By Mike Finn

“You Gotta Be a Football Hero To Get Along With the Beautiful Girls.”

It’s hard to say if John Dergo ever met a great gal — like the 1933 song suggested — during his high school days at Morris, Ill.

            But there was no doubt the current University of Illinois wrestler was great on the gridiron, especially in 2005 when the former running back — who rushed for 3,010 yards and 52 touchdowns in his prep career — was named Football Player of the Year by the Chicago Tribune.

            There is also no doubt Dergo was better known for his football exploits than what he did on the wrestling mat, which included back-to-back state championships and 86 consecutive victories.

            “I probably thought of myself more as a football player,” said Dergo, who played football for his father George in this Illinois community 100 miles north of Champaign. “Once I got to college, that was over and I started focusing specifically on wrestling. I’ve gotten better and better, learning the sport more the last couple of years.”

            Yet, when it came time for Dergo to continue his athletic career on the college level, he chose wrestling over football. And now nearly four years later, the 184-pound Illini is saving his best for last on the mat, especially in the month of December when he opened the month with a second-place finish at the Las Vegas Invitational and a ended the month with a championship at the Midlands in Evanston, Ill.

            “The way he looked at it was if he was going to play football, he wanted to play at the highest level and I don’t think a lot of those schools were giving him the opportunity,” said first-year Illini coach Jim Heffernan, who recruited Dergo to Champaign while he was a long-time assistant to former Illinois head coach Mark Johnson.

            “(Dergo) made the decision that to compete at the highest level, wrestling would be his route. It wasn’t difficult for us to talk him into it. Both he and his dad felt the same way that if he wasn’t going to play football at the highest level, he was going to wrestle at the highest level.”

            In his final year, Dergo has climbed to No. 2 in WIN’s national rankings after beating American University’s Mike Cannon, 11-9, in sudden victory of his Midlands final. (Dergo also beat Missouri’s Max Askren in Evanston and topped 2008 NCAA champion Mike Pucillo of Ohio State at the Las Vegas Invitational, where he lost in sudden victory to top-ranked Kirk Smith of Boise State.)

            The move to focus full-time on wrestling — which is something that separates Dergo’s career from that of most of his peers  — was a tough one for the Illini, who found himself inserted into Illinois’ varsity line-up as a true freshman, where he finished 24-12 at 184 pounds and qualified for the first of three NCAA tournaments.

            “Maybe I did (need the redshirt year), but the team needed me,” he said. “I was ready to help the team out. I wanted to wrestle too.

            “We wanted to wrestle him his freshman year, but he was suited to be a 174-pounder and made the decision his sophomore year to make 174,” Heffernan said. “He was doing OK but over the long haul it really wore on him. It was a long season and his body got worn down.”

       (You can read the rest of this article by subscribing to WIN Magazine. Either contact our office at 1-888-305-0606 or subscribe through this website by selecting the “Subscribe” section on our front page.)