Hartland’s Ben Askren has a not-so-quiet confidence
By GARY D’AMATO
Columbia, Mo. – You can see it on the videotape, just after the referee raises his hand. University of Missouri wrestler Ben Askren leans over and says something to Pittsburgh’s Keith Gavin.
Thanks for not ducking me. That’s what Askren is saying. Thanks for not moving up or down in weight to avoid me, for having the guts to wrestle me, for putting it on the line when you know deep down you can’t win.
The problem for Askren these days is not extending his unbeaten streak, which has reached 72 matches. It’s a given the senior from Hartland, Wis., will win every time he steps on the mat. The problem is finding opponents who will push him, something he needs in his all-consuming quest to be the best.
Askren is the defending NCAA champion at 174 pounds. He won the Dan Hodge Trophy, wrestling’s equivalent to the Heisman, after dismantling previously unbeaten Jake Herbert of Northwestern, 14-2, in the championship match to complete a 45-0 season.
This year, he is even better.
It’s one thing to be unbeaten and another to be unbeatable, and Askren is very close to the latter. He is 27-0 with 23 pins. In one astonishing stretch, he pinned 15 consecutive opponents in the first period. Gavin, ranked No. 2 in the nation, went down twice in a 19-day span, in 2 minutes 34 seconds and 2:16, respectively. All-American Matt Herrington of Penn lasted just 39 seconds.
“What he’s doing this season with pinning people is amazing, and it hasn’t been done too often, “says Missouri coach Brian Smith. “I’ve had other coaches say, ‘Man, I’ve never seen anything like it.’ ”
Askren doesn’t just beat people, he destroys them with cold-blooded fury. He breaks them down and brings them to dead-armed exhaustion with his unorthodox scrambling style. And then, almost always, he pins them.
“This year I’ve been going out there and going for the kill, “he says. “No messing around.”
Askren and his younger brother Maxwell, a redshirt freshman who is 22-0 at 197 pounds, have helped put Mizzou wrestling on the map. Attendance for home meets at the Hearnes Center has soared this season. The Tigers were ranked No. 1 before losing to No. 2 Minnesota, 20-16, two weeks ago.
Main attraction
While Max is one of the biggest surprises in college wrestling, big brother Ben is the main attraction, and his image is everywhere: On the cover of Missouri’s media guide, on team posters and, undoubtedly, in the minds of opponents both past and future.
Supremely confident and outspoken, Askren’s reputation as a showman precedes him and when he walks onto the mat, his wild blond mane poking out of his headgear in all directions, people can’t take their eyes off him.
“I’ve been around with (Cael) Sanderson and great wrestlers that people stop to watch, “Smith says. “That’s what Ben does. It’s like when a good-looking girl walks in the room. When a great wrestler wrestles, people stop and watch because they know they’re watching greatness.”
Like any athlete who isn’t afraid to let people know how good he is, Askren has his share of critics. Read the message boards on Internet wrestling sites and it’s apparent some think he’s a little too big for his singlet and wouldn’t mind seeing him taken down, literally and figuratively.
Askren guarantees that won’t happen any time soon.
“I truly believe I have worked harder than anyone else, “he says. “I truly believe my conditioning is better than anyone else’s. I truly believe that my technique is way better than anyone else’s. So I really don’t see how anybody is going to beat me. They can’t take me down. The definitely can’t ride me. And if I don’t want them to get up from the bottom, they’re not getting up from the bottom. So how are they going to beat me?”
Well, what if he makes a mistake? Even a great wrestler can get caught in a mistake and wind up on his back, a place Askren hasn’t been this season.
“Yeah, I could make a mistake, but then, nobody is going to pin me, “he says. “I fight too hard off my back. And the match is seven minutes long and they’re not going to be able to hold off all my offense for seven minutes. I’m going to come at them and they’re going to get so tired they’re going to fall over. And the demoralizing thing is, they’re going to make a mistake, and any mistake they make is going to put them on their back.
“So, ideally, they have to wrestle the perfect match against me.”
Early days
His unshakable self-confidence goes back to his days at Arrowhead High School, where he talked the talk and walked the walk as a two-time WIAA state champion who idolized and emulated Muhammad Ali.
“I think people would look at it like he was cocky or being a jerk, but sometimes I think he was saying stuff to set another challenge, “says Arrowhead coach John Mesenbrink. “You know, ‘Now I’ve got to live up to it.’ ”
Even his mother, Michele Askren, sometimes wishes her son would “tone it down a little bit.”
“When Ben was in high school, it was hard to be a mom because there’s a lot of criticism, “she says. “But he speaks his mind and he doesn’t believe in being politically correct all the time. If that’s the worst thing he does. . . .”
She has a point. Both Askrens are good students and by all accounts model citizens and consummate teammates. Ben is a geography major and plans to pursue a graduate degree in sports psychology; Max is a linguistics major and already speaks fluent Russian, Spanish, French and Japanese.
They live near campus as next-door neighbors, in separate houses owned by their parents. Ben, who can’t sit still, has a wrestling mat in his house; Max, more introverted and laid-back, has the hot tub.
“It’s like yin and yang, “Max says. “We balance each other out.”
Both say they could live together in relative comfort but admit their parents were wise to give them their own space.
“I say he’s got OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), “Ben says of Max. “His house is freakishly clean. My house is clean compared to the average college student’s, but Max calls me a slob and it’s like, ‘Max, I’m going to beat your (expletive).’
“It’s great we don’t live together because we’d drive each other nuts.”
Both wrestle with a distinctive style of scrambling perfected by Ben. Wrestlers call it “funk “because it consists of moves, counters and counters to counters that don’t even have names. To the untrained eye, it sometimes appears as if Ben is wildly twisting and turning and flopping around.
In reality, he is putting his opponents in unfamiliar positions, coming at them from awkward angles, using moves he literally invented. There is a counter to every move in wrestling, but Askren is so unorthodox that only he has taken the time to unlock the mysteries of his innovative funk.
Matt Pell, a senior from Luxemburg, Wis., who has a 13-2 record at 165 pounds, has known Askren for years and roomed with him when both were freshmen at Missouri. Pell says Askren routinely comes up with moves he’s never seen.
“Every match, at least five times, “Pell says. “You watch, any match he wrestles he does something where the crowd goes, ‘Whoa!’
“He says the reason he’s a better scrambler than most people is they take time to think about it. They’ll get in a position and they’ll have to think about what to do. He does it so much it’s like breathing to him. So he beats them in that split-second.”
Turning point
Ben has taught much of his repertoire to his teammates, and Max has incorporated some of Ben’s funk into his own wrestling.
“They like to be individuals, “says Dave Bennett, the national developmental freestyle coach for USA Wrestling. “They like to put their own spin on things and there’s nothing wrong with that. The guys who have been really great in this sport have had a little bit of that in them.”
In Ben’s case, necessity was the mother of invention.
The prep hotshot arrived on campus and discovered everyone in the Missouri wrestling room, and in college wrestling rooms across the land, was a prep hotshot. To his dismay, he realized he was slower and weaker than most of his opponents and although he has transformed his body, he still is not an overwhelming physical specimen.
“I’m sure if you put them in the weight room and tested their strength, everyone in the top 20 in my weight class would be faster and stronger than me, “he says. “If you averaged them out, I would probably be last out of those 20 people. But wrestling is about leverage and technique.”
Pell can pinpoint the exact time during their freshman year when Askren began developing his unique style.
“We had just got done with practice and Ben came into the room and he was crying, “Pell says. “I had never seen Ben cry. He looked awful, like something terrible happened. I was like, ‘What’s up, man? What’s wrong?’
“He said, ‘I’m not explosive enough. I’m not strong enough. I want to dominate my opponents and I don’t have the natural ability. I don’t have the fast-twitch muscles like good college wrestlers have.’ I remember laying in bed thinking about it. I had never seen Ben doubt himself like that.
“I could tell that day is when he made a decision that if he’s going to win a national title he’s got to change his style. That’s when he started developing this whole new style that he’s got.”
The monster season
Askren went 32-5 as a freshman and 34-3 as a sophomore, both times losing in the NCAA title match to Oklahoma State’s Chris Pendleton. Then came his breakout junior year, when he went undefeated and set the Tigers’ record for falls with 25, a record he is sure to break in the coming weeks.
In addition to his confounding style, and in part because of it, Askren never reaches the point of exhaustion, at least not in a seven-minute match.
“I don’t get tired, “he says.
Physiologically speaking, Askren has two lungs and a heart just like everyone else. But he is in such great condition – in 10 years he’s taken more than two days off from training just once – and is so strong mentally he doesn’t allow himself to get tired.
He credits Mesenbrink for instilling that toughness at Arrowhead.
“We worked so hard under him, “Askren says. “I’ll never feel as tired as I did in the Arrowhead practice wrestling room. I’ll never be that tired again in my entire life. So from that mind-set I just go and go and go. If I’m tired, the other guy is ready to fall over.”
Askren puts opponents in unfamiliar positions and they wind up expending all their energy trying to extricate themselves. He turns their strength against them with leverage and technique.
Like flies caught in a spider’s web, their struggles are futile.
“I’ve seen people in with Ben, in the first minute they look exhausted, “Smith says. “And these are people I watch in seven-minute wars the match before and say, ‘This guy might be able to hang with him.’ And all of a sudden, Ben is pinning him in 46 seconds. It’s amazing what he does.”
Askren is running out of challenges at the collegiate level – Missouri assistant coach Bart Horton calls him “a man among boys “- and is a safe bet to repeat as NCAA champion, barring injury. Some people already are comparing him with legends such as Sanderson and Dan Gable.
“I run into coaches all the time who say, ‘Ben is right up there with those guys,’ ” Smith says.
Many of Askren’s would-be challengers at 174 have moved up or down in weight, knowing they would have no chance to win a national championship at that weight (which is why he gave Gavin props earlier in the season).
Askren himself recently moved up to 184 just to face second-ranked Roger Kish of Minnesota and won, 5-4.
“I love challenges, “he says. “Since as long as I can remember, I always enjoyed a challenge. I don’t know if it’s my innate personality or something I was taught as a little kid. I’m always willing to put it on the line.
“Honestly, that has made me what I am today.”
New challenges await
After college, Askren will have little more than a year to get ready for the U.S. Olympic wrestling trials. He will have to change his style to adapt to international freestyle rules. Much of his funk, the twisting and turning, will be useless because in freestyle a wrestler cannot expose his back to the mat.
Even Bennett, who has coached both Askrens at developmental camps and in international meets, is not certain Ben will be able to make the adjustment in time to be a factor at the 2008 Olympic Games.
“What people fail to realize is the reason I win is that I’m a smart wrestler, “Askren says. “Obviously, I’m not going to roll across my back in freestyle. I’m not stupid. My freestyle technique – if you look back to when I was 19 or 20 and I placed at the world team trials – was some of the best freestyle tactical wrestling around.”
After he makes the U.S. team, there is but one goal left.
“At the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, “Askren says, “I’m going to win the gold medal.”
Notice, he didn’t say he wants to win the gold medal, or hopes to win the gold medal.
“I’m going to win the gold medal, “he repeats, for emphasis.
The message boards are sure to light up once people read that quote.
Askren will read them. And he’ll smile.
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