Of all the sports that this great planet has shown us, there is but one (aside from Chinese fire kayaking) that I am completely and utterly bamboozled by. That is the majestic sport of wrestling. All I knew was that there was a team at Garfield that dedicated themselves to the activity, and that there was a movie coming out starring Mickey Rourke. But other than that, I was coming up blank. In my quest to become the next Michael Phelps/ Michael Jordan/ David Beckham, I decided it would be a good idea to round out my athletic knowledge and learn about this mysterious and elusive sport.

Like any great revelation I started my journey for the truth on Youtube. After watching but a few matches of WWF I had to call up the wrestling captain for some verification. He assured me that the Garfield wrestling team does not wear Speedos or masks or use of two-by-fours, and that this activity is strictly outlawed in high school matches ever since the Roosevelt Gym Massacre of ’83. He explained to me a much milder and less deadly sport in which athletes from each team attempt to pin each other and are awarded points for different moves.

It sounded straightforward; the team with the most points at the end of the meet wins. But then he told me that sprained ankles, broken collar bones and mat herpes (its real, look it up: Herpes Gladiatorum) pose a huge threat to the well-being of a high school wrestler. I was scared and a little disgusted, but at the same time was intrigued and asked his captainess if I would be a good candidate to be a wrestler.

He guaranteed me, rather rudely, that with my cross-country physique it would be like Yao Ming trying to learn how to figure skate. This is the point of the story when, with the possibility of resignation, I decided to take a stand for skinny, frail people across the globe. I told him that I would train to become the greatest wrestler the world has ever seen, or at least good enough to take down and pin a child from the ages of six to eight.

As I now know, it is essential in wrestling to maintain and even drop weight on the day of a match. To simulate this, I decided that I would drop down from my meaty 150 pounds to the 147 weight class. So, on Sunday, instead of my usual cinnamon roll wrapped in pancakes covered with bacon, I started my day with a prayer to the ancient and mystical Greco goddess Jenny Craig. The most direct route to instant weight loss would be the most effective, so I simply stopped eating or drinking for around ten hours (which made for a fairly somber Super Bowl party) and exercised as much as possible.

The first thing I tried was going on a run bundled up in as much clothing as I could find in order to sweat as much as possible. Dressing up like a multicolored ninja might not be the best way to make new friends, but it earns a sort of unspoken respect on the streets where people would stand in awe as I ran by dripping sweat from every orifice.

Technique number two was to be constantly spitting throughout the day to lose unwanted saliva weight. At first, I did not realize how inappropriate this was to do in social situations, but after several “lugee trips” I had disgusted and offended nearly everyone in my family and decided that my weight-loss mission was a serious detriment to hygiene. After cleaning myself up, I stepped on my scale and nearly fainted when I saw that I had lost a whopping four pounds over the course of the day. Although starving and medically dehydrated, I was ready to prove myself as the wrestler I had become in the last 24 hours.

However, after a quick tour of Lowell, Lafayette, and Thurgood Marshall, I determined that the world does not have an excess of elementary school kids willing to wrestle a 16-year-old, but rather an excess of uptight mothers and fathers without a sense of humor. So I turned my sights on the closest thing to a small child that would wrestle me. Samuel R. Woestwin. We met up and wrestled for a good twenty seconds before the unforgivable things I had done to my body that day caught up to me, and I began to grow dizzy. On a normal day, I would have been able to pin Sam with one arm tied behind my back, but due to my fatigue, I was forced to use both hands to bring the rapscallion to the ground. We stood up and hugged it out, but I was soon forced to sit back down and close my eyes until I felt good enough to break my fast and stuff my face with everything classified as “edible” within my reach. It hit me like a brick wall. I was just not fit to be a wrestler.

One door had been closed for me, but my eyes had been opened. Wrestling could be one of the most physically demanding sports offered at Garfield, and everyone who does it deserves serious props. Though the team has not technically “won” a match this year, they have high aspirations and some certain individuals performed admirably at state. And in my book, anyone who can spit and sweat off weight twice a week and maintain friends and healthy relationships should be in a league of their own.