While an 81-year-old Hubie Wagner improves his 75 acres and works with his horses in the small town of Mansfield, Missouri, the wrestling tournament held each year in his honor goes on.
On and on and on. Thursday was the second day of the 51st annual Hubie Wagner Invitational at Middlebury Union High School.
Wagner was the head wrestling coach at MUHS for 30 years. The Tigers were a state power in the sport just as his football teams were.
Pete Bearor wrestled for Wagner at Middlebury before graduating in 1974. He found the experience to be special.
“He was all about discipline,” Bearor said. “And you did not want to cross him.
“I loved wrestling for him because he made it fun and I love this tournament.”
Bearor took much of Wagner’s coaching style and applied it when he became the wrestling coach down Route 7 at Otter Valley.
Bearor was in the MUHS gym to watch the Otter Valley wrestlers and wrestling in general.
He likes the direction that the Otters are heading in under coach Cole Mason who grew up with the sport in wrestling mad Iowa.
“Cole is great with the kids.” Bearor said.
Bearor could watch the action through the eyes of a wrestler, coach or official. After coaching, he became a high school wrestling official.
“I liked coaching but I liked officiating even more,” Bearor said.
You never know what you might see at the Hubie Wagner event. Schools from other states like New York and New Hampshire are well represented.
Perhaps you would be surprised to see a wrestler in the blue and gold of the Poultney Blue Devils, but there Kole Lynch was on Thursday winning his match as a one-man team for the Blue Devils.
Lynch practices with the Fair Haven team.
He is a freshman who would like to grow the sport at Poultney High.
“I am trying to get more people at our school to wrestle. I think that it is a really great sport,” Lynch said after winning his match.
Lynch has been involved in The Slaters Wrestling Club since the first grade and loves going to practice with his Fair Haven friends.
“I have been wrestling with them all my life. We are like a family,” Lynch said.
Springfield’s Hunter Ferland looked poised to win his 285-pound match on Thursday at the Wagner Invitational but lost after everything seemed to be going his way.
Things can turn quickly on a mat.
“He’s going to get better,” Springfield coach Don Beebe said.
He regards Ferland to be a contender in the heavyweight class. “I think he is good enough to go all the way,” Beebe said.
The setting with the mammoth crowd and numerous outstanding wrestlers and programs was not lost on Beebe. He knows that Hubie Wagner and Middlebury have been magic names in Vermont wrestling.
“Middlebury owned wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s,” Beebe said.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was a pioneer woman who authored the children’s book series Little House on the Prairie. She, her husband and daughter moved from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri in 1894.
Now, Hubie Wagner works the land and his horses in that same little town.
Hubie Wagner was most definitely a pioneer in his own right when the story is told of Vermont high school wrestling.
