He Wrestled With Life and Death : After Beirut, the NCAAs Were Easy for Fullerton’s Asgari

Ardeshir Asgari of Cal State Fullerton was a bit awe-struck when he first took to the mat in last week’s NCAA Division I wrestling championships at Iowa City, Iowa.

The 158-pounder from Tehran, Iran, couldn’t believe that 15,000 people would pay $10 a ticket to watch wrestling matches. But Asgari didn’t feel any pressure. A little nervous maybe, but not pressure.

Pressure is staying alive as an 18-year-old soldier for the Revolutionary Guard in war-torn Beirut. Pressure is keeping one step ahead of the Iranian government after defecting. Or deciding which method of death--self-induced starvation or execution by the government--is better after being told you are being sent back to Iran.

Indeed, Asgari took a liking to the noisy home of the Iowa Hawkeyes, who went on to win their ninth straight NCAA team title. So much so that he won his first four matches and advanced to the semifinals before being eliminated. He finished sixth and earned All-American honors. He was the first Titan wrestler to make it to the semifinals and only the second to be named All-American.

But Asgari’s trek to the NCAA championships was nothing, compared to his journey to freedom.

“I was sent to Beirut for three months while I was in the Revolutionary Guard,” Asgari, 23, said. “I was so scared, watching all those people kill each other.

“In Persia (Iran), they wash everybody’s minds. There is a lot of propaganda. They say you must fight for religion and if you die while fighting, you are a hero, you go to heaven. I could not believe in that. I didn’t want to die. When I was in Beirut, I decided to defect.”

Asgari got his chance when he was 19 and a member of Iran’s army wrestling team. The team went to Caracas, Venezuela, for the military world championships, and after their last matches, Asgari and three others sneaked away.

“My father works in the government for (Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini. He is still mad at me. I call home, but he won’t talk to me. He hangs up the phone. He thinks I am the Devil.

“The team (in Caracas) was supposed to leave in the morning, so we left at 2 a.m. when they were asleep. We hid for a couple of days.

“If they catch us, they kill us.”

After coming out of hiding, the group, which included Asgari’s current Fullerton teammate Morteza Abedi, went to see Venezuelan immigration officials. They were promptly jailed and told they would be sent back to Iran.

“I told them, ‘They will kill me if I go back, so I might as well die here.’ I stopped eating for two days and got sick. They sent me to the hospital. Finally, they believed me and said they wouldn’t send me back.”

That was just the beginning of Asgari’s odyssey, though. He had no money and no friends in Venezuela. For two months, he slept in a park and survived by digging through the trash for scraps of food outside an expensive restaurant.

After six months in Venezuela, he was able to get to France, where he was befriended by the anti-Khomeini resistance group Moujahedeen. Asgari spent the next year in France and Spain before finally being granted refugee status by the United States.

“They sent me to St. Louis,” he said. “But I had a friend in Michigan, and they let me go there to live with him. I stayed there for two months and then moved to California.”

He joined his old friend, Abedi, in San Jose. The pair then entered Cal State Bakersfield to wrestle. At Bakersfield last season, Asgari finished seventh in the nation to earn Division II All-American honors.

Asgari’s stay at Bakersfield was short-lived. Coach Joe Seay left to take a job at Oklahoma State and was replaced by T.J. Kerr, who ran practices like a drill sergeant. That didn’t go over well with Asgari.

So when Bakersfield assistant Joe Gonzales left to join Coach Dan Lewis at Fullerton, Asgari followed, as did Abedi, Bob Button and Shawn Dreitzler. Asgari became eligible at the beginning of the second semester.

“I love it here,” said Asgari, an international business major. “I will stay here. I want to bring my family over here, especially my sister. But my father does not want to come.

“Dan Lewis is the best coach I have had in my life. He has made me mentally tough. I used to lose all my close matches. Now I win them because of Dan Lewis.”

Asgari’s improvement this season is a source of pride for Lewis, who points out that Asgari had wrestled freestyle (Olympic style) all his life until last season. Freestyle differs from collegiate wrestling in that there is less mat wrestling. Wrestlers are on their feet most of the time in freestyle, which features more takedowns than collegiate wrestling.

“Ardeshir is so strong on his feet, it’s almost impossible to take him down,” Lewis said. “I think he was only taken down twice all year. And offensively, he scores most of his points on his feet. He has really impressed me. He has learned to wrestle collegiate style.”

Asgari went 34-7 this season, winning the Doc Peterson and Eagle tournaments as well as the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. title at 158 pounds. At the NCAA meet, he defeated Rob Bazant of Montana, 13-11; Peter Rogers of Stanford, 18-12; Ken Haselrig of Clarion State, 10-6, and Jeff Clutter of Northern Iowa, 15-5.

But in the semifinals, against eventual champion Jude Skove of Ohio State, he lost, 11-0. In that match, Asgari aggravated an injury he had suffered earlier, a pinched nerve in his right shoulder.

“Skove was so good at riding me,” Asgari said. “I just couldn’t escape. He had my shoulder for two minutes. The doctor says I broke the ligament in the shoulder.”

Even with the injured shoulder, Asgari nearly took third place. He was beaten, 2-0 in overtime, by Johnnie Johnson of Oklahoma. After losing that match, he forfeited the fifth-place match to Iowa’s Royce Alger because of the injury.

“I got a lot of experience at the NCAA,” he said. “Here in California, I beat everyone on my feet. I know much more about college wrestling now.”

Despite his injury, Asgari’s season isn’t quite over. He will compete in the Freestyle Nationals April 17-19 in Las Vegas.

“This is going to be fun,” Asgari said. “Freestyle is my kind of wrestling. The doctor says for me to take it easy for at least two weeks, so I’m not doing any wrestling. I’m running, jumping rope and riding the bike. But I’ll be OK.”