very March, I tune in to the NCAA Division I Men’s Wrestling Championships, a ritual I associate with the arrival of spring. It also reminds me of my own athletic tenure. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and started wrestling when I was five, and went on to compete at the Division I level in college.
This year’s championships were compulsive viewing. The first five-time D-I national champion was Carter Starocci of Penn State, and Oklahoma State’s Wyatt Hendrickson beat Olympic champion Gable Steveson in the heavyweight final. Oh. And Donald Trump was there. Joining him were Elon Musk, former wrestler turned Republican Ohio congressman Jim Jordan and other political allies.
Trump made his entrance in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center to cheers and “U-S-A, U-S-A” chants. He appeared after Starocci had just claimed his historic fifth title, prompting ESPN to interrupt Starocci’s interview and cut to the president. A former training partner texted me, saying, “Dude, WTF,” as Trump waved to the crowd. I understood what he meant. I felt the same sinking disappointment.
However, not all of the wrestlers at the tournament shared their feelings. Athletes shook hands with the president throughout the night, posed for photos with him, and allowed him to hold their NCAA trophies, which look like obelisks and represent years of bloody sacrifice that would be hard for the uninitiated to comprehend. Ohio State head coach Tom Ryan shared a photo of himself and Elon Musk, whom he referred to as one of his “favorite men,” on his X account. Hendrickson celebrated his victory by firing a stout salute in Trump’s direction and draping an American flag over his massive shoulders.
Starocci joined Fox & Friends two days after the tournament, and despite his name being repeatedly mispronounced, he seemed pleased to be there. Hendrickson appeared via video chat on America’s Newsroom, where Fox anchor Bill Hemmer, like many others, called him “Captain America”. In equal measure, Trump and wrestling were the subjects of both interviews. What do these athletes see in Trump? He is almost exactly the opposite of a wrestler. Though he has a weird habit of trying to dominate handshakes, he’s never been a serious athlete, despite his boasts. His privilege has shielded him from accountability throughout his life. Among high-level wrestlers, personal accountability is a deep, almost spiritual core value. Regardless of how hard they work, the majority of wrestlers never achieve their athletic goals. I can attest that such failures are crushing. However, when it comes to defeats, the majority of wrestlers refuse to accept any excuse. Two years ago, in a bout considered one of the all-time college upsets, Matt Ramos of Purdue pinned Iowa superstar, Spencer Lee. Lee, who was injured, said in a Barstool interview, “I saw people say I lost because I was hurt … That’s not true. I got beat. I hate when people try to make excuses for me when I got outwrestled and beat.” Trump has yet to publicly concede his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
This paradox is not surprising. Many of Trump’s fans voted for policies that will not benefit their lives. Their support is based on emotion, not logic. Viewed through this lens, college wrestling’s embrace of Trump makes sense. Trump’s antagonistic relationship with higher ed matters little when, to wrestling, he and his allies say, “We love you, we’re proud of you.”
For a sport routinely shoved to the margins, this high-profile support is significant. “You put politics aside, no matter if you’re conservative or liberal… to have the president of the United States be at something we want to get people to watch… [is] cool,” Penn State’s Mitchell Mesenbrink stated. Wasted tax dollars notwithstanding, Mesenbrink is right. You seldom see wrestlers in a montage on Gatorade commercials. You don’t hear about them inking huge corporate sponsorship deals. Simone Biles, Caitlin Clark, and Michael Phelps are well-known, but Jordan Burroughs is only known to a small group of people outside of the wrestling community. In 2016, The New Yorker published The Faces of College Wrestlers, which featured portraits taken after wrestlers had stepped off the mat. I was delighted until I read the article’s comment section on Facebook. With articulate prose, people had reduced these young men to knuckle-dragging stereotypes. The phrase “toxic masculinity” appeared multiple times.
Negative attention is nothing new for wrestling. Fifty years ago, there were more than 150 D-I wrestling programs; as of 2025, there are 79. My alma mater, Boston University, cut its program in 2014 to make space for men’s lacrosse. To me, an elite urban school rejecting wrestling for a sport associated with affluence felt like a rejection of my home state, and, more broadly, of rural America.
It took me three application cycles to gain admission to a fully funded MFA program. As rejections rolled in, I leaned on the persistence wrestling had instilled in me. My eventual acceptance letter filled me with as much joy as any win on the mat ever had. “How does it feel to be part of the problem?” an MFA colleague asked me. On my first night on campus, referring to my identity as a straight white male. The question portended several similar experiences. Phrases like “toxic masculinity” and “lit bro” were swung in my direction like a judge banging a gavel. In those moments, I wanted to turn translucent – to hold out my arms like a Da Vinci sketch and show the scar tissue and nerve damage and old surgeries and say, see?
In a guest essay for the New York Times, David J Morris laments the dearth of young men involved in the reading and writing of literature. He notes that this reality is reflected in our national politics. “Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world,” he writes, “Too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the ‘manosphere’ such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.”
Morris points out several discouraging trends. Young men’s suicide rates have skyrocketed, and educational statistics have continued to decline. Young men who exhibit “traditional” masculine qualities, such as physical strength and self-reliance, are labeled “toxic” by a culture that will just as quickly make male vulnerability the punchline of a joke. Last year, a study conducted at Dublin City University by Dr Catherine Baker, Professor Debbie Ging, and Dr Maja Brandt Andreasen uncovered the alarming extent to which algorithms used by social media platforms recommend misogynistic content to young men. A 2023 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that young men are reaching financial milestones at a slower rate than men of previous generations, while numbers among women swing in the opposite direction.
Leading up to the election, Trump took pains to forge an associative link between young men’s economic woes and progressive politics; his racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris fed into a prevailing sense of anger and dissatisfaction. The irony, of course, is that Trump has a long history of relying on immigrant labor and stiffing the working class. On 13 July 2024, the attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Pennsylvania further solidified his tough-guy image. AP photographer Evan Vucci captured a photo of Trump pumping his fist like a victorious athlete as blood dripped from his ear. (Celebrations of Trump’s temerity tended to ignore the fact that audience member Corey Comperatore was killed.) The president also has a strong relationship with the UFC. Last Saturday, he attended UFC 314 in Miami. When Trump sits among the people for a dose of cathartic violence, like a Roman emperor at the Colosseum, trade policies that cause chaos are trivial for fight fans. Is it thus surprising that Trump made significant gains among young men of all backgrounds in last year’s presidential election?
Wrestling is hard, and those who excel at it deserve to be celebrated. It teaches young people how to hold themselves accountable and persevere through difficult challenges – skills that seem to be in short supply. Boys are not the lone beneficiaries. Girls’ wrestling is the high school sport in America that is growing the fastest. While many figures of the “manosphere” champion physical fitness, the wholesale conflation of fitness and toxic masculinity is a mistake. Wrestling, like any sport, has its bad actors. Still, no one benefits when those who promote inclusiveness take it upon themselves to define masculinity with narrow parameters that shame a large number of young men. Shame drives these young men toward the praise of a hypocritical false idol, and, worse, toward “manosphere” extremism.
Perhaps the wrestling world’s embrace of Trump is a metonym for our historical moment. How to positively reengage young men is the question with which America must grapple if it is going to wrest democracy from the jaws of defeat. The whistle has already been blown; the match is underway.
