Fit to die

Cigarettes and sex have had a long, casual relationship. Rhode Island College wrestler Jimmy Quinn was in the best shape of his life. Is that what killed him?

by Jody Ericson

The metaphor for Jimmy Quinn's life was stunningly simple: he wrestled with demons. Struggling hand to hand with an opponent and throwing him to the ground, the young wrestler channeled the anger and anxiety that lingered from a troubled childhood into a sport he loved like no other. And he learned, as he did in life, that the only way he could win was to rise to his feet one more time -- a philosophy Jimmy embraced until last October, when, short of breath after a three-mile training run with his teammates, he collapsed and died on the campus of Rhode Island College.

Jimmy's story is a glimpse of rarely talked about weight-loss problems that plague many athletes, but wrestlers in particular. There is a quest for physical perfection among wrestlers, an unmistakable psychological component of the sport. Harking back to ancient Greece, wrestling is the purest form of athleticism -- your strength against someone else's. And this is part of the compulsion, the ultimate test of how you measure up as a man.

In Jimmy's case, he was a kid who already had problems. At the age of 12, he left his mother's home in Providence for a school in New Hampshire for youth with behavioral problems. From there, he went to several group homes in supervised settings before landing a place of his own his senior year in high school.

With brown eyes and light brown hair he shaved off during wrestling season, the young Jimmy was a troublemaker, a 13-year-old kid who bought a BB gun with his first paycheck from a job at New England Frozen Lemonade and then, according to his mother, shot someone in the face with it. A wiseass who had an answer for everything, he drew friends to him as much as his in-your-face style pushed others away.

But when Jimmy found wrestling his sophomore year at Providence's Hope High School, Jimmy found everything. A sport that some consider more physically demanding than any other, wrestling gave him goals and something at which he excelled. Determined to "make weight" to qualify for competition, he lost the baby fat and pimples of his awkward teenage years and took on the chiseled features of an adult, his muscles unnaturally bulging for a kid his age.

Jimmy, whose father died when he was a junior in high school, thrived under the sport's intense mental demands. He was more focused and driven than any of his teammates. "Jimmy wanted to be a state champion, and he took fourth place his senior year in high school," says Dennis J. Maroney, who volunteered to help coach Jimmy and his teammates at Hope. "Those three kids who beat him that year, they probably had three square meals a day and their clothes folded when they went home at night. So even without the title, Jimmy really was a champion."

But, as with any passion, Jimmy took wrestling too far at times, knowing that, in order to succeed, he constantly needed to push himself. Only the extremely disciplined can shed enough pounds to compete in a weight class lower than their bodies are designed for, which gives them a size advantage over their opponents. And Jimmy was one of them.

But at some point, his desire to make weight and win turned into an obsession that put him at risk in high school and probably killed him last October, when Jimmy, 23 and in his junior year at Rhode Island College, died of what the state Medical Examiners Office describes as "cardiac arrhythmia occurring after vigorous exercise and associated with a clinical history of electrolyte imbalance, dehydration and anemia."

According to Peggy Martin, Jimmy's mother, that "clinical history" stems from an incident during her son's junior year at Hope. Without informing his coach, Jimmy decided to lose weight in order to drop to a lower weight class. "He was not eating and was jogging in the shower with plastic bags on," says Martin, who adds that her son also hesitantly admitted that he was taking Dexitrim.

Fortunately, Jimmy was found out before he went too far -- a doctor diagnosed the 17-year-old's irregular heartbeat after Jimmy was rushed to the hospital for a concussion he received during a match. Martin says the doctor blamed her son's condition on a combination of things, among them dehydration -- the quickest but also most deadly way to lose weight, as the heart, deprived of fluids, must work overtime to pump blood.

Scared for her son, Martin made him promise never to go to such lengths again. To this day, she believes that he kept his word, and wonders whether his heart was so weak from the first incident that it couldn't handle even normal amounts of exercise and stress. It is a question she will probably struggle with for the rest of her life.

Sitting at her kitchen table in her tiny yellow house in Cranston, Martin and her daughter, Jennifer Quinn, can't help but note that what probably killed Jimmy was what he loved the most -- a fact that is less ironic than a reflection of the pressure put on some athletes to maintain their weight at any cost. According to a report put out by ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc.), a nonprofit associated with the National Eating Disorders Organization that maintains a Web site at www.anred.com, several studies suggest that participants in sports that emphasize appearance and a lean body (horse racing, gymnastics, running, dancing, etc.) are at higher risk for developing eating disorders than non-athletes or those who play football or other sports that require muscle mass and bulk.

One study of 695 male and female athletes found myriad examples of bulimic attitudes and behavior -- a third were preoccupied with food, about one quarter binged at least once a week, and 15 percent thought they were overweight when they weren't. Also, about 12 percent feared losing control, and actually did, when they ate.

"In a sense, eating and exercise disorders are diets and fitness or sports programs gone horribly wrong," says a report on ANRED's Web site. "A person wants to lose weight, get fit, excel in his or her sport, but then loses control. What may have begun as a solution to problems of low self-esteem has now become an even bigger problem in its own right."

The ANRED report takes special note of wrestlers, saying that, like people with eating disorders, they have unrealistic expectations and "drive themselves beyond fatigue.

"No one expects to die as a consequence of weight loss," the report says, "but it happens." Indeed, during a 32-day period in 1997, three wrestlers from three different colleges -- the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, and North Carolina's Campbell University -- died trying to cut weight with such drastic tactics as wearing rubber suits while exercising in a steamed-filled shower room and then depriving themselves of liquids to replenish those they lost through sweating.

Dr. Robert Oppliger, an adjunct researcher in the graduate program in physical therapy at the University of Iowa's College of Medicine, has written extensively about wrestling and has studied weight-related issues for more than a decade. When told of the Jimmy Quinn case, he says it bears a "striking" resemblance to the three other deaths two years ago. Indeed, all four wrestlers died of heart problems after an intense bout of exercise, and all were under pressure to lose weight within days.

According to Jerry Shellard, the athletic trainer at RIC, Jimmy had weighed in for the season two weeks before he died. And thanks to new rules passed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in response to those three deaths in '97, this initial "weigh-in" is crucial, essentially dictating in what class someone can compete for the rest of the year.

The way it works is that, in addition to obtaining a wrestler's weight, body-fat measurements are taken from three different spots on his body. As a rule, the NCAA requires a minimum of 5 percent body fat as the lowest possible weight at which someone can compete, and this figure dictates the amount of pounds a wrestler is allowed to lose over the ensuing eight-week period, which usually amounts to no more than a pound to a pound and a half a week.

In Jimmy's case, he hoped to wrestle in the 149-pound class, says Shellard, but during the October weigh-in, the scales tipped at 155. That meant that if Jimmy wanted to stay in the 149-pound class (some said he was considering moving up to 158) he would've had to lose about a pound or less a week for the next eight.

That may not sound like much, but consider this: one friend says Jimmy told him he weighed about 168. If that's true, then he somehow lost as many as 13 pounds for the day of the test. Dehydrated and rundown, he would've been in serious trouble if he'd then tried to tackle the pound-a-week regimen.

"If you dehydrate before that initial body-fat test, you can come in five to 10 pounds lower," says Dr. Oppliger.

And if a wrestler doesn't rehydrate himself after this, he's at risk. "It's cumulative -- if you dehydrate 2 percent of your body fat today and don't rehydrate tomorrow, it continues the process," Oppliger explains. Worse, once you cross the line to the point of collapse, "it's virtually impossible to bring you back. There's a cascade of shutdowns in your body."

Jimmy was more determined than ever to get in shape for the season, one that friends say was probably his last. The year before, he'd "red-shirted," or taken the year off from sports to pull up his grades, and over the summer of '98 he trained hard, running three to five miles a day and dropping by Shellard's office for advice on how to trim down.

"He'd ask things like, `If I cook something this way, will it have less calories?' " says Shellard. "Things like taking the skin off chicken, light dressing on salads, and whether Gatorade was too concentrated and should be diluted with water."

But Jimmy also was asking a lot of questions about the NCAA's new rules. And, curiously, Shellard says the young wrestler's concerns didn't send up any red flags that he might be losing weight in ways more extreme than the NCAA allowed. Indeed, even after the sudden death of the three college wrestlers two years ago, those involved in the sport don't appear as proactive about weight-loss problems as they could be. Among some, there is downright denial that the process is at all dangerous. Says Sam Berenson, a former teammate and a good friend of Jimmy's, "I've never come close to dying, and I've lost 14 pounds in a week."

And it is this type of attitude that concerns sports psychologists -- if athletes are so determined to win that they'd deliberately hurt themselves (an ESPN special feature called "The Weight Debate, Sports by the Pound" cited one example of a wrestler who actually punched himself in the nose to drain what little liquid he had left in his body), they'll find a way around the rules.

"Young athletes think they're invincible," says Aleta Walther, one of Chicago's pioneer women jockeys from the late '70s and early '80s. Among other things, Walther sat in a "hot box" and starved herself for days in order to make weight. Now living in California, she says it never dawned on her then that she was at risk -- even as she abused diuretics a friend obtained from his vet ("he lied and said they were for his dog," she says) and even as she stared into the gaunt faces of other jockeys, whose teeth were stained yellow with the stomach acid associated with purging.

"You can pick up drastic weight loss," says Shellard. But, obviously, nobody picked up on what was happening to Jimmy. After he collapsed in front of RIC's recreation center last October and left in an ambulance, some of his teammates went over to his locker and made a shocking discovery -- inside was a container of an over-the-counter appetite suppressant.

Sadly, friends say, right before Jimmy died, everything was coming together for him. Maroney, who met Jimmy during his senior year at Hope, still marvels at how his young friend managed to juggle everything. Staying in his own apartment in a state-run, independent-living facility in Providence's Wayland Square, Jimmy used to bum rides from Maroney after practice at Hope. Driving to Jimmy's night job, at a pizza joint just around the corner from where he lived, the two talked about themselves and their passion for wrestling. "Jimmy would not let you not know him," says Maroney.

Approaching life as aggressively as he would an opponent on the mat, "he drove everybody nuts in a good way," says Jen Marsella, a friend from RIC. She says that Jimmy was considered the unofficial mayor of Rhode Island College and that, despite a hectic schedule of classes, work, and wrestling practice, he always made time for friends.

Jimmy did what he had to to make ends meet, learning the asbestos-removal trade, bouncing at the Providence nightclubs Centerfolds and the Living Room, and living with Berenson for a time above a funeral home on Broadway. The rent was cheap and the place was gorgeous, says Berenson. "Jimmy and I helped out with funeral services, moved bodies, and painted the guy's house.

"People can't forget that a good amount of wrestlers from RIC come from low-income families," says Berenson, one of the team's former captains. "You got to wrestle, make weight, and support yourself."

But if anyone could do it, friends thought, it was Jimmy. Dubbing himself "The Mighty Quinn" in wrestling, he had boundless energy and ambition, filling a scrapbook of his with newspaper clippings of his wins and always underlining his name so it wouldn't be missed. More important, Jimmy found a family among his teammates, an intense camaraderie that buoyed him.

"Once you're a wrestler, you're always a wrestler," says Maroney. The sport "instills manly and sportsmanlike behavior. Two men can go out on a mat and do their best and not get hurt." And they can test their strength in other ways as well, namely by not giving their opponent the advantage in weight. That way, the two competitors are equally paired, and what wins out is the grace and beauty of wrestling.

To achieve this goal, "You have to be in a zone flat-out for the six months of the season," says Berenson. "Not many people can say they've done that."

But put that kind of pressure on a young man who had as much on his plate as Jimmy, and the sport could turn from a healthy ambition into something else. And this isn't something that just affects male athletes. Aleta Walther, the jockey from California, recalls how her anxiety about being a woman rider in the '70s erupted into her terrible obsession with her weight. And the longer she stayed in horse racing, the more intense this obsession became.

"I was more physically fit and healthier in the beginning," she says. "But the more involved I became, the worse I was eating." And the more she abused diuretics and "flipped," or vomited, her food, a practice another jockey had taught her.

Every morning, Walther "woke up and ran to the scale," she says -- until she finally quit one day after falling off her horse in a haze of fatigue. "I finally came to my senses . . . and said, `I have to live another 50 years after this, and I am not going to abuse myself any longer.' "

Wrestling officials have attempted to address irresponsible weight loss. Shellard says the new rules don't just dictate weight guidelines. "What they try to do is teach kids to gradually lose weight so they're not starving themselves," he says.

Also, the college has always made the wrestlers weigh in and out at every practice, and the athletes are tested for dehydration along with their body fat, to make sure they aren't depriving themselves of fluids.

Still, although RIC will bench a wrestler for losing too much weight too fast, there are no hard penalties attached to the new NCAA rules, and Shellard admits college officials cannot be everywhere at all times. "If a kid has his apartment's heat at 95 degrees and is exercising in trash bags, we can't do anything," he says.

Worse, even under the watchful eye of a coach or trainer, a wrestler can find ways around the new rules. The dehydration test, for instance, is not foolproof, says Oppliger. "It's very individualized -- I could go in and pass the test and you could fail, even though we dehydrated at the same level."

So according to Oppliger and ANRED, change needs to go beyond the current rules -- a seismic shift in attitudes must occur as well. "What's going on has been going on for decades, so to change behavior is difficult," says Oppliger. "All the coaches have been brought up on `You're supposed to cut weight.' It's going to take a while, just like the process of someone who enters drug rehab and thinks they don't consume too much alcohol."

Jean Rubel, president of ANRED, says she'd like to see a campaign similar to the one waged by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD). "In less than a decade, they changed our perception of drunken [driving] from something cool and hip to something that is scorned," she says.

Of course, for the wrestlers at Rhode Island College, nothing could serve as more of a wake-up call than the death of their fellow teammate, Jimmy Quinn. At his wake, more than 500 names filled the guest book, and the lines to see him were so long that some people left before their turn.

The following day, after cramming into St. Paul's Church in Cranston, the mourners emerged into a late October sun. "I remember walking out of the church -- I couldn't see hardly," says Jen Marsella, Jimmy's friend from RIC. "I looked up and the sky was blue."

Marsella remembers thinking that maybe Jimmy was okay now -- at peace with himself. And since then, whenever she looks up and sees that same brilliant blue, she tells herself, "It's a Jimmy sky." It is the way she wants to remember him.

Jody Ericson can be reached at jericson[a]phx.com.