UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – For the past two years ahead of every workout the growing list of Zain Retherford’s accomplishments were plastered on the wall in the Lorenzo Wrestling Complex.
As part of the Nittany Lions’ lengthy wall of NCAA champions, the two-time winner’s photo hangs above the mats, next to the one of Jason Nolf and ahead of Bo Nickal. That plaque will eventually be a permanent reminder of one of the all-time best college wrestlers who in turn has become a force at Penn State, amassing record after record while the 149 pounder looks to add a third NCAA title and a fourth All-America honoree to his resume by the end of the weekend.
“That’s pretty darn special,” Cael Sanderson said Monday. “He’s got a great mentality and he takes it one match at a time and he’s focused on just being the best he can be. I don’t think he’s worried about his legacy, or at least I hope not. You’ve heard him talk the past four years and he’s as down to earth as they get.”
There’s no reason to think the senior who hasn’t lost since his true freshman season – a streak that when NCAA’s begin Thursday in Cleveland will span 1,455 days, one redshirt season and 89 matches – won’t cap his career atop the podium yet again. He’s won everything under the sun in college, including the NCAA’s Most Dominant Wrestler award in both 2016 and 2017, was last year’s recipient of the Hodge Trophy and is already the 2018 Big Ten Wrester of the Year.
Cleveland marks the end of the collegiate road for the kid whose upbringing on his family’s farm outside of Bloomsburg in Benton, Pa., helped instill in him the importance of hard work. Wrestling camp was a relief from planting pumpkins and picking weeds, giving Sanderson a coachable wrestler who he knew could be quite good, but nobody knew for certain he would turn out to be this good.
Retherford's 130-3 high school career included two Pennsylvania state titles and a world championship in freestyle giving him quite the foundation, but as Sanderson -- whose own accolades are the stuff of wrestling legend -- knows, there's no guaranteeing a prep career blossoms into something quite like this.
Turns out those 1,000 pushups three times per week as a high schooler helped turn the undersized boy into a chiseled grappler whose laser focus was only magnified once he met with Sanderson and staff.
“My recruitment was kind of different,” Retherford said. “The coaches were really goal oriented and they were kind of like thinking how can we help you achieve your goals and other coaches were trying to sell me on the school and coach Cael and the coaching staff were focused on how we can achieve your goals as a person. … It’s a given we all want to win national titles and world and Olympic titles, that stuff is a given – but I really wanted to focus on getting the most out of myself and I kind of saw that this was the place to do that.”
Retherford’s consistency is what’s made him so difficult to try and supplant and, add to that, his willingness to outwork everyone, something Sanderson has seen time and time again, and there’s a reason why nobody since Edinboro’s Mitchell Port back in 2014 at the NCAA consolation semifinals has come close to knocking him off. Opponents have tried clawing at his eyes much to no avail as the sport is still full of unbridled joy for him, with each match serving as an opportunity to figure out how he can get better regardless of the score or the stage.
“It’s a never-ending journey,” Retherford said.
And as for what he wants his Penn State legacy to be? Oh no, that’s not something Retherford would even dream to think about, especially not this week or even any other. That talk, he says, is out of his control.
As Retherford's usual smile spreads wide ahead of Monday's practice Sanderson is reminded that this finely tuned machine-like wrestler of his – one that teammates joke can even be a bit robotic with his training regiment – has never in five years even lost his temper.
“He doesn’t really show that,” Sanderson said. “Somebody scores on him in practice and I wouldn’t say he gets mad, he usually just speeds it up so it’s usually not a good thing for them. I can’t say I’ve ever really seen him mad. It’s interesting.”
Perhaps that’s why trying to crack the code and figure out what makes Retherford tick is so tricky. He laughs, smiles and jogs out to Johnny Cash’s 'Folsom Prison Blues' before unleashing a fury of aggressive moves on an opponent, leaving each one with the same result as the last.
Then he smiles again, waves to the crowd and speaks about how grateful he is for the opportunity. He’ll go home, work on that finance degree where he’s become a mainstay on the dean’s list and has piled up the academic honors and then it’s back into the wrestling room to do it all over again.
That consistency, Sanderson said, has helped set the stage for this program to continue vying for history as the Lions will chase their seventh NCAA team title in the past eight years.
“For us as a staff and for us as a program his leadership as far as the consistency, every day is the same,” Sanderson said. “He’s going to be the same today in practice in an hour as he will be on Thursday at the national tournament. He’s the same all the time. I think that’s very important if you want to be the best is to just be the same every day.
“He doesn’t have to be anything other than himself this weekend.”