By Matt Krumrie “Senior Editor
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Mike Straka is currently the director of operations and special projects for FOXNews.com, and covers entertainment and features on the Sunday program “FOX Magazine. “He also writes the weekly Grrr! Column and hosts “The Real Deal “video segments on FOXNews.com.
Straka is also an actor who has had roles in Analyze This and Last Action Hero and also worked as a comedic sketch writer for the Late Night with Conan O’Brien show. He has worked with Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal and Lisa Kudrow, among many others.
Straka grew up in in Barnegat, New Jersey, where he was a high school wrestler. In a recent article on FOXNEWS.com (Read Here) Straka talked about his years as a high school wrestler and about the coach who inspired him to push himself harder and harder, day in and day out, season after season.
Through his work Straka also interviewed and talked about the sport of wrestling with Tom Cruise and Billy Baldwin, among others. Read below to find out what Straka, who now lives in New York City, had to say about the sport of wrestling, and much more.
TWM: Talk about your wrestling career, how did you get started in the sport?
STRAKA: I got started in wrestling because my older brother was a wrestler. He used to throw me around all the time and I figured the only way I’d have a fighting chance was to learn how to wrestle. The other reason I took up wrestling was because honestly, I was too small for most other sports. My freshman year in high school I barely weighed 90 pounds, and was just five feet tall, making football and basketball out of the question. I think I was even too small for soccer, because no matter how fast my little legs would go, I was still slower than the taller guys. I saw wrestling as the great equalizer for someone my size.
Wrestling was great for me. I was never into team sports. That’s not to say that I’m not a team player. I am. But I don’t suffer fools at all, and I found that in team sports there are a lot of fools, and a lot of foolish parents too. Wrestling is as individual as you can get – you work hard, you win. You dog it, you lose. Another reason I loved wrestling was I started martial arts at a very young age, and I was very good at kicking and punching (these were days before the Ultimate Fighting Championships and the popularity of jui jitsu), but I knew that most fights ended up on the ground. Wrestling would make me more of an all round fighter.
I loved the discipline of wrestling. Cutting weight was tough, but it taught me how to sacrifice. The conditioning was tough but the results after a few weeks of rolling on the mat are unbeatable.
Wrestling taught me how to prepare to win, and that lesson of preparation has carried over into my adult life and career. I come from a place of no excuses, and that’s the most important lesson I ever took away from wrestling. There’s a sign as one enters my office at FOX News Channel, and it says “Caution. You are now entering a no excuse zone. ”
TWM: A picture (below, right) from your senior season paints a picture of someone who was pretty successful. What was your career record, and what were your successes on the mat?
STRAKA: Honestly I don’t remember my career record. New Jersey is a tough wrestling state, so there were a lot of good guys around. I went to a parochial school where the wrestling coach was the guy who drew the shortest straw. I was lucky to have Toms River South coach John DeMarco for one season. He is a great wrestling coach who loves the sport. He lives for it, but for the most part, I got out of wrestling exactly what I put into it.
TWM: At that point you led the team in pins, was that your style, to go out, aggressive, and go for the pin?
STRAKA: Yes. I was never good at practicing or drilling during a match. I know some guys would work on some of the stuff they learned during the week, and in retrospect, I wish I worked the singles and whizzars on some of the opponents I knew I could beat, but I always entered a match with such intensity that I would forget my strategy and just go for the pin. I was not a good technician.
TWM: In the article on Foxnews.com, you talk about how much weight you had to cut, and how you believe that wrestlers should not cut too much weight. Can you elaborate more on your thoughts on that?
STRAKA: Everybody has their own thoughts on this, and it’s the grand design of the weight issue is best left to guys who devote a lot more time to the sport than I currently do, but for me cutting weight was all about being a nice guy, and as the saying goes, nice guys finish last. I had a friend who was taller than me and he couldn’t get down to 119. We were both wrestling 125 and he couldn’t beat me in the wrestle-off, and the guy at 135 was much better than my friend, and I was too small to go up, so I volunteered to go down. I was a stocky kid so cutting to 119 looked a lot easier than it actually was, and I started doing some really dangerous things to make the weight, like taking water pills, probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life. By the end of the season I was weak as hell, and guys that I pinned in the beginning of the winter I was barely beating by spring. I think that if I just stayed at 125 I would have been an even better wrestler.
TWM: Do you still follow the sport of wrestling now, and if so, who are your favorite teams and wrestlers? Was there a certain wrestler, coach or team growing up you followed or admired?
STRAKA: I don’t follow it as much anymore, but of course Cael Sanderson is an iron man. Growing up I admired guys like Pete Yazou, Bobby Weaver and Gene Mills (who were all older than me but I still loved them). I also spent every summer with Coach Ice (David Icenhower) at Trenton State College at wrestling camp, where I got the nickname “The Mauler. “I think it was more a term of endearment than a characterization of me on the mat, because there were some great wrestlers there. I think my intensity was part of the nickname but it had nothing to do with my win record at camp.
TWM: What did the sport of wrestling teach you that has helped you in your professional life? Are there any correlations?
STRAKA: Wrestling taught me that in order to be a winner you have to dig deep down and really want it. That means sacrifice. As wrestlers we have to make weight. We have to condition. We have to drill. We have to study our opponents. We have to clean the mats. We have to lift weights. We have to run. All of this for six minutes on the mat. You get one shot out there to win. If one applies that same approach to life, marriage, parenthood, a career, one can’t help but do well. I’ve been in movies, in commercials, in theater productions and on television. I am the director of operations for one of the biggest news websites on the Internet. I host my own webcast, called The Real Deal, and I write my own column, called Grrr! I also am also a contributing entertainment correspondent on the number one cable news network in the world. Nobody handed me anything. I have no connections in the media industry at all. All I have is my reputation as a go-getter, and my desire to do the work and to be the best. Life is like wrestling, only the stakes are even higher than the win/loss columns.
TWM: Youth sports have changed so much over the years, and now it’s more about competition and succeeding than being a kid, and learning life lessons. Do you feel that wrestling is one of the few sports left for kids that has not been altered that actually teaches kids lessons in life?
STRAKA: Absolutely. There’s a purity to the sport that most people cannot understand. They have to have experienced it to understand it. That being said, I was never a baseball, basketball or football player, so perhaps those participants would say the same.
TWM: Do you miss the sport? If so, what do you miss? What don’t you miss?
STRAKA: I totally miss the sport. I miss the physicality. I miss the workout. I even miss the smell of the wrestling room. I don’t miss starving myself and I don’t miss staph infection. I miss being sore all the time, but I don’t miss the chapped lips. I also use to have braces so I definitely don’t miss the crossfaces. I miss the guys I wrestled with. There’s a terrific bond that wrestlers share – at least the A-teams. We don’t like the up-and comers-who are threatening our spots.
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