Post by wrestlingpublicist on Oct 7, 2007 10:18:13 GMT -5
This is my preliminary text for the main page of Save Oregon Wresling MySpace and Facebook pages I am creating. I want to use the social networking computer networks to build support for our cause. I'd appreciate some feedback before I go forward with this.
I am neither a person nor a corporate entity. I am tradition.
I turn 55 years old this season, and some say it will be my last. They underestimate me. I am too young to die.
I am Oregon wrestling.
A perfect storm brewed in Eugene earlier this year. It sucked me in: a combination of poor athletic department stewardship, gender equity issues, the revival of baseball, and broken promises regarding a practice facility.
This swirling low-pressure system, propelled by big time, money-grubbing college athletics, threatens to throw me down like one of Hulk Hogan’s body slams.
It won’t happen. I grow stronger with age. I spawned champions in the days before lush athletic facilities, when miracles were wrought in cramped office bullpens and ancient locker rooms at McArthur Court and Gerlnger Hall.
I am Oregon wrestling.
I am John Miller, my university’s first NCAA champion. I became the first in a succession of Oregon wrestlers who went from the mat to medical school.
I am Ken Kesey, who before the Cuckoo’s Nest and acid tests was better known in these parts as a hard-nosed wrestler.
I am Greg Gibson, who came to Oregon as a defensive tackle but later earned All-American glory, Olympic silver and World Championship gold as a wrestler.
I am Ron Finley, who as a college freshman wrestler lost three times in JV meets to high school opponents, but later wrestled in the Olympics as a Beaver and coached America’s Olympians as a Duck.
I am Oregon wrestling.
My sons staff classrooms and wrestling rooms from Montana to California. You’ll also find them in law offices, hospitals, small businesses, corporate boardrooms, and church pulpits. Dedicated husbands and fathers, they form the pillars of their communities.
They are all successful people, although most do not measure achievement by the amount of money they earn. Their pride manifests itself in the lessons they pass along to the next generation, just as skilled and demanding teachers and coaches mentored them.
I am one of only three intercollegiate wrestling programs in a state that sees six thousand of its high school boys wrestle every year. By comparison, at least fifteen colleges and universities in our state field baseball teams. More than 33,000 boys wrestle in the greater Northwest, and my demise would quash their already-fleeting hopes for a wrestling scholarship.
I am Oregon wrestling.
Few outside the sport understand me. Basketball players exchange each other's sweat and smell as many armpits as we do, but their sport has the glitz and ours doesn't. Oh well, when is the last time you heard of a point-shaving, signal-stealing, or steroid scandal in wrestling?
My sons are not prima donnas. They did not flinch when the athletic department remodeled their practice facility into a treatment room. Likewise, they hardly objected when an athletic director found he could save six million dollars by penciling out their promised new wrestling room in the future basketball palace. All they need is a room with a mat.
My current coach even made do when the newest dandies on the block, a baseball staff that probably doesn’t yet realize how much it rains in Oregon, moved into his block of offices in the Casanova Cener. It mattered not that he still had wrestlers to counsel while the newbies won’t have an athlete on campus until next September.
Coach stated his case forcefully, but his objections were not heard outside of the athletic director's office walls. Wrestling may be an individual sport, but we wrestlers are team players. We're also rather low maintenance people.
Coach converted a storage room in the physical education building and passed it off as being closer to the room with the mat.
I am Oregon wrestling.
My sons always make do with less. It’s part of their ethos. They don’t expect five-star hotels, nor do they always hop jet airplanes to face the opposition. For generations, they traveled the highways, packed like sardines into vans, empty stomachs enduring the dual pain of weight cutting and road sickness.
More than twenty years ago, such paltry travel arrangements cost me two dear offspring. A state-owned van carrying my family, driving on balding tires, wrecked on a return trip from the Palouse. It was the worst tragedy my kin have ever suffered.
It broke my heart. But I sucked it up and came back. I endure.
I am Oregon wrestling.
They want to kill me off, purge me from the budget, as they tried to do three times in the past. They didn’t succeed then and I’ll try with every fiber of my being to survive this challenge.
But I could use some help this time. I ask you to look into your heart, determine whether my cause is worthy, and help if you can.
I am Oregon Wrestling
I am neither a person nor a corporate entity. I am tradition.
I turn 55 years old this season, and some say it will be my last. They underestimate me. I am too young to die.
I am Oregon wrestling.
A perfect storm brewed in Eugene earlier this year. It sucked me in: a combination of poor athletic department stewardship, gender equity issues, the revival of baseball, and broken promises regarding a practice facility.
This swirling low-pressure system, propelled by big time, money-grubbing college athletics, threatens to throw me down like one of Hulk Hogan’s body slams.
It won’t happen. I grow stronger with age. I spawned champions in the days before lush athletic facilities, when miracles were wrought in cramped office bullpens and ancient locker rooms at McArthur Court and Gerlnger Hall.
I am Oregon wrestling.
I am John Miller, my university’s first NCAA champion. I became the first in a succession of Oregon wrestlers who went from the mat to medical school.
I am Ken Kesey, who before the Cuckoo’s Nest and acid tests was better known in these parts as a hard-nosed wrestler.
I am Greg Gibson, who came to Oregon as a defensive tackle but later earned All-American glory, Olympic silver and World Championship gold as a wrestler.
I am Ron Finley, who as a college freshman wrestler lost three times in JV meets to high school opponents, but later wrestled in the Olympics as a Beaver and coached America’s Olympians as a Duck.
I am Oregon wrestling.
My sons staff classrooms and wrestling rooms from Montana to California. You’ll also find them in law offices, hospitals, small businesses, corporate boardrooms, and church pulpits. Dedicated husbands and fathers, they form the pillars of their communities.
They are all successful people, although most do not measure achievement by the amount of money they earn. Their pride manifests itself in the lessons they pass along to the next generation, just as skilled and demanding teachers and coaches mentored them.
I am one of only three intercollegiate wrestling programs in a state that sees six thousand of its high school boys wrestle every year. By comparison, at least fifteen colleges and universities in our state field baseball teams. More than 33,000 boys wrestle in the greater Northwest, and my demise would quash their already-fleeting hopes for a wrestling scholarship.
I am Oregon wrestling.
Few outside the sport understand me. Basketball players exchange each other's sweat and smell as many armpits as we do, but their sport has the glitz and ours doesn't. Oh well, when is the last time you heard of a point-shaving, signal-stealing, or steroid scandal in wrestling?
My sons are not prima donnas. They did not flinch when the athletic department remodeled their practice facility into a treatment room. Likewise, they hardly objected when an athletic director found he could save six million dollars by penciling out their promised new wrestling room in the future basketball palace. All they need is a room with a mat.
My current coach even made do when the newest dandies on the block, a baseball staff that probably doesn’t yet realize how much it rains in Oregon, moved into his block of offices in the Casanova Cener. It mattered not that he still had wrestlers to counsel while the newbies won’t have an athlete on campus until next September.
Coach stated his case forcefully, but his objections were not heard outside of the athletic director's office walls. Wrestling may be an individual sport, but we wrestlers are team players. We're also rather low maintenance people.
Coach converted a storage room in the physical education building and passed it off as being closer to the room with the mat.
I am Oregon wrestling.
My sons always make do with less. It’s part of their ethos. They don’t expect five-star hotels, nor do they always hop jet airplanes to face the opposition. For generations, they traveled the highways, packed like sardines into vans, empty stomachs enduring the dual pain of weight cutting and road sickness.
More than twenty years ago, such paltry travel arrangements cost me two dear offspring. A state-owned van carrying my family, driving on balding tires, wrecked on a return trip from the Palouse. It was the worst tragedy my kin have ever suffered.
It broke my heart. But I sucked it up and came back. I endure.
I am Oregon wrestling.
They want to kill me off, purge me from the budget, as they tried to do three times in the past. They didn’t succeed then and I’ll try with every fiber of my being to survive this challenge.
But I could use some help this time. I ask you to look into your heart, determine whether my cause is worthy, and help if you can.
