Longtime wrestling coach to step down after county finals
Longtime wrestling coach to step down after county finals
SAN JOSE – Bert Mar was a sixth-grader at Brownell when he first told his mom, “I want to go out for wrestling.”
His mother replied, “We don’t have enough money. The gas is for your dad to go to work.”
The Mars lived by Garlic World, three miles outside of town, and the family budget could not afford picking him up from practice every day.
“We were poor, so I used to run from Brownell all the way to Garlic World. Daylight savings time, it starts to get dark at five o’clock,” Mar said. “So I tell my kids, ‘You know what, I’ve gone through hard things in life, but when I think back about that kind of stuff, that meant that I wasn’t a loser. I was going to do it.’ That’s my philosophy with kids.”
Mar’s passion for wrestling grew with each day and hasn’t stopped to this day.
At Brownell (which is now South Valley), Mar won county weight class titles in 1960 and 1961 before graduating to Gilroy High School, where he won the Northern California State Championship as a junior at 154 pounds.
For the past 27 years, Mar has been passing his vast wrestling knowledge on to hundreds of local youngsters at South Valley Junior High School. But last night, the coaching legend coached his final meet at the junior high county championships at Andrew Hill High School in San Jose.
“I woke up at three o’clock this morning. I couldn’t sleep,” said Mar, who could not stop thinking about the upcoming match. “When I was pumping my kids up, one kid told me, ‘Coach, look at your eyes.’ He says, ‘It looks like you’re going to wrestle.’
“It’s just part of wrestling. I learned that from an old coach named James Fahey,” Mar added. “The guy was a legend. I took over his program (at South Valley in 1983).”
Mar ends his unprecedented coaching career with an astonishing 205-1 dual-meet record. He has groomed 111 section champions as well as 74 county champions and still counting with 14 finalists in Thursday’s county meet.
Before the start of the finals, GUSD Board of Trustee John Gurich announced Mar’s retirement to the packed-house crowd, reading off his accolades through the years. Gurich, a wrestling official whose son, Johnny, was tutored by Mar at South Valley and finished fourth in state as a Gilroy High junior, also presented Mar with a special gift – an all-expenses paid trip for two to the Reno Tournament of Champions.
The defending CCS Champion Gilroy High grapplers will be competing in the national event, tagged the toughest tournament this side of the Mississippi, Dec. 19 and 20 at the Reno Livestock Arena.
“The best quote for him is, ‘It’s all about the kids’, because that’s what he always says and this is the product he’s got,” said Gurich, who is a physical education teacher at Andrew Hill. “He’s an educator and a coach. … He’s good for South Valley. When he goes, they are going to hurt.”
Although Mar plans on giving up his head coaching duties, he can’t stay completely away from the program – promising to work behind the scenes in any way he can.
“(The new coaches) are going to be on the mat teaching technique. But when they come, I want to have the mats all mopped for them. … and I’ll be at tournaments,” said Mar, who will be there for scheduling and to make sure the kids keep their grades up. “Being on the mat, I’m going to miss that. I’ll be at tournaments helping out maybe for the next year to just watch it from behind the scenes.”
Two back surgeries, as well as diabetes, have worn on Mar’s body, and the coach can’t always get down on the mat for hands-on instruction like he wants to.
“It’s my health. I’ve gone through two back operations, and in ’97 it was brutal. I got rods in my back and wires,” Mar said. “I’ve gained weight because of it. I can’t do too much. I have good days and bad days. You’re looking at a man in another body. I used to pump weights and lift pretty good. And then I’ve acquired diabetes, which I have under control, and it’s because of the weight, too.”
With an encyclopedia of South Valley wrestlers imbedded in his memory, Mar rolled off just a few of his top pupils, including junior high county champion Kordell Baker, who became the only state champion from Gilroy High in the late 1980s; and his son, Sergio Mar, a Gilroy-best three-time high school state-placer.
“(Bert Mar) is the program,” said Chuck Ogle, who was the Mustang varsity wrestling coach from 1981to 1998. “He’s huge. He gets kids fired up and excited about wrestling. He’s an awesome motivator. There isn’t a better junior high motivator in the whole country. This guy knows how to motivate. He teaches basic techniques, nothing to get them in trouble. … He makes them believe they can win.”
And they usually do.
“Sometimes you start with a rough diamond, and then you polish him a little bit because you only have two months,” Mar said, “and then you see him in the county (meet) and he must be pretty good because only so many people reach the counties.”
Mar uses a system and even shared the secret to South Valley’s success. There are three “simple” components.
“One is the (Gilroy) Hawk wrestlers we get from the freestyle club. They’ve been wrestling since 6, 5. So when they come on to me, they’ve got a lot of mat-time. We get some of those, but we make some ourselves,” said Mar, who benefits from the strong club wrestling team headed up by varsity head coach Armando Gonzalez.
“The second part is our P.E. program, where I get to weigh them and recruit them and teach them basics for six weeks,” added Mar, who went without his physical education class for the first time this season. “I thought that was like one-third of our program, but it’s almost like half because that’s where you find the bodies.”
The master motivator would recruit new wrestlers right out the class.
“You may not have a heavyweight, and then all of a sudden you put your arm around this guy, feel his muscle, you pump him up and you say, ‘I’ll help you,’ ” Mar said. “The third one is very important – we run good practices. We practice for two hours a day.”
When Mar couldn’t find a wrestler in the P.E. class, he would go to the lunch room and look out for kids until he spotted his next champion.
“I can handle the kids, and I like the tough kids,” Mar said. “I even like the street kids that nobody else can handle. I’ll take those guys and put them on the mat and make them into champions and wrestlers.”
Mar still gets the same adrenaline rush from coaching wrestling today as he did when he was grappling on the mat himself. It never gets old. It just gets better.
“The love of the sport because I was a wrestler and it’s in my blood, and the kids (have kept me around),” Mar said. “You know I love my job. It’s hard. My back hurts and everything, but I read the paper in the morning, get some coffee and it’s a new day every day.”
With 14 of his wrestlers in this year’s county finals, Mar was a busy man, rarely leaving the corner coaching chair at the center mat. South Valley’s record is seven county champions in one year and before retiring, Mar will do his best to break that school record.
“It’s definitely an adrenaline rush,” Mar said. “It’s the system. If you have a system and it works and you keep working the system, it pays off.”
