…and yes, I believe wrestling and ultimate fighting to both be legitimate sports. Who says a girl has to be consistent?
Anyway, Martin Kennedy picked me up and took me over to the Father Ryan-MBA meet and it was great! I had forgotten how much I enjoyed wrestling.
Two brothers coach the teams, but their teams’ approaches were very different. Father Ryan’s wrestlers seemed to me to be a lot more strategic in their thinking–they’d come out early in the match just full on like some kind of force of nature, which tended to overwhelm the MBA kids. But then, the Father Ryan kids would keep checking over with their coach, who was very involved in the matches, while the MBA kids were clearly intensely focused on what was happening on the mat.
A couple of the MBA wrestlers figured out that, if they could just stick the onslaught out, the Father Ryan kids would wear themselves out.
And there was one kid on the MBA team who had such a good sense of his own body and how it worked that there was pretty much nothing his opponent could do that he wasn’t able to roll or twist or leverage into his advantage. You would have thought, by the way he was able to keep the other kid so easily under control that he outweighed him by 20 pounds, but of course he didn’t.
But, in the end, Father Ryan just thumped MBA. They just seemed to have the ability to concentrate on the match at both a visceral level and an objective level in a way that most of the MBA kids didn’t seem to have.
It was a bit like when you’re watching a guitarist who is so good that they don’t really have to think about what they’re doing, even when they’re improvising, you know their fingers are going to go exactly where they should go. That’s what a lot of these Father Ryan kids were like. They knew what they were doing and could think ahead, where as it looked like the MBA kids knew what they were doing, but were right there in the moment.
I really enjoyed it. Good fun.
Thanks for thinking of me, Martin!
Tiny Cat Pants 
You wrote a post about wrestling….
*smile*
I’ll stop here before I take up ten paragraphs.
What? You thought you hung out here only for the opportunity to mumble to yourself over and over “How wrong can one woman be?”
No, I’ve got interesting tastes.
Anyway, I was just saying to Kennedy that watching those boys made me a little jealous that they never taught us the basics of wrestling in school at some point (we had single-sex gym class in middle school for instance) because they have a sense of their own bodies and what they can do that I wish we’d been taught.
I love wrestling. Many of my cousins wrestled (several state champs in KY) and so I attended a lot of matches as a kid. One of the pleasures of being at UI in the 1990s was watching the Brands brothers on those Dan Gable championship teams.
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Is Father Ryan still considered the Goliath of wrestling? When I wrestled, they were simply unbeatable. Most other schools were intimidated before the match even started.
Of course, as I recall, MBA was pretty darned good, too.