Anyhow, I want to offer a contrasting opinion on what Fargo is, or maybe what it was circa 2001-02-03. My twin brother and I had the great pleasure of representing our home state in freestyle and/or Greco Roman wrestling at the Cadet and Junior National Championships during our time in high school. It meant a whole lot to strap on that Ohio singlet and pace out onto a football-field sized sea of wrestling mats with every other state's best kids all around you. From the first weigh-in to the singlet trading outside the FARGODOME, you felt like you were a part of something special. I want to explain why Fargo is (was?) a fantastic tournament and why it can still be a great experience, even with the current climate of competition and sport specialization.
Fargo is a dreamscape for many wrestlers, an out-of-state trip to test oneself against the best wrestlers in the country. To many wrestlers, it is a special rite of passage to go through the qualification process and arrive in a foreign land to gut wrench the crap out of kids from three time zones away. Fargo is a vision without formal infrastructure like high school folkstyle wrestling. You have to want to be there and have to go headlong through a gauntlet just to get there.
For example, my brother and I were very much immersed in the sport of wrestling from ages 12-17. Our local high school team was decent, and our friends were on the team. Wrestling was, at that time and at that school in northeast Ohio, a social engagement with a few kids picking up hardware at state tournaments every year. Our high school team was good, but not great. Our parents had never been exposed to wrestling, but were very supportive, and liked the fact that we had some goals and a vision to work hard and meet them. Prior to high school we had a middle school coach who made wrestling fun. He made every practice an absolute obstacle course of fun. "25-push-ups? 10-pull-ups? Run for 30-minutes? Is that even possible?" It was great fun to try and learn new moves and get fit. With each personal step in fitness, mat acumen and making friends, we gained confidence and built loftier goals. Today, wrestle-offs'stomorrow the world. Holy shit! Is that a tricep I have growing now too!?
Like lots of young men, my brother and I wanted to be good at wrestling. But a big part of that was because it was so much fun to scale each little mountain beside your brother, friends and classmates. Now, with that context, back to Fargo and why it mattered.
During our freshman year of mixed JV and varsity wrestling (read: lumps taken), a few of our older peers went onward to "nationals" in someplace called Fargo. Not the branded pay-to-play youth or grade-specific nationals that spring up every other year these days, but the USA wrestling nationals that a wrestler had to qualify for through regionals, states, and, if it came down to it, a wildcard process. This was the tournament that USA Wrestler highlighted every summer. On those pages, kids from small towns in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Delaware and Illinois were winning official-looking medals and damn, I wanted to win one too.
To make our state competitive out in Fargo, numerous grown-ups put together a great state system to encourage participation (<$20 entry at a USAW-sanctioned regional for two styles in one day?), get kids to learn the international styles, and hopefully become competent enough to bring home a medal should they qualify for Fargo (Free pre-tournament clinics at Greco-Roman and freestyle states! Holy reverse lift, batman!). Our state had great refs, great parents and great summer coaches (Sandy Cageao and Erik Burnett immediately spring to mind). The strength of "Fargo" was not one week in July looking at windmills from the flattest, windiest parking lot in North Dakota, but the process that it required and the wrestling community surrounding that process from Wadsworth to Austintown, Dayton to Toledo.
My brother, our teammates and I had very few local opportunities to train with freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestlers out in our little 'burb of northeast Ohio but the goal of getting to Fargo lived on. So, to get some competition, every Tuesday and Thursday in the spring we got a ride from our dad or a teammate's parent or got into a hand-me-down Buick Century and went to Cleveland State University for open mats. We did this to get sufficiently competent in gut-wrenches and body locks to qualify for Fargo where we could represent our hometown, school and state...and maybe rough up a cross-town rival or two who also happened to show up that week.
Jack Effner was coaching at CSU at the time, and these mats ranged from busy to absolutely packed. Among the din of a huge fan and sweaty kneepads squeaking across the mats, we made friends with kids from all over the ~one-hour radius around Woodling gymnasium. From the 'hood to the dairy farm to the rich suburb up the road, we met kids from all over our corner of the world. We sweated, scrapped, and tried to get better at wrestling all spring and summer during the Fargo qualifying season. The kids in that room didn't have elite camps, personal trainers, or diet specialists. They had a bus pass, some shorts and had heard word that some good kids from outside their district might push them to their limit in par terre or be interested in some drilling. We were white, black, Hispanic, eastern European, from schools public and private and we slapped hands and rolled along informally among CSU Vikings like Gerald Harris, Rocco and Phil Mansueto, Russ Davie, Anthony Coleman, and even one mean, gritty Jack Effner himself. The college athletes encouraged the younger wrestlers and would show a little technique if you happened to scramble into a teachable moment. Everyone knew everyone else by name. It was blue-collar, but Fargo was the dream that brought us all to those open mats.
In training for freestyle and Greco we made some great friends, scrapped, learned, and in the process, even got better at wrestling. This all gelled almost entirely without adult supervision. My old man did crosswords in the hall or graded papers from his own high school students. "How many gut wrenches did you fend off today? That's great son, what's a gut wrench?"
By May, there was a state tournament in freestyle and Greco-Roman. Greco was held in the Marion County Fairgrounds coliseum. It was probably the biggest non-rodeo event there all year. A lot of our CSU open mat friends were there. The matches were hard fought, and a lot was on the line. Beyond the state tournament, this was the qualifier for the ticket to the big tournament. Fargo, where guys like Harry Lester and Kyle Ott got their hands raised and made the pages of next month's USA Wrestler. When the dust settled, you either got an invitation letter to training camp or didn't. It was the best and worst of times. Every time we went to Marion, Dad bought us hamburgers and we listened to NPR or the Dropkick Murphys. Win or lose. Fargo or not that year, we were proud of the three months we had put in.
If you made the cut at your weight, training camp for the national team was at Walsh Jesuit or St. Edward, private schools with wrestling histories that were unfathomable to first-generation wrestlers of humble origins. Just to get there you had to raise money. I remember asking family members and local businesses for money to pay for the costs of camp each year. It was intimidating to ask for money when you didn't have much, but we always made it work. I still wonder how much of my parents' existing credit card debt comes from those Fargo teams. With the camp and trip paid for, you met your teammates and proceeded to wrestle live and learn technique for the week immediately prior to the trip to Fargo. If you lived within commuting distance to training camp, kids from far away stayed with you. I made even more friends from all over the state. O-H! I-O! We were buckeye state kids working toward a common goal, training hard and goofing around at every turn. The stress wasn't there like I felt during the high school folkstyle season. It was just wrestling one day after another.
At those camps, guys with resume in Fargo were all around you. You went live with them, scrapping and fighting for ground. You were opponents in the winter folkstyle season, but for this month, this year, you were teammates looking to taste gold amid a sea of blue and red mats that were unusually well-surrounded by seats. We carried the scrapping along I-80 and up to Madison, Wisconsin where Team Ohio practiced one night prior to the final drive into Fargo. It was a big, dark wrestling room. They let you cut weight throwing a Frisbee under the lights on the turf of Camp Randall. Some friends started to stress out. Others kept their cool. Kids told jokes and listened to music during the bus ride. Somebody always snuck a truck stop-bought girly magazine onto the bus and kids ogled around it. I don't remember how much weight I had to cut on those trips. We were having fun and going to the big dance to win some matches.
When you arrived to the North Dakota State gym for practice, there were a thousand kids running around in their team's colors, losing weight, joking around, drilling and running. The high plains humidity took the weight off in no time. There was an energy in that room that only a wrestler can explain. Kids were acting on their dreams, following through to try and meet low-probability goals. In an 80-man bracket that goal wasn't probable, but the hell if you weren't going to try and get it anyway. This was before the Internet really was used for scouting. You never knew if your next match was a scrub or a stud. You had to be ready at all times.
Those weeks, points were confirmed, hands were raised, and I never walked away with a medal. I was disappointed. I was mad if I lost a close one or the good mark system matched me up with a tough opponent first match. I had tested myself against the best, winning more than I lost each year, but always going down well before the All-American rounds. But in the end, it was summer, and the work of learning a new style of wrestling, staying in shape and making friends had already been put in. You took my name off the bracket, but you couldn't take Fargo away. I had qualified, I had tried and I had fallen short. The day of the finals I traded some gear with other wrestlers and went to the mall. One year I got shorts from a guy who edged me in the clinch but got teched the next round.
In Fargo, our team stayed at the NDSU dorms. For kids with limited family vacation experience, this stay, and the post weigh-in dorm buffet meals were memorable parts of the trip. We got to room with our open mat friends and eat bottomless ice cream after we got done wrestling. One year my dad came out to watch me get back-to-back tech falled on Day 2. Damn was that ice cream good. After my exit from Cadet Nationals one year, I dyed my blonde hair jet black after elimination. Parted in the middle, with the roots poorly covered, my hair looked like a skunk. Everyone thought it was hilarious except girls. Besides, there was still a bus ride home, and we always knew that without weight to cut, it was going to be really, really fun.
Fargo was the biggest wrestling event to my brother and me beyond the state tournament for three straight years. We set a goal to get to Fargo and win, but accomplishing only some of that, we had to be content that we had made some friends, tried our best and put in an awful lot of work, work that we took great pride in. Fargo lived up to our expectations, even if we didn't live up to our own in any given year. It was a formative experience to set a goal and spend four months in hot pursuit of it alongside your other motivated kids with similar dreams. Losing wasn't fun, but everything else was. I bet a lot of kids in Fargo this week may feel the same way I do when they look back.
*And ladies at the bar totally love the stories of what happened in North Dakota after the good-mark system weeded a teenage boy out of the running for a top-eight finish at a wrestling tournament. Do you know how much trouble a 14-18 year-old boy can find in a town like Fargo with a thousand other idle 14-18 year-old boys? Trust me, nobody got hurt and everybody walked with good stories about a random teammate from Godknowswhere who did the craziest thing following his triple chest lock exit from competition.
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