Dakota's Dream |
The heart of a true champion is measured by the sacrifices one makes to pursue a dream and the journey they embark on. In his own words, Dakota takes you on his journey to become a professional wrestler.
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I was fortunate to grow up in a small town with strong community pride, so there were a lot of opportunities for me in school. Academics were not difficult for me and I liked sports. With hard work and dedication I excelled at both. I was a four-year varsity letterman in football, basketball, and track. In basketball, I was a two-year starter and achieved All-District status on a team that was at one time ranked #3 in the state. The school’s track and field program was not as strong, but after basically coaching myself in long jump I achieved a Regional Championship and two years of All-State honors. Football, although not my favorite sport, was my most decorated. I started the first two years on offense and the last two years on offense, defense, and special teams. I was All-Conference for four years and during my senior year was named All-State as the top receiver in the state, even though I played the end position. In my studies, I was a yearly member of the National Honor Society and the Acalympic team. Before graduating as an honor student I earned the top score on a statewide math test. In addition to all of these school activities, there was one other interest that would prove to outweigh the rest – professional wrestling.
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Ever since discovering wrestling as a young child, a wrestler is all I wanted to be. That dream stayed with me through my high school days. Upon graduation, I had a choice to make: follow that crazy dream or go to college and continue on with the achievements I had started in high school. It was a tough decision. If North Dakota is known for producing pro athletes for any sport, it is rodeo. Wrestling is at the bottom of the list, so support and expectations for me to venture into wrestling were virtually non-existent. However, I was being recruited for football by colleges across the upper Midwest, including current Division I school, North Dakota State University. As a result of my top math score in the state, I was offered a lucrative academic scholarship to a different university. However, because of my intentions to wrestle, I had not pursued any of these opportunities. I never returned a call to a football coach, and I never actively applied for any scholarship. Despite my desire to wrestle, it was very difficult to sacrifice the rest of these hard-earned offers. I still wasn’t ready to commit myself totally to them, so I enrolled in a local university on football, track, and academic scholarships. I lasted one year. I wanted to wrestle, not be a student-athlete. So after I quit football, flunked a class (a first for me), and struggled half-heartedly through a track season, I left college and focused on following my dream.
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After a couple years of training with Ken Patera a few times a week at the beginning of my career in Minnesota, the time came when most of my advancement would take place outside of the training sessions and in actual matches. I decided to enroll in college at NDSU in Fargo and eventually settled into a major in civil engineering, while still spending the weekends wrestling, I would travel up to 13 1/2 hours one way to wrestle while still maintaining a GPA and eventually graduating with honors. I made the decision to attack college full force, taking up to 20 credits per semester of difficult engineering courses. I eventually even attempted to walk on the former national champion football team that had recruited me years earlier, only to realize that any opportunities would be very limited because I had spent the last few seasons focused on wrestling and I was in my final year of eligibility. My class schedule was more intense than that of the majority of my fellow students and that was recommended by the university. A 4-year engineering degree is typically earned in 5 years because of the quantity and difficulty of the classes. Although I do have 5 years of undergraduate classes, my first year of college after high school and my first semester back at NDSU contributed very little to the requirements of my degree, so I essentially earned it in 3½ years. Doing this as a full-time student is difficult enough, but I was spending weekends traveling to wrestling events in the upper Midwest, which would usually take 1-1½ days out of my schedule. This demand would increase greatly later on as I began wrestling regularly for Harley Race and World League Wrestling (WLW) in Missouri - a one-way trip would take up to 13½ hours. At times I would leave Fargo after classes on Thursday, drive to Missouri, wrestle Friday and Saturday, and return exhausted on Sunday night. This caused me to miss classes and have to cram a week’s worth of schoolwork into 4-5 days, while still trying to train at the gym as much as possible.
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It never crossed my mind to cut back on wrestling or school, because I remained focused on the goals at the end of both endeavors. Although I didn’t feel like I was committing myself totally to wrestling, I knew I was improving and working toward bigger opportunities which would come later. And despite the tremendous strain my schedule placed on my coursework, I was able to graduate with honors after earning a 3.9 GPA, membership into four honor societies, never missing a semester on the university’s Dean’s List or a year on the National Dean’s List, and being honored as a research scholar. But my college graduation would pose the same decision as my high school graduation – reap the benefits of my hard work in school or sacrifice it all, once again, for wrestling.
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My hard work in college had paid off because I was offered engineering positions based largely on the recommendations of professors and without me expressing any interest in the particular company. Aside from summers, I never had a regular job during my college years because I wanted to focus on my studies and wrestling. I survived financially off of student loans and any income I received from wrestling. But trying to balance the costs of college, independent living, and travel for wrestling (especially the rising fuel costs in recent years), was a lost cause. After years of living off of a very limited budget, which included saving money by sleeping in my car rather than a hotel 95% of the time, financial stability from an engineering job was very tempting. But a full-time job would require me to limit myself with wrestling. Although I had not dedicated myself completely to wrestling, I had never done anything to set myself back. This time, though, I had a choice that would allow a compromise.
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I decided to enter graduate school and pursue my Master’s degree. This would allow me a schedule flexible enough to continue wrestling while not having to sacrifice all the opportunities I earned during college. In fact, once I decided to pursue graduate school, more opportunities came my way. After completing one semester of graduate school at NDSU, I was given a research assistantship to one of the top 15 civil engineering universities in the nation, Iowa State University (ISU), which provided me with a generous stipend and a project that would allow me to complete my Master’s degree in one year. Very few students are offered a research assistantship in their first semester of study, much less one that will allow completion of a Master’s in one year, so I couldn’t refuse the proposal. In addition to that, I received the most prestigious fellowship given by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), which is given to only one graduate student each year in the nation. As a wrestler/engineer, I was even featured on the front page of their national publication, an occurrence that most likely has never happened before and will never happen again.
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But the opportunities didn’t stop there. One month after I began school at ISU, I attended Harley Race’s WLW/NOAH training camp, in which Pro Wrestling NOAH scouts for talent to invite to Japan. About a month after the camp, I was given the unbelievable opportunity to live, train, and compete in Japan for three months. This was the kind of opportunity I had been working for since I began wrestling. The only negative about the Japan trip was that the timing was not very good. I would have to sacrifice everything ISU and NSPE had given me in order to go to Japan. Again it was a tough decision with a lot at stake, but I had never backed off of my dream before and wasn’t about to start by turning down this opportunity. I gave up a seldom-offered research assistantship leading to the one-year completion of a Masters degree from one of the top 15 civil engineering universities in the nation in order to move to Japan for 3 months and wrestle.
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When I returned from my three months in Japan, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I decided to move back to my home in Richardton, North Dakota to spend time with my family because of the passing of my father just six weeks before I went to Japan. I returned to my very enjoyable but physically demanding job of landscaping that I had after high school, and I took the lead as the foreman of the crew. But I was determined that this would not inhibit my wrestling career. I continued to travel to Missouri to wrestle as I did when I was at NDSU, but these trips would increase in length by another 4 hours each way because Richardton is 4 hours west of Fargo.
In addition to the high costs of travel, long hours driving, and the 341,752 miles I had on my car before being hit by an inattentive driver, I had spent more nights sleeping in that car than in some apartments I have lived in.
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In fact, in one particular three-week stretch in May of 2006 I can recall working 48 hours one week, then driving to St. Joseph, Missouri to wrestle, returning home late Sunday night, working 40 hours in the next 3 days, going back to Missouri to wrestle on Thursday and Friday, returning home late Sunday night again, working 46 hours in the next 4 days, then leaving again to wrestle in Hannibal, Missouri, only to have my car breakdown halfway through Iowa on Saturday morning and be stranded there over Memorial Day weekend until I could get it fixed the following Tuesday. That time period was another test of my dedication for wrestling. My landscaping job was not only physically demanding, but I had the responsibility of being the crew foreman and it was the busiest time of the year for the business, so I routinely worked 11-13 hour days to accomplish as much as possible. I usually enjoy traveling to wrestling events, but after working the hours on a job like I was, driving 2000+ miles to wrestle, feeling the physical effects of wrestling, and trying sleep in a car at some rest area or truck stop along the road, those trips aren’t quite as enjoyable. I guess you could say I was lucky on that last trip when my car broke down because it happened only 30 miles from Ames, the home of ISU, and I still had an apartment there because I was waiting for my lease to expire. I didn’t have to pay for a 3-day motel stay, but I did have to pay for a $60 taxi ride back to Ames, which is a little hard to swallow when you’re on a tight budget. Once my car was fixed, I decided to save the $60 taxi charge and ride my bike the 30 miles to the shop to pick it up, but 3 miles before I got there I blew a tire, so I had to walk the rest of the way. Those last 3 miles of walking made me wonder if it was worth it. Instead of making nice overtime money at landscaping during the busiest time of the year, I was spending most of what I made during the week for fuel and car repairs on the weekends to continue my wrestling career. But this was my dream, and I figured this was just one small stretch of bad luck to test my desire. Little did I know that the luck would continue, as I would have another major breakdown later in the year returning from a wrestling trip. And after spending more money than the car was worth to fix the 1992 vehicle with 341,752 miles because I couldn't afford to get a different one, I was hit by an inattentive driver while returning from yet another wrestling trip to Missouri, which finally totaled my vehicle that I had spent more nights sleeping in than some apartments I have rented.
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Even after all the opportunity, award, financial, and lifestyle sacrifices I have made for wrestling, I can’t say that I regret any decision I have made. I wasn’t forced to choose wrestling, but I did, and I do know everything I missed because of it. But if I had not chosen wrestling, I would have regretted what I would have missed from that decision more than anything, and that is the realization of a childhood dream.
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| Dakota |