No Holds Barred: Wade Schalles on How Wrestling Wins

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman once again spoke with wrestling legend Wade Schalles.

Besides serving as the coach at Scientific Wrestling, he has been writing a multi-part series called "How Wrestling Wins".

Mainly focusing on the decline of American wrestling, he goes in-depth to analyze the problems of the sport and offer numerous innovative solutions. Whether or not you agree with everything he writes, people in wrestling and the combat sports will find this series to be a much-needed and refreshing change from the mediocrity and lack of critical analysis which characterizes most discussion about wrestling.

We spoke with Wade Schalles by phone Monday.

This series "covers the greatness of the sport of wrestling, what's unique about it, why I think it's the best sport for young men and young ladies to participate in, certainly at an early age, and the reasons why I believe that way," he said.

"I follow up with where we are struggling, where we are in the world of sports today both domestically and internationally, and why we are where we are, who's at fault, why they're at fault, and how do we go about fixing it."

We discussed the urgent need for wrestling to attract more spectators to live events, how those events have to be much better organized and presented than they are now, the effect on wrestling of the film and book "Foxcatcher", his own experiences with John du Pont, and more.

We also discussed the revival of catch wrestling and his role in that. He explained why this style, where you win by pin or submission, has great potential to grow, why college wrestling should consider adding submissions, the creativeness of catch wrestling, and much more about catch wrestling.

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The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

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Thanks, Eddie Goldman
EddieGoldman.com

This was a great listen! The wrestling info was great and so spot on.

But what really got me, the interview with Wade about John DuPont. This all went down not far from where I grew up. I remember some of the events, but not much, I was ten when it happened. They filmed the movie the movie even closer to my home. Kicking myself for moving away this year. Maybe I could have got a walk-on role.

John DuPont is a public example of how our rulers really are. They don't normally interact this closely with us as John DuPont did, so we don't always get to see how crazy they really are. As Wade Schalles kept saying, how do you entertain yourself when you grow up with that much money and power?