Lessons From the Fall

The young lad’s road to excellence began with a good, old-fashioned, behind-the-woodshed thumping.
Don Pate’s first official high school wrestling experience was that painful. As an 89-pound freshman competing in the 95-pound weight class for Bloomington High against an older, more seasoned opponent from Mater Dei Catholic (Evansville), he found himself on his back, staring at the ceiling when the referee slapped the mat.
        
“I’d been working so hard, but I went out there and got pinned,” Pate recalled one morning recently. “Really got drilled. I went home and told my dad that I didn’t think I could continue.”
 
Will Pate responded with the time-honored words of Winston Churchill: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
 
One minute, the 14-year-old Don Pate was questioning his choice of sports. The next moment, he was absorbing a lesson he would never forget, a lesson that would carry him through his years as a competitive athlete, his long tenure as a coach, and, truly, the toughest interludes in his life.
 
“Once you’ve been humiliated, once you’re beat down, you have a choice,” he explained. “You get up and go at it again, or you give up. That’s the groundwork for wrestling.”
 
If the name Don Pate – Dr. Don Pate – sounds familiar, the reason is that he’s been part of the Collegiate landscape since the early ‘80’s.
 
In 1982 when Collegiate was beginning a wrestling team, the University of Richmond, where Pate had coached since 1973, was discontinuing its varsity-level program. One thing led to another, and Pate, a professor of health and sports science, answered the call.
 
“It was really Ground Zero,” he said. “I had to order a mat. The wrestling room was the West Gym because the athletic center hadn’t been built yet. After basketball practice, we rolled the mats out, taped them, then rolled them back up and put them against the wall for storage. It was a hassle, but that’s part of wrestling.”
 
When the season began, the only wrestler with varsity experience was Pate’s son D. Wayne, a junior who had recently transferred from Douglas Freeman. The coach began recruiting from within the student body. There was even an assembly in Jacobs Gym where a several guys demonstrated moves.
 
“Maybe 12 kids came out for the team,” Pate continued. “Anybody who walked through the room and said they wanted to wrestle, I said, ‘You’re on. You got it.”
 
It wasn’t like Pate was an up-and-coming coach who needed to prove himself.
 
From that rough start of his high school career, he’d become a two-time state finalist, team captain, and member of the 1957 Indiana state championship team. At Minnesota State, Moorhead, he earned All-American honors, captained the 1964 NAIA national championship squad, and joined the university’s athletic hall of fame in 1981.
        
As a high school coach in Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah, and Minnesota, he’d coached a slew of state champs. At Wayne State (Nebraska), he’d coached five NAIA national champions, 11 All-Americans, and six conference championship teams. He’d earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from Minnesota State and a PhD from the University of Utah.
        
“I’d been all over the place,” he said. “After coaching in college, it was fun to come back to high school and see the interest, enthusiasm, and excitement.”
 
Though very green, Pate’s first Collegiate team finished 8-1 and second in the Prep League behind Woodberry Forest, a national power at the time.
 
“I didn’t try to teach them a lot: one or two takedowns, one or two escapes, one or two reversals,” he said. “It wasn’t a wrestling clinic. It was coaching them how to win.”
 
In 1988 and 1989, the Cougars won the state title.
 
“It was just pure grit and toughness,” Pate said. “Our kids were able to rise to that level. I was excited for their success.”
 
His tenure, during which Pate won three Prep League coach of the year awards and the Cougars finished 77-21-1 in dual matches, ended in 1990 when his UR responsibilities limited his availability.
 
He returned for a stretch in the late ‘90’s as an assistant to Wortie Ferrell, whom he had coached a decade earlier, and played a role in the Cougars’ 1999 Prep League and VISAA championship season.
 
“Don has incredible knowledge about wrestling, he’s to-the-core tough, and he was a great marketer of the sports and the merits it could bring,” Ferrell said. “He definitely instilled confidence and belief in his athletes.
 
“Wrestling is a tough sport. He made sure practices were hard: get in there, get your nose bloodied, get your finger jammed, wrestle some kids who were better or stronger or older. He pushed us to deal with adversity and make ourselves tougher. He made a great investment in us. His pushing us to get better made us want to do well for him.”
 
Over the years, Pate also served as an assistant coach in both football and track and field at Collegiate. Wrestling, though, has been the athletic love of his life.
 
“I was attracted to it in elementary school,” he said. “I was a runt. When the coach came in and introduced it, he said that you only compete against people your own size. That was great for me because I’d always competed against bigger people.
 
“Once I got into it, the discipline, the hard work – all the things that people see as being difficult – were encompassed in wrestling. I was attracted to the challenge of accomplishing something that was difficult.”
 
This past spring, Pate’s credentials and accomplishments earned him induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He was recognized in a ceremony attended by a group of his former Collegiate and UR wrestlers.
 
“I was very humbled and honored to be recognized for something I truly love,” he said. “Wrestling holds a place in my heart that will always be there. The lessons I’ve learned from wrestling have been very meaningful.”
 
Never more so than in the aftermath of November 18, 2014.
 
On that day, two of his brothers, his sister, and two sisters-in-law, traveling by car from Bloomington to Houston to console their brother Austin following his wife’s death, were stuck by a tractor-trailer in Hope, Arkansas. All died in the accident.
 
“If it hadn’t been for the sport of wrestling,” Pate said, “I don’t think I would have made it. It goes back to getting pinned in my first match. You can pity yourself, or you can stand up, stand tall, and move forward. I look back at wrestling with that in mind. It’s so important in life.”
 
Pate retired from UR in 2001, but he’s hardly ridden into the sunset.
 
He conveyed his love of sports to his sons Elliott (Collegiate class of 2012 and an Army officer stationed at Ft. Riley, KS), Kyle ’13, a Navy officer stationed aboard the USS Chancellorsville, and Kakie ’15, a senior English major at Richmond.
 
He continues to serve as a certified wrestling official and will coach the newly-formed club wrestling team at UR. With the nest empty, he and his wife Val, also a former Collegiate coach, have enjoyed traveling throughout the world to visit family or just for pleasure.
 
And he works out regularly at the Weinstein Center at UR. In fact, Pate might be the fittest, youngest looking, almost 80-year-old around.
 
“I’m as old as I feel,” he said with a laugh. “Do I feel 80? Maybe sometimes. Most of the time I don’t. I’m the luckiest person in the world, certainly the most satisfied. I practice being positive. There’re too many negatives in the world. If you let the negative take over, you’re lost. I get up every morning on the positive side. That’s the way I live my life.”
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