On the Mat - Rummy Meets His Match

The New Yorker - by Ben McGrath April 14, 2003

Every March, on the occasion of the N.C.A.A. wrestling championships, serious matmen abandon their desks and their wives for a few days and gather to reminisce about rapid weight loss and sweaty entanglements on the plastic-covered horsehair. At this year’s tournament, in Kansas City, the sport’s elder statesmen had a particular lanky old grappler on their minds: Don Rumsfeld. Fifty years earlier, as a Princeton undergraduate, Rumsfeld, who is now, of course, the Secretary of Defense, fought a match that is legendary among wrestlers not so much for what it augured about a career in public service or a style of conducting Pentagon briefings as for what it said about the man as a wrestler.

“It was in 1953, the Eastern Intercollegiates, at Princeton, and the weight class was a hundred and fifty-seven pounds,” Phil Harvey, a Class of ’55 wrestler for Cornell, recalled. “Everybody assumed that in the finals our Ken Hunt, who had had an undefeated season for Cornell, would meet a kid from Syracuse named Ed Rooney. But in the semis, lo and behold, Don Rumsfeld knocked Rooney out of the tournament. It was a huge upset.”

Among his Princeton teammates, Rumsfeld had earned a reputation for quick takedowns. He was an avid practitioner of the fireman’s carry. (“You actually picked the man up off the mat, like a fireman carrying somebody out of a house,” Harvey said. “And then there was this spinning motion you’d do, where you’d chuck him over your head and bring him down to the mat.”) But, amid the tougher competition at the Easterns, Rumsfeld stood out for his superior conditioning and his fierce determination; he was relentless, a bulldog.

Ed Rooney was what is known as a leg wrestler, attempting to tie his opponents up below the waist and then overpower them. At Dillon Gym that day, Rumsfeld, cheered on by his friends from the Cap & Gown eating club, shrewdly kept his distance. Ed Rooney has since died, but his son, Jim, who made the pilgrimage to Kansas City in his stead, recalled, “My father fell behind in that match and was trying to catch up. And basically he spent the last three minutes chasing Don Rumsfeld all over the mat.”

Final score: Rumsfeld 6, Rooney 4.

The championship bout took place later that night, with Rumsfeld, in his orange-and-black togs, squaring off against Ken Hunt. “I’d sort of forgotten about it until Rooney’s son contacted me,” Hunt said the other day, from his home, in North Carolina. “The gym was packed—people were right down on the mats, almost like the kids at Duke basketball games. It was quite a jovial get-together. But Don was quite serious. Even in those days, gosh, he was a very intense guy.”

Hunt said that, in contrast to Rooney, who was aggressive from the start, he liked to “try to get other wrestlers to make a move first, and I’d react, and just count on my speed to win.” The strategy seemed to work well against Rumsfeld. “He would go in for this so-called takedown, and see that he couldn’t get it, and as he backed off, that’s when I would go in and take him down with an ankle pickup,” Hunt said. “I took him down three times with that, and that was six points right off the bat.” (“Rumsfeld was the kind of wrestler, you knew what he was going to do and he’d do it anyhow,” Don Dickason, a Cornell teammate of Hunt’s, said.)

Still, Rumsfeld wouldn’t give up. “Kenny was an amazingly slick wrestler, just as smooth as can be,” Harvey said, “but Rumsfeld was obviously in much better condition.”

“I think I was ahead eight-zip or eight-two,” Hunt said. “And then I began to run out of gas. I had the feeling that he could taste blood, you know, if he could get me real tired—and I was getting tired.”

In the third period (there are three to a match), Rumsfeld began “reversing” Hunt. “He exploited every possible tool,” Hunt said. “I think we rolled into the spectators at one point.”

“It was just a thing of beauty, where there’d be a move and a countermove and a countermove,” Dickason said. “In a way, it didn’t matter who got the final points. It was just that both guys were so good.”

“I frankly don’t remember the end of it,” Hunt said. “One of my best friends from high school was at the edge of the mat there, and I remember him saying, ‘One more minute!’ Don may have gotten one takedown toward the end—gosh, I don’t remember. He had sheer will and determination.”

Final score: Hunt 9, Rumsfeld 5.

Hunt never wrestled again.

Roger Olesen, who has been called the Boswell of wrestling, has had occasion to think a lot about Rumsfeld recently, because he has just co-written a book about the 1953 wrestling season, called “The Turning Point.” (The preface begins, “Wrestling is not, as some contend, like life. Wrestling is life—reduced to its essence.”)

“They’ve always built Rumsfeld up as being a great wrestler,” Olesen said. “But he wasn’t. Rumsfeld, I think, was just a plugger. He would keep coming after you even when the final verdict was no longer in doubt.”