When wrestling becomes too arduous, when the consequences of the present moment appear too grave, John Michael Staudenmayer tries to remember to forget.
The creed, counter to intuition and common sense, has served the North Carolina wrestler this season. It helped him bounce back from elbow surgery, from a sluggish start, from moments that siphoned his confidence and taxed his belief.
It served him Saturday afternoon when Staudenmayer’s turbulent season collided with the specter of the NCAA championships. The UNC redshirt sophomore entered his matches against Pittsburgh and SIU-Edwardsville with an 10-11 record, too meager, just yet, to qualify for nationals in his 165-pound weight class.
The conference championships loomed beyond these, the last of UNC’s team bouts of 2013-2014. The time to forget was now.
“It’s the moment,” Staudenmayer said. “Forget about everything and do what you set out to do.”
Staudenmayer did just that, overcoming a slap across the face from Pittsburgh’s Geno Morelli and enduring a fit of lower-back spasms against SIU-Edwardsville’s Matt Lester to earn two wins that looked more like slogs.
Saturday presented the latest hurdles in Staudenmayer’s eventful 2013-14 season, one marred by injury, by inconsistency, by creeping doubts about whether he’d return to the standard that helped Staudenmayer compile a 56-24 record in his first two seasons at UNC.
“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Staudenmayer said.
Staudenmayer began the season ranked as the nation’s 14th-best wrestler in his weight class. Before the season, he underwent surgery on his elbow to clean out floating cartilage, the result of a lanky body putting too much duress on its limbs. Staudenmayer missed seven weeks, struggled to regain his fitness and saw his performance rise and fall like stock prices.
