The Best There Ever Was

In these hardscrabble times Cary's wrestling is a community treasure, diverting and delighting people when they need it most. Even practices draw spectators to Central Garde School, the tiny redbrick schoolhouse that has been converted into Jefferson-Morgan's wrestling room. Grown men stand quietly on the edge of the mat in work boots and flannel shirts, sneaking out now and then for a quick smoke. "People around here realize they may never see his like again," says John Sacco, who covers wrestling for the Greene County Observer-Reporter:

"Most matches are really noisy, but when Cary wrestles, everything gets quiet," says Headlee. "They're in awe. [At a state tournament] they gave a kid a standing ovation for riding Cary the whole period, even though the kid got no points."

On a January Saturday night 2.000 people packed into the Trinity High gym, 20 miles north in Washington , to get a look at this prodigy. When Trinity coach John Abajace opted to forfeit the 135-pound match rather than let Kolat inspire his teammates, the crowd erupted with boos and jeers. Somebody lobbed a program down at Abajace. Later that night, as the Kolats ate in a Washington restaurant, strangers came up to tell them how disappointed they had been with the forfeit. One man said he had driven four hours to watch Cary wrestle. "This is why Cary is a little tired of high school wrestling," says Judy.

"He's suffering right now," says Joe, who clearly is suffering too. "He gives up his leg sometimes just to get some excitement out of a match. There's nothing else he can do, really."

Cary does not look all that intimidating. His face is a scrubbed pink, and his dark-blond hair, which he wears spikily short, seems to be permanently damp. At 5' 5", he is shorter than almost all of his opponents. The distance from Kolat's knee to his ankle is unusually short, an anatomical quirk that makes it more difficult for an opponent to get to his legs. For that reason Kolat prefers freestyle, or Olympic-style, wrestling to folk-style, or collegiate, wrestling. His specialty is takedowns. "I do my wrestling with my feet," he says. In his 137 high school matches Kolat escaped 24 times but allowed 364 escapes. Anything to prolong a match.

"I worry about my image," says Kolat. "I used to take people down and let them up. Nobody booed me then. But now I'd look silly doing that. So I train all week to go out and pin somebody."

College has come to look a lot like paradise to Kolat, 18. He has narrowed his choices to Penn State and Minnesota . For now he frets that while he trains with boys, his rivals for the single berth per weight class on the '92 U.S. Olympic team are honing their technique against equals. "I got too far ahead," he says. "I've been at this level for a while. I think about that a lot, and I get paranoid."

In a sense Joe is to blame for his son's predicament. He created this monster. A quiet man who is proud of his impressive, iron-gray walrus moustache, Joe grew up in Chartiers Bottom, four miles from Rices Landing, where the Kolats now live. Hard work was a way of life for Joe and his six younger sisters. Their family vegetable garden covered two acres. Joe is an independent building contractor, and around Greene County his work ethic is the stuff of legend.

Joe works 14-hour days and doesn't believe in a lunch hour. One of Joe's projects was the Econo Lodge near Harris-burg. He completed it a month ahead of schedule, working seven days a week. Some nights he worked until 4 a.m. and slept on the site. "He makes me nervous sometimes, he's such a perfectionist," says his daughter Kim, 24.

For Joe it's not enough to do the work. He must lay obstacles in his own path. So he chain-smokes Lucky Strikes and drinks three or four pots of coffee a day. His arms are scarred from long ago, when he played the game in which two men hold their forearms together and place a lighted cigarette between them, with the first to pull away losing.