Wrestling was, more than anything, about control. We were trying to wrest control of ourselves from the world, from school, from our parents, even from each other. And we were doing this by learning to control other people, to gain mastery of them, to make their limbs move in the directions that we dictated.
Mastery – control – was everything. We conditioned ourselves in the art of exerting force. And at the heart of it all was the issue of weight, of making weight, of controlling our physical selves in the most literal way. There were thirteen weight classes: 103, 112, 119, 125, 130, 135, 140, 145, 152, 160, 171, 189, and Heavyweight (up to 275). To make the varsity team, we had to find our way into one of these slots. For most of us, this meant losing weight, which we called “sucking weight” or “sucking down.”
Sucking weight is as much a part of the sport as the shoes, the mat, the scoring, the pins, and the moves. In the more serious wrestling states, boys would suck down twenty or twenty-five pounds from their natural weight. For that, they had to lose real weight, which meant runs before and after practice and a strict, low-fat diet. We were less committed, and sucked down less, typically ten or twelve pounds. My freshman year, when I had to lose seven pounds, was the most excruciating. I didn’t have much to give, and the marginal pounds were harder to dispose of than they were for the bigger guys. At the end of every practice, I compared my T-shirt to theirs with envy. Theirs were drenched; the light gray cotton had turned uniformly dark. I was lucky if I had dark spots beneath my arms.
We all sucked weight, to greater and lesser degrees, every year, and we each had our own strategies. Most of the team ran for a few miles before practice; I had flat feet and was prone to shin splints, so I used the rowing machine in the weight room. I often wore full sweats during practice. Some of my teammates did the same, but I was the only one who, for reasons still mysterious to me, never washed them. By a month into the season, the stink was near unbearable. That my practice partners rarely complained was evidence of how off-kilter the sport was. Compared to many of our weight-loss methods, putrescent sweats were normal. If the weigh-in on match day was approaching, for instance, and someone still hadn’t made weight, he would buy a pack of gum and stuff the whole thing in his mouth, chewing to stimulate the salivary glands, and then spit into a Snapple bottle. If you were good at it, you could spit out a half pound in an hour. I wasn’t good at it, so if I had to drop some quick weight, I’d put on a few layers of clothing, don my sweats and head to the showers in the faculty locker room with my jump rope. It was a tiny square room, with four showers – two on each side – and a narrow strip outside of the spigots’ radius with just enough room for the jump-rope’s arc. I would turn the showers to scalding, and jump rope in the steam, breaking a sweat within thirty seconds. I could lose a half-pound like that in fifteen minutes.
I hated sucking weight, but of course I also loved it. We all did, even the few teammates who occasionally got so hungry that they would eat and then make themselves throw the food up. In the end, every wrestler loses weight alone, but we made it as much of a team sport as possible. We bonded through shared misery. We compared war stories: a teammate once lost 12 pounds in 24 hours; I once wore five layers of clothing to practice; someone else experimented with laxatives; most of us spent at least some time in a sauna. We loved to complain, boast really, to our non-wrestling friends about how long it had been since we’d last eaten. “You guys are nuts,” they’d say, and we’d halfheartedly protest, inwardly smiling.
The abstinence also brought with it the twice-weekly release, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, after we weighed in for the match. We weighed in about an hour-and-a-half before the wrestling began, and had that time to try to recover fluids and eat for some quick energy. Our coaches made suggestions as to what we should eat and drink – water and foods with a lot of sugar – but I ignored them. I wanted the foods that I loved and hadn’t been able to touch for days: meaty, salty foods. If it was a home match, I would run over to the snack bar in the student center and order a cheeseburger or a chicken patty sandwich, or both, and a Coke. For away matches, I packed bags of Doritos, turkey & cheese Lunchables?, and cans of Coke. I’ve never since had a cheeseburger as good as the ones that I ate during that time after weigh-in.
After away matches, when we wouldn’t be able to make it back to Loomis in time for dinner, we would descend on a fast food restaurant, usually Taco Bell, for a more leisurely and deliberate gorging. The school gave us $5 apiece, but we would often supplement that from our own wallets by another $5 or so, which made for a lot of tacos. We did this even though we knew the cost in misery that would be exacted over the next few days, as we struggled once again to bring our weight back down to qualify for the next match.
At the weigh-ins, the two teams would line up facing each other, radiating out in a V from the scale by weight, smallest first, and the coaches would call each boy up in turn, first one team then the other. The lucky few who were comfortably under weight would step onto the scale in shorts and maybe a T-shirt. Most of the rest of us had to strip down to our jock straps. A few each week had to go naked. When I began wrestling, I was afraid that because I didn’t have much in the way of pubic hair, I would be embarrassed to go naked in front of everyone, but when I finally had to walk that gauntlet the anxiety of making weight easily trumped the anxiety of exposing myself.
Even though most of us had weighed in ourselves before the official weigh-in, the anxiety was inescapable. Our scale, a massive, old metal beast with a big dial and a orange ticker that swung around clockwise, was temperamental, with an unpredictable margin of error of about a half-pound. Scales differed. Ours was on the light side. Medical scales, with their imprecise T-bar balance, were the most beloved. Coaches tended to give you the benefit of the doubt if the metal nub showed the least inclination to float above the bottom bar. Digital scales were the most hated. They allowed no room for interpretation, measuring weight to the hundredth of the pound, and they always seemed to be heavier than our scale. Quite a few times, I made weight on the Loomis scale only to discover that I was a pound over on the home team’s digital scale, which meant that the interim before the match would be spent in my sweats, running or jumping rope, miserable.
Much of the time, in fact, was miserable. I became so sensitive to my weight that I could tell to the half-pound how much I weighed by the curve of my abdomen. In season, I weighed myself six or seven times a day; I stepped on the scale every morning when I arrived at school, and stepped off when my ride came in the evening. The day before a match I rarely ate, or drank more than one glass of water, and if I was gluttonous over the weekend, I might have to abstain from food and drink for two days to make weight for Wednesday’s match. I was tired all of the time. A friend once said to me that I was “in a bad mood every winter.”
