Francis Bentley coached his Flint Northern wrestling teams by the book.
He had to – he had no other alternative.
Bentley, who grew up in St. Louis, Mo., didn’t have a wrestling career of his own from which to impart wisdom to his athletes. Wrestling was a
new sport at Northern and still relatively new in the state when Bentley agreed to help out as an assistant coach in 1956. The head coach at the time didn’t know much more about the sport than Bentley.
“There was one book published that had little drawings of what wrestlers looked like,” Bentley recalls. “We sat down on the oor and practiced in the basement of the elementary school next to us. The kids would look at the book and we’d say, ‘Well, let’s try this’ when we’d look at a picture. That’s how it was when it started.”
“How do you do that?” former Northern wrestler Joe Johnson asked rhetorically. “Reading a book?”
It wasn’t the conventional way to start a winning tradition, nobody today would ever recommend it but, hey, it was just crazy enough to work. “Unbelievable,” said another former Northern wrestler, Arnold Brown. “Here we’ve got a guy who has never wrestled before, who probably
couldn’t beat our 98-pounder, but he was a good teacher, a very good teacher. I think I remember most of the things he taught us today.”
Bentley took over the program in 1960 after the head coach died of cancer. It didn’t take long for the Vikings to become a force on the state
scene.
They nished sixth in the state tournament in 1961 and third in 1962, setting the stage for a state championship in the 1963 tournament.
That victory was signi cant for a host of reasons. The Vikings were the rst school to win a state wrestling title with an all-black lineup, although
the team had two white wrestlers who didn’t qualify for the state nals. They were the rst Flint-area team to win the state title, pre-dating the powerful programs in Davison, Fenton, Montrose and New Lothrop. Northern was also the rst team not located near Michigan or Michigan State to win the top class in the tournament, which began in 1948. Lansing Eastern (6), Lansing Sexton (4), Ypsilanti (3) and Ann Arbor (2) won the rst 15 state titles in the open class or Class A.
