9 - Number One

The final chapter of my collegiate wrestling career started in Iowa, the second after I lost to Gaeta. Due to my All-American status, I was able to walk on top of the NCAA podium for a split second. I eventually stopped at the spot I earned. It had the number six in front. But in my brief moment on top, I closed my eyes and envisioned myself there next year.

The Saturday night after the finals conclude, wrestlers, coaches, and family members tend to go out and celebrate. This usually is a night a wrestler looks forward to all season. On the contrary, the only thing on my agenda that night was a nice meal with my family. Afterward, I went back to my room and slept.

I would be graduating from RIC two months later, in May 2007, but since I had taken a year and a half off from wrestling, I still had twelve months of athletic eligibility. My options were few. The first was to wrestle at a Division I school. If I had won nationals my junior year, I would have gone that route. Since I did not, my lone goal remained winning a Division III national title. An NCAA rule allows you only to continue wrestling for the Division III school at which you earned your undergraduate degree. This limited my Division III options to RIC.

Of course, I had to be an enrolled student, and the next obstacle became getting into a graduate program at RIC. I had taken an undergraduate class in school psychology and liked it. After a lengthy application process, I was accepted into the school psychology program and even managed to land a graduate assistantship position to pay for the tuition.

In the meantime, I was working out constantly. I knew I would find a way to compete and prepared accordingly. The New York Athletic Club (NYAC) became my training headquarters that entire summer. I remembered going to NYAC when I was a high school student and watching the national and world champs work out there. Now I was getting an opportunity to train alongside them, and it felt great. On the other hand, before I got to the gym each time, I hated the idea of going. Then, following the workout, I was always glad I had gone and felt something similar to a runner’s high. The high was a mixture of being in New York City, working out diligently in the company of other elite athletes, and knowing I was doing everything I could to accomplish my goal.

In August of 2007, before heading back to RIC to begin graduate school and resume my collegiate wrestling career, my girlfriend and I broke up after four years together. The next day at NYAC, I got beat up handily by lesser opponents. I wondered how my new relationship status would affect my wrestling, and that thinking in itself points to my one-track mind. It was ironic since I had heard that girls are the fall of many great athletes multiple times. And yet, the exact opposite was happening to me. I was having trouble adjusting to my new life, and as a result, my wrestling suffered. It turned out to be a tough few weeks for me, but I managed to get through it. Once I did, my wrestling was back on track as my then ex-girlfriend and I continued to talk on and off throughout the year.

As in previous summers, there were many things I wanted to work on before the season arrived and then set goals to continue improving as the season progressed. Here is a list I first made in the preseason of my junior year and continually modified anytime I saw a crack in my wrestling.

Things I must work on during practice:

-Top: Riding Legs, Returning Opponents to the mat. Get nasty.

-Defense on my feet, get taken down too easily sometimes, Stay Focused.

-Defense to Legs

-Add ten pounds of muscle.

-Learn to deal with kids who attack your head better.

-DRILL TO THE FINISH EVERYTIME, Must finish shots cleanly, cannot hesitate.

-Practice Gator Roll, just in case.

-Finish opposite leg single from high crotch especially. If stuck circle left then cut back right while elevating opponent’s leg.

-Don’t finish dart shot coming out the back, finish it in front and bring it up. Or John Smith’s finish.

-Drag like Casey

-Take shots with eyes closed and notice how it feels in the body.

-Never give up on Scrambles.

-Do chest passes with medicine ball, box jumps, sprint jump rope and sprints w/heavy bag

-LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED

-Martini’s single leg defenses A. whizzer own thigh, lock opponent’s arm out if he reaches for the second leg, go with it and roll to his back. B. shoulder/head under chin

-Control Weight

-Outside Single

-Get Better every day.

Once school started, I got on the mat as frequently as possible. I was curious to see what the freshmen had and who would be able to make an immediate impact. We were invited to help at a wrestling club in Johnston, Rhode Island, which was an excellent opportunity for our team. Wrestling with our future 133 and 149-pound wrestlers, Travis Drappi and Kevin Sutherland, led me to conclude that they would be around .500 in their freshmen campaigns.

What I see now, that I did not then, was that the core group of freshmen showed up to every one of the preseason practices. They were willing to work hard to become better wrestlers. They were ready to pay their dues in the offseason, which is of utmost importance, and in myself, I took that attitude for granted. It was nice to see these freshmen sharing those qualities. Sutherland eventually became my new workout partner and became the most vital person in the wrestling room.

Before our first competition, the RIC team members were asked to officiate a takedown tournament for Rhode Island high school wrestlers. As one of the bouts was set to begin, the two wrestlers did the mandatory shaking of the hands when one asked the other, “Are you good?” To which wrestler number two responded, “Um, yeah, I think.” Between the laughter, I blew the whistle to commence the highly anticipated match.

In preseason training, I stumbled upon a problem that threatened my entire season. My right knee locked for the third time that preseason during a workout. Each time this happened, my knee was stuck in a bent position, and I could not move it without pain. I had to build my courage to extend my leg quickly and snap it back into place. An MRI of the knee revealed that I had lots of scar tissue, throwing it out of whack. The doctor told me there was nothing he could do about it besides surgery. I decided not to let it bother me and went about my business, hoping it would not happen in my future matches.

One of the main lifting areas I focused on during the offseason was my grip strength. Due to Madelung’s deformity, my wrists were still very weak. My friend, ex-coach, and former teammate, Keith, had some serious grip strength which I envied. He could not curl twenty pounds or bench press half as much as me, but he felt ten times stronger when we wrestled. I rock climbed in the summer to help build grip, finger, and hand power. I was also introduced by my friend to a rotating grip-strength ball, which encourages gripping power and finger strength. I used it religiously.

The primary influence on my grip strength was Andrew Algarin, our heavyweight my junior year. He introduced me to the world’s best grippers. At first, I could not even close the trainer, which required eighty pounds of pressure. My grip strength needed serious help, and that is why I used a full gym day on it. It was a great decision and made me feel a lot stronger.

One day in September, I was told the number one nationally ranked 141-pound wrestler was: me. The rankings came from a great website that was new for the 2007-2008 season, d3wrestle.com. The rankings were not official yet were almost identical to the National Wrestling Coaches Association rankings that would come out later in October.

When I saw my name at the top of the list, I was a bit surprised. I had heard rumors that the defending 141-pound national champion was moving up a weight class, and I knew then that they were more than rumors. Robbie told me, “You better start working out harder now that you have a big bull’s eye on your back.” At first, the whole idea of being ranked first made me nervous. I told myself many times that it is just a ranking. Ultimately, I welcomed the big X. The thought, “Let them come,” rang through my head. As former high school coach Chris Chern told me to do, I took it one match, one period, one minute, one moment at a time.

The number one ranking was exciting, yet at the same time, it put me on a bit of a pedestal in certain circles. It was hard to connect with my younger teammates, who only knew me by the ranking. They seemed to forget I was still going through many of the same struggles as them.

Wrestlers need their teammates. When there was a distance between a teammate and me, I felt the gap needed to be closed. I knew I would have some close calls and that I would need their support and vice versa. Thankfully, I was surrounded by people who proved that they would and could help me time and again.

The weekend before our team’s official practice was scheduled to start, I went home. My grandmother had been very sick and passed away while I was there. This was difficult for me to deal with, even though she had been ill for a long time. I took comfort in the fact that her suffering was finally over. This also meant I would be staying home for the funeral services and would not be back at RIC to attend practice most of the crucial first week.

I did not get back to Rhode Island until late Thursday. In addition to feeling terrible about the loss of my grandmother, I felt awful that, as a captain, I had not been there for the very beginning of the season. I also felt guilty that losing my grandma had already become just another situation that was negatively affecting my wrestling. Again it showed how the sport had consumed my life. I saw everything that happened in life in terms of whether or not it would impact wrestling. Sure, this showed dedication, but it also showed that I could have been giving wrestling too much power in my overall life.

I arrived at practice on the first Friday of the season, ready to go. Ideally, I would have a little over three weeks of mat time until the opening tournament. Realistically, I had much less time due to my course schedule, which caused me to miss quite a few practices.

This was part of being a wrestler and a graduate student. The classes I needed to take were only offered in the late afternoon from four to seven or seven to ten in the evening. Coach Jones was also an assistant football coach at nearby Bryant University, and they practiced from four to six. This meant that wrestling practice was from six to eight-thirty during the first half of our season. On Mondays and Thursdays, I had a four to seven class, so I missed half the mat time. On Tuesdays, I had classes stretching from four in the afternoon to ten in the evening and consequently missed all wrestling practice. One advantage was that I had no classes at all on Fridays.

Almost mockingly, while in one of my classrooms, I could see my team running outside through campus. Missing the run part of practice was not a big problem as it was the easiest thing to make up on my own. Still, I hated watching them through the window. I had to constantly remind myself that there was no other way. In time, the guys realized what room I was in, and one day, as a joke, one of them screamed into the window, “Man, I hate that I have herpes.” All heads darted toward the window, a stunned look on everyone’s face. I, on the other hand, could barely conceal my smile.

Missing a lot of practice was a chief concern to me. To help make up for it, I worked out two to three times a day independently. However, nothing can get you into top wrestling shape except wrestling others. I was hoping my lack of mat time would not hurt me in the early part of the season. Twice a week, I stayed late and wrestled more with former teammates Ray and Todd. They were both in the process of finishing up their degrees.

There were a few other things that were different about my senior year practices. First, we had only two official coaches in Jones and Paquette. Ray was the volunteer assistant. We also had changed the format of our Saturday morning practices. In previous years, early-season Saturday practices were a split between the pool and the mat, but that year the three captains and the coaches decided to make Saturdays a mock tournament day. It was designed to show the team the importance of warming up before matches.

Our team, like many, mistakenly thought that warming up would cause them to be too tired when a match began. I had learned that this was false. A college wrestling match is only seven minutes long. Our bodies can handle warming up while still competing at their highest level for that amount of time. The following experiment, which my team did on these Saturdays, proves it. We would wrestle a live bout as soon as practice began, then one in the middle, and lastly, a third at the very end. Almost always, the second match would turn out to be everyone’s best. The first bout, when we were cold, was our worst. I am not suggesting an hour warm-up before a match. I am saying a wrestler could do that and still be fresh. We learned getting the first sweat out of our system before hitting the mat was best.

The weekend before the Roger Williams Invitational, we had our official mock dual meet. After seeing our team compete amongst ourselves, I thought we would be a middle-of-the-pack team. I am glad to have been dead wrong.

I was very nervous because of my lack of practice time. I had also expected to win this tournament my junior year and had not even made the semis. In addition, I was wrestling with the target of number one ranking on my back for the first time. One comforting thought was that the tournament would be held in the same gymnasium where I had won a New England championship the previous February.

My first match was against a Bridgewater State freshman. Ray calmed me down when he said, “Go out there and show everyone why you are the best.” He helped me recognize it was my opponent who should be nervous. On the flip side, my challenger may have thought to themself, “I have no pressure. He’s supposed to beat me.” Which is what I should have thought many times before.

Once I won the opening bout, my demeanor relaxed for the rest of the tournament, and I won the invitational. When I evaluated my performance, I noticed a kink in my armor. I used the fireman’s carry to score the majority of my takedowns. This was something my competition would also quickly see, and I knew if I did not correct it, it could be troublesome in future matches. Overall, it was the start I expected for myself. My team, however, was a different story altogether.

I first realized that we had a legitimate shot at winning the tournament early in the day when Travis Drappi upset a returning All-New England wrestler. Going into the match, I did not think Travis had much of a chance. Another freshman, Kevin Sutherland, kept the ball rolling with an upset of Frank Cammisa, a defending New England champion. Sutherland went on to win in the finals by a major decision. Kevin Davis, our 197, coasted to his weight class crown as well.

Regardless of the individual performances, the story of the day was not any one of its parts, but RIC wrestling as a whole. We shocked everyone, including ourselves. We ended up in a tie for first place with the eighteenth-ranked team in the country, despite not being ranked in the top thirty ourselves. It was the first time RIC had won a tournament in fifteen years.

A few days later, Geoff Riccio, an injured member of our team, made the first of many extraordinary highlight videos. Getting to watch our achievements on film was as unexpected as the win. The highlights fired the guys up and became essential to the future success of our team.

The following Tuesday, the new national rankings were announced with me at one, Sutherland at eight, and our team now ranked twenty-eighth in the country. Oddly, we did not believe our collective success would last, even though we did believe in ourselves as strong competitors individually. We did not talk about it much; having confidence in ourselves was enough.

In between the first two tournaments, we had a dual match in Boston against MIT. Typically their team is not the most competitive due to the rigors of their students’ academic workload. (Ironically, at the 2008 NCAA championships, they finished fifteenth in the nation on the strength of their heavyweight wrestler, Glen Geesemen, despite an 0-22 record as a team). The dual match should have been painless for us. It did not turn out that way. We were overconfident as a whole after our impressive performance a few days earlier at Roger Williams. Our team wrestled terribly, and we were lucky to escape with a win.

The next tournament, the Doug Parker Invitational at Springfield College, was a more extensive test for us than the Roger Williams Invitational. When I calculated our chances of winning, I came up with zero percent. I tried to focus on myself because I knew there would be tougher competition than I had faced in the brief season. My bracket had thirty-one wrestlers in it, as teams were allowed to enter more than one athlete per weight. The problem for us was that we only had fourteen wrestlers total.

Out of fourteen, eight placed to help us win the tournament, which was another pleasant shock.

At this tournament, I decided I had to get more physical during my matches. The objective was to beat my opponents so badly that they never wanted to wrestle me again. Not to hurt them, just to take them out of their comfort zone.

In the semifinals, I wrestled a freshman who was a New Jersey state finalist the year before. Going into the match, I had more butterflies than usual. I had only taken eighth in the state. My game plan was to be very physical with him. He shot in at the beginning of the match, and I secured a front headlock. I locked it up tight and then bounced his head off the mat. He was stunned, and I quickly spun around for the takedown. The exchange set the tempo for the whole match. The final score was 18-6 in my favor. I won the next match as well and became the tournament champion.

It is important to know that every wrestler has a breaking point. Everyone eventually will mentally and physically give up. I breached that with my opponent in the semifinals soon after the first takedown. At that point, he stopped trying to win the match and only concerned himself with making it until the end.

When you have two champions going at it, you usually do not see it occur, though it certainly is possible. This happened to me when Gaeta broke me during my freshman year. When beaten that way, all a wrestler wants to do is crawl into a corner and cover their head, feeling helpless, hopeless, and embarrassed. No one ever wants it to happen. By experiencing that breaking point, an athlete gains a lot through learning and growth, and in the end, it may actually be beneficial. What I gained from my experience was mental toughness. During my senior year, I told myself if I was ever down by ten points, I would still come after my opponent to try for a fall. I would never give up.

Our team had one more tournament to wrestle before the first semester concluded. Each of the three tournaments was progressively more challenging than the previous one, and the Rochester Invitational was easily the toughest of the three. The field was primarily teams from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, including three teams ranked in the top twenty. To lessen our chances, even more, we were not going to be able to enter a 174-pound wrestler, with both Brendan Casey and Joe Manley sidelined. They had placed third and fifth respectively at Springfield.

We were now only able to enter twelve wrestlers. Our diminished numbers, compounded with the level of competition, led us to believe that our short, wild ride as tournament victors was about to come to an end. Then, Brendan Guarino and Ray Moore stepped up and placed for the first time that year. We had three champions (Martini, Logan, and myself) in the ten weight classes, and out of our twelve guys, eight medaled. What that meant was we had won back to back to back tournaments. On the strength of these wins, RIC moved up to rank eighteen in the nation. We finished the first half of the season 3-0 in dual meets while winning all the tournaments we entered.

I had made it through unscathed. For the next semester, as a graduate assistant, I took only two classes and chose classes on Monday and Tuesday nights. Since football season was over, practice time moved to four to six-thirty, and I would not miss any more practices the rest of the season. I was psyched.

I was still on good terms with my then ex-girlfriend and confided in her that my main concern heading into the second semester was my weight. “You better not let that be an excuse,” she said and recommended that I start writing down everything I ate. The idea was that when I saw in print the amount of food I was consuming, it would help curb my appetite. Although, at first, it sounded crazy, her idea worked. I also added my weight each morning and every workout I did to the journal. My “food folder” was handy on days before matches. I was able to see exactly what I ate, how much I worked out, and the results. Looking back on it now, the whole thing seems a bit much. For me, though, it was what I needed to do to address my overeating problem.

What You Can Take Away from Chapter 9:

1. Accept unchangeable circumstances and adjust to make up for them.

2. If you want something bad enough, you have to make it your number one priority.

3. Whatever scenario you find yourself in, you can draw a mental edge from it.

4. Write down what you have to improve.