Chuck Farina: Legend of the Sport
Part one in a four-part series
By Gary Larsen
Photo courtesy of Mike Farina
The old flamethrower shot up from his chair and headed to the scorer’s table. It was 1974, and East Leyden coach Chuck Farina had just watched Holy Cross’s John Morocco earn a takedown at the end of the third period for an 8-7 win over Farina’s wrestler, Ernie Krist.
Krist led 7-3 before Morocco took him to his back with a headlock as time ran out in the match. Feisty, long-time Evanston football coach Murney Lazier was the referee, and he signaled two points for a takedown and three for a near-fall after the final buzzer, giving Morocco the win in the sectional match at 132 pounds.
Or maybe not.
“Farina went wild, and in no time there’s a big group of Leyden people going at it with Lazier at the scorer’s table,” said Bernie Botheroyd. Botheroyd would go on to a long coaching career at Glenbard West, but on that day in 1974 he was the 25-year-old head coach of Holy Cross.
As a young coach not yet practiced at the art of head table disputes, Botheroyd kept his seat as the argument escalated between Farina and Lazier. The debate raged on, and when his patience finally ran out, Botheroyd headed over to the scorer’s table.
“I walk up and Lazier is surrounded with all the hyenas on his ankles. I haven’t said a thing, and I’m standing ten feet away, just trying to hear what’s being said,” Botheroyd said. “Lazier looks over at me and yells ‘Go sit down or you’re out of this gym!’. Farina is all over him and I'm just standing there, but I have to go sit down.”
Farina's persistence paid off. Lazier reset the score at 7-7 and sent the two wrestlers back to the center of the mat for an overtime period. Before it began, however, Farina again stormed over to the scorer’s table. He gave Lazier another earful and suddenly, seemingly from thin air, the referee waved off Morocco’s late takedown. Krist was awarded a 7-3 decision win, with no explanation offered.
Morocco was understandably upset, but Botheroyd got no answers from the head table. He later found Lazier in the hallway but the fiery referee was still in no mood to explain himself. “I asked him what happened,” Botheroyd said. “And he challenged me to a fistfight.”
Botheroyd finally crossed paths with Farina and asked him about Lazier's controversial call. The old flamethrower calmly reached out and put his hand on Botheroyd’s shoulder.
“Kid,” Farina said. “Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way.” Thirty-four years later, Lazier's reversed call remains a mystery.
“To this day,” Botheroyd said. “I have no idea what happened.”
Maybe Farina simply wore Lazier down, hammering away at him with the argument that time had expired before Morocco’s takedown. Whatever his argument was, it worked.
“Charlie was in complete control of that situation,” Botheroyd said. "He was very animated, but he never lost his cool. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was the first time as a young coach that I was coaching in the big time, and I was taught a lesson by a master.”
Krist went on to win the state title at 132 pounds that year.
These are the stories of Chuck Farina, and there is seemingly no end to them. There was the time he punched a locker and ripped open his knuckles while chewing out his boys after a dual. He ignored the gash in his hand and continued gesturing at his assembled team, spattering blood all over his wrestlers.
There was the night the team bus got stranded in the snow and he almost came to blows with a tow-truck driver who cursed at one of his wrestlers. Farina challenged the guy to a fight, right there on the side of the road, in the middle of a snowstorm. The driver got back into his tow-truck and left in a huff, and Farina and his team pushed the bus out of the snow.
Once, after Leyden lost badly in a dual, Farina handed his varsity wrestlers their old freshmen-year singlets. They had to wear those singlets in their next meet, and until they earned the right to wear their varsity singlets again.
If you proved that you weren’t accountable enough to make weight, you had to follow Farina to his house after practice, where another workout would take place in his basement gym.
“Nobody ever wanted to go to his house,” said Tom Gigiano, who wrestled for Farina in his last year at Leyden.
There are also stories about the kids who spent nights at Chuck and Terri Farina’s house through the years, kids who had it a little rough at home and needed a place to stay now and then. Stories about all the extra time Farina would spend working with his less-talented wrestlers. Stories about the influence he continues to have on Illinois high school wrestling.
So while many of the stories told about him point to Farina’s high demands and his fire-and-brimstone intensity, he didn’t become one of the greatest high school coaches in the country by those hard-edged qualities alone.
Terri Farina, Chuck’s wife of 47 years, is still in contact with many of his old wrestlers.
“I’ve had so many of them come up to me over the years," she said. "They tell me ‘coach made me the man I am today’."
Setting the bar
The chain in a sport like wrestling has a million links, keeping the sport alive across generations, and today's Illinois high school wrestlers are feeling the impact of countless people they’ve likely never even heard of.
This story is about one of those people, a guy who felt the same way all die-hard wrestlers feel about the sport, only he felt it for the first time more than 60 years ago. It’s also a story about how that passion turned him into one of the most influential figures in Illinois wrestling history.
If there was a Mount Rushmore for Illinois high school wrestling coaches, Chuck Farina’s face would be chiseled into the side of the mountain.
“He’s one of those names that everybody knows,” said Mike Bukovsky, coach of seven-time state champion Montini. “He’s a giant in our sport.”
If career numbers quantify a coach, try these: 644 wins, 99 losses, and seven ties over 39 years, 36 of which were spent while teaching at East Leyden. His win total ranks Farina second all-time in Illinois behind long-time Tilden and current Brother Rice coach Bill Weick. Farina’s teams at East Leyden went unbeaten in dual meets an Illinois record nine seasons.
From 1970-1979, Farina’s teams won 162 of 164 dual meets, including 88 in a row. He retired as the all-time winningest high school wrestling coach in the country, and no coach in Illinois history has won more duals at a single school.
“He was a combination of Einstein and Patton,” Botheroyd said. “There was no one better.”
Farina coached two state title teams at East Leyden, but for the first 30 years of his coaching career Illinois’ team state champion was determined at the individual state finals. From 1937 to 1983 there was no seperate state final for dual team competition, which is where Farina’s teams shined. His program placed second three times and third three times under the old format.
“I remember a team that placed second downstate, and they only won two matches against us in a dual that year,” said long-time Marist coach Mark Gervais, a 1972 East Leyden grad. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that his program would have won a lot more titles in today’s format.”
For people like Gervais that knew and wrestled for Farina, however, the coaching numbers are an afterthought to what defined him.
Great expectations
Current Leyden athletic director Randy Conrad won a state title as an East Leyden senior in 1978, and as a sophomore he placed third in Champaign.
“I was pretty happy about taking third that year,” Conrad said. “But Farina was yelling at me as I was walking off the mat.”
“He was shouting at me that I was only using Shabbona Park moves. I said ‘but Shabbona Park moves are what got me down here’. Later I understood what he was doing. He just didn’t want me to be satisfied.”
Hinsdale South’s Mike Matozzi coached against Farina at the end of his Leyden years in the 1980’s.
“He demanded every ounce of effort from his guys,” Matozzi said. "When they didn’t give it, he considered the match a loss, no matter what the score of the match was."
In a dual against Willowbrook during the 80’s, Farina began shouting at the official during a match.
“He’s yelling ‘Stalling! Stalling!’ and I was about to get angry about it because my kid wasn’t stalling,” said long-time Willowbrook coach Chuck Rossetti. “Farina turned to me and said ‘No -- my kid! Stalling!’”
Imagine a football coach urging an official to call holding on one of his offensive lineman, or a basketball coach shouting at a ref to call a foul on one of his own players. You very rarely see a wrestling coach shouting at an official to tag his own wrestler with a stalling penalty, but Farina wouldn’t hesitate if he thought one of his wrestlers was lapsing into bad habits.
“He wanted you in the middle of the mat, dominating the guy you were wrestling. There was no playing the edge,” said Gigiano, former head wrestling coach and current teacher at Lake Forest.
If you wrestled and also happened to be one of Farina’s sons, the demands were even higher. Mike and Jim Farina were both Illinois state champions – Mike for York in 1976, and Jim for East Leyden in 1978 and ‘79.
One year for Christmas their father brought home a wrestling mat for the garage, where a space heater got the temperature up to a chilly 50 degrees. Every night – after high school wrestling practice – the three Farinas would head out to the garage for an extra practice of their own.
Jim was two years younger but 20 pounds heavier than Mike, and tough as nails in the top position.
“If I didn’t escape from him in 30 or 40 seconds, I’d catch hell for it,” said Mike Farina, who laughs about it today. Back then, of course, it didn’t seem all that funny.
“We were already tired. We were cutting weight. But every night he made us go out there and practice on a mat that was hard as a rock in a cold garage,” he said. “At the time it didn’t seem like a normal way to live.”
Only later did he come to appreciate the method behind the madness. Mike Farina made the U.S. Olympic team as an 18-year-old in 1976, and he knows that the rock-hard mat in the frozen garage had everything to do with it.
“If it wasn’t for my father, I never would have had the conditioning it took to compete at that level,” Mike said. “At the trials, I know I beat guys that were better athletes and better wrestlers than I was, but I had the edge. I had him in the corner.”
Glenbard North coach Mark Hahn wrestled for the Panthers in the 1970’s and coached against Leyden at the end of Farina’s career there. As the coach of a state-power program himself, Hahn knows a little something about wringing every bit of potential from his wrestlers.
“It’s really about the expectation to win,” Hahn said. “If you go out there with that expectation, you won’t be satisfied with anything less. You could tell just by the way his kids wrestled that Farina had those expectations.”
Tuesday: Part II -- Rough Beginnings
