RUMMY MEETS HIS MATCH.(Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's college wrestling match)

Every March, on the occasion of the N.C.A.A. wrestling championships, serious matmen abandon their desks and their wives for a few days and gather to reminisce about rapid weight loss and sweaty entanglements on the plasticcovered horsehair. At this year's tournament, in Kansas City, the sport's elder statesmen had a particular lanky old grappler on their minds: Don Rumsfeld. Fifty years earlier, as a Princeton undergraduate, Rumsfeld, who is now, of course, the Secretary of Defense, fought a match that is legendary among wrestlers not so much for what it augured about a career in public service or a style of conducting Pentagon briefings as for what it said about the man as a wrestler.

"It was in 1953, the Eastern Intercollegiates, at Princeton, and the weight class was a hundred and fifty-seven pounds,"Phil Harvey, a Class of '55 wrestler for Cornell, recalled. "Everybody assumed that in the finals our Ken Hunt, who had had an undefeated season for Cornell, would meet a kid from Syracuse named Ed Rooney. But in the semis, lo and behold, Don Rumsfeld knocked Rooney out of the tournament. It was a huge upset."

Among his Princeton teammates, Rumsfeld had earned a reputation for quick takedowns. He was an avid practitioner of the fireman's carry. ("You actually picked the man up off the mat, like a fireman carrying somebody out of a house,"Harvey said. "And then there was this spinning motion you'd do, where you'd chuck him over your head and bring him down to the mat.”) But, amid the tougher competition at the Easterns, Rumsfeld stood out for his superior conditioning and his fierce determination; he was relentless, a bulldog.

Ed Rooney was what is known as a leg wrestler, attempting to tie his opponents up below the waist and then overpower them. At Dillon Gym that day, Rumsfeld, cheered on by his friends from the Cap & Gown eating club, shrewdly kept his distance. Ed Rooney has since died, but his son, Jim, who made the pilgrimage to Kansas City in his stead, recalled, "My father fell behind in that match and was trying to catch up. And basically he spent the last three minutes chasing Don Rumsfeld all over the mat.”

Final score: Rumsfeld 6, Rooney 4.

The championship bout took place later that night, with Rumsfeld, in his orange-and-black togs, squaring off against Ken Hunt. "I'd sort of forgotten about it until Rooney's son contacted me,"Hunt said the other day, from his home, in North Carolina. "The gym was packed--people were right down on the mats, almost like the kids at Duke basketball games. ...