By Kyle Klingman, W.I.N. Columnist

It’s a simple message: If you win, you get to go to the White House.

On March 17, 2007, the University of Minnesota won an NCAA team championship in wrestling … and on September 21, 2007, the Gophers got to visit the White House.

It was a trip that encompassed everything that Minnesota head wrestling coach J Robinson holds true: work hard, become the best, get rewarded. The standard is excellence.

Robinson, wrestling’s quintessential philosopher, believes it’s a message that applies to any endeavor worth pursuing. You’re going to fail, you’re going to stumble, you’re going to get hurt, but don’t stop until you reach the top.

So after too many surgeries to count, a right wrist that looks like it could go at any minute and disappointments at several NCAA tournaments before finally winning the big one in 2001, Robinson has had more than a few setbacks on his journey to the summit. But he has the Gophers right where they need to be.

And retirement? Not yet says the 61-year-old Robinson. He’s still having too much fun being in the game.

So as a reward for being the best, Robinson and crew — along with nine other championship teams from various sports — earned a trip to our nation’s capital to meet the president of the United States at the White House.

“I think we live in a society where everybody is so afraid to talk about being the best,” said Robinson “You don’t have five valedictorians, you have one. You only have one team that’s the champion in each sport and they’re here. I think it’s a great message to people.”

But there were other great messages that would have been missed had I not been in Washington to experience them first hand. The first lesson learned is that you can never truly know a wrestler by watching him on a mat.

And it happens all the time. We draw conclusions about a wrestler based solely on what we see inside the circle — or outside the circle if that particular wrestler fakes injuries or stalls a lot.

So if someone asked me about 157-pounder C.P. Schlatter before this trip, I might have mentioned something about his wrestling career. How he is a wrestler at the University of Minnesota who didn’t place at the NCAA tourney during his first two years of college but finally placed sixth last year. Maybe I’d reference his high school credentials or say something about his wrestling style, but beyond that, what else is there?

Now if someone asks, I can mention his imitation of Borat (the popular fictional character who is supposedly from Kazakhstan) in front of the Capitol building. I can talk about the time he grabbed his brother Dustin in Congressman Dennis Hastert’s office, looked into the video camera that was documenting the entire trip and joked, “You see us, we’re a big deal.”

I also saw how the Minnesota wrestling team interacted with each other and how they functioned as a team. How they played a card game called “Mafia” during a two-hour flight delay on the way back to Minneapolis and how they played jokes on each other.

One of the pranks occurred during their early morning tour of the Capitol building.

Each person who entered was required to wear a sticker to show that he or she was official. At the conclusion of the tour and with stickers in hand, former Golden Gopher Matt Nagel was the recipient of a practical joke that is older than mankind’s oldest sport. It’s the one where you act like you’re patting someone on the back but in actuality you’re placing a sticker (or in some cases a sign that says “Kick Me”) there instead.

Nagel had no idea that 20 stickers were on his back until Sadie Russell, wife of assistant coach Joe Russell, let him in on the trick.

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