Painful to watch final days of Boston U wrestling program
By Gary Abbott My first NCAA Wrestling Championships was 1983 in Oklahoma City. It was the season after I graduated from Boston University with a journalism degree. My college wrestling coach Carl Adams had this crazy idea to create a new wrestling magazine, and he brought me in to handle the project. I was there to cover the event for Wrestling Masters, and sell magazine subscriptions. I was a walk-on at BU, choosing the school for its journalism school, not its wrestling. My coach the first three years at BU was Freddy Lett, who is an inter- esting story all by himself and still brings a smile to my face when I see him. My senior year, we had two-time NCAA champion Carl Adams come in as coach, hired after his program had been dropped at Rhode Island. I never qualified for the NCAA Championships, placing second, third and fourth in the New England Conference, which only brought its cham- pions to the big dance. I was a four-year starter with a winning record, basically an average Division I wrestler with a love and passion for the sport.
I find it amazingly ironic that I have been sitting here, my 32nd straight NCAAs, once again in Oklahoma City, watching the last days of Boston University wrestling. It has been both painful and sad, and has truly affected me all weekend.
The BU administration made a bad decision last April to drop wrestling after this season, and the team has gone through a full season with lame duck sta- tus. Our alumni, which honestly had not been as active as we should have been over the years, made a hard push to come up with a plan to retain the pro- gram, including a strong fundraising ele- ment. BU, in its typical style in all matters, strung us along, rejected the proposal, and then shut it all down. They allowed no more contact with the wrestling alumni. They would not even respond to media requests about it. Case closed. Done.
Instead of splitting apart, the young men in the BU program all stuck together, and put together an admirable season. The team acted with class and integrity,
8 USA Wrestler
wrestling on the national level. I was on our first conference championship team, which won the New Englands in 1982 during my senior year. Since that first NCAAs I attended in 1983, I have watched the BU wrestlers closely every year at nationals.
Boston’s Nestor Taffur battles Oklahoma State’s Alex Dieringer at the NCAAs. Tony Rotundo photo.
in spite of the adversity it faced. In its first year in the EIWA, BU had its first EIWA champion, the talented and impressive Nestor Taffur at 157, and qualified three guys for the NCAAs. Joining Taffur in Oklahoma City were teammates Tyler Scotton at 141 and Mitchell Wightman at 165.
Sitting on press row, which is where I’ve seen all of my NCAA events, I could not help but think about Boston University and the cold fact that our program was shutting down. I have gotten used to see- ing the guys in the red singlet at nation- als. Dropped wrestling programs have affected my family directly. My older brother Jim was fourth in the EIWA for Colgate, which dropped its team a year after his career ended. My nephew Nick considered wrestling for Coach Adams at BU as a high school senior last year, but made a different choice after BU announced it was cutting the sport. I have watched literally hundreds of colleges drop wrestling over the last 35 years, but this time it was happening to me. My college. My wrestling history. My legacy. As a BU alum, I have gone through the full range of emotions, from anger to frustration to determination to disgust. Now, all I can come up with is painful sadness.
As a journalist, I asked myself this weekend what had been the legacy of BU
I am not allowed to root as a journalist, but I have been a supportive observer, and of course, kept up with the team through my friendship with Coach Adams. If I were to characterize BU’s impact on college wrestling, it would have to be its ability to occasionally pull off some amaz- ing upset every few years. The first one came in 1984, when my college team- mate Tod Giles was a senior competing at 190 pounds. In the second round, Giles knocked off returning NCAA cham- pion Pete Bush of Iowa, the No. 4 seed, in the second round 7-4. Giles lost his next match, which put Bush out of the tournament, and ultimately finished eighth, our first All-American. Adding to the sadness is that Tod Giles is now deceased. He stayed in wrestling as a top Greco-Roman athlete and a coach, spending a few years as head coach for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I was in Beijing, China at the 2007 Junior World Championships when I heard of Tod’s untimely passing, and was unable to get back in time for the funeral. The biggest upset by a BU guy came in 1993, when Earl Walker, a transfer from Brown who hails from Delaware, knocked off No. 1 seed Matt Lindland of Nebraska in the first round. Alas, Walker lost his next match to Doug Taylor of West Virginia, and did not become an All- American. We all know about Lindland’s amazing career since then, winning Olympic and World silver medals in Greco. Walker also gave BU its best individual performance. Walker went on a run the next year in 1994, getting all the way to the NCAA semifinals, where he lost a competitive 6-2 match to Pat Smith of Oklahoma State. Walker wrestled back and took third, the highest placement ever for a Terrier wrestler. We all know about Pat Smith, the first four-time NCAA champion in Div. I wrestling history, and Continued on page 9
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