Can't-win kid is ace, thanks to wrestling
Flop on mat kept trying, and it pays off - in the classroom
By Mick Garry
mgarry@argusleader.com
Published: 08/2/05
The high school wrestling career of Zach Lamberty lasted four years, but was often sliced into very short increments.
His matches were quick; Lamberty was not.
The O'Gorman High School graduate, a Notre Dame junior who will spend next year at Oxford studying physics, makes light of his lack of wrestling talent but poignantly talks about the role the sport played in sharpening his talents elsewhere.
He said he won four matches in four years at O'Gorman, with more losses than this math whiz could count. None of these victories, he added, came against South Dakota varsity opponents.
"And the sick thing is," he said, "if Notre Dame had a wrestling team, I'd be tempted to go out."
Lamberty, also a football player at O'Gorman, initially joined the team as a means of staying in shape during the winter months. The shine of that concept began to wear off his sophomore year, however, as the beatings piled up.
"I was getting pretty frustrated," he said. "I wasn't coming close to winning anything."
Sensing Lamberty was ready to bolt, Ken Lindemann, an assistant wrestling coach and a math teacher, took his terrible wrestler and brilliant student aside.
"He pointed out how easily things had come to me in the classroom," Lamberty said. "Then he pointed to some people in the wrestling room who were a lot better wrestlers than I was. 'This is their classroom,' he said. 'This is where things come easily to them.' "
Lindemann went on to point out that things also worked the other way. There were wrestlers who struggled to keep up in the classroom, where Lamberty was undefeated.
"It was eye-opening at the time," Lamberty said. "I'd never thought of it that way before. It was unfair of me to run into something I was not good at and then quit immediately. Kids who had a harder time in school didn't have the option of quitting in the classroom. They had to stick with it."
Lamberty retold that story in his valedictorian address to his classmates, citing it as a pivotal moment. He has since increased his appreciation of all that losing even more.
"There have been times at Notre Dame when classes have seemed unbelievably difficult," Lamberty said. "And this was the stuff I was supposed to be good at. I wouldn't have been prepared for the struggle if I hadn't been a wrestler. It would have been, 'Why isn't this as easy as it has always been?' I don't know how I could have handled it."
He expects the year at Oxford will be far tougher yet academically, and he knows he'll dearly miss the Saturdays when the Fighting Irish football team is playing in South Bend. Even so, Oxford was something he had to try.
"I think getting through all those losses gave me a better attitude toward seeking out challenges," he said. "In a way, it goes back to the wrestling. It's going to be real tough, but it's my gift. I can do math and physics. If I were to quit short of getting the best education I can get, I'd be doing a disservice to my God-given talent."
There are figurative challenges brought on by wrestling, and there are also literal ones. In his Notre Dame dorm, Lamberty will occasionally announce to those up and down the hall that it's wrestling time. Potential opponents pop out of their rooms like cartoon villains in a video game.
"The sad thing is, I'll still get killed by guys who wrestled once in 10th grade or something," Lamberty said. "Here I am thinking: 'Sweet, I got some fresh meat here. I'm going to show you guys what it's all about.' And then I'll start wrestling and it's, 'Oh man, here we go again.' "