



1 / 17 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Benjamin Lowy for The New Yorker Isaac Jordan, University of Wisconsin, hundred-and-sixty-five-pound weight class.

The college wrestlers at the N.C.A.A. championships, which took place last weekend at Madison Square Garden, tend to compete year-round. Most qualified for this year’s tournament by placing in an earlier conference meet, while others were voted in by committee, based on their performance during the collegiate season, which runs from fall to early spring. This is followed by Greco-Roman and freestyle tournaments, including nationals, world championships, and Olympic-team trials. Many spend the off-season coaching at summer camps.

This constant training causes young wrestlers to look haggard but phenomenally fit, a contradiction that the photographer Ben Lowy captures in his post-match portraits from the weekend’s events. The athletes are required to wear headgear during collegiate matches but not during practice, and the repeated bruising leaves their ears permanently thick and lumpy, their faces bony and hollowed-out, with cheekbones so high their eyes swell like a boxer's. Long sprints make their legs lean and explosive, tightly muscled and dense. Thanks to endless rope climbs and pull-ups, their arms are often thicker below the elbow than above—the “Popeye effect.” “It is not a beautiful body,” John Irving wrote of the Olympic wrestler Dan Gable, in a 1973 article for Esquire. “It is no more pretty than an axhead. It is no more elaborate than a hammer.”

At the Garden, wrestlers on deck paced the area between the press room and the tournament floor, wearing shorts and warmup jackets, listening to music on earbuds, hoods pulled over their heads to block out the constant din from the announcers and spectators. (The Garden sold out three of six sessions, and attendance surpassed nineteen thousand during the finals. Regular-season duals can be bigger—last November, a meet between Iowa and Oklahoma State drew more than forty thousand fans.) Coaches would occasionally massage shoulders and necks, but most would leave their athletes alone until seconds before a match, when they would slap their hands or discreetly smack them in the face.

The only times the wrestlers seemed to smile, or even speak, were in the minutes immediately after a victory, when they were approached by reporters or photographers. By then, they had lowered the tight straps of their singlets, had put their T-shirts and jackets back on, and were struggling to catch their breath. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years,” Bo Nickal, a finalist in the hundred-and-seventy-four-pound weight class from Penn State, said. “After a while, you realize there’s never a point in focussing too much on your last match. You just get ready for the next one.”