Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

This is my last blog post. I’m retiring this blog now. However, there is a slight chance that that retirement will end up like Michael Jordon’s retirement (where it tries out for baseball and stars in a movie, then goes back to blogging, then retires again and then comes back as a blog in Washington, D.C.)

With that out of the way I’d like to talk about losing. The first thing I would like to mention about losing is that it sucks. Hands down, losing sucks. It always has and always will. Losing is necessary in wrestling and a handful of other things in life. These things are called practices. There is science, which is a method of calculating and determining the exact outcome of a situation. There is also art, which is creating something new and different, and sometimes it is beautiful. And then there is practice; in the study of psychology it is called the naïve scientist approach. You create something that is new and original to you and then you try it out. You test it over and over again, each time making slight little variations, trying to perfect it. A practice requires action, followed by failing, followed by growing. If there is one thing I hope you have learned from my blogs, it is to try to look at something a different way. Keep learning; find other people’s experiences as well as learn about art and science. Test it to see what it has to offer you. In the end you are on your own though. This accounts for any field of life where things are constantly changing and developing in unpredictable ways and there is only enough time to act intuitively… Wrestling is a practice but the list goes on: war, politics, dating and social interaction, business and entrepreneurship, and essentially life.

As long as I can remember, I have never preformed above expectations at the end of the season tournament, during the months of February and March. (I am going to blame the winter in this case because freestyle is in the summer and I still need to win that.) A lot of people would call it choking, however I like to refer to the term ‘Valleying’. I have been so consistent in finishing below expectations. While everybody is busy peaking I have been climbing my mountain of improvement. I have improved every year faster than most since fifth grade. So when I finally reach the peak, there is nowhere to go but down into the valley…to get to the next peak, which is higher than the one I’m at. Of course most of my opponents are busy climbing hills and then they’re getting to the peak as I’m coming back to the valley. In the end, the only way to ensure that I still beat my opponents is to improve so much that my valley is still at eye level or above their peak. I have to improve so much that I am two levels ahead of my opponents in skill. Haha, I guess that’s probably not totally accurate; I never would have accepted valleying before, but since I dropped it my senior year, I can look at the evidence and just say “Yup, definitely a case of Valleying, don’t ask me how to peak.”

Somewhere along the way you are going to fail. Since real failure tears at your essence and the things that are really important to you in life, you are going to have to find a way to deal with it. One method of dealing with it is to eat or drink your problems away. I tried this method after valleying pretty bad at big tens freshman year to Josh Weitzel. I can say… that there is a chance you will end up crying on Dustin Fox’s shoulder with a hot and spicy barbeque chicken wing in one hand, scooping ice cream out of a five-gallon tub with the other; an empty bottle of tequila (of course saving the worm for when you wake up), babbling about how your dreams are crushed and then finding out the next morning you went streaking and you don’t remember it… not that I’d know, but uhh… I can imagine that would just give people stories to rip on you for quite some time. So you should probably avoid drinking and eating your problems away. I can’t tell you if drugs help but I’m guessing they produce similar results to drinking. They are a temporary solution to a permanent problem and can cause more long-term problems. I was on antidepressants for a long time and they don’t help much, from what I remember they really just make you compliant and numb to most feelings as well as reality. I would never take them on my own free will. (Unless I wanted to be numb to reality, to me that seems like death)

Don’t do drugs, drink responsibly, and eat in moderation. God, I am an awesome role model, ha. Since life is a practice you might learn this lesson on your own, good luck.

Dispel ‘the myth’ to understand that a loss does not take away from a win. A lot of people create ‘the myth’ in order to accept losing during the year. The myth is “The only thing that matters is (State/Nationals/the end of the season) tournament.” It’s a great myth because then in-season losses will not produce some kind of downward spiral towards failure at nationals; they can all be viewed as independent. However, it also places a lot of pressure on nationals. When someone says it I generally cringe thinking, “Is this a reason for that guy to wrestle sub-par in-season?” If you are warming up for a match and you say to a friend “this match doesn’t really mean anything” then you are missing the point. There is a high emphasis placed on nationals because it is the highest quality wrestling packed in one tournament. It takes a lot to win nationals and that’s why it means something. It also means something because so many fans come. We perpetuate that myth.

But what really means anything in life? Things have meaning because we give them meaning. When you work hard for something it means more to you. Pride in knowing I worked hard means very much to me. Every time I step on the mat I put my pride on the line. Also I like to believe that I am able to achieve anything I really want in life. (When told I could no longer win a national title, I jokingly said I could still live vicariously through my children) So far, in my twenty-two years of life I have found that there is only one thing that inherently has any value, and that is human life. Whatever drives people should be valued; whatever brings meaning to other people should be treasured. People come before anything else, anyone who puts other things before people will, eventually find people putting other things before them. It’s a tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma that can’t be won.

The next thing I want you to do in order to handle loss is put yourself in everyone else’s shoes. Wade Genova of USAW suggested reading How to win friends and influence people in trying to get calls from refs. If you were at nationals you may have thought that there were some bad calls. The funny thing about collegiate wrestling is that as the wrestling gets better the calls naturally get worse. A takedown is based on having control and that is a judgment call. If you ask me I should get a takedown just for stepping on the mat because I’m always in control. Refs naturally try to call based on positions but there are exceptions to every position, the better the wrestling the more exceptions. This means that the ref is relying on intuition; intuition is affected by many different things.

When watching the video of my match against Max Askren, the ref looks at the position and doesn’t call the takedown. The position doesn’t change and Max looks up as if to indicate ‘see I have control’. The ref still refuses to call a takedown for him. Max looks down again and then back up and says something to the ref; the ref takes a closer look and then awards the takedown without the position changing at all. I couldn’t help but laugh and wonder what he said to the ref, it made me think of a WWE match. (It was probably the right call after watching it, it’s just funny how he changed his mind.) As much as these refs are making what we may think of as bad calls, they are making their best judgments, with more experience of wrestling then most have. Refs have to call matches all day long, which I’ve tried, and it is exhausting. They are forced to make a handful of borderline calls and one way or another two hundred fifty kids are getting sent home with unfinished business. Another seventy kids aren’t going to reach the goal they want to. It is hard for a ref to play favorites too much because if your favorite gets dominated it’s like having to take the dog you love out back and put a bullet through his head. Bad calls, maybe, but who’s to say.

For anyone who did win, you should try to feel for them. They have the same story of hard work and dedication to a goal as you did. So naturally they should be happy that they accomplished their goals. Instead of letting it bother you, the best thing you can do is to realize that someone had to fail and someone had to succeed. See the bigger picture. Accept the people who did succeed as deserving. If there is a wrestling coach that doesn’t ask his athletes “Are you working harder than anyone else in the nation?” I’d be surprised. The athletes who have won can almost always say ‘yes’. (Even though that can’t possibly be true – that person is Bill Scherr and he doesn’t sleep) Make friends with them; be happy for them. If the only thing with any inherent meaning in the world is people like I said, then all you can do is congratulate them and not worry about yourself. Winning has no bearing on who you are but it is a good accomplishment and should make anyone feel good knowing that their hard work paid off to reach a goal. And losing does not mean your hard work never paid off, only that someone else’s did.

I have been told that sometime in the future I will be looking back on my days of wrestling and either be thinking “yeah we did it” or “If only…” For god’s sake I hope this isn’t the best time of my life. Things can always get better. There can always be a higher placement or a greater margin of victory. There were never enough Rocky movies because someone new always came up and he always has to defend himself. I’m sure there are people who are wondering “Is Cael going to try out for the 2008 Olympics?” And a handful of people in Russia, instead of saying Karelin did awesome, are saying “He lost to that American… Great wrestler but it could have been better.” Let your last failure bother you but move on to greater things. There is no reason to regret it down the line. Dan Gable is probably the last person to think of his loss to Larry Owings and that is because Gable continued on to do many more great things. If it weren’t for the fact that Gable went on to win the Olympics then rewrote Iowa history, Larry Owings would just be an NCAA champ, instead of the one guy who could knock off Gable. There is no reason to regret things as long as you can move on and make your life better. Act and fail, learn and grow. Repeat.

Ricky Bobby: Wait, Dad. Don't you remember the time you told me "If you ain't first, you're last"?
Reese: Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth.
Ricky Bobby: What? I've lived my whole life by that!