“Winning as a team is important to me. I put a lot of the blame on myself. There were some matches if I could have gotten a win or pin, we could have won. It was the hardest year I’ve ever had in my life in terms of wrestling.”
— Mark Perry

By Mike Finn, W.I.N. Editor
The Hawkeyes’ two-time All-American may have wanted to shoulder Iowa’s problems last year when the Hawkeyes suffered their most dual meet losses (7) in nearly 40 years.
But Perry’s shoulders and neck — stiff and sore from a season-long pinched nerve — could hardly support himself, much less his team that was forced to wrestle eight dual meets without the 2005 NCAA runner-up.
“I felt like I had a 50-pound dumbbell sitting on my head,” said Perry, who injured his neck in a Midlands semifinal victory over Illinois’ Donny Reynolds. “I was hitting an outside duck-under or windmill in the first 10-15 seconds of the match. I slipped on a wet spot on the mat and my knee kind of buckled. I kind of got stuck underneath with my head hanging and he sprawled real hard. That’s how it happened and later in the match, (Reynolds) had no idea but he cranked on my neck pretty bad.”
Perry chose not to say anything to his coaches, but knew something was seriously wrong as he prepared to compete in the Midlands finals.
“I was drilling with Cliff Moore and once I hit my knee I couldn’t come back up,” recalled Perry, who still wrestled the Midlands championship against Northwestern’s Jake Herbert but lost, 5-4, on the final days of December which suggested that 2006 would not be a happy new year for this native of Stillwater, Okla.
For over the next two months he would be forced to not only sit out eight dual meets — five of which were losses for the Hawkeyes, including four Big Ten meets — and only practice perhaps five times the rest of the year. The Iowa coaches were forced to shut Perry down after an extremely painful National Duals, where Perry first lost to Nebraska’s Jacob Klein and could only watch as the Hawkeyes finished sixth in Cedar Falls.
“It was just a rough year,” said Perry, who moved up to 174 pounds after finishing second to Oklahoma State’s Johny Hendricks in the 2005 NCAA final. “It was hard to get excited about wrestling when all I was thinking about were my injuries.”
After competing in just 15 regular-season matches, Perry’s post-season was a roller coaster ride. After winning his first three Big Ten tournament matches — two by fall — he was pinned by Herbert in the championship match.
Then at the NCAA tournament, held less than an hour from where he grew up in Stillwater, Okla., and where his father, Mark, wrestled for Oklahoma State. His mother, Cathy, is the sister of Cowboy legend and current head coach John Smith. Before the home crowd, Perry pinned his first three opponents and eventually added a fourth fall to win the Gorriaran Trophy for most falls in fewest time. But he also injured the ligament on his lower right leg in his victory over former Blair Academy teammate Matthew Palmer of Columbia and lost a third time to Herbert in the national semifinals and settled for third place and a 21-4 record on the year.
“It was a situation that I had never been in before in my life,” added Perry, the former Junior Hodge Trophy winner from Blair Academy. “I’m one of the most competitive people in the world. I just felt for some reason that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
“Some people would say that I was more worried about my health and my neck. Some people preach that you work through the pain and I’ve always done a good job of dealing with minor injuries. But it’s really hard to wrestle a funky style and roll around bouncing off your head and giving up positions that you shouldn’t give up.
“Still, I credit a lot of the problems I had on myself. I should have kept my mouth shut. Once people knew the problem I had, they started to attack on it. It was a good learning experience and I grew up a lot. Now I try to block it out of my mind.”
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