Six-time world and Olympic champion John Smith became familiar with pain during his sensational freestyle career. He suffered from broken fingers, sprained ankles, torn rib cartilage, a separated shoulder, damaged knee ligaments, cauliflower ears, and extremely painful hip pointers. But Smith knew, as do other high-achieving wrestlers, that injuries are part of the game and that a wrestler must learn to live with them and block them out.
While covering the 1988 Olympics for the Chicago Tribune, writer John Husar captured what winning a gold medal can cost a wrestler like John Smith.
“His nose had been broken Tuesday by the Bulgarian and Smith said he had never bled so much,” wrote Husar. “His bent and stubby fingers that had been broken four or five times apiece were jammed anew and swollen, and his right shoulder was crying for arthroscopic surgery. But none of that hurt as much, he said, as the rawness on his backside, where he wore away the skin sitting nightly in his rubber suit on the stationary bike.”
“‘Aw, it’s nothing, really,’ he assured a knot of incredulous re-porters. ‘All athletes go through this type of stuff. Aches and pains come with sport. You’ve just gotta adapt to ’em’” (Husar 1988, 12).
Adapt he did, and again in 1992, when he was searching for his second Olympic gold medal. This time, Smith was facing a different type of injury.
“I had a staph infection hit me in January and it tore me up,” said Smith in 2004. “My whole head was swollen, and I had bald spots on my head, too. It just gradually got worse. I suffered from fatigue. After just 15 minutes of drilling, I would be exhausted.
“During some practices, it felt like my head was going to explode. It took everything I had to mentally get through the Olympic trials and the Olympics. It would have been easy for some guys to just walk away at that point, to settle for something less. But I couldn’t do that.
“I remember writers coming up and acting surprised that I could keep going, and I thought, ‘What’s the big deal? It comes with the territory.’ I’ve just always assumed injuries are part of the game.”
In that respect, he was akin to Dan Gable, who entered the 1972 Olympics in Munich with a severely damaged left knee. In the first match, Gable’s foe from Yugoslavia headbutted him, opening a gash that required seven stitches to close.
“Sure, it hurt,” said Gable years later. “But so what? The point of wrestling is that it hurts and you overcome that. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t supposed to hurt.”
Pain is part of the game at the highest levels. The finest athletes have learned to accept it and to ignore it, in many respects