YOUTH SPORTS: A Superior 13-year-old takes his zest for wrestling to national levels.
BY DALTON WALKER
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Most 13-year-olds can be found playing video games or hanging out at a mall.
Nikola Bogojevic can be found in his basement tossing weights around for three and a half hours a day. That’s the routine of a national wrestling champion.
Bogojevic, of Superior, helped Team Wisconsin win the Schoolboy Dual National Championship for sixth- through eighth-graders June 19 in Indianapolis. He also returned with an invididual title, winning the 225-250-pound division with a record of 17-1.
“I always loved wrestling,” said Bogojevic, who stands 5-foot-9 and weighs 220 pounds. “My main goal is to make it to the Olympics.”
The Olympics are a few years away, but another competition awaits. Bogojevic will wrestle in the Kids National Championships on Wednesday in Green Bay.
In Green Bay he will compete alone, not as a member of Team Wisconsin. He said he wouldn’t want it any other way.
“Step up to the plate,” Bogojevic said. “I can’t be afraid of who I go against. Human to human, no reason to be afraid.”
Bogojevic wrestles three styles — Greco-Roman, freestyle and folk, the style sactioned by the governing body of Wisconsin high school athletics. In Green Bay, Bogojevic will compete in Greco-Roman and freestyle.
Joseph Reasbeck, 62, has been training Bogojevic since February. Bogojevic credits much of his success to their two-hour training sessions each Tuesday and Thursday. Reasbeck stresses technique and patience.
Bogojevic’s size sometimes is his worst enemy. In two recent tournaments he took first place without breaking a sweat, winning because he was the only entry in his category.
“He would walk around hours looking for an exhibition match,” Kim Bogojevic, Nikola’s mother, said. “Nobody would want to wrestle him.”
TURNING POINT
Kim Bogojevic spends $200 a week on groceries, but she doesn’t mind. Two years ago she was diagnosed with epilepsy and confined to a wheelchair. Today she walks with help of a walker.
The time Kim Bogojevic spent in the hospital left her son home alone. He took up wrestling as a first-grader and made it his focus while his mother was hospitalized.
“I was home alone, stressed out,” Nikola Bogojevic said. “I started to work hard. I lost 30 pounds.”
Nikola Bogojevic was named after King Nikola Petrovic of Montenegro. His father was born Yugoslavia.
Nikola’s father, Zoran Bogojevic, was born in Yugoslavia and arrived in the United States in the 1970s. Kim Bogojevic first worked for Zoran Bogojevic before they got married.
Zoran Bogojevic, 51, works 20 hours a day to support his family, and it’s from him that Nikola Bogojevic has learned discipline.
Kim Kogojevic says her son is a gentle giant wrapped in a man’s body. His bedroom is full of medals and posters of World Wrestling Entertainment stars. When friends visit Nikola, they sometimes wrestle downstairs, dressed costumes mimicking pro wrestling stars, Kim Bogojevic said.
“We’re very proud of him. We’ll push him all we can,” Kim Bogojevic said “I really feel he will be in the Olympics one day.”
DALTON WALKER can be reached at (218) 723-5390 or e-mailed at [email protected]
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