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By Steve Fraser
was eight or nine years old when I got my first introduction to organized sports. I was the tenth guy on the midget baseball team. Another guy and I alternated playing right field. They always put the scrubs in right field. I hadn't had too much experience with ball games.
When I came up to the plate I was afraid I was going to get hit by the ball. I was also afraid to swing and miss. I always hoped the pitcher would walk me.
I did get a little more coordinated in baseball as I got older. A man my mother dated before she remarried (my mother and father divorced when I was five years old) taught me how to catch one-hop grounders, the kind that bounce right in front of you and shoots up in your face.
But my first faint glimmer of athletic talent became apparent in gym class when I was in the eighth grade.
Wrestling was one of our required activities and I kind of enjoyed it. I was strong because I had lifted a lot of weights in order to have muscular arms like my older sister's boyfriend. While wrestling in gym class, I'd get kids in headlocks. They were actually illegal headlocks that I was using, but I didn't know any better at the time. I squeezed and squeezed because I was pretty strong, and when my opponent quit I figured I was the winner.
The gym teacher and wrestling coach, Frank Stagg, saw that I liked to wrestle and he encouraged me several times to come out for the junior high school team. "Yeah, I'd like to," I told him. But I didn't follow through. Why, I really don't know.
One day as I was standing at my locker between classes when Mr. Stagg came up behind me and grabbed me, right in the middle of the hallway, in a sleeper hold, you know, a kind of chokehold around the neck. Lifting me off the ground, he was careful not to hurt me. But as you know, a chokehold isn't exactly like shaking hands. "Steve," he said in my ear - still choking me a little bit - "I want to see you at practice tonight!" Of course I didn't have any choice but to say, "Okay."
I wasn't really surprised that Frank had grabbed me like that. He had a special way of relating to kids. He was a teacher who cared, and he represented everything that was right in the school system. In those few moments, as he was simultaneously choking me and caring about me, he changed the direction of my life. If he had not given me that extra little push, I might never have gone out for wrestling.
I wasn't nearly as good as the other wrestlers at Webb Junior High. I wasn't even the No. 2 man in my weight division, and I didn't make the team. I wrestled only one match for the varsity that year at 126 pounds. But I loved the sport immediately. I liked the training, and I liked the combat. The physicalness of it was exhilarating to me.
Frank was a great teacher and motivator and he knew how to get you in shape. One day after we wrestled in practice, did our drills and ran up and down stairs until we were ready to drop, I told Frank, "Mr. Stagg, I just love this sport. I love to sweat."
He got a kick out of the fact that I loved to sweat. I also loved wrestling because it was so manly, so basic and so primitive. Grappling is the oldest sport known to man, the origins going back 15,000 years. Some people say running was the first sport. But we wrestlers know that the runner was probably running from a wrestler!
Being tough was rewarding to me. If you're a good baseball player, you're good on the field. But if you're a good wrestler, you can carry that with you all the time. Baseball players, like hockey players or tennis players use other artifacts, such as bats and sticks and rackets to assert their supremacy. But a wrestler has only the most primitive tools available: his legs, his body and his arms and hands. If you're a tough wrestler, you're tough, period. People don't mess around with you.
Lacking a father figure, I had spent my childhood searching for something to fill that void. I was attracted to manliness. And because my mother had brought me up, I rebelled against the possibility that might become a mama's boy. In wrestling, I knew I could be tough. Even as a 13-year-old I could appreciate that.
In Frank Stagg I found my first male influence who represented discipline, morality and success. Frank wasn't a harsh man, but he was firm in his beliefs. He emphasized human kindness and he took a firm hand against smoking, drinking and using drugs. Frank caught me smoking once, right after the eighth-grade season. I was with my girlfriend; a cute girl named Colleen who smoked and was well-liked by a lot of guys. She was just as rough as the neighborhood we came from. I was walking home from school with her one day, holding her hand, a cigarette dangling from my lips, when Frank drove by and saw me.
"So you're smoking, huh?" he said, the next time he saw me. I knew he was upset with me but he never condemned me for what I had done. Frank ran the lunch line at school, and for the next month he frisked me every day looking for cigarettes. I'm happy to say he never found any because I had already stopped smoking. His opinion of me meant more to me than cigarettes.
The summer after eighth grade, I started to go through a growth spurt, and the effects of the weight lifting I had done as a sixth grader were suddenly apparent in my strong muscular arms. When I went out for the wrestling team as a ninth grader, I weighed 145 pounds. Seniority, experience, hard work and my new build helped me earn a starting role in my weight class, and I had a very good year. I lost my first match to a tough, muscular kid, but I went undefeated the rest of the year, finishing with a 16-1 record. I won the Little Oak League title at my weight, and I received my first medal ever.
Today, after almost 28 years of coaching myself, I think that sometimes coaches and teachers don't always realize the great impact they have on our kids. Although very rewarding, our jobs at times can seem thankless and immaterial.
To Mr. Frank Stagg and all the other great people who work with our young kids, I'm here to say, "keep the faith and stay on track". Believe me, you are making a difference. No matter what level you are at, know that you are affecting our kids positively. Keep up the good work and thank you for a job well done!
(Steve Fraser was the 1984 Olympic champion at 198 pounds in Los Angeles - which made him the first Greco-Roman gold medalist in American history. He was the 1983 Pan-American Games gold medalist, a two-time Greco-Roman national champion and 1984 freestyle national champion. He is currently the national Greco-Roman coach at USA Wrestling.)
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