Wrestling 101
The First Practice
There is no card in this room. The Warrior hands you a pair of shoes that lace to the ankle and a headgear that smells like the last man who wore it, and he points at the thermostat on the far wall, which has been turned up past anything a reasonable building allows. "The room is hot on purpose," he says. "You'll find out why." Then the whistle.
It starts with running, laps around the painted circle until the shirt is through. Then tumbling, forward rolls and shoulder rolls and cartwheels down the length of the mat, because a wrestler spends half his life upside down and the body has to stop being afraid of it. Then sprawls on the whistle, twenty of them, hips thrown back and chest to the floor and back to the feet before the echo has died. Then stance and motion for what feels like an hour and is eight minutes. Then he calls the room in around him and puts four things on the floor, one at a time. The level change. The penetration step. The double leg. The sprawl that stops it. Then he pairs you with a man your size and blows the whistle for thirty seconds of live wrestling, and in the twenty-fourth second you are flat on your face with somebody's chest on the back of your head, and he blows it again, and you go again. Then conditioning, at the end, when there is nothing left to condition with. Then the parking lot, and a shirt you can wring out, and the strange discovery that you want to come back.
That is Wrestling 101, and the Warrior runs it himself, because the three rooms after it are three rulebooks and this one is the engine all three run on. Stance, motion, the hand fight, the level change and the shot, the sprawl and the chain that answers it, and the three positions a match is wrestled in. There is no philosophy in here. There is a handful of movements drilled until they no longer ask permission, and a body that learns to live on the floor and get back up.
Stance and Motion
The stance is the first thing taught and the last thing mastered, and a wrestler can tell you how many years a man has been on the mat by watching him stand for three seconds.
Feet a little wider than the shoulders, one foot slightly ahead. Knees bent, and then bent more than feels reasonable, so the hips sit low and the thighs carry the weight. Back straight, not folded. Head up, eyes on his chest. Elbows in against the ribs and the hands out in front of the knees, palms in, because the space between your knees and his hands is where every shot he owns is going to arrive, and the hands live there so that they are already in the way. The Warrior walks the line and pushes on each man's shoulder, and the ones who stumble backward learn what the bent knees were for.
Then motion, because a stance that stands still is a target with good posture. The feet never cross and never come together. The wrestler circles, short steps, weight loaded, always able to shoot and always able to sprawl, and a man who stops moving for one second in a wrestling room has told the other man exactly where his feet are. The stance is not a position you hold. It is the position you return to, a hundred times a match, between every motion and every shot, and the whole of the first month is the body learning to find it without being asked.
The Hand Fight
Before a wrestler shoots, he wins the hands, and the argument over the hands is the part of wrestling that nobody outside the sport can see.
Two men in stance, and each one's hands are trying to make the other's hands worth less. The collar tie is a hand on the back of the neck, pulling his head down and his posture with it. The underhook is an arm swum under his arm and up, lifting his elbow and owning his side. The two-on-one is both hands on one of his arms, taking the arm out of the fight entirely. The arm drag is a grip on his wrist and his triceps that pulls him past you and puts you at his side. The Warrior drills the pummel for ten minutes, two men chest to chest swimming for underhooks, and it looks like nothing and it is the most important ten minutes of the hour, because every clinch in every kind of fight comes down to who got the underhook.
The hand fight has a rule that the room never says out loud and everybody learns anyway: whoever controls the head controls the man. Move his head and his shoulders follow. Move his shoulders and his hips are late. A wrestler who has won the collar tie can snap a man's head down and step around him, and the man whose head was pulled down has lost his feet before he has lost his balance. It is the smallest fight inside the fight, and it is the one that decides where the shot lands.
The Level Change and the Shot
Now the four things on the Warrior's list, in the order he teaches them.
The level change. The wrestler drops his hips below the other man's hips, and he does it at the knees. Never at the waist. A man who bends at the waist to reach for a leg has handed over his neck and his back in one motion, and the room punishes it so quickly that by the second week nobody does it anymore. The knees bend, the hips drop straight down, the back stays flat and the head stays up, and the wrestler is now under the other man's hands and looking at his legs from a place his hands cannot reach.
The penetration step. From the low stance, the lead foot steps deep, between his feet or beside the one you want, and the trailing knee comes to the mat and slides through. The head drives forward into his chest or his hip and leads the whole body through the space where he was standing. Shallow is the beginner's error, a half step that leaves you kneeling in front of a man who is still upright and now on top of your head. Deep is the whole art. The Warrior has the room shoot the step at nothing, down the mat and back, a hundred times, before anybody is allowed to shoot it at a man.
The double leg. The oldest takedown there is, and the one nearly every complete fighter on earth still leans on. Level change, penetration step, and both arms wrap behind his knees while the head drives to one side of his hip. Then the finish, which is not the catch. Beginners catch the legs and stop, and the man they caught sprawls on them and the shot dies. The takedown is the drive through him, hips forward, head turning into him, feet running, until his base is gone and he is on the mat and you are on top. The finish has flavors. Drive at an angle and run him down. Lift and return him to the floor. Trip a leg while you drive. All of them are the same lesson: the shot is not finished when you arrive at his legs. It is finished when he is on his back.
The single leg. When a man defends the double, he usually leaves one leg behind, and the single leg is built on that. Both hands on one leg, head inside or head outside his hip, and the leg comes up off the floor. From there the wrestler can turn the corner and drive him down, or lift the leg high and dump him, or run the pipe, which is the finish where you pivot around the captured leg while pulling it and he has one foot to stand on and it is going the wrong way. The single is slower than the double and has more doors, and a wrestler who owns both never gets stuck with a stopped shot.
And the snapdown, which the Warrior adds at the end because it is what a man does when the shot is not there. From the collar tie, snap his head down hard and step to the side or behind him. He comes down onto his hands and you are on his back. If he fights the snap by pulling his head up, he has just opened the duck-under. If he fights it by grabbing you, he has just handed you the arm drag. If he backs away, he has just given you a shot at a man moving backward, which is a man who cannot sprawl. The snapdown teaches something the shot does not: that a wrestler with no attack available still has three.
The Sprawl, and the Chain That Answers It
The sprawl is the reason the double leg does not work on trained men, and it is taught the same night as the shot so that no wrestler ever leaves the room believing his shot is enough.
He shoots. You throw your hips back and down, so the legs he was reaching for are gone, and your chest lands on his head or the back of his neck, so that his drive goes into the mat instead of through you. One arm goes over his shoulder and one hand pulls his head across, and now the man who came for your legs is underneath you with his face in the mat. The whole thing happens in the time it takes to say it. The Warrior drills it on the whistle until the hips move before the mind has heard the word.
And then he teaches the answer to the answer, which is the thing that separates a wrestler from a man who knows a takedown. The stopped double becomes a single. The stopped single becomes a snapdown. The snapdown becomes a duck-under, and the duck-under becomes a shot from behind. The chain never stops moving, and the man defending it has to be right every time while the man running it only has to be right once. A shot is not a move. It is the first word in a sentence, and the wrestler who shoots and stops is a man who said one word and waited for the world to agree with him.
Top, Bottom, and the Getting Up
A match is wrestled in three places, and the first practice visits all three, because a man who only trains on his feet has trained a third of the sport.
Neutral is both men standing, everything above. Top is the position after the takedown, and the Warrior teaches it in one sentence: be heavy where he needs to be light. Hips down on his hips, chest on his back, one hand on his wrist and one arm around his waist, so that every attempt he makes to get up is made with your weight attached to it. From top a wrestler turns a man, the half nelson threaded under his arm and over his neck, driving him onto his back and toward the pin, which is both shoulders flat and the match over.
Bottom is the position nobody wants and everybody spends time in, and here the room teaches its most transferable lesson. On the whistle the man underneath does not lie there. He builds his base, hands and knees, hips under him. He clears the hand on his wrist, because a hand you cannot free is a hand that will be holding you down all night. Then the stand-up: one foot planted, hips driving back into the man on top, hands fighting his hands, until you are on your feet with him behind you and then facing him again. Or the sit-out, hips through and turned, that puts you facing him from the floor. Getting up is not a hope. It is a drill, with steps, repeated until being flattened is a place you know the way out of.
"You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance" (Psalm 66:12). The man who wrote that line had a word for being held down, and it is the word a wrestling room uses, and he was not describing a hold he broke himself. It is worth remembering in the second month, when the man on top is stronger than you and the stand-up is not working and the whistle is a long way off, that the psalm does not say we got up. It says we were brought through.
The First Season From Inside
Be told what the first months actually cost, because the men who quit a wrestling room did not quit because it was hard. They quit because nobody told them what hard would feel like, and they thought something was wrong with them.
Your face is going to burn. Mat burn on the forehead and the cheekbones, from being driven across a surface that is not as soft as it looks, and the headgear that seemed like an insult will be the thing you reach for first. Your skin is a responsibility now. Wrestling rooms carry ringworm and worse, and the man who does not shower the minute practice ends, on a mat that is not mopped every night, will spread something to every partner he touches. Wash. Report it. Stay off the mat until it clears. That is not squeamishness. That is the first act of care a wrestler owes the room.
You are going to get flattened. In the first live go of your life a man who has wrestled for three years will shoot before you have seen him move, and the mat will arrive, and he will be on top, and you will spend thirty seconds learning that your strength means nothing to a man who knows where to put his weight. This will happen every night for six weeks. Around week seven you will sprawl on a shot you did not consciously see, and your chest will land on his head, and the room will look different after that.
The scale comes in the second month. Wrestling is contested by weight, and every man on the team will be asked, at some point, what he weighs and what he could weigh. The Warrior says one thing about it and says it hard: you will make weight by eating right and training right, and you will not make it in a plastic suit in a sauna, because the sport already buried boys that way and learned. The room after this one reads their names.
And the conditioning does not stop, because a wrestling match is six or seven minutes of a man trying to move you against your will, and there is no rest in it, and the tenth shot costs what the first one did. The running at the start of the practice and the sprints at the end are not separate from wrestling. They are the reason the last minute of a match is survivable, and the Proving Ground was never a different program from this one.
What the Engine Does, and What It Does Not
Before the rulebooks get their turn, the Warrior wants two things understood, and he says them at the door.
The first is what this engine is for. Everything drilled tonight carries into every fight a man will ever have. The level change is how a man gets under a punch. The double leg is how a man puts a bigger man on the ground, on purpose, arriving on top, which is the only way a sane man ever wants to arrive on the ground. The sprawl is why a trained man stays on his feet when somebody grabs his legs in a parking lot. The stand-up is why he does not stay under. The hand fight is every grab that ever started a fight, trained in advance. And the chain is the habit, in the body, of never stopping when the first thing fails, which is a habit a man will use in rooms that have no mat in them.
The second is what it is not. Wrestling controls a man. It does not finish him. The pin ends a match because a referee says so, and nobody says so on a sidewalk, and the man underneath you there is not waiting for a whistle. The wrestler who has only ever wrestled has the most complete answer in the building to the question of where the fight happens, and no answer at all to the question of how it ends. The rest of this mat exists to give him one. He should walk onto it knowing exactly what he is carrying and exactly what he is missing, because the man who carries a half and believes it is a whole is the one the floor eventually corrects.
Everything is true here, or it is found out on the whistle. Every partner in the room is handing you a body to learn on and taking yours in trade, and the takedown you finish gently is the first payment on that debt. And the strength this room builds is governed strength, started and stopped by a whistle a man did not blow, held to account for every place another man's head lands. Those three facts were on the mat before you were, and they leave with you.
Where This Sits
Four rooms in this hall, and this is the one with no rulebook on the door. The engine is built. The three rooms ahead are the story of the same engine raised under three sets of rules, each of which pays for a different virtue and refuses to pay for the others, and each of which produced men that the other two could not have produced. The first of them is the one the American boy actually grows up in, the style that was handed to schoolteachers on purpose, and it grades one thing above every other: what a man does after he has been taken down.