Wrestling is a team and an individual sport. You compete against an opponent, as an individual, but you are part of a 14 person team, where you are one of the weight classes and no one else can really fill your role, because you compete against the other person on the other team. You score points for your team by winning by a 1-3 point margin which is called a minor. A major is a win of 4-14 points, a technical win by 15 and a pin is when you put someone’s back on the mat. If you don’t show up, you forfeit and the other team gets what is equivalent of a pin.
So how is this a video game? Well, when you start, you know nothing. You only have your natural ability to fight other novices. So you have to learn and pick up new moves. These moves are like weapons or special items that one might find in a game. As you learn more and more of these moves you are able to fight tougher and tougher opponents. With time, your reaction time increases, you start to be able to go into a flow and become even strategic. You can start to take on tougher and tougher opponents.
When you compete, you compete against another team in a dual or you compete in a tournament. Dual feels like one army against another or a multiplayer game with teams. You go out one at a time, cheered on by your team and your supporters, with everyone to witness your victory or defeat. You fight for yourself but even more so, for your team. Your individual loss or win matters less than the team winning as a whole.
When you compete in a tournament, you also score points for your team, and those points go up depending on how far you get in that tournament. You fight one opponent after the other, one tougher than the next until you get to the final level with the final opponent who should be just as tough as you and you fight out for the final score.
During the season, you fight through the duals for a league championship and the tournaments to rack up points to get final seating in the final tournament of the year. This allows you to have the best shot at the championship in your weight class, to fight that final person in the tournament.
You can’t get there and win if you don’t go to practice to learn the moves, you can’t get there if you don’t put in the time drilling the moves and getting the conditioning to last through the match, to have the stamina and the drive to win.
Not everyone is able to play a game and go through the entire game. It requires dedication and hard work to get to the final boss with all the right weapons. Same with wrestling, you have to have all the moves drilled so that you are not thinking which buttons to press, you just hit that flow and you go. Unlike a video game, to become good at wrestling it takes years of hard work and dedication. But just like with videogames, if you do it right, you win and with that win, you get pride, a feeling of accomplishment, a great physical shape, the ability to be disciplined, and your name in that top score leaderboard, or as we call it, immortality.
Henry-Wrestling 