Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [6]
Let me tell you, if Rice would have charged me twenty cents a month for that flophouse attic, it still would have been too much. It was absolutely horrendous. When Rice said the room was in an attic, he wasn’t kidding. This was not some bedroom above a frat house; it was really a stinking attic. I had pigeons up there. It was dusty. It was cramped. It was drafty. I was living in a miserable attic in Minnesota!
To pay the rent for that frickin’ place, and to get some money for food, I took a job as a demolition man with a construction company. That was the perfect job for me. Every day from 7 A.M. till the middle of the afternoon, I demolished things with a sledgehammer. And when I was done swinging the sixteen-pounder, I still had time to make my afternoon workouts at the gym.
Yeah, I was paying my dues, but I knew it would all be worth it. I was determined to win an NCAA Division I title, and I was willing to do whatever it takes to get there. The U of M was a program on the rise, and I was going to be its star. But then the road took an unexpected turn.
Just as I was settling into my routine, J Robinson called me and said there was a problem. They were trying to get me enrolled at the U for the fall, but my junior college transcript was twenty-four credits shy of the minimum for eligibility to transfer. Are you kidding me? I was pissed. All I could think was, “You guys had all my transcripts and you saw what classes I was taking. I’m nineteen years old. You’re the wrestling coaches. This is something you should have seen right away.” But there we were, sitting in J’s office, and he’s telling me I am twenty-four credits short.
Can you believe that?
After all that I had been through, I wasn’t about to just kiss my dream good-bye. I wasn’t going to let the system beat me. I was going to take control of my own destiny. Unfortunately, summer sessions had already started at most schools.
J wanted me to go somewhere that had a wrestling team I could practice with, and he had a connection at Lasson Community College in Susanville, California, where the team was pretty good. The original plan was for me to go to summer and fall at Lasson, then transfer to the U. I thought it was a huge move going from the farm in South Dakota to the big city of Minneapolis, even if it is only a couple hundred miles away. But California? J might as well have told me I had to move to Japan. They were both a world away as far as I was concerned.
I immediately went back to my attic in the frat house, grabbed all my stuff, and headed home to Webster. On the way, I was thinking about how to tell my parents that I wasn’t a U of M Golden Gopher, and that I was heading out to California in two days.
I never did think of a good way to deliver the news, so I just told my mom and dad straight out, “I’m not eligible for college, and I need to get some quick credits at a school in California.” They looked at me like I was nuts, but my mind was made up. If this was what I had to do to get on the U of M wrestling team, then this was what I would do. There was no discussion.
I left home in my ten-year-old Mazda RX-7 with Lasson Community College in Susanville, California, as my destination. I remember thinking this might actually be a really fun road trip.
I didn’t know anything about the school I was going to. I didn’t know where I would stay. I didn’t know how I would afford to eat or where I’d train. All I knew was I had a long drive to Susanville, and by the time I got there, I would be just in time for classes.
I remember driving until I hit Salt Lake City, Utah, around 5 A.M. on a Sunday morning. I pulled into a truck stop and took a little nap, but I knew that if I didn’t get my ass back on the road I couldn’t get my school credits. And without the credits, I couldn’t get into the U of M wrestling program. How could J Robinson not have known I was