Story by Dr. Rick J. Addante

Wrestling has changed my life in major ways for the better, and Olympic Wrestling has played an integral role along the way of transforming me from a kid in public housing to a PhD in Neuroscience, College Professoriate career track, FAA Pilot, & an aspiring NASA Astronaut applicant.  At first I had no interest in the sport, but Olympic Wrestling changed all that in 1993, and this was a critical turning point in my life. I was unsure about even trying wrestling, but as an undersized sized child in 6^th grade, I found true inspiration from a Sports Illustrated story of John Smith and his dominance in Barcelona, and later identified with the story of Rob Either’s Olympic efforts in ’96 since he hailed from my same hometown of Arlington Heights, IL.  I had only thought of professional wrestling (WWF), but it was when I saw John Smith on the Olympic cover of sports illustrated from 1992 and learned about it in that article’s profile that I was convinced to endeavor wrestling.  When I qualified for the Illinois State tournament in junior high, the highlight was the keynote address from Olympian Matt Ghaffari to the entire stadium, who humbly spoke to us kids about his Rudy-like quest to beat the unbeaten Alexander Karelin of Russia in the upcoming 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and we later watched those games intently while we cheered the TV when he valiantly ran out for the Championship match to the music of Rocky and a ravenous USA crowd, before his heart breaking 1-point over-time loss for the Silver Medal. We were inspired.

These 1996 Olympic Games also served as an inspiration for me to continue the requisite hard training in high school wrestling after seeing Gold Medalist Tom Brands win his Olympic Title on our home turf of Atlanta when I was only a teenager, and thus developed Olympic dreams of my own; and it was the tremendous wrestling community of Manahawkin NJ that helped support my high school transfer to Southern Regional (NJ) from Hersey High (IL) in much the same way as is chronicled in the popular movie Win Win. I bought an Atlanta Olympics workout bag, and it accompanied me to all of the extra wrestling tournaments I pursued to get better. The work that it inspired me to do helped me to make the transition from a struggling athlete to an eventual varsity stand out, particularly when I was too small to viably compete in football as a 98 lb. freshman: wrestling truly was non-discriminatory, offering a fair & level playing field for people of all sizes, shapes & colors.

In 2000, I was a beginning college freshman at The College of New Jersey, and unsure about collegiate athletics, but it was the persistence of Matt Lindland’s story to earn an Olympic berth and then fight for a Gold Medal Match, followed then by the heroics of Rulon Gardner over Russian legend Alexander Karelin in the same 2000 Games in Sydney, that provided me the needed motivation to continue wrestling collegiately in the NCAA and push my limits to new heights as a walk-on for an elite team at TCNJ.  This is important because from this critical foundation I developed with the requisite mindset and credentials to become a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship during my senior year.  That process too was critically augmented by wrestling’s training, giving me the determination, discipline, and dedication to persist towards that lofty goal even when my own college president at first discouraged me from applying.  With a wrestler’s work ethic and tenacity to refuse to lose by finding a way to win via the Will to Win, I eventually won her over. Without the enormous inspiration from Rulon Gardner and Matt Lindland’s incredible performances during the Sydney Games reminding me that Anything is Possible for those who prepare, I would not have pursued NCAA athletics nor have later been eligible for the world’s top academic scholarship honor of the Rhodes.  For that, and the innumerable intangible lessons that I learned along the journey to those destinations, I am humbly indebted to Olympic Wrestling.

My wrestling background was an absolutely critical component of my Rhodes Scholar application, which Newark Mayor Cory Booker can surely attest to, since he was one of the committee members with whom I interviewed, and whom was so supportive of sports like wrestling.  As such, it proved a crucial element to subsequently driving me to pursue graduate school in order to earn a doctoral degree, buffered in between by meaningful work giving back to the wrestling community via serving as Head Coach of the new Robbinsville High School (NJ) as well as college teams (Florida Atlantic University), building them up from humble beginnings into championship squads, and ultimately imparting a special knowledge to students who went on to become stellar pillars of their communities and All-American athletes.  When I later endeavored to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, wrestling gave the vital ethos that allowed me to survive while suffering from life-threatening cerebral and pulmonary edema conditions yet still reach the summit, not unlike how in Life we must all still find ways to dig deep to reach the success of our goals to the highest peaks despite substantial obstacles of adversity which may occur along our way.

While in graduate school at UC Davis, 2008 proved an essential Olympic year as well.  I was mid-way through a rigorous PhD program in neuroscience, but with aspirations for even greater goals.  Another former wrestler, Astronaut Dr. Ed Lu, had encouraged me to consider the NASA Space Program after I presented research to the US Congress while in college, and now in 2008 NASA had recently begun accepting applications for this exclusive position.  I was unsure of applying so young for such a program in the summer of 2008, but I became incredibly inspired that same time when young American Henry Cejudo qualified for the Games by beating reigning Athens medalist Stephen Abas, and this inspiration motivated me to also throw my hat in the ring and Endeavor to reach to new heights by striving for this NASA dream of Astronaut explorations of Space.  I did indeed apply, and followed suit by beginning (& finishing) a pilot’s license as well as Master & Rescue scuba diving credentials to bolster the NASA application.  At times when these pursuits seemed daunting amidst the rigors of a neuroscience PhD, I simultaneously watched with great pride and inspiration when 20 year old Henry Cejudo shocked the world with a Gold Medal performance in Beijing, reminding me that even youthful dreams can be realized with dedicated pursuit, and I resolved to finish through with the additional pilot training to earn my flight license that I committed to in the Astronaut application during 2008.  Without the presence of the Olympic Wrestling that year, I would not have had the necessary reminders, motivation, and inspiration to follow my dreams by applying to NASA.

I was ultimately not accepted in NASA’s class of 2008, which was to be expected given that I had not yet completed the PhD degree or my pilot’s license.  But I built upon this formative experience, and developed to become much better due to it.

It’s ironic how the Olympic cycle and the NASA Astronaut cycle seem to match up every 4 years, with unguided solitary training in-between.  While I did not get accepted during my first bid in 2008 for NASA, I maintained the wrestler’s mentality to continue training hard in order to best prepare for an incumbent but uncertain future of later application cycles.  Sure enough, in 2012 NASA re-opened a new call for Astronaut applications, and due to the hard work in ambitions that I was inspired to pursue from the 2008 Olympic Wrestling lessons, I had fortunately now completed both my PhD in Neuroscience and my FAA pilot’s license, in addition to the master scuba certifications that was also obtained.  Interestingly, I had also learned from the exemplar of Olympic Gold Medalist Dave Shultz of the importance of putting extra effort into learning Russian as well: Shultz had famously went to great length to learn Russian in order to better understand his competitors but moreover to build goodwill and peace amongst the Russian teams as well.  As such, he was an incredible role model for diplomacy in sport and peace in goodwill, and as a spectator this left a lasting impression.  I also took several Russian language courses during this time in order to similarly be suited for building goodwill with potential future colleagues in Space, should the opportunity arise to apply again for astronaut.

Thus, I was now much better prepared for the 2012 NASA Astronaut cycle that soon emerged, and as such I applied with full vigor.  There were of course many times of challenge and discouragement through this process, but interestingly this also paralleled with occurrence of the 2012 London Games for wrestling as well.  I took great inspiration from watching competitors like Jared Frayer emerge as underdog Americans, and the incredible confidence that was contagious from Gold Medalist Jordan Burroughs, a fellow New Jersey wrestler.  From being able to observe these role models in their quest, it guided me similarly in my own and helped my overcome challenges and tribulations that arose during my same coincident cycle for a once-in-4-year system.  Again, without the Olympic wrestling model I learned from of them, my NASA application would have been substantially less competitive and I would have been far more daunted by it.  But I wasn’t, thanks to Olympic Wrestling.

Through this process I’ve had the privilege of now getting to know many of these wrestlers personally, and the honor of contributing scientific material to some their athletic web sites such as www.coachmattlindland.com to help others in training who are seeking to reach the pinnacles of their respective sports. Even now, I take great solace from mentoring of Olympians such as Matt Lindland, who remind me of the long journey of 3 Olympic cycles needed to reach his dreams, which coincides quite consistently with the same pattern that I must also pursue for my ambitions to become a NASA Astronaut.  I have just completed my second application period without quite reaching success.  When I was initially daunted by this recent short-coming, Matt related how he too had come close but nearly missed in his second bid in 1996 for Atlanta (Olympic alternate), and how he recouped to refocus for the later 2000 games that would follow and brought him ultimate success.

As such, this Olympic experience of his has guided me to stay committed to another 4 years of perpetual training in further advanced science, language, and aeronautics experience needed to achieve my dream of becoming a NASA Astronaut in order to not just represent my country with pride on the international stage, but to help represent our entire world with good will on the galactic stage together with our Russian, European, and Asian colleagues with whom space collaboration is so critically dependent.  In many ways, this endeavor to explore our universe in inextricably tied to our efforts to build international rapport with each other through sport, learning to work together with shared values of competition that yield greater understandings of diversity and cultures that is so much the essence of the Olympic Spirit.

No other sport has both the history and the magnitude of these things in the Olympics as wrestling does.  No other sport deserves to be a bedrock component of the Olympic Games as wrestling is & ought to be.

Please return wrestling back in the Olympic Games, so that the Games themselves may shine with their full luster, and serve with their full beacon of good will and peace to the people of all nations that wrestling uniquely provides.  Olympic Wrestling has provided key turning points at each segment of my journey that started merely as a youth admiring it, resulting in formative high school lessons, college diplomas, Rhodes Scholar consideration, the actual heights reached from a pilot’s license, publishing new discoveries about memory and the brain in PNAS, and earning a PhD in neuroscience while striving for even greater heights as an astronaut applicant to NASA.

Wrestling has tangibly helped me rise to the next level in other critical instances, such as overcoming serious injury with positive mental attitude to recover 100% after being hit by car at 50 mph while in college; the doctors said that my body was saved from that impact in large part due to its conditioning from having been in the middle of wrestling season.  Later, I drew upon the mental and physical strength honed from persevering in collegiate wrestling to survive the devastating pulmonary edema and cerebral edema conditions that threatened my life while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and thus still reached the summit in the same ways that many Olympic Champions have reached their podiums through substantial pain and struggle to climb to new heights.  I learned what it took to become a Champion from living with my college team mates as they won National Championships on the mat and I applied these same principles towards graduating as the #1 student in psychology, reaching the Rhodes Scholar finals, and even tutored the same guys to succeed in college courses that earned them college degrees in return. I took these lessons forward then to applying to other non-sport endeavors, and bring with me too the ethos and principles needed for winning championships to whatever I pursue in life, with notable results.  All due to wrestling – not just competing, but also from learning while observing others compete as well.  This is critical.

Any time along the difficult  and strenuous journeys to contend for the Rhodes, earn my PhD, fly an airplane, rescue divers, climb a mountain, make scientific discoveries, or to simply survive and support myself financially through college after leaving home at 16 to escape the many abuses of my father in Chicago, the natural default thought at first is that I may be reaching to high  or aspiring too far or against too great of odds to do something too difficult, but it has always been the Olympic stories of wrestlers such as Rulon Gardner, Matt Lindland, Henry Cejudo, Brandy Slay, Bruce Baumgartner, Jake Varner, Jared Frayer, Jake Dietchler, Jordan Burroughs, and many others whom have quickly reminded me with the inspiration of their Olympic exemplars to endeavor to keep pushing no matter what daunting challenge exists, because the odds indeed Can Be Overcome.

In a modern society searching for heroes, amidst a Hollywood culture of fictitious CGI characters and professional sports endemic of chemical performance scandals, it is  Wrestlers who present the true titans of real life heroics that have consistently guided humanity with profound leadership lessons. It was the ancient Jewish patriarch Abraham who first wrestled, the Greek philosopher Socrates who swore it upon Zeus that “an outstanding runner cannot be the equal of an average wrestler”, and 3 of 4 Presidents on Mt. Rushmore  who were forged by wrestling to lead a new nation in three separate eras of Freedom, Liberty, & Peace (GW, AL, TR).  It was wrestlers such as Dan O’Cone and Adam Angelozzi from TCNJ who were hailed as heroes for saving the lives of several people in a car accident they passed by en route to their National Championships in 1997.  When the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001, it was the ethos ingrained in me from wrestling that led me to organize a bus full of students from New Jersey to go assist the firefighters and rescuers at Ground Zero, and it was this same wrestling ethos to help and fearlessly defend others that led a wrestler, Jeremy Glick, to overtake the terrorists on Flight 93 with the iconic phrase “Let’s Roll”, thus preventing even more atrocities and saving hundreds of American lives that fateful day.  Real Life Heroes.

There is a long history of wrestling fostering peace and goodwill among nations of the world. It was Olympic Wrestlers who bridged the geopolitical divide to bring peace and goodwill between Iran and the United States in 1998 that no army nor politician could achieve in the 20 years preceding, bringing the first time that the American Flag was raised in Iran after it was famously burned in 1979 at the American embassy in Tehran – and it was raised joyously to thousands of supportive Iranians as American wrestlers also waived Iranian flags in goodwill.  It was American Jordan Burroughs who famously hugged his Iranian opponent on the Olympic Medal Stand in 2012; and it is wrestling travel that remains one of the few barriers currently broken between the US and Cuban relations today.  It is these real-life titans who provide our cultures with examples of real life heroes and role models of peace across the world.

Without these exemplars of our Olympian wrestlers through the course of my own journey in the past 20 years, the thousands of future students I will teach through my budding career towards a college professor would never have been reached, the scientific discoveries about the brain that I will make with a lifetime of neuroscience research would never have been explored, and without these Olympic inspirations of resilience my own life might never have begun its trajectory to rise beyond the humble beginnings with a single-mother of six kids in public housing units in Chicago.  Now, because of wrestling, we must work together even closer with our international partners of Russia, Iran, Cuba, India, Japan, and the Eastern European Republics with whom we are cultural brothers in sport.

I never realized my own Olympic Dream that began watching the Brands brothers in Atlanta ’96, was strengthened watching Rulon Gardner’s Gold Medal in 2000, was inspired by Henry Cejudo’s win in 2008, and which persists still today from the inspiration of Jordan Burroughs and the 2012 Olympians that have helped to guide me still in an arena of civilian life that is actually not sport at all, but in which I have applied sport’s lessons from Olympic Wrestling to reach new heights of improving society. The Olympics reach beyond the athletes.  I may not have become an Olympian myself, but look at how much more good has been realized because of simply instilling that Olympic Dream into a 98 lb. kid, who had learned to wrestle the heavyweights of Life, and who has now become a doctoral neuroscientist and leader within my communities for impacts that reach far beyond what I ever could have reached in sport alone. This is due to Olympic Wrestling. All by actually *having* wrestling in the Olympics.

This is just my story, but I know that I am not alone in them.  #SaveOlympicWrestling

Dr. Rick J. Addante

Post-doctoral Neuroscientist, University of Texas at Dallas

Doctoral Fellow, American Psychological Association Diversity Program in Neuroscience ’09-‘10

Web (science): http://vitallongevity.utdallas.edu/fnim/addante.html

Web (wrestling): http://coachmattlindland.com/about/

twitter: @RickAddante  email: Richad.Addante@Utdallas.edu

*the views expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer