Unless you’ve been curled up underneath the mat trying to lose that last quarter pound, you’ve seen them.
Jax Forrest. Marcus Blaze. Bo Bassett. PJ Duke. Daniel Zepeda. Leo DeLuca. The list keeps growing.
Young wrestlers some of them still considered boys are stepping onto the mat with older, stronger, fully developed men and acting as if nobody remembered to tell them how this is supposed to work.
And they aren’t merely surviving, mind you.
They’re attacking. Scoring. Winning.
At times, they’re having their way with some of the best senior-level wrestlers in America.
Twenty or thirty years ago, this would have sounded preposterous. A high school freshman beating up your senior buddies at Homecoming? Come on. That irritating little fellow would have had a better chance of being elected king, queen and principal on the same night.
Not gonna happen.
But here we are.
The boys are beating the men.
So the question begs:
What on Earth is going on here?
The easy explanation is talent. Obviously these kids have truckloads of it.
But talent explains a phenom. And make no mistake, those dudes yesteryear had plenty of talent too.
It doesn’t explain a generation.
And maybe that’s exactly what we’re looking at a generation.
For the first time, we have young wrestlers who have spent virtually their entire wrestling lives inside wrestling’s New World Order. They didn’t have to unlearn the old rules because, in many cases, they never learned them. The new technique, new thinking, new training, new nutrition, new psychology this has been their wrestling world from the beginning.
Keep that thought in your back pocket.
One phenom is a spark. Two might be coincidence.
But look around, my friend.
The Forrest is a Blaze.
And when miracles start happening one after another after another, eventually we’re going to need another word for miracle.
I’ve written about metamorphosis before the caterpillar and the butterfly and wrestling is the perfect example.
The caterpillar wasn’t bad. It simply wasn’t the finished product.
Neither was the wrestling many of us grew up with.
Double leg. High crotch. Sweep single. Stand-up. Switch. Short sit. Half nelson. Cross-face cradle. Drill hard, get tough, get in shape and go wrestle.
It was the foundation.
The mistake was believing the foundation was the finished house.
Then came along a relatively small group of independent wrestling minds who started knocking on the walls.
They questioned the status quo.
Actually, that’s underselling it.
They questioned darn near everything.
Why do we teach this, like that?
Wait, that doesn’t make any mechanical sense.
How can this be improved?
Why automatically sprawl?
Maybe we should teach how to wrestle “in-between the moves.”
Who says taking shots is the best way to go?
Why practice this way? Eat this way? Cut weight this way? Condition this way? Talk to athletes this way?
They analyzed what we were doing, took it apart and started putting it back together.
These were the pioneers the Steve Jobses of wrestling.
While the rest of us were happily using the product, these guys were out in the garage taking the damn thing apart. Improving. Optimizing.
And look at the rewards.
Their wrestlers are winning all over the place. Their ideas are spreading. They’re changing the sport for the better. And the young are doing things we never thought possible.
There goes another one!
They didn’t just create some new moves.
They flipped the script and threw the old clipboard out the window.
They altered the technique. They broke the old norms. They applied real, up-to-date nutritional information. They gutted and rebuilt the mental aspect. The philosophy changed. The pursuit became the lifestyle.
This ain’t your daddy’s wrestling.
This is wrestling reborn.
Y’all ready for this?
Here’s how fundamental some of this became.
For generations, the sprawl was practically wrestling law. Somebody touches your legs, you throw your hips down hard enough to leave a dent in the cement.
Now some of the best wrestling minds are asking:
Why merely stop his attack?
Why surrender your hips?
Let’s go around the corners instead.
Can I meet him earlier? Redirect him? T-off? Create an angle? Go behind?
What??
No sprawl? Are you kidding me?
Nobody is saying the sprawl became bad wrestling. That’s not the point.
The point is that somebody had the nerve to question something we considered unquestionable.
And once that started happening, wrestling took off.
Even the humble takedown finally got some justice.
For years, the workhorse of our sport the number-one offensive act in all of wrestling—was worth a measly two points. Just one more than an escape.
It was another “rethink” situation.
Now they’re worth three, and good luck finding a wrestler who thinks three is too much. The point is, it’s wise to relook at things that have been common for a long time. The older they are, the more likely they may not be ideal, and a word to the wise in there sits all the gold.
Then there’s one of my favorites.
Former USA Wrestling head coach Bruce Burnett preached a piece of wrestling gospel that might have gotten somebody arrested in certain wrestling states twenty years ago:
“You don’t have to shoot to win at wrestling.”
Excuse me?
Please step away from the window.
Father Drew Lilledahl took that gem to heart, and Luke adopted and refined it into a brilliant style attacking the stance, looking for holes in the bucket, incredibly active and almost impossible to keep up with.
And then, Lord have mercy, if you even think about shooting on Luke, he takes offense one kind, and then the other. There are only two things that can possibly happen in this situation. Luke goes around your right side for the takedown…or he goes around your left.
He is now widely considered one of wrestling’s great go-behind masters and counterattack artists in the game.
Luke 20:16 “You don’t have to shoot to win at wrestling”.
Amen!
And this brings us directly back to our young phenoms and that thought I asked you to put in your back pocket.
These kids aren’t merely benefiting from the New Wrestling Order.
They’re the first generation raised in it.
Think about that.
Like their less committed mates, brought up with a screen in their hand and face since birth, these new elite wrestling kids have been literally “scrambling” like mad since day one. And brother, in case you didn’t notice, scrambling is the new name of the game.
So yes, my fine reader, these kids are the first wave to have spent their entire wrestling lives in the New Wrestling Order!
This is their native language and they literally speak it fluently.
They’ve also grown up with more efficient systems around the wrestling itself: sophisticated clubs, better strength training, improved nutrition and recovery, film everywhere, national competition and, for some, world class workout partners at ridiculously young ages.
Furthermore, there’s simply more volume in today’s wrestling. More exchanges. More transitions. More scrambles. More attacks and counterattacks. More everything.
We’ll come back to that.
Better information. Earlier.
Better tools. Earlier.
More quality experience. Earlier.
Do that for fifteen years and the calendar starts becoming a little misleading.
The birth certificate may say 19.
But in wrestling years, the kid might be 45.
Now we’re getting somewhere…
But the technical metamorphosis is only the part everybody can see.
Something equally interesting has happened mentally, emotionally, psychologically, philosophically and, for perhaps the first time so openly in modern wrestling, spiritually.
The old motivational system wasn’t terribly complicated:
“Kick his ass!”
Now listen to David Taylor:
“Stay present.”
Stay present?
What’s that all about?
The last time I heard something like that I was at a Reiki treatment, and I’m pretty sure somebody was about to pass around a tambourine.
Now one of the greatest wrestlers on Earth is teaching it in a wrestling room.
Are we going backward in time?
But there’s something happening here.
Stay present.
Be yourself.
Have fun.
Be grateful.
These aren’t throwaway phrases. They’re simple instructions directing an athlete’s attention and state of mind.
Translation?
Don’t wrestle the takedown you surrendered thirty seconds ago.
Don’t wrestle the match you’re afraid you might lose.
Wrestle now. Win this position. Stay in the moment.
Think positively and expect to win.
Look closely and you will see that some are now consciously using the power of consciousness in order to win at wrestling.
For my .02, that might deserve a pause and nod.
Repetition. Visualization. Mental rehearsal. Deliberately directing attention and belief. There are tried-and-true ways to train this stuff, just as we train a single leg.
We’ll get much deeper into that in future Journals.
For now, just recognize how far we’ve traveled.
“Kick his ass” became “stay present.”
That’s every bit as radical as don’t sprawl and you don’t have to shoot.
And perhaps the most impressive part of the New Wrestling Order isn’t technical at all.
It’s the commitment.
These kids are all in.
And I mean all in.
Five o’clock in the morning workouts. Lifting before school. Wrestling after school. Clubs at night. Weekends spent driving across the state or flying across the country to find better competition. Camps. Tournaments. Film. Recovery. Nutrition. Strength training.
Then they wake up and do it again.
And unlike the wrestling season many of us grew up with, there really isn’t much of an offseason anymore. Wrestling has become a year-round pursuit.
Think about the amount of time and energy that represents over ten or fifteen years.
Think about what gets sacrificed along the way.
Sleepovers. Friday nights. Vacations. Other sports. Girlfriends. Parties. Sometimes just being a regular kid with absolutely nowhere he needs to be at 5:00 tomorrow morning.
These young elite have focused themselves on wrestling like a beam.
This isn’t something they do. It’s increasingly how they live.
And that’s another major change.
Back in the day, plenty of us could work ourselves half to death all week and still find creative ways to waste some of those benefits on the weekend. Today’s elite increasingly understand waste.
They understand that Optimization isn’t always about adding something.
Sometimes it’s about removing what doesn’t serve you.
Because you don’t become this good this young accidentally.
Talent helps. Coaching helps. God helps. Better information helps. The New Wrestling Order helps.
But somebody still has to get out of bed at 5:00 in the morning.
Somebody still has to put in the hours.
Somebody still has to choose wrestling again tomorrow.
And again.
And again.
The new elite aren’t merely being taught how to wrestle.
They’re organizing their lives around becoming great at it.
Cleaner. More focused. More purposeful. Less waste.
So when we marvel at a 17-year-old standing toe-to-toe with a grown man, maybe we shouldn’t be quite so surprised.
That kid may be 17.
But he’s already given wrestling a lifetime.
And this brings us right back to where we started.
Perhaps you’ve read my piece on the caterpillar and butterfly, and here we are again.
The caterpillar wasn’t wrong.
It simply wasn’t finished.
Neither was the wrestling we grew up with.
Wrestling put on its plastics and went into the cocoon. Inside, some very smart wrestling people questioned darn near everything, removed some waste, added some wisdom and it came back out with wings.
And there’s another piece of the puzzle.
Volume.
The sheer volume of wrestling has gone up.
Not necessarily more hours in the room. More wrestling happening inside those hours. More wrestling per minute.
More exchanges. More attacks. More counterattacks. More transitions. More scrambles. More positions that used to end in a stalemate but today turn into another scoring opportunity.
Watch wrestling from the ’60s or ’70s. It’s still great wrestling. Great wrestlers, too. But watch the sheer volume of wrestling taking place in many of today’s matches.
There’s just more going on.
And more going on means more decisions being made. More positions being experienced. More problems being solved.
More learning.
And here’s the kicker: it compounds.
One exchange teaches you something that helps you in the next exchange. One scramble prepares you for another. One position leads to another position, another solution, another little piece of wrestling knowledge.
Now multiply that by thousands of practices and matches beginning when a kid is five, six or seven years old.
That’s a lot of wrestling.
And an enormous amount of experience being accumulated in a hurry.
Add better information earlier. Better technique earlier. Better nutrition and recovery. Better clubs. Better partners. Film. Freestyle. Folkstyle. National tournaments. International competition. Scrambling almost from the crib.
Suddenly our Nineteen Going on Forty-Five thing doesn’t sound quite so crazy.
These kids have accumulated an enormous amount of quality wrestling experience before they’re old enough to order a beer.
And remember, unlike the generations before them, they didn’t arrive halfway through the transformation.
They were born into it.
This is the first generation to spend essentially their entire wrestling lives under the New Wrestling Order.
The new wrestling isn’t new to them.
It’s just wrestling.
More active. More efficient. More intelligent. More conscious.
Wrestling reborn.
And personally?
I think the butterfly is a whole lot more fun to watch.
The boys are beating the men.
The outliers are arriving in bunches.
The miracles are coming so fast we’re going to have to stop calling them miracles.
And suddenly, unmistakably, beautifully
The Forrest is a Blaze.
Welcome to Wrestling’s New World Order.
The secret is out.
