Celebrate a Kansas treasure… Olympic Champion Peter Mehringer... purchase a tee… or two TODAY!
Mehringer is an awesome story… one of ten children. Due to budget constraints was head coach, assistant coach, manager, and team-of-one in winning his second State Championship. The guy learned the sport through the Farmer Burns correspondence course for crying out loud… did I mention that he hitchhiked to State?
He was an All-American at KU… yes, the University of Kansas had a wrestling program (it was not well funded and was dropped in 1966… so, not a Title IX casualty)… His AA finish came during his sophomore season. What happened during his Jr/Sr season you ask? Well for some reason the program was defunded by the Athletic Director… this guy named Phog Allen. Think of that the next time you are standing in line at 3:30 pm for Midnight Madness waiting to get in to Phog Fieldhouse… blasphemy you say? Don’t take my word for it, KU History professor, Mark Hersey details it…
“When Bauman stepped down as KU wrestling coach to enter medical school before the 1932-33 academic year, Mehringer became a student-coach for the second time in his young life. He met with continued success on the mat, but Athletic Director Phog Allen would not grant him the funds necessary to travel to the National Intercollegiate Meet to attempt to win a NCAA crown. (Thus it was that Mehringer, an Olympic champion, never could claim a NCAA title.) Financial considerations, made more difficult by Allen’s refusal to permit Mehringer to keep his campus job, led the star athlete to leave the University after his senior year without a degree.†Mark D. Hersey, Department of History, University of Kansas. Read the whole article here:
CLICK HEREMehringer remains the only Olympic Wrestling Champion from Kansas. With Tokyo just around the corner, wear your Mehringer shirt with pride to celebrate our piece of Olympic Wrestling history.
The shirts are available through Blue Chip for only a few more weeks, so order yours TODAY from the following link:
CLICK HEREThe shirts are available in six colors to accommodate Derby, BVSW, Pratt, Chapman and other Green teams; Olathe North, Marysville, Emporia and other teams that favor Red; Emporia again, Paola, and Topeka that use Black; Norton, Santa Fe Trail, and other teams that fancy Royal; Midnight Navy to cover Manhattan and Goddard among others. Cardinal is also thrown in for good measure to cover almost any other team in the state. Sorry, Pitt, no purple.
