Heavy Lifting: Triangle's Top Wrestlers Hold the World at Their Fingertips

A day after competing in a big wrestling tournament, Chris Johnson was sore.

“I am sore all over from the intensity of using all my muscles for six minutes,” he said.

Simply hit the alarm clock’s snooze button at 6 a.m., and six minutes can seem like six seconds. But that same six minutes can seem like six hours if you are teetering between victory and defeat under a worthy opponent, on a wrestling mat, hanging on for dear life.

To a casual spectator, wrestling appears to be an especially brutal form of hand-to-hand combat which incorporates a variety of limb-twisting moves that would make Gumby cringe. At times, it appears the very arms and legs of these athletes are in danger of being wrenched completely off their bodies.

A good wrestler would laugh at this notion.

Grueling hours in the gym spent building strength, flexibility and the mental toughness that is required to do the dance in those interminable six-minute matches.

“I love wrestling,” said Ben Creed, 16, a two-time high school state champion who wrestles on the storied Cary High School team. “It’s just you out there, and if you lose, it’s all your fault.”

Creed, a junior, has made a big leap since last season after gaining 22 pounds and moving up several notches to the 125-lb. class in which he wrestles today.

Wrestlers are separated into weight classes, and they wrestle opponents of the same weight. They must maintain a body weight within the parameters of their weight class, or they cannot compete.

For many wrestlers, struggling to maintain weight is often tougher than actually wrestling, and methods to which some wrestlers have resorted for making weight have been controversial.

It’s a balancing act for wrestlers to consume enough food to give them the energy it takes to power through an intense six minute match. Most wrestlers spend hours in the gym weight training to replace fat pounds with lean muscle mass.

Creed struggled at 103 pounds. Today, at 125, he’s a much happier wrestler.

“My weight is much easier to manage now,” Creed said.

At 5’5”, Creed is considered small for his weight.

“People of different body types wrestle a certain way,” he said. “I am short and stocky, and that poses different problems from someone who is long and lanky.”

Johnson, a senior at Orange High School in Hillsborough won his first high school state championship last year. He’s wrestling at 132 pounds now, up from 112, when he first started in high school.

He’s also on the bigger end of his weight class, and constantly faces the challenging task of cutting weight, but concedes bigger’s not bad.

“I check my weight twice a day,” he said. “I eat right; good food with lots of energy and I drink water to keep balanced.”

His parents are supportive of his efforts to micromanage his weight and actually use a food scale to measure out correct portions.

Matt Colvard loves a good challenge.

The Cary High School senior, coming off his first high school state championship, grew from 135 pounds last year to a whopping 160.

“I had a growth spurt and grew to 145 pounds,” he said. “But I thought I could do better than that.”

He’s a small 160-pounder, and relies on good wrestling technique over brute strength.

He’s planning to attend Lochaven College in Pennsylvania next year, and his college coach wants him to wrestle in the 157-pound class.

Colvard has a strategy.

“I am going to work out and gain more muscle mass, and then work on getting down to the desired weight,” he said.

Creed and Colvard started wrestling when they were little boys. Johnson was in the seventh grade when the bug bit him.

Colvard’s father was a wrestler, and the sport is in his DNA.

“I have been wrestling since I was six,” he said. “I wasn’t good at other sports, and I got clobbered in football.”

All his life, his goal was to win a state wrestling championship. After joining Cary’s varsity wrestling team his freshman year, he had to wait two years to realize this dream. The victory came in dramatic fashion. “I won by one point in the last 15 seconds of the match, and was in such awe when I won, that I burst into tears,” he said.

Matt Williams knows how it feels to win a state championship, and he’s just a sophomore. Last year, he was the only freshman to win the title, and he won it in the 119-lb. weight class.

He’s riding the roller coaster.

“During the year, last year, I didn’t expect to win the championship, but at states, my nerves went away, and winning was wild,” he said.

On the one hand, he has put himself under pressure to win a second championship this year and go all the way, four for four by the time he graduates. On the other hand, he believes he has a psychological edge over many of his opponents who know he is a defending state champion.

“More than half of all matches are won before you even hit the mat,” he said. “You know your opponent’s skill level, and the intimidation factor is huge.”

Tyrone Eatmon is a two-time state champ. As a senior at Riverside High School, he is wrestling at the 130-lb class, up from 119 pounds his freshman year. He has won more than 200 wrestling matches, has lost fewer than 10, and enjoys an undefeated season this year.

What keeps him in the game?

“I love winning,” he said.

Adam Tassitino is undefeated and enjoying his best season ever. He’s in just his fourth year of wrestling at Sanderson High School, and when he graduates, he’ll leave the sport behind, instead preferring to focus on his engineering major at N.C. State University.

A friend on his freshman cross country team talked him into trying wrestling. His first year, on the JV team, he went 11-2.

“I love it. There’s no other sport like wrestling. It’s just you and another guy who has worked just has hard as you have, and in order to win, you just have to put it all out there,” he said. “There is nothing better than the feeling of winning under those circumstances.”

Johnson, who has signed with Appalachian State University next year, was never content to be a runner up, and after finishing in second place too many times, he finally clinched the crown in his junior year.

“The win was awesome. I have been training real hard, and when I went into the state finals, I was nervous, but well prepared,” he said.

Creed didn’t have to wait as long for championship glory to come his way. He’s worn the crown each time he has competed in the finals. He is on a quest to win a championship all four years. Now in his junior year, if he doesn’t win his third championship, he won’t have a chance to go for four in a row.

The pressure he feels is not more intense than normal, though.

The first year, as a freshman, no one had any expectations he’d score the championship.

“I put pressure on myself,” he said. “If I hadn’t, I would not have gone that far.”

Last year, he applied self-imposed pressure to repeat his championship performance.

The mere idea of losing is all it takes to keep Creed going strong.

“I told myself if I didn’t repeat, it would be the end of the world,” he said. “This year is the same. One of my worst nightmares is to make it all the way to the state finals and lose in the very last match.”

A hatred of losing also keeps Colvard in the gym.

“No one wrestles to lose,” he said. “When you lose, you just feel like crap.”

So he works hard on conditioning, which he considers the toughest part of the sport.

“You go into the practice room and work beyond your goal. It’s very individual. You are your own team and get out of it what you put into it,” he said. “It’s the best feeling when you put in all that work, go out and smash your opponent and get your hand raised in the end.”

Colvard runs a lot and does bikhram, or yoga performed at temperatures over 100 degrees. He admits hot yoga can be a dehydration risk, requiring practitioners to drink plenty of water.

“But it has improved my flexibility 10-fold,” he said. “I can almost do a split.”

For top wrestlers, there’s more to the sport than mere athleticism.

“If you are naturally strong, you can get off to a good start because of athleticism, but you have to learn good technique, and that’s what ultimately makes the difference,” Colvard said.

Willpower and the heart of a champion go a long way too.

“The will to win is a huge thing,” Colvard said. “It can be a psychological battle, and it’s often the little things that can break your opponent.”

Little things like never giving in no matter how exhausting a match can be.

For Creed, simply the idea of losing is enough to keep him going, even when he’s exhausted, and wrestling is by far the hardest thing he’s ever done.

“I try to relate wrestling to the hardest things I have done in my life, but once you have wrestled, everything else in life seems easy,” he said.

Colvard agrees.

“Wrestling’s not just a sport, it helps you become a man. It teaches you honor, respect, and discipline and this stays with you for your entire life,” he said. “It also gets you in great shape and you can get all the girls.”