Article authored by Justin Dyer appearing in the W.I.N. magazine this month.
Dyer Puts Wrestling in Perspective
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have tasted neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
By Justin Dyer, Special to W.I.N.
A pair of losses at the national tournament this year ended my season a day earlier than expected. It also postponed for at least another year the fulfillment of two of my personal athletic goals: to be an NCAA All-American and a national champion. However, the time since the tournament has given me time to reflect on my life and the role that wrestling plays in it.
If I were to have reflected on my season and my experiences immediately after the tournament, they would have likely been different than they are today. It is often said that hindsight is 20/20, and the amount of time that has elapsed since the tournament allows me to see more clearly where I may have gone wrong and how I may be able to plot a better course for the future.
Because of the immense amount of time and commitment I have invested into the sport, the emotional cost of failing to reach my goals has been very great indeed.
My performance at the national tournament, as the culmination of my collegiate season, carries the ability to either erase the disparate individual disappointments and failures of the season or to synthesize them into a greater, overarching chagrin that will remain in the back of my mind until the first match of the next year.
For the past two seasons (and the past two national tournaments), the latter proved to be the case.
After the 2005 tournament, a teammate of mine who lost his final match in the same round that I did — had we would have won, would have become All-Americans — shook his head in disillusionment and remarked, “Five years of wrestling wasted.” Another senior teammate — who did not even earn the opportunity to wrestle at the national tournament — replied in a rare moment of inebriated wisdom, “Correction: Five years of wrestling accomplished.”
Since that night, the dichotomy between my teammates’ perspectives has given me food for thought. Increasingly, my personal philosophy of wrestling and competition has tended toward the latter perspective.
If wrestling is only about medals and trophies, praises and recognition, then it is a shallow and ultimately hollow endeavor. There must be something more, something that gives value to the sacrifices, the commitment, the work, the competition — the heartbreak and the failures — even when these things are not accompanied by success (as we typically define it).
This idea is a far cry from claiming that results don’t matter: Anyone who has ever competed (and invested himself in that competition) knows that results do matter. And while I have been tempted at times to downplay my desire to succeed in an attempt to diminish the pain associated with losing, the harsh winds of reality that always blow strong in the wake of defeat remind me that the importance of outcome is an inevitable fact of sport. But simply winning is not the only meaningful measurement of success; it is not even the most important.
The wrestling mindset is one that is all too-often outcome oriented. When ESPN dedicated a portion of its series “The Season” to documenting the personal stories of the 2002 Iowa Hawkeye wrestling team, the world caught a glimpse of just how intense and emotional the successes and failures of a wrestler can be.
After the unbeaten and No. 1-ranked Mike Zadick placed seventh at the NCAA National Championships, the documentary chronicled how weeks went by before Zadick and his father began speaking to each other again.
The emotional pain associated with the loss was simply too great for both of them: Zadick likened the experience he had to the death of a close family member and Zadick’s father shed a tear on camera as he spoke about the tournament. Zadick’s brother, Bill, a former Hawkeye himself, commented that time would not erase the pain that Mike felt. Instead, the older Zadick suggested that his brother would wake up each and every day feeling worse than he did the day before. The elder brother felt a sort of empathy that not many in the world can feel.
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