Wrestling is very much like Glee

One of the great things about the type of work I do is that I get to work with wonderful people.  One of the downsides of the kind of work I do is that we get moved around a lot so the wonderful people I get to know don't work with me forever.

One of the wonderful people I have worked with is named Tom.  Tom and I worked together for years with a great team of people.  The situation was horrendous, but the team was amazing.  It has been a while since I have worked with Tom.  Luckily, with my new job being in Downtown Detroit, Tom and I can meet for lunch occasionally.

Tom is a wrestling Ref and recently he couldn't meet me for lunch because he would be at Regionals.  I had to ask if it was the same as Regionals on Glee.  Tom is hilarious and this is his response.

"Yes, those wrestling boys like to think of it as being very much like Glee. Except their uniforms aren’t so much like costumes. They do have regionals too.


At one meet that I reffed, this kid who wasn’t very good at wrestling, and everyone knew it, except his mom who thought he was good (but she wasn’t very knowledgeable about anything anyway) tried to wrestle the champ. When I blew the whistle to start the match, the kid started running around the wrestling mat snapping his fingers and singing that song from West Side Story, you know the one:


"When you’re a Jet, you’re the top cat in town, you’re the gold-medal kid, with the heavyweight crown!...”


The champ looked at him like he was a weirdo (which he was in fact) and the kid’s Mom was yelling, “…take him down, Snowboy, take him down…”, which also didn’t make sense to those watching since the kid was clearly dancing like a Puerto Rican and not really a Jet. Suddenly, his teammates too started dancing, as did everyone in the gym.

The champ, yelling and cursing, chased the dancer/wrestler into the hallway wanting to beat this kid’s ass, but stopped short because now there were like 200 people in the hallway doing the same Puerto Rican-like dance. The look on the champ’s face was priceless—he didn’t know what the hell was going on, he was scared. He just stared with a panicked look on his face. Out of nowhere, the weirdo wrestler who was also a bad dancer but could sing pretty good, walked up to the champ and, in a falsetto voice, sang, “Don’t be angry, I am your brother.” The champ immediately puked, and while everyone started laughing at him, Howie Mandel walked from out of the crowd and said, “Champ, this isn’t a real wrestling meet, or even an episode of Glee. You’ve been mobbed. The champ started crying while everyone clapped and cheered. The weirdo tried to kiss his brother but was quickly punched unconscious.

That’s why I like reffing, but I digress. In wrestling, it starts with eight Districts. If you make it out of Districts, you advance to one of four Regionals.

Here is where the pressure builds. Everyone wants to make it out of their respective regional (one of four regions) to the State meet, or “State” for short.

Now, there is much disagreement and discord about whether a wrestler advances to “State” or “States”. I am in the “State” camp. To me, a number of districts make up a number of regionals make up only one state meet. So I say “State”. Others disagree with me. Of course many of them say Fords, Chryslers, K Marts, Wal Marts, Meijers, etc. Not me though."