Ron Kantowski gets a lesson from three figurative heavyweights on rules changes, the selection procedure and the difference between wrestling and grappling

By Ron Kantowski

Monday, June 11, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

Before Saturday, my limited knowledge of Real Wrestling was limited to two snapshots from my youth.

The first is of the grapplers - which is how our high school newspaper always referred to them - putting on plastic navy blue suits during lunch hour and running interminable laps around the gymnasium. They called this "making weight." I called it "sweating a lot."

The second is of the grapplers at my school engaging the grapplers from another school in fierce one-on-one combat, which usually included a segment where they twisted themselves into the shape of a pretzel. Their muscles would ripple like the waves on Lake Michigan, the crowd would get excited and shout "Pin! Pin! Pin!" and if the referee didn't slap the thick, vinyl mat to put an end to it, the guy keeping time would, by tossing a rolled-up towel at the grapplers - which I thought was way cooler than sounding a horn or a buzzer.

Then the next day, the grapplers would be back in their plastic suits, running laps around the gym. They called this "dedication." I still called it sweating a lot.

With apologies to Dan Gable, a former great Real Wrestler whose name, for whatever reason, is stuck in my head like the chorus of a Huey Lewis song, that's about I'll knew about Real Wrestling until Saturday night, when Pat Christenson, Mitch Hull and Barry Davis showed me there's a lot more to it than I had ever imagined. Or could possibly comprehend.

You probably know Christenson as the president of Las Vegas Events, the man who is primarily responsible for bringing sporting fare, such as the USA Wrestling World Team Trials, to town. You may not know he won the NCAA 167-pound national championship while grappling for the University of Wisconsin in 1976.

Christenson is in such good shape that he could probably still fit into his wrestling singlet, although, quite frankly, I didn't ask and he didn't offer.

Davis won three NCAA championships wrestling for Iowa and a silver medal in the 1984 Olympics. Last week he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla.

Hull is USA Wrestling's national director. Like Christenson and Davis, now the wrestling coach at Wisconsin, he has an affinity for Johnsonville bratwurst and dairy cattle, having grown up in Wisconsin and sweated a lot - er, wrestled - there.

But as I left them in the grandstands Saturday night, they were still well, grappling with rules and scoring changes in the sport that, at least at the national and international level, makes it more difficult to follow than directions from a 7-Eleven employee.

Upon introducing myself to Hull, I confessed I didn't know much about Real Wrestling, and hoped he might be able to explain what I was watching down on the mats. Imagine my surprise when Christenson and Davis told him the same thing.

Hull said other than the Figure 4 leg lock now being illegal, high school and college wrestling basically hasn't changed since I watched the grapplers at my high school sweat in their plastic suits.

"But if you wrestled internationally in 1990, you almost wouldn't recognize it today," he said, adding that a lot of wrestling purists don't like the new rules that were adopted to be consistent with the rest of the world.

I'll say they don't. As we watched the matches unfold, I thought Christenson and Davis were going to tag team Hull and put him in a headlock.

The procedure for selecting wrestlers for international competition such as the Olympic and Pan-American Games is so convoluted that it takes 15 pages to explain on the USA Wrestling Web site.

But in listening to the three wrestling amigos, it would seem the new scoring rules have led to defensive-minded matches that place a premium on tactics rather than action and are sometimes decided by the whimsy of a coin flip.

"Instead of rewarding aggressiveness, now it's all position," Christenson said.

Worse, Davis said, is that all that positioning sometimes means the best wrestlers now stay home instead of compete for precious medals.

He must have noticed my quizzical expression.

"Who would you rather have driving your race car: Tony Stewart of Kyle Petty?" Davis asked rhetorically.

That I can understand.

But just as I was getting a little less confused, I flipped open the souvenir program to discover that wrestling and grappling no longer are the same thing. In conjunction with the World Team Trials, USA Wrestling staged its first national selection tournament in grappling, a combat sport that combines elements of wrestling and jiu jitsu, including UFC-style submission holds.

While I'm not sure what Dan Gable will make of all this, I am absolutely certain the headline writers at high school newspapers are gonna hate it.

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