Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Where Meat Comes From

It takes a couple hours before you notice what's wrong with everyone.

It's their ears. It's as if you've landed on some planet where almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted and shrunken. It's not the first thing you notice about people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see.

"To most wrestlers, cauliflower ear is like a tattoo," says Justin Petersen. "It's like a status symbol. It's kind of looked on with pride in the community. It means you've put in the time."

"That's just from getting in there and brawling, getting in there and getting your ears rubbed a lot," says William R. Groves. "What happens is, as you rub and rub and rub, the abrasion, the cartilage separates from the skin, and in that separation, blood and fluid fills it up. After a while, it drains out, but the calcium will solidify on the cartilage. A lot of wrestlers see it as a kind of badge of wrestling, a necessary badge of wrestling."

Sean Harrington says, "It's like a stalactite or something. Slowly blood trickles in there and hardens. It gets injured again, and a little more blood trickles in and hardens, and slowly it's unrecognizable anymore. Some guys definitely feel that way, that it's a badge of courage, a badge of honor."

"I think it's very much a badge of honor," says Sara Levin. "You know somebody's a wrestler. It's another one of those things that makes someone else an equal to you. And a bond. Part of the grind. The ears. It's just part of the game. It's the nature of the sport, like scars, battle wounds."

Petersen says, "I had one teammate who, before he'd go to bed, he'd sit there and punch his ear for ten minutes. He wanted cauliflower ear so bad."

"I've drained mine a lot," says Joe Calavitta. "I got syringes, and when they blew up, I kept draining them. They fill up. They fill up with blood. As long as you keep draining them before the blood hardens, you can keep it down, pretty much. You can get it done by a doctor, but you'd have to go in all the time, so you just get your own syringes and do it."

Petersen, Groves, Harrington, and Calavitta, they're amateur wrestlers.

Levin is the Men's Event Coordinator for USA Wrestling, the national governing body for amateur wrestling.

What happens on this page isn't wrestling, it's writing. At best, this is a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meat comes from. From the North Regional Olympic Trials, the first step, where for twenty dollars any man can compete for a chance on the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team.

The Nationals are over, so are the other regionals. This is the last chance to qualify for the finals.

These men, some are here to wrestle other high school «Junior» level wrestlers now that the regular season is over.

For some of these men, who range in age from seventeen to forty-one, this will be their last shot at the Olympics. As Levin says, "You're going to see the end of a lot of careers here."

Everybody here will tell you about amateur wrestling.

It's the ultimate sport, they'll tell you. It's the oldest sport. It's the purest sport. The toughest sport.

It's a sport under attack from men and women alike.

It's a dying sport.

It's a cult. It's a club. It's a drug. It's a fraternity. It's a family.

For all of these people, amateur wrestling is a misunderstood sport.

"Track and field, you run from here to there. Basketball, you put the ball in the hoop," says three-time world champion Kevin Jackson. "Wrestling has two different styles, as well as folkstyle and collegiate styles of wrestling, which gives you so many rules that the general public cannot follow it."

"You don't have the cheerleaders running around, confetti falling from the ceiling, and Jack Nicholson in the bleachers," says former college and army team wrestler Butch Wingett. "You might have a bunch of grizzled old guys who might be farmers or were maybe laid off from the John Deere plant."

"I think that wrestlers are misjudged a lot," says Lee Pritts, who wrestles freestyle at 54 kilograms. "It's actually a classy sport. And a lot of times it's kinda considered barbaric. Wrestling gets a lot of bad publicity."

"Right now, people just don't understand the sport," says Jackson, "and if you don't understand something or know who might compete in it, you won't watch."

"People don't give the sport its respect because they're, like, 'Oh, it's just two guys rolling around, and I think that's wrong," says three-time NCAA wrestler Tyrone Davis, who wrestles Greco-Roman at 130 kilograms. "It's more than just two guys rolling around. Basically, wrestling's like life. You got a lot of decisions out there. The mat is your life."

When you fly into Waterloo, Iowa, the city looks exactly like the map on its website, flat and cut with freeways. At the Young Arena, near the dry, empty downtown, all day before weigh-ins, wrestlers stop in to ask if there's a sauna in town. Where's the scale? The Young Arena is where elderly people go on weekdays to walk around and around the air-conditioned indoor track.

Wrestlers will lose up to a pound a minute during a seven-minute match. The training stories they tell include running in-flight "laps," back and forth in jetliners, despite the crew's protests. Then doing chin-ups in the jetliner's galley area. An old trick for high school wrestlers is to ask to go to the bathroom during every class, and then doing chin-ups on the toilet stall walls, letting the sharp edge along the top cut calluses into their hands. They talk about running up and down the bleachers, past angry fans during basketball games, in order to make their competitive weight the next day.

In 1998, Wingett says, three college wrestlers died of dehydration trying to cut weight while taking the supplement Creatine.

"I don't think there's any more grueling or tougher sport to train in," says Kevin Jackson. "By going through that, it's a humbling experience. You do get beat in the practice room. You do get fatigued running the track or running the stadium stairs."

Wingett talks about long runs in the middle of summer where three wrestlers take turns, two chasing a pickup truck that the third drives with the windows rolled up and the heater cranked.

"You get it down to a system," says Justin Petersen, who at seventeen years old has had his nose broken more than fifteen times. "You think: 'I can have this carton of milk, I can have this bagel, and I will have sweated it off by this time of the day, at which time I can have this sip of water and still make weight. You have it down exact."

Lee Pritts and Mark Strickland, a 76-kilogram freestyle wrestler with «Strick» tattooed on his arm, have brought their own stationary bikes into town and are sweating off the weight in room 232 of the Hartland Inn. A third friend, Nick Feldman, is here for moral support and to massage them when their bodies get so dehydrated that their muscles cramp.

Feldman, a former college wrestler who drove down from Mitchell, South Dakota, says, "Wrestling's like a club where once you get in, you can't get out."

"You see the other athletes in the schools, the basketball players and the football players, they'll talk about how 'wrestling's not that tough, but then they join the team, and they quit within the week," says Sean Harrington, who's been training at Colorado Springs for the past six months in order to compete in freestyle at 76 kilograms.

He says, "We always have such pride in the fact that we work harder than everybody else, and we get no recognition to speak of. I mean, there's no fans here. Most of them are parents. It's not a popular sport."

"When I was in college I cried a lot just because it was so hard, and I was never very good," says Ken Bigley, twenty-four, who started wrestling in first grade and now coaches at Ohio State University. "I asked myself a lot of times why I did it. One analogy I like to use is it's like a drug. You get addicted to it. Sometimes you know-you know it's not good for you, especially emotionally, some of those tough practices or bad competitions, but you just keep coming back for it. If I didn't need it, I wouldn't be here. You don't make money off it. You don't get any glory off it. It's just searching for the high, I guess."

Sean Harrington says, "I've been wrestling so long that I don't remember what pain was like before wrestling."

Says Lee Pritts, twenty-six, a coach at the University of Missouri, "It's kind of weird. You get in the shower after a tournament and your face is usually banged up from wrestling all day, and the water running over it gives you a little burn, but if you take a week off you miss it. You miss the pain. After a week off, you're ready to go back because you miss the pain."

The pain is maybe one reason why the stands are almost empty.

Amateur wrestling isn't easy to watch. It can be a flesh-and-blood demolition derby.

During the first minute of his first match last Christmas, Sean Harrington broke his wrist.

Keith Wilson's injuries include his shoulder, elbow, knee, his right ankle, and a herniated disk between C5 and C6 of his spine. Seven surgeries, total.

At home in a jar full of alcohol, junior-level wrestler Mike Engelmann from Spencer, Iowa, keeps a translucent sliver of cartilage that surgeons removed from the meniscus of his knee. It's his good-luck charm. He's been stitched up nine times.

About his nose, Ken Bigley says, "Sometimes it's pointing left. Sometimes it's pointing right."

A medic in an orange "Sports Injury Center" T-shirt says, "Ringworm is unbelievably common among these guys."

One of the oldest rules, he says, is that wrestlers have to get down and wipe up their own blood with a spray bottle of bleach.

"His grandparents will say all the time, 'This is nuts, " says software engineer David Rodrigues, here with his seventeen-year-old son, Chris, a four-time Georgia State champion who placed fifth in the world in the Youth Games in Moscow last year.

"There's been the injuries," he says, listing them off. "Hyperextended knee, hyperextended elbow, he had a slight tear in a back muscle, a broken hand, broken finger, broken toe, sprained knee, but we've seen worse. We've seen kids carried out on stretchers. Broken collarbones, broken arm, broken leg, broken neck. God forbid, we had a kid in Georgia whose neck was broken. Those are the kind of injuries you pray that never happen, but at the same token we all understand that's the nature of the sport."

"And my broken tooth," his son, Chris, says.

And David Rodrigues says, "His tooth broke off and it was in the kid's head, sticking out of the kid's head."

About Chris's mother, David Rodrigues says, "My wife will only go to a couple tournaments a year. She'll go to State and she'll go to Nationals, but she won't go to a lot because she's afraid of injuries. She doesn't want to be there when one happens."

Chris's front teeth are bonded now.

In a few more days, Chris Rodrigues will break his jaw in the Junior World Team Trials.

Justin Petersen says, "There's a picture of me after the state tournament my sophomore year. I had hit someone's knee with my face so one side of my face was all swollen, and the other side of my face I had mat burn. It's nasty. It seeps and scabs and the scabs keep breaking every time you move your facial muscles. And my nose, I'd broken that again, so I had a cotton ball up my nose. And I'd sprained my shoulder again, so I had a big ice pack up to my shoulder. I'd just finished wrestling my last match and someone took a picture of me."

Timothy O'Rourke, who's wrestling today for the first time in nineteen years, is here without his wife. "She doesn't want to see me get hurt," he says. "Rolling around with the big boys… She's afraid she's going to see me get hurt, so she stayed at the hotel."

For Greco-Roman wrestler Phil Lanzatella, it was his wife who first noticed his injury and saved his life.

"I was going to Sweden/Norway, and my wife was putting her head to my chest, hugging me," he says. "I'd just gotten back from the Olympic Training Center. And she's about five-three, and she said, 'Your heart sounds like it's making a funny sound. She said, 'You'd better get checked out. So I went to the emergency room."

It was a torn heart valve.

Lanzatella says, "To make a long story short, I went in on Sunday night and they told me on Tuesday of that next week that I'd need immediate open-heart surgery. The only thing they could surmise is that it was from wrestling. One of the top surgeons in the world, the one who did my surgery, said he'd never seen an injury like it in his career. If you tear a valve like that, the analogy is hitting the steering wheel of a car, head-on, at sixty miles an hour."

The heart valve was torn in three places-in a V shape, with another tear horizontally across the midpoint of the V-forcing Lanzatella's heart to pump five times faster than normal to keep up.

This was in February of 1997. Phil Lanzatella had qualified for the Olympic trials every year since 1980, when he was on top, still a teenager, but already a world-class wrestler, dating Water Mondale's daughter and headed for the Olympics in Moscow. The Olympics we boycotted that year. Now, for Phil the options were a mechanical valve, a pig heart valve, or a recovered human valve. The recovered valve was the choice that would let him still compete.

After that, he started helping coach at local colleges and high schools. He started feeling good, getting a little more active.

"I didn't tell my wife. I came home one day and said, 'Hey, Mel, what do you think about me wrestling? and she said, 'Yeah, okay, if you want to be single. I'm not going through that again. But she got used to the idea."

They've been married fifteen years.

Finally, Melody Lanzatella said, "If you're going to do this, then you're going to win."

So far, Phil hasn't. He didn't make it in the South Regionals.

"I took tenth in the Nationals, top eight qualifying, in Las Vegas. In Tulsa," he says, "my hotel van broke down, and I missed weigh-ins. I got stuck on the highway. So this is really it. This is it, literally."

So for Phil Lanzatella, thirty-seven, this is his last shot at the Olympics after decades of training and competition.

It's the last shot for Sheldon Kim, twenty-nine, from Orange County, California, who works full-time as an inventory analyst and is here with his wife, Sasha, and their three-year-old, Michaela, and who is busy right now trying to drop two extra pounds in the last half-hour before weigh-ins are over.

It's the last shot for Trevor Lewis, thirty-three, the comptroller at Penn State with a master's degree in engineering and architecture, who's here with his father.

It's the last shot for Keith Wilson, thirty-three, who has a baby boy due in two weeks and practices two or three times every day as part of the army's World Class Athlete program.

It's the last shot for Michael Jones, thirty-eight, of Southfield, Michigan, whose first film project, Revelations: The Movie, is about to begin production.

Jones says, "My body just can't go through another four years of wrestling guys like this. Like I say, my knees are starting to buckle. My back is starting to really get to me now. I don't want to get to around fifty years old and be bent over with a cane. This will definitely be my last Olympics."

It's the last shot for former college wrestler Timothy O'Rourke, forty-one, who last wrestled in 1980 and says, "I saw something on the Internet and thought, 'What the hell, I'll give it a shot.»

Despite everything at stake, the mood is less like a fighting tournament than a family reunion.

Keith Wilson is here from the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to compete as a 76-kilogram Greco-Roman wrestler.

"I don't hold anything in," he says. "I'm happy all the time. And if I get stressed, I have an okay outlet. I can just come here and beat the shit out of someone and I won't get in trouble for it. When you wrestle, it's for blood, but when you walk off the mat, you're friends again."

"It's almost like a family," says Chris Rodrigues. "You know everyone. I know everyone. You meet people you know, and everyone gets to know each other, hanging out at the big national tournaments. The Junior Nationals and the Nationals, every year. It's like a big connection to everyone. I know people in Moscow and Bulgaria. I know people around the world."

His father, David, adds, "That fraternity he's part of, when he goes to Michigan and gets a business degree and maybe goes out, and maybe he never wrestles another day in his life, but he'll run into a guy who wrestled during the same period of time he did, and that camaraderie will always be there."

Sean Harrington says, "When you meet another wrestler that you don't know, say you're on a trip, it's like you hear about people who own Corvettes, you always wave to each other. It's the same thing with wrestling. You have a camaraderie there because you know what the other guy's been through."

"It's just focusing the energy for the match," says Ken Bigley. "When we're on the mat, we want to just beat the piss out of each other, but when we're off the mat we know what each other's going through because we've been there. As much as you focus on beating your opponent up, as much as you're enemies on the mat, as hard as you're going to hit him, once you're off the mat we're not violent people, we just like a violent sport."

Nick Feldman calls it "elegant violence."

During the matches, wrestlers lie around on the edges of the mats and watch. Wearing baggy sweats. They stay together, arms around each other, or locked in practice holds, in the kind of laid-back closeness you see only in men's fashion advertising anymore. Abercrombie & Fitch or Tommy Hilfiger magazine ads. Nobody seems to need "personal space." Nobody throws off "attitude."

"You're brothers," says Justin Petersen, who at seventeen has a 4.0 GPA and runs his own Internet marketing business. "We eat together. When you have lunch, it's with the other wrestlers, and all you do is talk about how hungry you are and you can't wait until after that weigh-in so you can eat this or that. How many tenths of a pound you're going to lose in a day."

Nick Feldman says, "As a whole, wrestlers are more comfortable with themselves. There's not too many egos getting blown everywhere because that's just all smoke. It's anti-NBA, pretty much."

"Hell," says Sara Levin. "Going through hell together does it. You know that a guy in Russia is going through the same thing that this guy here is, trying to cut this much weight. They've got to do the same thing to get on the mat. There's a bond in that we're not a glamorous sport. We're not high-profile, money. You know that you're down and dirty."

Like brothers, they even look alike. Many with broken noses. Cauliflower ears. Most have a kind of pulpy, boiled look from sweating hard and landing on their faces. They're all muscled like an anatomy chart. Most seem to have heavy brows.

"In our wrestling room, we usually have the heat high," says Mike Engelmann, whose long eyelashes are in contrast to his brow. "What that does is it kind of flushes your body. You sweat all of it out. You drink more and sweat it out again, and it kind of sinks the cheeks and the eyes in, a little bit, and the forehead's all you've got left sticking out there. I kind of like the look, because it shows you're working hard."

This brotherhood thing seems to end when the ref blows his whistle.

On Saturday, despite all the years of preparation, the freestyle tournament is all over, fast.

Joe Calavitta loses and is out of the Olympics.

In Junior competition, Justin Petersen wins, and as soon as he's off the mat he throws up.

The few people in the stands cheer, Sheldon Kim's wife, Sasha, saying softly, over and over, "Go, Shel. Go, Shel. Go, Shel…"

"When you're in there, one-on-one with somebody," says Timothy O'Rourke, "you can't even hear what's going on in the stands."

O'Rourke is pinned in five seconds.

Sheldon Kim loses.

Trevor Lewis wins his first match, but loses his second.

Chris Rodrigues wins his first match.

Sheldon Kim's younger brother, Sean, loses to Rodrigues.

Mark Strickland goes against Sean Harrington, with Lee Pritts coaching from a corner. Behind in the match, Strickland calls a time-out, screaming at Pritts, "I'm going to break his ribs!" His face twisted as if he's already crying.

"The toughest guys I know cry after matches because they put so much into it," Joe Calavitta says.

Lee Pritts says, "You become so close with a workout partner that they're like your own blood, and if they go out and lose a match, lose a big match, then you've just had your heart torn out."

Strickland loses to Harrington.

"I hate to see him lose," Pritts says. "I've seen him have so much success, that when he loses, it's crushing."

Pritts wins his match.

Chris Rodrigues wins his second match.

Ken Bigley wins his first and second matches, but loses his third.

Rodrigues loses his third match and is out of the freestyle tournament.

Sean Harrington and Lee Pritts are going to the Olympic finals in Dallas.

A medic refuses to say how many muscles are pulled, bones broken, joints dislocated. All that's, he says, "highly confidential."

And the freestyle tournament is over for another four years.

That night, in a tavern, a wrestler who didn't win talks about how he was screwed over by the ref in favor of a local hero, and how USA Wrestling should import impartial refs from other areas. This wrestler talks about going to Japan to earn $20,000 in an "ultimate fighting" match, then using the money to create a joint marketing venture between topless clubs and amateur fighting events.

"Many of these guys do the ultimate fighting because it's good money," says Sara Levin. "We have Olympians who are doing it. Kevin Jackson's done it. Half of our Greco Olympic team from 96 does it. I'm not thrilled that it's the professional outlet that our guys have, but it's their only option."

The wrestler in the tavern says he can sneak the money back from Japan and not pay any taxes. He plans to avoid state laws about professional fighting by paying fighters under the table. He signs autographs for little boys. He's huge and nobody disagrees with anything he says. And he talks and talks.

The next morning, Sunday, a Marine recruiting Humvee is parked outside the Young Arena, blaring heavy-metal rock music from giant speakers as two recruiters in Marine fatigues stand nearby.

Inside the arena, the mats are laid on top of each other, double-thick, in preparation for the Greco-Roman tournament.

"A lot of people are scared of Greco," says Michael Jones. "It took me a lot of years to get into it, because I was scared of it. Because of the throws. You got some serious throws."

Phil Lanzatella suits up to wrestle, the scar from his open-heart surgery running down the center of his chest. He explains how at least the third and final heart valve tear probably happened while he was practicing Greco-Roman wrestling with Jeff Green at the Olympic Training Center in 1997.

"I weighed about two-seventy and Green's probably about two-sixty, so we totaled about five-thirty, coming through the air at I don't know how many miles an hour. Twisting and turning. And we got next to some smaller guys. That space was tight. And they put their hands and feet up," he says. "And we came out of the turn and through the air, and I landed right on the guy's foot."

Lanzatella says, "I felt it. I knew what had happened, but I didn't think much of it. I'd taken worse shots than that."

Today, there's some talk about the darker side of wrestling, how someone snuck a camera into the weigh-ins at the Midlands tournament a few years ago and the best wrestlers in the world ended up naked on the Internet. People talk about how amateur wrestlers have been stalked by obsessed fans. Called late at night. Harassed. Killed.

"I know there was a lot of talk," says Butch Wingett. "DuPont was hot for Dave Schultz for a long time."

Former college wrestler Joe Valente says, "This sport gets so much disrespect. People think it's a bunch of homo men trying to feel each other up."

As the Greco competition starts, there's no one in the stands.

Keith Wilson wins his first match, loses his second, but will still go to the Olympic finals because he's already qualified in the Nationals.

Chris Rodrigues wins a single match and will go to the Olympic finals as a Greco-Roman wrestler. The only high school student to qualify.

With his father after the match, he says, "This is just great. I'm still in high school. I get to go back home and tell all my friends I'm going to the Olympic trials in Dallas."

Phil Lanzatella wins his first match three-zero.

His second match, Phil ties zero-zero in the first period, then loses a point to his opponent in the second period and loses the match in overtime.

Already the crowd of wrestlers is thin. People are getting out, catching planes. Tomorrow is Monday and everybody has to be back at work. Sean Harrington as a painting contractor. Tyrone Davis as a water-plant operator for the town of Hempstead, New York. Phil Lanzatella as a spokesman for the company who installed his heart valve and as an advertising account rep for Time Warner.

Lanzatella sits at the far side of the tournament floor while the last consolation matches wrap up. His wrestling shoes sit a few feet away.

"I got what I deserved," he says. "I haven't been training hard enough. I have different priorities now. My wife. My kids. A job."

He says, "Last time these shoes will see action."

He says, "Maybe I'll take up golf or something."

Sheldon Kim says, "This is probably it for me. I have other priorities. I have my little girl. After this, that's it for me. I've gotten enough out of the sport to know what I've accomplished."

Wrestlers leaving "the family" to concentrate on their own.

Now almost no one is here at the Young Arena.

"Wrestling has a kind of cult following," says William R. Groves, who's driving back to Ohio State University tonight, to finish the last year on his Ph.D. in physics. "Your friends come. Your family comes. And I think a lot of people view wrestling as a boring sport."

Justin Petersen says, "It is a dying sport. I've heard some people say that boxing's a little bit worse, but wrestling's right there behind it. There's a lot of colleges dropping their wrestling programs. The high school popularity is going down. It doesn't have a lot of years left, that's what people say."

"It's dying at the collegiate level most of all," says Sean Harrington. "But I've read that at the kid level, the young children, it's more popular than ever. There's just lots of kids getting involved in wrestling because parents know what it can be to their children."

He says, "It's a hundred percent Title IX."

In the twenty-five years since the federal law that requires colleges to offer equal sports opportunities for men and women, more than 462 schools have dropped their wrestling programs.

"Title IX, that's a major factor," says Mike Engelmann. "All those colleges are getting screwed out of their wrestling programs because we have to have an equal amount of sports. I don't want to sound like a sexist or anything, but I really don't believe in it."

Even Olympic champion Kevin Jackson says, "I have a son, and he's started to wrestle a little bit, but he does tae kwon do, soccer, basketball, and I really hesitate to push him toward wrestling in any way because it is such hard work for little reward."

Still sitting near his shoes in the almost empty arena, Phil Lanzatella talks about his children, "More to the point, I'd push them to tennis or golf. Something noncontact, with lots of money."

Jackson says, "So many people around the country have wrestled, or they know someone who wrestled. They have some connection to it. We just have to do a better job of promoting our athletes so folks watching TV can make that connection."

"These guys," Engelmann says, "I'm sure all their kids are going to wrestle, too. And that's why it's not going to die. I want to have kids, and I'm not going to push it on them, but I hope they're going to want to wrestle."

Phil Lanzatella has a plane to catch, too.

"Maybe all this energy can be funneled into monetary gains," he says. He's been approached about writing a book. "Now I have the time to reflect and certainly the stories. From 1979 through today. I've been through about every aspect. Running for state legislator… going out with Mondale's daughter when we boycotted the Olympics in 80… being a part of five Olympic teams-that's never been done before. Yeah, there's a lot."

He picks up his shoes and says, "I still have to call my wife…"

"It feels so good when you stop," says high school wrestling coach Steve Knipp. "It's such a demanding thing when you're doing it that when you stop cutting weight and get to eat, you never appreciated food so much in your life. Or when you get to just sit down, you never appreciated that chair so much. Or when you get to take a drink of water, you never appreciated water so much."

And now Lanzatella, Harrington, Lewis, Kim, Rodrigues, Jackson, Petersen, all those ears. Davis, Wilson, Bigley, all those stalactite cauliflower ears are diffused out into the big world, where they'll blend in. Into jobs. Into families.

Where they'll only ever be noticed by other wrestlers.

Keith Wilson says, "It's a small family, but everybody knows each other."

And maybe amateur wrestling is dying, but maybe not.

At the Olympic team finals in Dallas, there are 50,170 paying spectators, and big-money corporate sponsors including Bank of America, AT&T, Chevrolet, and Budweiser.

In Dallas, one wrestler asks to perform an old ritual to mark the last match of his career. In this tradition, the wrestler puts his shoes in the center of the mat and covers them with a handkerchief. With the crowd silent, the wrestler kisses the mat and leaves his shoes behind.

Sean Harrington says, "I got a friend who used to tell me, 'If I wrestled, I'd be the best. I know I'd be the best. I know I could. But he didn't. He didn't do it. So he could always just think that he could've been the best, but he never actually put on the shoes and went out and did it."

He says, "Just the fact that you've accomplished, and you've set your goals and you went after them, and you never were a 'woulda, shoulda, coulda. You actually did it."

No one mentioned in this article made the Olympic team.