Outbreak Signals Need for Change

I read an article on Yahoo! today in which high school wrestling matches in Minnesota were suspended due to an outbreak of herpes among competitors. Now, I'm not sure how much play this is getting nationally--wrestling's not exactly a household name of a sport--but I think the situation underscores a need for some changes.

For the uninitiated, wrestling is a close-quarters sport that is the very definition of contact. You can't be successful in this sport without grabbing, pulling, holding onto and slamming your opponent to the mat, and given the very nature of this sport, there's plenty of skin-on-skin contact.

Go ahead, make all the homoerotic jokes you want...I'll wait until you're all done.

So anyway, with that much contact being an inevitability, it's not terribly surprising for me to read of an outbreak like this. Those in charge of the decision to suspend matches in Minnesota were right to do so, but I think it needs to go a little bit further.

I say we start taking better care of the equipment -- primarily the mats these guys (and girls, in some instances) wrestle on.

I've spent the past month and a half covering high school wrestling for the Daily Press (Newport News, Va.), and seeing as how I'd had little to no exposure to the sport prior to this, I've learned a lot. And one of the things I've learned is there needs to be a more concerted effort when it comes to sanitation.

To illustrate what I mean: at the Virginia Duals earlier this month, all 10 wrestling mats were wiped down and cleaned between meets. With dozens of colleges and high schools throughout the country wrestling over the course of the two-day event, such a thing was necessary, especially given all the contact and spilled blood.

Of all the wrestling meets I've seen this year, that's been the only time I've seen a massive effort to clean the mats. Sure, the trainers will spray down the mat whenever blood's been spilled, but aside from that, I haven't really seen much being done on that end.

And I think that needs to change.

I was at the MatTalk Online Ram Rumble last weekend in Williamsburg, Va., and over the two-day event, 26 high school teams competed on five separate mats. Not once in those two days did I see the mats cleaned, save the aforementioned blood clean-up.

I think the cleaning used at the Duals could've been used here. Maybe not clean the mat after every single match (probably too time-consuming), but after every round would've sufficed. Not only because of the blood and the sweat, but I recall one of the wrestlers becoming ill during his match. Thankfully, he made it to the trash can in time (during the match, anyway...not so much afterward), but I think cleaning the mat after his match would've still been a real good idea.

Every large-scale tournament should enforce mat cleaning at least after every round. There's no telling what gets left on a mat after a combined 28 wrestlers have gone at it.

Focusing on the smaller events -- the dual, tri- and quad-meets specifically -- I think mat cleaning needs to be more prevalent. I've covered several tri- and quad-meets and not once have I seen mats being cleaned between matches.

Again, I'm not saying clean the mat after the 103-pound match, after the 112, after the 119, etc...that would take entirely too long (and considering I'm always on deadline, that would irritate me), but clean the mat, say, after Tabb and Lafayette have wrestled, then again after Lafayette and Poquoson have wrestled.

Also, clean the mat after every match in which one of the competitors had to take an injury or blood timeout. Not just the spot of blood, either--the whole mat.

Given the proximity required by wrestling, the above suggestions won't do away with all outbreaks or infections--that's simply impossible. But I think a lot of problems can be avoided if we start doing a better job of keeping up with and cleaning the wrestling surface.

It's one thing for a wrestler to catch the flu from the guy he wrestled, but if he caught it from a bead of sweat left over from a previous match? That's just unnecessary.

Remembering a Champion

I just want to take a few moments to say a couple words about former NASCAR champion Benny Parsons, who last week died of lung cancer at 65.

Given my age (I'm 25), I don't remember Benny for his driving days, outside of what I've read and heard other people talk about. Even his later driving years, when I was a child, I never followed because I wasn't a NASCAR fan then. Almost everything I remember of Benny is from his work in the TV booth--first at ESPN and ABC, and then NBC and TNT.

Everyone talks about how gentle and kind Benny was, even on the race track. The story of how he got caught up in a wreck in the 1973 season finale at Rockingham, only have to almost every crew in the garage help him fix the car to get him back out there and take the Wintson Cup title over Cale Yarborough. That kind of thing would never happen today, and it never happened back then, either.

Unless your name was Benny Parsons.

But as gracious as Benny was on the track, what's more impressive was how he was off of it. I can't think of a single moment whn I saw him and he wasn't smiling. Even last season, when he announced he had lung cancer and treatment plagued his body and kept him off-air at times, that smile never once diminished. Benny had a spirit that was inextinguishable, a spirit I often wished I had.

I learned four years ago first-hand just how generous Benny was as a person. Then working as sports editor at The Mace & Crown (Old Dominion University's campus newspaper), I'd taken a trip to Richmond International Raceway to cover a few stories during the big race weekend. We had a few alumns in the Busch Series and seeing as how ODU was a big engineering school, it felt pertinent to do a large piece on the role of engineering in NASCAR.

Now, having covered mostly college basketball in my life, I'm used to a rigid structure when setting up interviews. Contact the Sports Information Director, file the interview request, give dates and times that worked, and wait to hear back. That wasn't the case in NASCAR; for the most part, once you'd received your press credential, getting interviews was pretty much a matter of walking the garage area and grabbing whoever you needed when you saw them.

So imagine me, an ameteur college reporter, standing in the fast-paced world of NASCAr's top series. As good as I was--am--at my job, that was slightly intimidating. Most interviews are done on the move, drivers giving short, quick answers before abruptly cutting the interview short and going about their business. They're not being asses (well, most of them), they just have things to do.

And it took me a while to gather that and calm myself.

But when I saw Benny in the garage area, I saw that smile of his. I wanted his interview, since he drove in the pre-engineering days of NASCAR and had followed the sport through its evolution, but saw him busy talking to crew chiefs and drivers (undoubtedly for his broadcast later that night). He saw me standing there, waiting for him, and with that big grin of his, he walked up to me and asked me my name.

I told him and the smile seemed to widen. He shook my hand and asked me how I was.

It's amazing how a small gesture like that can put a nervous reporter's mind at ease. From there, I explained to him what I was after and that I needed just a few minutes of his time for my story. He happily obliged and five minutes later, I had my interview.

Wanting to return the graciousness Benny had shown me, I allowed him the opportunity to go back to doing his job. We shook hands again--I will never forget such a mighty grip--and that smile just seemed plastered to his face. I thanked him for his time and he told me if I needed anything else, just find him and let him know.

He'd known me five minutes, and already he was offering to help me.

I didn't need his help the rest of the weekend; I'd had it pretty much figured out from there. I got the rest of my interviews and wrote my stories, and that weekend turned out to be pretty damn good. But I will never forget the way Benny Parsons reached out to a young, unknown college reporter and treated him just as well as if he'd been writing for the New York Times.

I quoted Benny in that story, and to this day that is one of my proudest moments as a sports journalist, right there with the year I followed ODU's run to the NCAA tournament.

Benny Parsons was a champion, and a wonderful man. I'll miss hearing him on my TV on Sunday, but more than anything, I'll miss that smile.

Rest well, Benny.