Chuck Farina: Part II
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By Gary Larsen
Rough beginnings
Charles J. Farina grew up in Melrose Park in the 1930's and 40's as the son of a single mother. His parents divorced during the Great Depression when he was eight years old, and his father was never again a part of his life.
“He had a real tough childhood,” son Mike Farina said. “My grandma worked in a factory, and he had an older sister who helped raise him, but they had it rough.”
Farina was working by the age of 12 before attending Proviso Township High School from 1941 to 1945. He won an Illinois state title as a senior at 125 pounds for coach Louis Slimmer, whose teams at Proviso won seven state titles in eight years between 1937 and 1945. It was Slimmer who taught Farina how to wrestle, preaching the fundamentals of the sport.
Farina recounted Slimmer’s approach in Rob Sherrill’s 1996 book Mat madness: 60 glorious years of Illinois high school wrestling.
“He really knew his wrestling,” Farina said of Slimmer. “It wasn’t any fancy holds or anything. It was just good, basic wrestling. And that’s where we had the edge on most schools we competed against.”
The impact that Slimmer had on Farina’s coaching style is hard to overstate. If one of Slimmer’s wrestlers gave less than their best effort in a match, consequences were swift. From Mat madness:
“He’d point to the track and say ‘go run two miles’,” Farina said. “You’d just have gotten off the mat, and he’d say ‘Get on that track’…and the meet is still going on.”
In a three-page autobiography written after he retired to California, Farina wrote: “(Slimmer) was my role model throughout my coaching career. I always considered myself lucky in life to have wrestled for such a fine man.
“Slimmer was very tough. He was firm, but he was fair.”
After graduating from Proviso in 1945, World War II called. Too young for the draft, Farina got his mother to sign permission papers for him to enlist in the Marines at the age of seventeen.
“One of the guys from his neighborhood was killed in the war, and that was a big reason why he wanted to go,” said Terri Farina. Farina promptly volunteered to be a flamethrower – a 140-pound kid strapped to an 80-pound backpack full of napalm -- but the war ended as he was preparing to ship off to Japan.
That Farina volunteered to be flamethrower, of all things, is telling. A favorite target of snipers, flamethrowers were rarely taken prisoner and almost always executed when captured by the Japanese.
“If he had gone to Japan, I might not even be here,” Mike Farina said. “But he was sorry he didn’t get a chance to go.”
Farina enrolled at Purdue on the GI bill in 1947. He failed to make the football team at Purdue, but that only served to fuel the fire. “Failing at other sports helped me to work even harder at wrestling,” he wrote.
He was a Big Ten wrestling champion twice and a Boilermakers team captain and an all-American in 1950, placing fourth at the NCAA tournament at 136 pounds.
After graduating from Purdue, he taught judo and self-defense in South Dakota for the military for two years during the Korean War. He considered a career in the service, but opted instead for a future in education.
Farina earned his master’s degree in physical education from Purdue and in 1954, at the age of 26, he joined the staff at East Leyden. The school was building a new field house and a wrestling coach was needed.
For the next four decades, the flamethrower with the rough childhood tried to instill fire, discipline, and toughness in every wrestler he coached.
He did it pretty well. In 1986, they named that field house after him.
East Leyden
East Leyden sits in Franklin Park, a 116-year-old working class town with no shortage of factories. The town is cut in half by train tracks that lead to a massive freight yard on the town’s western edge, and a separate set of Metra passenger line tracks linking downtown Chicago to Elgin. On any given day, airplane noise from nearby O’Hare airport provides a constant overhead roar.
Families from Franklin Park, Schiller Park, River Grove, and Rosemont fed Farina’s program for most of his career. Most of those families were headed by tradesmen, truck drivers, and factory workers alike. A steady stream of predominantly Polish, Italian, and Slavic-American kids attended East Leyden from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, and families with four to six or more kids were not uncommon.
“Those were hard-nosed, blue-collar kids,” said Mike Farina. “And parents were tougher on their kids then.”
A generation of people whose character was forged by the Great Depression and WWII is fading away. There’s a no-nonsense grittiness to that generation of parents, who had no qualms about handing over their sons – without conditions or interference -- to a hard-nosed coach like Farina.
Niles Notre Dame coach Augie Genovesi, East Leyden class of 1969, wrestled for Farina.
“For a lot of us, our fathers worked two jobs. I don’t know if my father ever saw me wrestle even once in high school,” Genovesi said. “The coaches we had at East Leyden were hard on us, but that’s how most of us were treated at home. And they watched over us. They cared.”
Willowbrook coach Bryan Murphy also coached against Farina near the tail end of his career.
“It’s not politically correct anymore, but I think kids still need that old-school, blue-collar mentality,” Murphy said. “Farina treated his wrestlers like young men.”
Above all, that meant accountability.
“He would throw you out of practice, or even off the team, if you didn’t do things the right way, as he saw it,” said Tom Gervais, East Leyden class of 1970. “And he didn’t care if you were the best wrestler on the team. You were going to do things the right way.”
Farina put the team ahead of the individual and preached relentless repetition of the basics. He wasn’t a big proponent of weight lifting or running, believing that the best way to get in shape for wrestling was to wrestle.
Where wrestling was concerned, Farina's pet peeve -- what he considered the greatest sin in the sport -- was failing to escape from the bottom position.
“He always said ‘if you can’t get out, you don’t deserve to win’,” Conrad said. “It didn’t matter if you won 10-0. If the match ended with your face on the mat, he wasn’t happy.”
Farina bombarded his teams with his favorite talking points, phrases like ‘mental toughness,’ ‘intestinal fortitude,’ and ‘pay the price.’ For four decades he drove those principles like stakes into the hearts of his wrestlers.
“Oh, we all heard those phrases all the time,” said Tom Gervais. “And ‘bums’, too. Above everything else, he didn’t want us to be bums.”
Like the parents of his wrestlers, Farina offered no coddling whatsoever.
“We were all bums,” Conrad said. “I think I graduated from college before he ever paid me any kind of a compliment. He said ‘I knew someday you might amount to something'.”
Mark Gervais laughed when reminded of the way Farina doled out compliments with an eyedropper.
“Well," he said. "If he wasn’t (ticked off) at you, that was sort of like a compliment."
Wednesday: Part III -- Motivation
