Vets’ atmosphere left this wrestler in awe
By TIM JOHNSON
SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER
Veterans Memorial Auditorium captured the imagination of the Morning Sun Tiger wrestling team from the moment it was announced the big show was going to be held in the capital city.
“Vets “was the cry every night in the practice room during conditioning and up-downs. We knew our goal and focused on it every day, having grown up in girls basketball country and going to the big house to watch several games in the mid-1960s. I knew the venue, but this 98-pound sophomore had no idea that entering Vets on the morning of the 1970 state tournament would leave me in such awe – to the point of being practically a zombie.
I was among the first called to the mat – the first ever to wrestle in the state tournament at Vets and guess who was working the score table? None other then the coach who got me started but left before my high school career, future hall-of-famer Bob Darrah, who had recently taken over the Dowling program and had not yet taken the program to the level of success that would never allow him to work the score tables at Vets again.
I don’t remember the match with Dan McKee, but I lost 6-1 and was finished (this was when there were only eight wrestlers in the bracket and no wrestle backs). I enjoyed the pats on the back from fans the rest of the tournament and the satisfaction of reaching my goal to see Vets.
I knew I wanted to coach from a very young age and after a college career at Coe, I became the head coach at Mount Vernon High School and again “Vets “was the cry.
I had the good fortune of coaching 30 some wrestlers at Vets and several state champions, including four-timer Greg Randall. Between my first state champ, Randy Majors in ’79, and Greg’s fourth, I can say that the highlights of my years was seeing these young men accomplish their goals at Vets.
Of course, I didn’t let them make the same mistakes I did. I found an open door at Vets the night before the meet started and walked the young men into the partially-lit Barn. I told the boys to envision the crowd and their entry to the mats and just pretend that all the noise was for them, applauding their yearlong efforts. It made a difference.
And then to have the opportunity to call 16 state tournaments for IPTV was also a dream come true as I remember seeing Randy Neilson and Doug Brown calling Greg’s fourth state title and I thought, “I would love to do that!”
Never over all these years did I ever enter Vets without feeling a sense of wonder a sense of “I’ve arrived “- all going back to the first day of practice in the fall of ’69 when a rag-tag group of small-country boys realized that we could go to the big city we could earn our way to the biggest show on earth.
That’s how we felt – that if we would just work hard enough and do enough up-downs (while simultaneously crying out “Vets”), it would happen.
Tim Johnson grew up in and wrestled for Morning Sun and was a wrestling coach at Mount Vernon before entering into private business. He did play-by-play of the state wrestling tournament for IPTV and now does similar work for the network on its college wrestling telecasts.
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