The Turning Point,<\/em> a book about the 1953 college wrestling season, which culminated in the NCAA tournament at Penn State College (now University), begins the preface with this statement: \u201cWrestling is not, as some contend, like life. Wrestling is <\/em>life\u2014reduced to its essence.\u201d\u00a0 An overstatement, indeed, but the author gives the sport its proper place as the generator of spiritual reformation by the refining work that it performs in the soul of the participants.<\/p>\n Two of the long-recognized \u201cfour cardinal virtues\u201d – prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance \u2013 are especially cultivated in the wrestler. He learns fortitude and temperance in driving his body onward with rigorous physical workouts and then denies himself the pleasure of eating in order to maximize his competitive edge.\u00a0 But more emphatically, he regularly develops a particular one of the \u201cseven heavenly virtues\u201d \u2013 humility.\u00a0 When he loses, he gets the blame.\u00a0 And it is quite personal.\u00a0 He loses alone.\u00a0 There is no one else to share his defeat and whatever shame attaches to it.\u00a0 He must take responsibility for the loss.\u00a0 But in victory, if he is really understanding the way things work, he must give credit to his coaches and to the God who gave him the skills to succeed.\u00a0 Character is built.\u00a0 His is grateful, not proud, in victory.\u00a0 Character is built in the wrestler.<\/p>\n In addition to developing fortitude, temperance, and humility, there is a unique fellowship among wrestlers. They spend time socially together, especially during tournaments.\u00a0 They have the opportunity to observe one another in each one\u2019s personal contest.\u00a0 In these contests, they simulate a most ancient and ubiquitous feature of human existence \u2013 war.\u00a0 They look upon one another as fellow warriors, each taking his turn to undergo another soul-wrenching battle.<\/p>\n Alex Nedved, of Clinton Massie, is a participant in the Ohio State High School Wrestling Tournament in Columbus this weekend.\u00a0 In the Wilmington News Journal<\/em> (March 3), he is reported to have said, \u201cI am forever in debt to this sport for I would not be the person I am today without it. It has taught me not only how to win, but more importantly the essence of defeat and how to turn that negative energy into something prosperous.\u201d*<\/p>\n How appropriate that many of our national political leaders and soldiers have also been wrestlers: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln Calvin Coolidge, Zach Taylor, John Tyler, Ted Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and William Taft are among U.S. Presidents.\u00a0 General Norman Schwarzkopf, John McCain, Dennis Hastert, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield are four more recent notables.<\/p>\n Long may the sport continue in our land, and may our community do all it can to encourage the participation of its young men for their personal good and for that of the community and nation.<\/p>\n *I note by way of amendment here on 30 May, 2017, that in another News Journal<\/em> article in Wilmington (3 March, 2017) a WHS football player\u00a0who also wrestles was reported as saying what I have heard and observed on manifold occasions, viz., that wrestling is more grueling that football, “way more physical , it wears you out. \u00a0One wrestling match is like one football game.”<\/p>\n Well and simply put.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Posted on 31 March, 2017 (Amended on 30 May 2017) 4 March, 2011 Wrestling season comes to a close. My last high school wrestler has finished his course.\u00a0 Both my sons have gotten from the sport what I had hoped they would get.\u00a0 The sport is a wonderful means of character development. Mack Remington, writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,37,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2197"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelbray.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}