Wednesday, December 26, 2007
On a mission
Luke Lofthouse returns to wrestling with a renewed focus
By Andy Hamilton
Iowa City Press-Citizen
Luke Lofthouse never stepped onto a wrestling mat in Zimbabwe. He couldn't find an All-American to train with in Malawi. And he didn't come across a place to squeeze in a good workout in Zambia.
No wonder the Iowa sophomore needed some time this fall to brush off layers of rust covering his wrestling skills from the two seasons he missed with the Hawkeyes while fulfilling a Mormon mission in Africa.
"There were a few times when I was able to go out on the lawn and wrestle with other missionaries," Lofthouse said. "But those were few and far between. Some of them wrestled in high school, but most of them had never done it before, and they wanted to know more about it and learn some moves. I showed them a few things."
The talent level and wrestling expertise Lofthouse will encounter this weekend on the mats at the Midlands Championships is far greater than what he faced rolling around with novices on lawns in Africa. But Lofthouse's skills have changed drastically since then, too. He has an 8-6 record wrestling unattached at 197 pounds while the Hawkeyes explore the possibility of redshirting him this season.
"I think he's finding out he probably didn't lose as much of a step as maybe he thought he would've lost," Iowa coach
Tom Brands said. "I think a lot of his frustration came from some of the timing things technically, but I don't think it was as bad as maybe he thought it would be."
Lofthouse was so far from wrestling for so long that virtually everything he knew when he left the Hawkeyes was turned upside down by the time he came back.
Through weekly e-mails from his family, the three-time Utah state champion found out Brands had replaced
Jim Zalesky as Iowa's head coach in April 2006. He read how the Iowa lineup had changed radically since the days when he compiled an 8-17 record as the starter at 174 pounds as a true freshman in 2005. He discovered that his younger brother, Ethen, had developed into one of the nation's top high school wrestlers, as well as a tough practice partner for a college competitor stepping onto a mat for the first time in two years.
"The first time we wrestled, he was coming off some big wins and had a lot of confidence and he was in really good shape, and I wasn't," Luke said of his younger brother who won the Cadet Greco-Roman national title this summer, placed third in freestyle and is ranked No. 10 in the country at 160 pounds.
The Lofthouse brothers wrestled until five takedowns were scored. Ethen -- who had never scored an offensive point against Luke before his mission -- recorded four of the five takedowns.
"It went a lot different than what I was thinking," Ethen said. "I took it to him pretty good that first day."
Luke turned to his younger brother after the practice and offered a prediction.
"He said, 'In two weeks, you'll never take me down another time in your life,'" said Ethen, who won state titles in each of his first two seasons at Mountain Crest High School in Avon, Utah, and intends to join Luke at Iowa in a couple years. "Two days later, he was taking it to me pretty good again."
The time away from wrestling gave Lofthouse an opportunity to learn "a lot about myself, a lot about life and a lot about people in general."
He got an up-close look at poverty and the hunger crisis in southern Africa.
"We had the means to get the food we needed, we had the means to be taken care of," Lofthouse said. "But life is difficult for those people. There are a lot of people who really don't know when their next meal is going to be, or if they're going to have a job tomorrow or if things are going to be working out for them. It was really humbling to see people living by the bare minimum and sometimes even less than that."
Lofthouse said the missionaries lived in accommodations that "weren't anything spectacular." He said occasionally they would have an apartment that was better than most, but most of the time they lived like the citizens.
Lofthouse said he "enjoyed every minute" of the experience. But his missionary duties and the surroundings weren't conducive to an easy transition back to wrestling.
"One thing that's been a challenge has been getting my weight training because there weren't a lot of gyms there and time wasn't on my side to take a few hours and go lift and do those things," he said. "Even our diet didn't have a lot of stuff to maintain muscle. I didn't eat a lot of protein because meat was expensive or hard to find and eggs were expensive or hard to find.
"That was the biggest challenge -- getting my strength back to where it was and getting the rust off my technique and working through the cobwebs."
Luke Lofthouse returns to wrestling with a renewed focus 
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