Wrestling Blogs - Rollie Peterkin

Ted Williams may rightfully be considered the best hitter to ever pick up a bat. He won the Triple Crown three times and retired with a career batting average of .344. His .406 batting average in the 1941 season is unsurpassed to this day. The Kid, as he came to be known, was a wizard behind the plate.

As a child, he carried a bat with him to school and swung it every chance he got, trying to imagine fastballs and sliders shooting by. His childhood friend once remarked, “He’d close one eye, then the other, figuring out what he could see from each eye. He did this all the time. He was always figuring things out. I guess it had something to do with hitting. They’d talk later about how great his eyes were. Well, he worked at it.” He would sit for hours and watch pitchers practicing, until he could read the trajectory with the blink of an eye. He became so familiar with different pitches that he couldn’t even tell the difference between them when batting. “They all look like they are hanging out in front of the plate on a string,” he would say.

Carl Yastrzemski said of his mentor, “He studied hitting the way a broker studies the stock market.” The Kid never really did well in school, but no one would deny that he was one hell of a student.

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Roger Bannister never won an Olympic medal, but the running world will forever remember this Brit for his extraordinary achievement of being the first to break the four minute mile barrier.

In the middle of the twentieth century, running underwent a few drastic changes. There were some breakthroughs in interval training and advances in footwear that brought the world record asymptotically closer to four minutes. Some thought it was impossible for the human body to handle, but Roger Bannister knew better. This wasn’t because he was a senseless dreamer or hopeless optimist, he really knew.

Bannister was a very serious medical student at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School while he was training. During his residency at St. Mary’s, he used his precious lunch break to sneak off for laps on the track. For part of his clinical research, he had subjects run on a treadmill with a breathing tube in their mouth and measured the intake and outtake of oxygen until the point of exhaustion. The patients were literally shot off the back of the treadmill when they failed. He was his own primary patient − both guinea pig and lab researcher at once.

He learned firsthand how to properly control his breathing during each anaerobic second of the 5,280 foot race. He learned that it’s more efficient to run 4 x 60 second quarter mile splits than, say, 62 − 61 − 59 − 58. And he endlessly practiced pacing himself at 60 seconds flat. We take for granted all of the physiological and anatomical information we have, but 50 years ago, they knew a lot less. Bannister was literally on the cutting edge of new developments coming out. He approached his goal analytically and used the scientific method to break this unbreakable barrier.

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John Smith was the most successful American wrestler to ever grace the international arena. He won six consecutive world championships and holds two Olympic gold medals. He was the first American to be voted Master of Technique and Wrestler of the Year by the International Wrestling Federation. Though Smith was a master of all technique, one move stood above the rest: his low single.

John Smith’s name has become synonymous with the low single leg attack. What’s amazing is that not only does every young wrestler know this, but the Russians knew this. The Iranians knew this. The Cubans knew this. And that didn’t stop him, he hit it on anyone and everyone.

As a freshman enrolled at Oklahoma State, Smith quickly adapted to the collegiate style, though he did not place at nationals that year. Disappointed, he trained harder, and made it all the way to the finals in his sophomore season, only to lose to Jim Jordan. Sick of losing, he asked his coaches for a redshirt year, which was granted.

During this year off, Smith stumbled on the low single and fell in love. “I was not the first guy to work on a low shot, but mine was very different. Very technical, with numerous finishes and ways to score back points,” he explained. Every day he entered the wrestling room with a renewed excitement, wanting to fine tune some minor aspect of his creation. He tinkered at it like a scientist on the brink of discovering a cure for cancer. Every day Smith saw progress, but he kept experimenting, determined to create his masterpiece on the mat. Most of the finishes he was hitting had never been done before so he was treading on unexplored territory.

Shakespeare mastered the English language so thoroughly that he invented new words frequently. So too did Smith master the wrestling mat. He came out of his year-long redshirt as a different wrestler. Like a tornado, he left a trail of wreckage wherever he went. He went on to win national titles in his final two years of college and even won his first world title after his junior year. And then five more.

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Sources:

Ted Williams, Leigh Montville

The Perfect Mile, Neal Bascomb

Cowboy Up, Kim Parrish

More here.