>>I have no idea why the selection committee took six Big 10 teams
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>I have no idea why they took six Big Ten teams, but not the team in 4th place in the conference!!!! OK, I can see why the NCAA didn't take them, but it was a shot in the junk when the NIT passes them by too. What a horrible horrible weekend for Iowa sports.


The rasslers are still going <g>. There is an excellent article in the current Sports Illustrated about wrestling in Iowa and how imbued it is in the state. I was glad to hear the U of Iowa and Iowa State have bounced back from their relative doldrums. Dan Gable himself is even back in the picture as an assistant coach. (Can you imagine being an Iowa high school kid and getting a call from Dan Gable asking if he can come talk to you about joining the program?) There was a nice quote from the wrestling coach at Minnesota, which is #1 heading into the tournament. "Wrestling is a minor sport here. In Iowa it's a major sport."

One of my buddies at UW-Madison wrestled for the Badgers, another perennial power. He made it to the round of 8 as a junior, 148. (He was a natural 157 but unfortunately one of his teammates was Lee Kemp, the Greco-Roman world champ at 157). He always looked forward to those road trips to Iowa and Oklahoma. "You wouldn't believe it," he said. "The chicks know your name, your record, your home town." The way he smiled when he said it indicated they knew more about him than his home town.

Sigs was what you might call a wrestling anorexic. He always had to struggle to make weight -- as I said, he wrestled 9 pounds below his natural weight and probably another 10 or 20 below what he would have been if not for freakish year round conditioning -- and that often meant fasting for a day or two before the weigh-in. More than once I saw him wolf some food down and then force himself to vomit. "I know it's stupid but it cuts the hunger pangs," he said.