Matt Tuthill

Published in the Bennington Banner on February 23, 2008

DIESEL-POWERED: McVAY’s DRIVE DOESN’T STOP AT THE EDGE OF THE WRESTLING MAT

RUTLAND — By the time you’ve figured out where he’s coming from, it’s too late. Matt McVay just killed you, plastering your goggles all shades of red, blue and green – a cruel death in the world of competitive paintball. Don’t feel bad. He’s a master sneak, crawling on his belly for as long he needs to, never making a sound as he gets into position.

Fun and games, it would seem, to anyone who doesn’t know the senior at Mount Anthony Union High School very well. Those that do know that paintball is no mere hobby for him. He plays out each scenario as if it really were a life or death situation, and when he gets you in his sights, you’re a terrorist about to take your last breath.

Parents take heart: McVay is the antithesis of the socially ostracized problem teens that have been known to play out such fantasies in their lunch rooms. He is a picture of well-adjusted youth – a dynamo in the classroom who is on the cusp of claiming his second-straight Vermont state wrestling championship in the 189 pound weight-class for the Patriots. He and his teammates form an historic group poised to win the program’s 20th-straight state title, which would set a new national record.

It is an impressive resume, and has turned McVay into a wrestling recruit at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where he has every intention of being accepted and spending four fruitful years.

Physically, he is an unusual specimen for a high school senior, even by super-jock standards. Thick, round veins wander his shoulders and biceps like tree roots searching for water, and every one of his opponents at this weekend’s state meet in Rutland will be greeted by an understated confidence that would seem light years away from his true destructive potential on the mat, which is evidenced by a career varsity record of 144-32. Eighteen of those losses came in his sophomore year, which was his first on varsity. He went on to lose just seven times in both his junior and senior seasons, and if all goes according to his plan, he won’t be losing again.

As for his obsession with paintball – it’s simply the safest career training he could think of. He has known since the fifth grade that he would one day be a Navy SEAL. Shockingly, it is a desire that has never wavered. Not once in the last eight years did he consider the odds of becoming a SEAL (so named for their combat skills in Sea, Air and Land) to be too long. Likewise, the chances of getting into the ultra-competitive Naval Academy never struck him as too far-fetched.

It makes a bit more sense, however, when you realize that McVay has never been deterred by much of anything, and any setbacks in his life have only served to galvanize his focus.

His interest in guns and guerilla tactics coincided with the birth of his passion for the gym. It started when McVay saw the Rambo movies, and, being a fifth grade boy at the time, he didn’t dismiss them as preposterous. He started thinking career.

“As soon as I heard about it and knew what it was, I knew it was what I wanted to do,” McVay said of being a SEAL, the closest real-life equivalent of Stallone’s invincible war machine.

Around the same time, McVay started gaining weight. They were useful pounds for a lineman-type – McVay was a center for Mount Anthony Union Middle School – but he had already begun reading a memoir by a Navy SEAL and started to realize that peak physical conditioning was the precursor to all his daydreams about hunting the enemy.

It’s hard to imagine that the senior who is announced at home meets as “Diesel” was ever soft around the middle, but like every failing that has come since, he vowed to make it temporary, a stepping stone to self-improvement.

“I was always the kid who finished everything on his plate,” McVay said, explaining how an infomercial for Jackie Chan’s Cable Flex piqued his interest in fitness, and after he convinced his father Kirke to order it, a new love for training was born. By the time he hit seventh grade, the Jackie Chan contraption was replaced by Chuck Norris’ Total Gym. As an eighth-grader, no semblance of the formerly heavy-set boy existed.

“He was tall and gangly with no muscle,” said MAU varsity wrestling head coach Scott Legacy, explaining that the McVay opponents now fear was built over long hours in the gym with free weights. “It wasn’t just because it happened. He made it happen.”

Because he is also a linebacker and defensive end for the varsity football team, McVay’s off-season stretches from March to August. Five days of each of those weeks are spent in the gym. Nearly every waking moment is dedicated to being a better wrestler – and someday a better soldier. Coach Legacy has several times happened upon McVay during these off-season workouts.

“In the summer, he’s always out on the track, running and doing pushups,” Coach Legacy said. “He’s a health freak.”

While personal fitness became a major priority for McVay in junior high, he knew little of wrestling outside of the two years he spent with a youth program in Kindergarten and first grade – which he only joined because his close friend Scott Legacy II, Coach Legacy’s son, was part of the team.

It wasn’t an experience that stuck with McVay. Coach Legacy fondly recalls that his son’s friend was nowhere to be found at the start of some matches when his name was called. (McVay could invariably be tracked down on the playground outside.)

As it has been with everything in his life, his return to wrestling and the start of his successful high school career began with a small failure.

“I went to Sacred Heart my whole life, and I was usually the biggest kid there, so there wasn’t too much competition,” McVay said of his dominance in schoolyard arm-wrestling matches. “I started working out in sixth grade, so the gap grew even further.”

At least until he met Ben D’Agostino in a summer camp at Lake Shaftsbury. The name became branded into McVay’s memory – he would never forget the boy who dealt him his first arm-wrestling loss.

“He said he got real strong from wrestling,” said McVay, recalling that he later asked D’Agostino for his secret.

That was enough for McVay. He joined the MAUMS eighth grade team and hasn’t looked back since, drinking in every moment of pain in the wrestling room as if he were studying for the unprecedented trials that await him in SEAL training.

Navy wrestling and SEAL qualification will likely make McVay look back fondly on his days under Legacy, though the coach’s reputation is anything but soft.

Before those dreams of hunting down terrorists can come to fruition (McVay hasn’t been accepted at the Academy yet) there are the small matters of wrapping up another individual state championship, taking his place in national high school sports history with the rest of his teammates and avenging his 2007 showing at New Englands, where he lost to the eventual champion by a single point.

Just one of those accomplishments would be a major milestone for most, but there is no doubt in McVay’s mind that all of it will happen. When asked if MAU stood any chance of failing in its quest for the record-setting championship, McVay flatly replied, “No.”

That sort of certainty – some would call it naïveté – is something that continues to endear McVay to his teammates and coaches. It also makes for a few good inside jokes amongst friends. After all, what high school kid would pass up a chance to take a crack at the guy whose life was changed by Rambo and infomercials, who considers paintball an art form and who does homework before practice to keep his grades up for Annapolis?

“Even if he gets picked on for it a little, it doesn’t bother him,” Coach Legacy said. “He’s got a stick-to-itiveness, athletically and academically. Setbacks don’t hurt him at all.”

For any jokes there have been, there is quiet admiration, too. Each of his accomplishments is a testimony to his own willpower and his mantra that if someone else has done something, there’s no reason that he can’t do it, too.

“I’m not willing to admit that anyone is that much better than [me],” McVay said.

The persistence that has defined his wrestling career and much of his life will very likely end up getting Matt McVay everything he’s ever wanted in the world – right down to the country house in Vermont where he plans to settle one day, provided he finds enough property to stage large-scale paintball battles.

Coach Legacy chuckled to himself and considered the idea for a moment before saying, “He will.”

From the Bennington Banner, Saturday, February 23, 2008