And Then There Is Funk

By: Mike Chapman

Originally Published in: Wrestling Tough

Provided by: Human Kinetics

In the 2018 NCAA tournament, Nickal won his second straight 184-pound title with a much different approach than he used the year before against Dean. Facing another NCAA champion in Myles Martin of Ohio State, Nickal gave up what looked to be a perfect takedown by Martin but then quickly reversed the Buckeye star to his back for a stunning first-period pin. His victory clinched the team title for Penn State and sent the crowd into wild applause. it also earned Nickal the Most Outstanding Wrestler award.

The exciting Nittany Lion has emerged as the latest star in what some fans are calling funk. Traditionalists view this form of wrestling as outside the box, but it has proven to be very effective in many instances and can be highly entertaining. Funk has been around for a long time but in recent years has become more noticeable as a form of scrambling.

Two wrestlers known for their ability to do the uncommon on a mat several decades ago were Wade Schalles and Randy Lewis. Both excited fans with their emphasis on high-scoring moves and pinning. Schalles was a two-time NCAA champion for Clarion University in the early 1970s and is credited with 106 pins in college while fashioning an overall record of 156-5-2. In 1976 at the famed Tbilisi Tournament in Georgia, USSR, he pinned six world-class foes in a row. Years later, he said with a smile that the foreigners were at a loss because they had just never seen "my backyard junk. I think it was a shock to their system."

"Wade developed a gutsy, unorthodox, no-one-can-coach style that was fun to watch," said veteran wrestling historian Norm Palovcsik. "He was a showman, and the mat was his stage. His legend continued to grow because he could talk the talk and walk the walk."

Today, that "backyard junk" and the "gutsy, unorthodox style" is called funk.

His go-for-broke style may have seemed a form of gambling to some, but Schalles always had an extremely keen awareness of mat position. Like Nickal today, he had an uncanny sense of not only where he was at but how to put his opponent in danger.

In the viewpoint of some, funk wrestling is simply very effective counter-wrestling. And the legendary martial-artist-turned-actor Bruce Lee felt that is a style that should be held in the highest esteem.

"The counterattack calls for the greatest skill, the most perfect planning, and the most delicate execution of all fighting techniques. It is the greatest art in fighting, the art of the champion," wrote Lee, in his famous book, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

"I would agree with Bruce," said Schalles when told of Lee's comment. "As in war, there's a lot of strategy and skill regarding where you position your army prior to the start of a battle. Sixty percent of all generals can do that; forty percent can't and shouldn't be generals. But the real talent here is how to reposition your men and artillery to counter the initial attack after the battle has started.

"Both you and your opponent can train to have great double legs, stand ups, and blanket rides and win a lot of matches. But what happens when your opponent stays on his knees while you're in neutral, or shoots his single before you can launch your double? The great wrestler knows how to counterattack because that's the way he trains and thinks, it's part of his makeup; he has a wide-open mentality. This is how you get a Mills, Lewis, Askren, Gable, Stieber, Sanderson, and the list goes on.

"Counter-wrestling is never knowing what's coming your way until it happens, being able to stop it when it does, and then make the aggressor pay by way of your skill sets, regardless of the position. Great counter-attackers know how to use their bodies in more ways than their opponents do offensively. It's far more than just knowing a group of techniques, but the what, when, and how to respond in a fraction of a second to a myriad of possible positions.

"But in actuality, I don't know if I'd refer to it as counterattacking, although that is what it is. It's really the speed of thought and action. Whoever shoots first has multiple seconds or minutes to set everything up. From there, response times shrink to milliseconds. I counter your shot and you counter my counter and I then counter your counter and so on until one ultimately wins the position.

"So, the successful counterattacker is the one who survived the scramble and has the greatest war chest of techniques."

A decade later, Randy Lewis offered fans the same type of wrestling. After an amazing high school career at Rapid City, South Dakota, where he was 89-0 with 83 pins his final three seasons, he became a Junior National and Junior World champion. Lewis enrolled at the University of Iowa and became an immediate sensation with his wide-open offense. He was NCAA runner-up at 126 pounds as a pure freshman in 1978, then went 36-0 as sophomore, winning the NCAA title. The next year, he moved up to 134 pounds and won again, rolling up many pins and lopsided scores along the way. A serious elbow injury his senior year stopped his quest to become a three-time champion.

His style was one of explosive moves, with a little funk thrown in for good measure. He was a gambler, willing to put a leg out for the taking just for the opportunity to counter and put the opponent in a position where he was uncomfortable and insecure. "I'm not afraid to give them something and see what happens," he said. "That's what wrestling is all about."

After college, he won numerous events, including a gold medal in the 136.5-pound class at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

"Randy Lewis was a very unusual, exciting type of wrestler," said his coach, Dan Gable. "He was not afraid to give you something, anything, really, to see what you could do with it. He came to wrestle, every time, every match. He was great for Iowa wrestling and great for the sport overall."

In truth, the term funk probably has no better example, and advocate, than Ben Askren, so much so that he earned the nickname "Funky Ben" during his years at the University of Missouri. Askren was a four-time NCAA finalist, winning two titles at 174 pounds and the Dan Hodge Trophy (given to the nation's top college wrestler each year) twice, then making the 2008 Olympic freestyle team.

Askren helped revolutionize wrestling at the University of Missouri as he and his coach, Brian Smith, took the Tigers to unprecedented heights. Askren finished college in 2007 with a record of 153-8 and won his last 87 matches in a row. Included in the 153 wins were a school record 91 falls and 15 technical falls. He is considered one of the most exciting, and dangerous, wrestlers to ever step on a mat. He transitioned into mixed martial arts and retired undefeated in 2017 after winning world championships for two major organizations.

"In college, a buddy developed a shirt with my name on it and called it 'Funky Ben,' and that's how it started," said Askren in 2017. "You develop a style like that out of necessity, not desire. But really, styles are irrelevant. The only thing is to figure out what you have to do to get better. You are limiting yourself by saying 'I need to have this or that style.'

"What you have to do," he said with emphasis, "is be able to wrestle through any situation that you are faced with. You get better by doing, how do I stop a high-crotch move? Try something, and if that's not working you begin to explore . . . what I do to stop that."

Askren believes that there is no set way to score other than to just wrestle. To most observers, that sort of mind-set creates some unscripted moves, and they call it funk.

He credits Coach Smith with supporting an environment that allowed him and others wrestlers to work on unorthodox solutions: "We started doing this stuff (funk), and we explored different options. There was a lot of structure to Coach Smith's sessions, but he also let me experiment because he thought I was onto something. He even let me run some practices in the fall."

His brother Max was a three-time All-American and captured the 184-pound NCAA title in 2010, and today they own and operate a successful wrestling academy in Wisconsin.

Few wrestlers have analyzed the sport to the degree that Ray Brinzer has. He is a three-time Pennsylvania state champion in high school and three-time Junior National champion who was the Asics High School Wrestler of the Year in 1990.

Brinzer holds a unique spot in college history in that he won both a Big Eight title (for Oklahoma State in 1991) and then a pair of Big Ten titles (for the University of Iowa). He started his career with the Cowboys as a freshman and then transferred to Iowa, where he also twice placed third in the NCAA tournament at 177 pounds.

As a young wrestler, he traveled overseas several times to [earn new techniques and study the way other societies function. He once trained in Bulgaria for six months and cherishes those experiences. He has coached on many levels through the years and was a co-founder of the Angry Fish Wrestling Club in Pennsylvania. As an athlete, he was known for an innovative style of wrestling that could confound foes and delight fans.

"He often makes his moves up as he goes along and enjoys high-risk moves," wrote one scribe in 1995. "He said he would rather throw or be thrown, pin or be pinned."

Some fans called his style funk, which has caused him to reflect at length on what that truly means.

"Funk, as wrestlers tend to use the term, is unconventional technique," said Brinzer in 2017. "When a wrestler does the unexpected, particularly when what he does has a look of complexity about it, we call it funk. Wrestlers who are habitually unconventional we call funky."

He added that the term funk will sometimes be used in the same sense as the term unsound.

"There is a particular leg pass, used as a shot defense in American collegiate style, which has (rather confusingly) become known as The Funk.' But mostly, funk is wrestling's synonym for weird. As such, it's inherently cultural. The idea of `weird' requires the idea of 'normal,' and normal is whatever most people do. If a weird idea catches on, it's no longer weird; if a funky move becomes mainstream, it stops being funk.

"Wrestling culture, like culture generally, provides solutions to problems. We need to eat, to stay safe and warm, to reproduce and raise children; our culture suggests tried ways of doing these things. In wrestling, we need to control an opponent. Once we strike upon some main ideas which work, the opponent must develop ways to stop them, and a back-and-forth process of antagonistic research begins.

"Learning technique, however, is difficult and time-consuming. Wrestling presents so many problems that students are taxed to learn the conventional solutions, much less consider alternatives. And since it is impractical to record technique on paper, wrestling knowledge has been passed from person to person for most of history.

"Thus, just like culture generally, wrestling culture tends not to concern itself with edge cases; a solution which works 99 percent of the time is good enough. Since the conventional solutions are also the conventional problems, viewed from the other wrestler's standpoint, our knowledge tends to run deep, rather than broad.

"This is where funk's fascinating counter-cultural role appears. Because wrestling branches so rapidly, it is easy to violate our expectations in a great many positions. The potential payoff for doing so is large: Like a confidence man running a shell game, you can make a living off of forcing opponents to improvise at a game you've played thousands of times."

Then, in a sentence that Schalles, Lewis, and Askren - and now Bo Nickal of Penn State - would certainly applaud, he adds: "Wrestling rewards technical deviants.

"The trend in modern wrestling toward funk is a consequence of this incentive. Increasingly specialized athletes are finding profit in exploring alternative lines of play, and the ease of recording and sharing video is accelerating the pace of innovation. Weaknesses in conventional solutions, which were always there, are now more likely to be exploited. A conservative era of navigating a very large sport with a very small map seems likely to end the renaissance.

"From the standpoint of yesterday's wrestlers, wrestling has become more funky. But as a culture, as the strange becomes familiar, the threshold of funk is receding. In the end, we may find that there is no funk. There is only wrestling."