Coach Koll was more than a wrestling coach, and I sometimes feel that I learned more than my teammates did from Coach Bill Koll.
When it comes to actual wrestling, that has to be true. When I went out for the team, I knew nothing compared to almost everyone already on the team.
When there are 30 guys in the room, 25 who are great, four who are very good, and one who walked on and never wrestled varsity in high school (something I never told anyone ‘til AFTER I graduated), the walk-on had to learn more than everyone else.
For me, it was like this: Suppose you were a trying out for the Yankees, and you were being coached by Casey Stengel, and you were in the locker room with the Babe and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. How the heck would you feel?
Jerry Villecco, a Jersey legend, talked me into walking on my junior year (I guess he needed another Jersey guy on the team). And since he was bigger than life to me, I did it.
Long term: It was the smartest move I ever made. Short term: the stupidest.
The first three weeks were the toughest three weeks physically I had ever had in my life. I had black and blue marks all over me, as I was not used to the kind of physical pounding that occurred.
But Coach never cut anyone. He figured if you can hang in the room, you could stay. (As tough and mean as he was in the room, he was as kind in other things.)
It was a Koll idea: Given enough freedom, you will compete and learn from those around you.
I did not have a locker in the locker room when I first walked on. But one day, Coach Andy Matter called me over and said I was in the main locker room. I did the math, and probably 20 people had fallen away.
(As a point of note, I notice our current wrestling room has thinned from where it was at the start of the year, and that is probably a product of the level up you see when you go to a match.)
Years later, I realized that using people who are better than you to challenge yourself is the best way to make any and your life successful.
People who read my column at www.AccuWeather.com Pro will often see me bring up competitors of ours in a flattering way. There are a lot of great talents in the field of weather, and I look at them as reasons to push myself.
It is no different than when I used to go a round of takedowns with Coach Matter every day after practice for my last two years. (That st
ory is more gory than it is of glory.)
Coach Matter had no problem with taking on all comers. He loved to “play” wrestling the same way someone may want to play a game of hoops. Interestingly enough, I see that with the coaching staff today.
I go over to the room just to sit and think, and Casey Cunningham, Cody Sanderson and Cael Sanderson will sometimes be in there just rolling around. If someone shows up…look out.
(I quickly made sure Casey knew I am retired. He is in the Top 5 as far as toughest top position people I have ever seen in that room. I would love to see a round robin of Casey Cunningham, Andy Matter, and Jerry White in top positions.)
I took Coach Koll’s wrestling coaching class as an elective. And one day, he explained why wrestling was truly America’s sport. I wish I had a tape of it.
America was the only country that understood the idea of freedom leading to excellence, he said. But the main lesson was this: The rise of the individual leads to the rise of those around him. This assumes, of course, that those around him want to win and have the freedom to compete.
The team is the Constitution and the coach is the president, because he sets the tone.
Here is how he would explain it:
Person A lives in a town and makes widgets. He employed only one worker at first but employs dozens now that he is the Widget King. (Back in those days, they used to talk about widgets all of the time.)
The whole town is benefitting from the Widget King’s success. People who want to be employed are employed, and he makes a profit.
On the other side of town is another guy who thinks he can make widgets better. So he challenges the Widget King. Pretty soon he is employing more people, and the quality of the widget improves. Now the whole town is the widget capital of the world.
But what if someone said they could not make those widgets, or made it so they could not turn a profit off the widget? Why then would they do anything? (Here he would point out the problem with communism). It took away incentive to excel.
He then tied it into the team. As “president,” he had a certain philosophy that said we would be in better shape than anyone, and take the match to our opponents.
He would show us the moves, but we had to perfect it. We had to do the work on our own if we wanted to excel. In addition, we would find ways to butt heads against the guys you wanted to be better than. We had the freedom to train ourselves.
But he would tie all that in and make a civics lesson out of it.
If it was good enough for a three-time national champion, an Olympian and one of the first men on the beach in Normandy, it was good enough for me.
Koll always felt that a winner wanted to be challenged. My first two years on the team he hardly said boo to me. (One time he asked me if I liked basketball because I looked like one the way I was getting bounced up and down off the mat.) But my senior year, he rode me without mercy.
He was always a nice guy in the office, so I asked him what was going on. He said, “Joe, you weren’t worth anything before, but you worked so darn hard to get where you are, I figured I should help you.”
Within the realm of his “country,” I used the freedom he gave me to put myself in a position where he would pay attention. He was going to help in his way.
It was civics lesson that no course at PSU could possibly teach.
I simply don’t know what my life would have been without PSU wrestling, Coach Koll and Andy Matter and the rest of the people I wrestled with. That is scarier than thinking about what might happen tomorrow.
I don’t know if Amy (one of Coach Koll’s children) remembers this, but she came up to me at a tailgate before a PSU game once and said this: “My dad loves when you are on TV. He starts laughing when he watches you and said you never had a lick of talent but would walk through a wall if he asked you.”
I think almost all of us would have done that for him. It probably wouldn’t be as bas as getting pounded by Coach Matter anyway.
The teacher he was and the lesson he taught of “Wrestling as America’s Sport” are things that stick with me to this very day.
The rise of the individual leads to the rise of those around him. That is the lesson behind wrestling and, yes, many other sports.
The adage “Only those willing to risk going too far find out how far they can go” is something that applies to a team and, in the bigger picture, to a free and open society.
Coach Koll passed a few years ago, but he lives every day to a lot of us and is bigger each day.
The mark of greatness is timeless.
