PROFILE: Matt Gentry
Gentry-fied approach
Stanford now on wrestling map
Tom FitzGerald, Chronicle Staff Writer
ver the Thanksgiving break in 1998, a 122-pound high school junior and his dad visited Stanford. If the boy had shown you his driver’s license, you would have said it was a nice fake. Where’s your bicycle, kid?
Even when he was about to enroll at Stanford as a 145-pound wrestler, there were questions about his toughness. This kid’s too gentle, too humble, too polite. Even his family name denotes a person of — ugh — good breeding.
But know this about Matt Gentry: He’s as relentless as a clock. A clock with a smiling face.
“Nine out of 10 wrestlers slap their faces and get angry (before matches), ” Stanford coach Steve Buddie said.
But if you’re Matt Gentry, what you do before a match is smile.
“I wrestle best when I’m relaxed, when I’m focused on the wrestling, not the outcome,” Gentry, 22, said. “If I focus on the outcome, I get tense. Once I open up, I rely on my ability. I love the sport. I love the fight. I love going out there one-on-one. Every position is different. Every scramble is different. You can be really creative in the way you move your body.”
Stanford has educated four members of the presiding U.S. Supreme Court, a couple of astronauts and dozens of current or former professional athletes. Although its wrestling program goes back to 1916 and the team has been going to the NCAA’s since 1967, Stanford has had only one national wrestling champion. The guy who goes into each match armed with a smile.
How Gentry traveled from the wrestling coldbed of Grants Pass, Ore., to the 157-pound championship last year in the NCAA Division I championship in St. Louis is a testament not only to his grit and athletic ability, but to his intelligence and coachability. Now he’s back for more. He will try to defend his Pac-10 title today and Monday in San Luis Obispo before returning to the nationals in St. Louis on March 18-19.
The son of a family doctor and a nurse, Gentry is majoring in human biology and plans to be a doctor, too. His parents, by the way, considered TV to be one big visual, well, infection. The occasional movie was all the kids were allowed to watch. “I’m kind of clueless on pop culture,” he said.
Because of the boob-tube ban, he and his younger brother, Patrick, spent a lot of time outdoors, and they also wrestled a lot. “He’s the only one who can pin me,” Gentry said. “Something about that guy — he starts to wrestle me, I think it’s funny, I start laughing and he pins me every time.”
Gentry started wrestling at age 6 at a local club. “My first match, I started crying and actually forfeited the match,” he said. “This kid was trash-talking me and making my life miserable. My dad said, ‘Are you having fun? Because if you’re not, we’re going to go home.’ That probably would have been the end of my career, but I said no, I’ll stick with it, maybe because I was afraid of disappointing him. I did it and started to love it.”
So much so that throughout his four years in high school, he worked out once a week with former Olympic wrestler Sergio Gonzalez. Gentry’s dad drove him 45 minutes to the weekly workouts for four years. The extra work paid off in two state titles. “The thing I try to pass on is my love for wrestling,” Gonzalez said, “and Matt got that.”
Stanford, then under coach Chris Horpel, wasn’t a national wrestling powerhouse. But Gentry, valedictorian of his high school class, wanted the challenging academics and the sunny weather, so he was willing to forego a full scholarship to Oregon in favor of a partial ride on the Farm.
“He always believed he could help us pioneer something great here,” said Buddie, who took over when Horpel retired in 2001, “and he’s done just that. There’s no way you could measure what he’s done for the program.”
The 157-pound class was probably the toughest in last year’s nationals, featuring three unbeaten wrestlers — No. 1 ranked Alex Tirapelle of Illinois, Jake Percival of Ohio University and Gentry. In the semifinals, Percival upset Tirapelle and Gentry beat Ryan Bertin of Michigan 6-4 in overtime, in what Gentry called his best match of the season.
Gentry had beaten Percival a month earlier in the All-Star Classic in Iowa, a wild 13-10 match in which Gentry had jumped to an 8-0 lead. The NCAA final was much more cautious. Gentry needed a reversal with 30 seconds left to win 4-2, the finishing touch on a 42-0 season. This time, the smile lasted well into the spring.
His senior year brought adversity. During a punishing practice in October, he landed hard on his midsection and later collapsed. At the emergency room, it was feared he had damaged his spleen and was bleeding internally, but it turned out to be torn rib cartilage.
He took a month off and missed several matches before returning to the nationals. At the Midlands tournament in Chicago, he jolted Tirapelle 8-1, exploding for seven points in the last 30 seconds. The one blemish on his 25-1 record as a senior was a 4-3 overtime loss to Fresno State’s Jim Medeiros, ending his school-record 64-match win streak. Gentry, 6-2 against Medeiros in his career, admitted, “I didn’t wrestle as well as I could have.”
Once again, 157 pounds will be the toughest weight class for next month’s NCAA revival of “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Percival, Bertin and Tirapelle are all back. “And the next four are equally tough,” Buddie said.
Gentry plans to attend medical school, but he also hopes those plans are waylaid by the Beijing Olympics. “He’s still such an open book,” Buddie said. “He’s a great candidate for the Olympic team in 2008.”
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