Damn. Boy. Go get em.

 When I started this last year as a quarantine project, I had no idea where it would take me, I thought no one was interested in this stuff except me. I didn't think I could get more than 3 people to talk to me. After all, I had zero press creds(still don't) and my only wrestling experience was sitting on the couch and screaming along with my fellow fans with every takedown and pin. When you take a step back and think about it, what I was trying to pull off was damn near impossible, I was going to talk to people that are world-class at their craft, while not knowing anything about the technical aspect of wrestling. However, as I got started, I realized that, short of being a national champ/high placing All-American, the chance of you getting a long podcast interview is few and far in between, and many of the questions would be the same old, same old... 

1. When did you start wrestling?

2. Why did you choose x college?

3. How did it feel winning(insert big wrestling tournament here)?

Guilty as charged. Have I never used these questions? Of course, I've used them. The whole point though was for my sake, to humanize what I saw in my eyes as a greek god, the concept of weight cutting is still absolutely mind-boggling to me. When you challenge yourself to ask different questions and peel back the layers of someone's personality, you'll be shocked at some of the in-depth answers that you'll get. Never in a million years, would I have ever thought that an episode of my "podcast", if you could call it that, would have such a personal impact, Zach Hartman is the kind of guy you'd love to get stuck next to on a plane on a cross-country flight, that 4 hours in the middle seat would go by a whole heck of a lot quicker. Don't be fooled by his unassuming persona and his borderline laissez-faire attitude, if we could put into practice what he preaches in the episode, we'd all have an extra spring in our step, we wouldn't need the fourth cup of coffee on a Monday morning to get through the day, and we sure as hell wouldn't have all this negative pent up energy in us all the time. To quote the legendary Mark Jackson "Mama, there goes that man"

This brings me to my larger point, I'm all about promoting the sport. People don't give a s**t about the ins and outs of a wrestling match. You root for the people. We have to let these wrestlers expose their persona, and across many sports, media does a royally awful job. Whether it be the craziness of Desanto or whatever else floats your boat, we watch sports because we can relate to the person. If we don't let them express themselves beyond the obligatory post-match interview, how are we ever supposed to like anyone, if we don't know their personality? You can bet your bottom dollar that I'm tuning in to every damn Bucknell dual just to see how much stoicism a human can display.