Marcotulli and Lowe discuss hairy chests and 'Bicep Fridays'

Recently, Daily Princetonian senior writer Sofia Mata-Leclerc sat down with a pair of wrestlers, junior Eric Marcotulli and sophomore Logan Lowe, to discuss singlets, superheroes and Ryan Foss.

Daily Princetonian: How is the wrestling team looking this season?

Eric Marcotulli: I think we're looking pretty good. We've got [senior] Jake Butler, ranked in the country and returning NCAA qualifier. Our goal for the season is to have every one of our wrestlers choke someone out. We keep track of that.

Logan Lowe: Yeah, we've got a lot of seniors in the lineup and a couple good freshmen in the lower weights.

DP: What's the best thing about wearing a singlet?

LL: Showing off your hairy chest.

EM: Well, first of all, we have a bunch of different singlets, and some of them are not so sweet. Some of them are neon orange and have tiger stripes that come around across the chest, as if you're in a tiger costume. So that's not cool.

LL: [Junior Jesse] Palermo thinks his abs look great in those.

EM: Yeah, Palermo loves those singlets. And then we got some new ones last year that basically make us look like a middle school wrestling team, which is real nice.

DP: How do they make you look like a middle school wrestling team?

EM: They're just really simple singlets. I'm pretty sure they came from the little kids' wrestling program. We have a little kids' wrestling program called PAWS, and I'm pretty sure our coach just stole them from there.

LL: We also always manage to lose all the medium and small singlets, so our lower weights are in baggy singlets with their armpits hanging out.

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EM: Yeah, it looks like they're wearing overalls.

DP: Who is the coolest superhero?

EM: Ooh, we have this conversation all the time.

LL: Yeah, I'm going to go with Superman, hands down. I'm a big Smallville fan. He can do just about everything. What's there not to like about him?

EM: Okay, so there's this series called Dragonball Z, and there's this guy named Goku on there, and we always have this debate about whether Goku could beat Superman, and I think he can.

DP: In practice, what's your favorite exercise?

LL: Nothing that involves an animal in the name, which rules out Monkey Rolls, Bear Crawls ...

EM: The Wounded Dog. Our coaches get pretty creative with our conditioning.

DP: So Eric, how many bicep curls do you do a week?

EM: Well, I do them only once a week, but when I do them I do ...

LL: Four million reps.

EM: Ten exercises, three sets, 10 reps each time. What's 30 times 10 ... 300? We have 'Bicep Fridays,' so anyone who wants to work on their biceps comes to the gym on Friday.

DP: Eric, I hear you have an unorthodox wrestling style?

EM: Oh gee. Well, I would first like to start off by saying that I'm extremely lazy, so I guess my wrestling style reflects that I don't like to work hard — which I don't know if you should put that in there, but it's nothing my coaches don't already know. So I'm a really defensive wrestler, and when you're a defensive wrestler you have to learn really scrappy moves, and I happen to be flexible so my knees bend in funny ways and I do a lot of flips and rolls and stuff. Every once in a while, I score points from it, which is cool, too.

LL: As a byproduct.

EM: One of my friends used to call it 'The Funk.'

DP: Speaking of nicknames, do you have any?

LL: Logi Bear is an oldie but goodie. And a more recent development is the Hebrew Hammer, which was coined after I attempted to slam-dunk a dodgeball on [senior] Ryan Foss's head.

EM: Yeah, we play some pretty heated dodgeball tournaments.

DP: Logan, I hear you like to sing karaoke?

LL: Over spring break last year we were down in Florida in a karaoke bar. Everyone was keeping it pretty social, and I decided to go from zero to 60 in about 15 minutes, got up there, did my best Backstreet Boys rendition and followed that up with a duet with one of my teammate's younger sister — of Evanesence — and got thrown off for yelling into the microphone.

DP: Great, now let's do some free association: Coach [Greg] New.

EM: Crazy.

LL: Viking.

EM: Pirate.

LL: Ooh, pirate. I like that.

DP: [Senior] Matt Denichilo's Halloween costume this year.

EM: Oh, the greased-up deaf guy from "Family Guy" — a lot of people tried to tackle him, and a lot of people succeeded. Strange.

LL: Typical of Matt.

EM. Vaseline. I'm not a big fan of covering myself in Vaseline.

DP: Street Fighter.

EM: Ooh, M. Bison.

LL: Sonic Boom. Eric is an excellent Street Fighter II player. He used to brag that he went years without losing a game.

EM: Decades. That's a fact.

DP: What's 'The Pump?'

EM: Have you ever seen "Pumping Iron?" It's a pseudo-documentary of the last time Arnold won the Mr. Olympia competition ...

LL: Truly inspirational.

EM: ... So Arnold is explaining when you're lifting weights, blood rushes to your muscles, and it fills up your muscles, so the more you lift you get 'The Pump,' which is when your muscle swells up. 'The Pump' is an enjoyable experience.

LL: It's definitely a rush.

DP: Could you talk a little bit about the team's coaching staff?

EM: Yeah, there's Coach New. First of all, he sleeps two hours a night. If you go to the WaWa at 4 a.m., he'll be there buying milk because that's what he does. He talks like a pirate. He doesn't really talk in coherent sentences. A lot of our practices are head nodding.

And then we have an assistant coach, Ryan Bonfiglio. He holds the current world record for pull-ups in an hour. He has things called "Meathead Miracles" that he does. He did like 1,000 push-ups in an hour, and he recently ran a marathon in which each of his miles was under seven minutes, which is just absurd. He was running with the Ethiopians, and he's like a 175-pound wrestler.

Then there is [assistant coach] Cameron Plocus. He's obsessed with Batman and calls his house the bat cave.

We have a new addition to our staff this year, Joe Jamison. I don't really know how to characterize him — he teaches third grade. He thinks adult books are boring, so he only reads kids' books.

LL: Joe told us that teachers prefer Guiness to apples.

EM: Yeah, so we're not like [traditional NCAA wrestling powerhouses] Iowa or Oklahoma State who go in the room and try to murder each other.

LL: We like to have a good time.

DP: What did you think of the Nassau Weekly's recent issue devoted to teammate Ryan Foss?

LL: Wow, it's close to genius, but they left out a few [stories]. Can we use this opportunity to fill some of the blanks from that article?

DP: Uh, sure.

LL: So this is on the same spring break trip that I did my karaoke for. We went out to a club in Tampa one night, dancing around, and me and one of my other teammates were dancing with a group of girls. Ryan Foss sees us dancing with these girls, and instead of approaching us like a normal person would, he decides to climb up a flight of stairs that happen to be right next to where we're dancing, at which point he dives on to one of the girl's backs, puts her in a Sleeper Hold and drops her right on the floor.

EM: And by 'drops her right on the floor,' he means he actually passed her out. Foss came out as a really good person in the Nass article, but it's usually when he gets a little fired up that [problems occur]. Foss is also a Facebook.com animal. I once witnessed that he tried to befriend random girls from other schools like from Arizona State and USC, and he couldn't add any more friends. It said that he had too many friend requests pending. I don't think that's a Facebook message that anyone else has ever received.

DP: Any other interesting stories you would care to share?

EM: Last year when we took a trip to North Dakota, [senior] Tim Prugar was supposed to make weight, and we were at the match, running sprints before we had to make weight. We were warming up, and he managed to somehow hurt his ankle, and as soon as he was hurt, the first thing he yelled after he screamed was, 'Gatorade, Gatorade.'

LL: Yeah, he starts waving over the food.

EM: As they were carting him out to take him to the hospital, he passes through the lobby that had all our food for after weigh-ins. He calls our trainer over and is like, 'Oh, Natalie, could you please get me a bagel, two Gatorades and some oranges, please?' So that was the big joke, Prugar injured his ankle. And this past weekend ...

LL: Lightning struck twice. Prugar went down with another ankle injury.

EM: This is probably one of Prugar's last competitions. He had been hyping it up and had been making a joke all week about how he was going to leave his shoes on the mat. It's typical of a really famous wrestler at the end of his career to leave his shoes out on the mat.

The ironic thing is that he actually did leave his shoes on the mat. He was winning his match, and he tweaked his ankle, and after a few vulgarities, they removed his shoe so he could get to his ankle — so they left his shoe out on the mat.