Jim Phills

When Winthrop's Gregory Urrutia went scramblng for a loose puck during an intramural ice hockey match against Kirkland the other night, he didn't expect to emerge from the corner with a separated shoulder. Then again, he didn't expect to bump into Jim Phills.

"Separated? Are you serious?" asked Harvard's surprised heavyweight wrestler, when informed of the damage he'd done. Articulate and affable, composed and contemplative, Jim Phills--currently ranked fourth nationally, a three-time Harvard MVP and a three-time Eastern place winner--may still be unaware of his own strength.

All-Around Hulk

Indeed, as an athlete, Phills regards himself as something other than a hulking specimen of brute force. Drafted by a junior professional hockey team in Canada when he was sixteen, a former high school football star, a competition-class water skier and a three-year member of Harvard's rugby team, Phills qualifies and an all-around athlete.

While most Harvard sport-goers would expect Phills to have worn wresting tights at birth, he didn't don his first pair until his second year in high school. More surprisingly, Harvard didn't even recruit him for wrestling.

Only six years ago, Phills had been playing hockey for both his school and a Montreal city team when the imposition of a rule forced him to drop one of his hockey affiliations. Trying to maintain some school spirit, Phills decided to wrestle for Lower Canada College (LCC). "Wrestling in my high school was for all the rejects from hockey and basketball," Phills recalls. "The guys on the team told me to come out because they needed a heavyweight."

With only a short period of training, Phills produced a banner season in his first year on the mats, claiming the city championship. At that time, hockey was still his prime interest, but wrestling began to occupy more and more of his time and effort. Along with other LCC teammates, Phills ventured to a local training gym to learn from a European coach. There, the future Harvard superstar began to develop the form and the attitude that have carried him to the top of the American wrestling scene.

While under the twenty-one year age limit, Phills wrestled for the Canadian National Junior Team in four successive summers, claiming gold medals at the Pan American Junior Championships in 1979 and 1980.

Playful, easy-going and often grinning before his matches, Phills' apparent nonchalance towards wrestling would seem to bely the intensity needed to chalk up as impressive a record as he has at Harvard (six regular season losses in four years). Despite the ease with which he turns his less-conditioned, though larger opponents, wrestling at Harvard hasn't been without pitfalls for Phills.

"I was used to training with Olympic wrestlers in Canada," Phills says. "But here, wrestling is just an extracurricular activity." Not practicing with wrestlers capable of beating him regularly has cost him, adds the Kirkland House resident.

Jim also had to abandon the "free style" wrestling techniques practiced in Canada and learn American collegiate wrestling--which forces the wrestlers to compete from the mat as well as from their feet--when he joined the Crimson forces.

"Mat wrestling is grant wrestling," Phills quips, commenting on his preference--and talent--for tackling his rivals from the standing position. "There's art in taking a person down," he says.

Indeed, Phills has mastered the art of taking down the much larger opponents so well that he, at only 215 pounds, wrestles in the unlimited heavyweight class. However, Phills finds that his opponents' sizes are not the major factors. "Style and skill are the keys to beating the bigger opponents," says Phills, expressing the confidence and courage required to take on 300-plus-lb. Goliaths.

But for Phills, winning doesn't easily assuage some of the fundamental problems of athletics in a competitive academic environment. "Harvard is a very difficult place to be a national class athlete because of the time demands academically and because there's a subtle--sometimes not so subtle--tendency to discourage athletic excellence here," he says.

"Once you go outside Ivy competition and you excel, there's danger that as an athlete of national caliber you may give the impression that Harvard is compromising the academic standards for its athletes," he adds. Phills cites Harvard's refusal to allow wrestlers a chance to work out in the gym during the off-season as an example of the university's attempt "to discourage athletic professionalism."

If anything, Jim Phills is one athlete not likely to compromise Harvard's academic tradition. As a sophomore-standing student, Phills completed his A.B. degree in Psychology magna cum laude last year, and is now completing his Master's degree in Experimental Psychopathology.

"Academics are my first priority here," he says, though he openly admits "there's a limit as to how much training I'll compromise."

Before Phills applies to medical school, however, there remain a few more tasks to be completed on the mat. The heavyweight champ hopes to retain his number-one ranking at this weekend's Eastern Wrestling Championships at Lehigh University, and earn a trip to the Nationals next month in Oklahoma City. Next year, he hopes to represent Canada in the 1984 Olympics.

Although Phills will assuredly someday trade in his wrestling tights for a lab cost, his heart will remain close to the sport. "When I'm a chubby old doctor at Mass. General I'll probably still come over here and work out," he says.

Indeed, Jim Phills' philosophy on wrestling closely resembles his upbeat philosophy on life. "When you triumph, you get a feeling of personal satisfaction. Wrestling is an art. Although you want to win and do well in competition, a more important goal is to improve yourself, to teach yourself, and to grow to says.