This Championship Wrestling team started in an innocuous moment in September 1971 when State Champ Senior wrestlers Ricky Licari and Damian Kovary, recruited Billy Joyce, Steve Schneider and me to wrestle and work out with them one fall afternoon. I had known Licari and Schneider from an Amityville swim club and Billy from homeroom. We were smart and strong and learned quickly, but more importantly we were still small, and Ricky said we had great potential for the challenging lower weight classes. I wanted to swim or play hockey, but they weren’t sponsored sports yet, and we were too small for football or hoops. So, we followed our new mentors. These would be our people, our tribe. I wrestled with them for four years until I broke an ankle senior year. Then I went skiing and they went on to win the Championship. Some times the fringe element tends to be marginalized and I was not much of a wrestler, but I was a team player. I never missed a match. I stuck with these guys and we are still friends today. This is our story.
Wrestling started in November under Coach Jefferies, but we didn’t
start practice in the Small Gym until 600 PM when the Freshman Basketball Team
finished. Wrestling was a secondary
sport at the time with used mats, hand-me-down singlets and a $800 annual
budget. We filled the time after school
studying and giving Mrs. Agnes Hickman fits in the library. It is no accident that these wrestlers were all
good student athletes with high GPAs that would propel them to good colleges to
become Doctors and Lawyers, Engineers and Entrepreneurs, Writers and
Businessmen.
We turned up the heat in the Small Gym and put on plastic
sweat suits to lose weight and practiced hard until 800 PM, learning the moves
and getting in great shape. The room
smelt of sweat and Lysol and tasted like salt.
There is nothing as aerobic as wrestling except, perhaps, a 2-minute
shift playing hockey. But in wrestling we
did 3 consecutive 2-minute shifts in a match, with overtime if necessary. It was always anaerobic after the first period
and if you didn’t have a miraculous second and third wind, you were toast. In addition, most of us were losing 10% of
our body weight in sweat and blood every week to wrestle in a lower weight
class. This might explain our eating insecurities later in life but that is another story. Pound for pound these were the
best athletes around and the sport demanded total commitment of body, soul and
mind.
That year was a blur of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow
stuffed in the back of Licari’s frozen pick-up truck listening to “American Pie”
and “Mississippi Queen” going home hungry at 9 PM or famishly eating peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches after Saturday matches.
We wrestled some good catholic schools and great public schools that year,
including Hempstead in their new gym that looked like Madison Square Garden. We were exhausted after just the handshakes
and terrified after Paul Callahan got his eye ripped out, but the JV team won
57 – 3 portending greatness to come. We didn’t
travel far since we used the old retired CHS school bus that had no heat and
one windshield wiper and could only go 45 mph on the LIE. These ‘Boys on the Bus’ went undefeated and
won the 1972 League Championship while Licari and Kovary won individual State
Championships again that year while the rest of us watched and learned how to
win.
The next year was different with Coach Rotondi when our pre-Nike motto was to just ‘Do It’ meaning - throw a half-nelson from anywhere and everywhere. There were several more of us from the class of 75 including Joe Sampson, Massoni and Corsello. Dugan, Dachille and Jimmy Finn joined us as well as the infamous Conway brothers. Terry Rogers won the 1973 States, and we got a better bus so we could go out to Syosset and Suffolk County and wrestle some new schools. Kevin Sampson led the way and started the Sampson family wrestling legacy at CHS.
We were introduced into the 'team' concept that has since been appropriated by corporate America for higher productivity through binding interpersonal relationships. Employees don't work hard now because they love Goldman Sacs or General Motors, they work hard because they don't want to let their teammates down. Kind of a manipulation of human nature. By 1974 our team began to grow wings. Many of the frustrated football and soccer players and other good athletes began to join the team. There was Westerman and Souzzi, Reardon and Jack LeRoland, Casey, Squillace and Frank Nataro, Nuzzolese, Hess and Colin Carol, Quartararo, Derdak and Kim Uniack. Puberty came and we all grew bigger and stronger. Wrestling was cool and fun again and people began to come out and watch us.
The biggest change was that George Dlugolonski became the
coach. He also coached soccer and was a
relentless taskmaster with attention to detail.
He was barely six years older than us, and he was full of life and new
ideas, a sense of humor and a fair disciplinarian. I car-pooled daily with ‘Dugo’ to Massapequa,
and he had a heater, quad-stereo and a fake mobile phone in his car and he felt like a big brother. He used to date my babysitter years before, but now had a serious
partner Susan, who came to all our matches.
Dugo would ask me how practice was, and I would recommend fewer neck
bridges and more fancy head lock moves, and he would listen. We were peers and we had buy-in. I was the worst wrestler because I was slow, lazy and didn't care who won but coach would spend as much time with me as the champs. It is easy to coach champs but he spent as much time coaching the chumps about things other than wrestling. It’s a funny thing that we began to believe
in ourselves, and we started winning. We
were no back-room secondary sport, we were bona-fide athletes now and no longer
invisible at the sock-hops. Joyce,
Schneider, Massoni and Finn led the way that year, but we all contributed, and we were finally
Flyers.
Senior year rolled out as expected. We won four out of five of our first matches
against good public schools and that steeled us for the regular schedule. We were 5-1 against our Catholic league
opponents losing by only 2 points to our arch-rivals St John the Baptist. Dugo kept us scheduled against more tough public
schools and even his Alma Mater – Plainedge, and we won our last 5 matches against
lesser opponents. We got our revenge against St Johns by winning the 1975 League
Championship meet by 13.5 points with Joyce, Derdak and Massoni wining League
Championships while Sampson, Schneider, Finn and Dugan contributed.
In the1975 State Championships, Joyce, Schneider and Derdak won
handily. Joyce was the soul of the team, Schneider was the heart and Derdak was
the tenacious grit. Bill Joyce set the early
example and pinned his undefeated nemesis in the first period of the finals, with
a screaming figure four - split scissors, and everyone else followed suit by contributing
mightily to the Carthaginian victory. Joyce unanimously won Tournament MVP, then proudly
dropped the microphone on his wrestling career.
It was his moment in time, and
the teams as well. This was Chaminade’s,
and Coach Dugo’s, first of many State Championships that would follow in the
next 40 years. A winning culture was launched,
and a dynasty was born. We went home and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
together to celebrate. Lots of
them.
But trophies did not define this team, solidarity and camaraderie,
loyalty and brotherhood, character and discipline did. We had our special moments, but it was the day-to-day
grind that made these guys heroes. The way
we developed from the fledgling, back-room wrestling program with an old bus
and a new coach was heroic, and the way we trained hard with each other every
day so that our matches were the easiest part of our week, was sublime. There were no stars in the room, just a group
of guys united by a common pursuit and a team effort fueled by our commitment to
our school, our sport, and each other.
Fortes in Unitate.
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