Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [3]
The only problem was that I went into the Guard to join the local artillery supply unit. We worked with explosive charges that were coded red and green. That’s what I wanted to do. But after an eye test, which showed that I am red-green color-blind, I was assigned to clerical duty. Can you see my big ass sitting at a computer screen all day? That was not exactly what I had in mind when I signed up. Lucky for me, I couldn’t pass the typing test, and that was the end of my Guard career.
During guard training, we had to run every morning, which helped me nail a two-mile run in 10:56. When I went back to high school for my senior year, I was in great shape, and I had one more year on the football team with my friends. I even signed a letter of intent to play football at Northern State University in Aberdeen, because I didn’t have any wrestling offers.
I wanted to run the ball. I had the speed, and I was getting some size. But just as I was starting to rack up some impressive numbers, a defensive back took my knee out, and I had to have knee surgery. That was the end of my high school football career.
High school wrestling starts when the football season ends. That meant that my knee wouldn’t be completely healed before the first day of wrestling practice. In fact, when wrestling started I was still on my crutches.
That was bad enough. But to make matters worse, every year since I was in sixth grade, our coach, John Schiley, made us do a six-mile run on the first day of practice. It was called a “gut check,” and everyone was expected to finish if they wanted to be on Schiley’s team. This was my senior year and I was a leader. So I started the six miles on crutches and kept going until the coach was satisfied and let me jump in the back of his pickup. I was disappointed, though, because I had finished that run every year since I was in sixth grade.
Believe it or not, I was a late developer. As a young kid, I certainly was no heavyweight. I was a string bean.
In seventh grade, I wrestled at 103 pounds. As a freshman in high school, I was a 152-pounder; sophomore year, I was 160. By my junior year, I was 189 pounds. Finally, as a senior, I made it to the heavyweight division, but only by a couple of pounds.
Looking at me now, it might be hard to believe that I didn’t even have hair in my armpits when I graduated from high school. I guarantee you I was the last guy to go through puberty in my class. I lifted a lot of weights, and even though I was a six-foot-tall, 210-pound senior, I still looked like nothing more than a big stretched-out kid. Even in my freshman year of college, at my heaviest, I was only 226 pounds.
Coming up through the high school ranks, I was never a monster by any means. I was just trying to grow into my own skin. But that struggle became a huge positive for me: when I had to wrestle as a 103-pounder, or a 152-pounder, I developed the moves and quickness of a lighter-weight wrestler. When I got to heavyweight, I still had those moves, and I was fast. Had I always been big, I probably would have skated by on strength and size alone, and I never would have learned to move like I do now.
In both my junior and senior years in high school, I placed third in the state tourney. But to me, that was nothing special. I was supposed to win. That’s what I came to do.
Even though I only played football in high school because everyone else did, I was still pretty good at it. In my heart, though, I was a wrestler. Football was just something to do with my friends until the wrestling season started.
I never thought of myself as a football player, even when I was exploding through the defensive line. I never for a minute thought I was going to play football in college, or at the professional level. When I looked in the mirror, all I ever saw was a wrestler.
That’s probably why, when things didn’t work out for me with the Minnesota Vikings, I wasn’t all that upset. Instead, in some ways, being the last man cut from the roster only confirmed something I had always known. I can’t hide the fact, and I really