Douglas book delivers with compelling story
By Mike Finn, Wrestling Insider Newsmagazine The life of Bobby Douglas, the first African-American wrestler to win an Ohio state championship, represent the United States in the Olympics and be named head coach of a Division I col- lege program, is more than skin deep. And thanks to the biography, “Bobby Douglas, Life and Legacy of an American Wrestling Legend,” author Craig Sesker showed his readers a man, who ignored racism, poverty and pain to win on the wrestling mat and make an even bigger impact on those he coached. Simply put, this is the most outstanding book on a wrestler that I have ever read. Not since Nolan Zavoral’s book, “A Season on the Mat: Dan Gable and the Pursuit of Perfection,” has a book taken readers inside the life of the wrestler and coach who reached the high- est levels of wrestling while remaining a gentlemen when the moments weren’t too great.
But unlike Zavoral, the former Iowa City Press-Citizen editor, who witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes stories of Gable’s final season at Iowa in 1997, Sesker, a former award- winning sportswriter for the Omaha World-Herald and current communications manager for USA Wrestling, puts readers in his time machine and takes them to the happy and sad moments in the life of Douglas. Sesker simply collected candid comments and remembrances from Douglas and those who have been close to this man.
In fact, the first chapter relays the story about how a three- year-old Bobby Douglas was forced to watch his mother, Belove Johnson, raped and nearly murdered in 1945 when an assailant broke into their low-income apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio. “The man is breathing heavily with a scowl on his face and a crazed look in his eyes,” writes Sesker. “He is drunk and reeks of alcohol. He clutches a large, shiny butcher knife — with a razor-sharp, six-inch long blade — in his right hand as he glares at Bobby’s mother.
“Johnson tries to fight off her attacker as he descends on her while repeatedly driving the butcher knife into her chest and abdomen.
“Her repeated cries of “No, no” bounce off the walls of the tiny
apartment. “A petrified Bobby Douglas dives under the bed, tears flowing down his cheeks as his heart pounds like a hammer on a steel drum. He is shaking in fear as he cowers underneath the mat- tress. A large pool of blood begins forming on the floor amid the high-pitched shrieks of terror from his mother.” Fortunately, Douglas’ mother survived those wounds but there would be no justice for that act and she would only live another 20 years. Bobby — whose father, Eddie Douglas, was in jail when Bobby was born in 1942 in Bellaire, Ohio, and was rarely part of his son’s life — was sent to live with his grandparents to live in the small eastern Ohio coal-mining community of Blaine, near the border of West Virginia.
18 USA Wrestler
According to Sesker: “The community, located at the bus stop known as Stop 32, was a diverse collection of people from African, Italian, Polish, Czech, Russian and Slavic descent. There were 32 small houses that were bunched together in an area adjacent to a large coal mine.
“The shack they lived in had an old wooden floor with holes in it, big enough to see the brown dirt the shacks were built on. The walls of the shack also had holes, allowing the wind and cold to whip through the small home. Any heat was provided by a stove in the bedroom.”
According to Douglas, his grandmother, Maggie Davis, was the one who added discipline to his young life. “I got a lot of whippings,” Douglas told Sesker. “I think I got a beating almost every day from my grandmother when I was 7 and 8 years old. I always did my chores, but I would come
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