The fight for a shot at the gold

By Ron Kantowski

Saturday, June 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

If there’s an equivalent of the cover of the Rolling Stone for athletes, it would have to be the front of a Wheaties box. I mean, how cool is that, having your picture plastered on that orange box, right under the words “The Breakfast of Champions”?

But you can’t eat the Wheaties box, only what’s inside, and after the thrill of seeing your mug on the front of the box wears off, chances are, at some point, you’re gonna want a sandwich.

At least with the Rolling Stone, you could keep getting richer, even if you couldn’t get your picture on the cover of the magazine. Or so said Dr. Hook.

It doesn’t work like that in amateur wrestling.

Cael Sanderson was the first amateur wrestler to grace the front of a Wheaties box. All it took was a 159-0 record in college and an Olympic gold medal. But you can’t eat a gold medal, either. So when Sanderson wanted a sandwich, he became the head coach at Iowa State, his alma mater.

That was about the best an amateur wrestler could hope for. Win enough matches and a couple of NCAA championships, and maybe somebody will let you coach. If you happened to be a big guy and were willing to shave your head and check your competitive pride at the door, you might have the option of becoming a professional wrestler, like Kurt Angle.

Other than that, you could sell cars for your father-in-law. Or get a real job, like people who wouldn’t know a near fall from a Niagara one.

But then the Ultimate Fighting Championship and its family tree of mixed martial artists came along, or at least got bigger, and amateur wrestlers began to discover that many of the techniques they had learned on the mat translated pretty well to the octagon, trapezoid, rhombus or whatever other geometrical shape you can build a fence around and beat somebody up in.

“Wrestling is probably the best martial art for self-defense in the world,” said Kevin Jackson, the national freestyle coach of USA Wrestling, which is holding its Olympic

trials at the Thomas & Mack Center this weekend.

Naturally, attaining one of those Olympic berths will be the focus of this weekend, and for those who do, it’ll represent the culmination of a lifelong dream. Or, for those who might have competed in Athens four years ago, a chance to relive one.

Then it’ll be on to Beijing and let’s win there, because that’s where the NBC cameras will be rolling.

Beyond that, some Olympic wrestlers will become coaches. Some will continue training, for London in 2012. Some will become used car salesmen.

And some will get hungry for a sandwich and become mixed martial artists.

“It may hurt us in the long run where depth is concerned, because a guy may have another (Olympic) cycle in him,” Jackson said.

But Jackson understands why some wrestlers would be willing to give up the pursuit of gold, as in medals, for the pursuit of green, as in backs.

“There’s a chance to make some money,” he said. “The best fighters in the world might make a million dollars in a couple of years.”

And the best wrestlers in the world won’t. A gold medal winner at Barcelona at 180.5 pounds in ’92 and a former two-time amateur wrestling world champion, Jackson said he wished MMA had been this big during his prime.

“You could see it coming,” he said, “but I never imagined they would be making what the superstars are making now.”

Some of the biggest names in the UFC have amateur wrestling backgrounds. Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell, Quinton Jackson, Dan Henderson, Matt Hughes, Josh Koscheck, Diego Sanchez, Rashad Evans, Tito Ortiz, Keith Jardine, Roger Huerta, Matt Hamill, Brandon Vera, Gray Maynard ... you’d almost need three or four octagons to accommodate all the martial artists who have worn singlets.

Joe Silva, the top matchmaker for the UFC, said wrestlers have done well in MMA since the beginning.

“A lot of people didn’t understand it because when they looked at wrestling, there’s no striking, no submission — you don’t finish people, you pin them,” he said. “What people underestimate is that unlike most martial arts, wrestling is done at 100 percent, full execution every day against an unwilling opponent.”

Put another way, there are no sparring partners in amateur wrestling, only the guy you wrestle against in practice who wants to take your spot.

“That gives them a big step up,” Silva said, adding that a good wrestler also dictates how and where a match is fought, another key element in MMA.

But some wrestlers don’t like to get punched in the face. That’s also a key element in MMA and might explain why although many wrestlers have gone on to become stars in the UFC, not all have.

For instance, Rulon Gardner was literally as big as it gets in amateur wrestling. But his MMA career lasted one fight. He won, but had to box to do it, and judging from the accounts I read, it sort of looked like Butterbean fighting a giant canned ham.

It wasn’t pretty, and Rulon decided that getting lost in the woods on a snowmobile and eating chicken on the banquet circuit was a better career choice than rededicating himself to a new sport where he would be starting from scratch, or at least semiscratch.

But semiscratch is better than no scratch at all, especially when you’ve got a taste for a sandwich.