A Wrestling Remembrance

It’s hard to believe that they’re both gone. When they wandered the Penn campus 40 years or so ago, when Smokey Joe’s was in the middle of campus and binge drinking was politically correct, Bruce Jacobsohn C ‘65 and Richie Sofman W’65 made their marks in ways that laid the foundation for the modern era in Penn wrestling. They were bookends, the lightest weight and the heaviest weight wrestlers on some of the worst of legendary coach Don Frey’s teams. But, their marks both were large.

Jacobsohn, or “Big Jake” as he was known, was BIG. He was ugly, too. Even in clothes, let alone in a wrestling singlet, one look at Bruce was more than enough to make someone want to turn and walk away. No one would confuse Jake with anything Grecian which, one day, might be displayed in some museum. But, he was a pretty good wrestler, being stopped in the Eastern Championships, which in those days include powerhouses Penn State, Syracuse and Pitt, by some behemoth named Nance (as in Jim “Bo” Nance), who twice was an NCAA champion and is a member of the New England Patriots Hall of Fame. Jake was good enough to earn a place on the 1965 U.S. Maccabiah Games team and win two gold medals in Israel.

Bruce was much more than a wrestler. He was a bona fide character. His wrestling warm-ups were legendary, including head first runs into the basketball goal posts and growls which could be heard throughout whatever venue was hosting the matches on a given day. He would delight in rubbing his two day chin growth into the back of whatever opponent was unlucky enough to assume the down position. Jake was a master of stalling.

But, Jake was more than just another dumb jock, even though he played football, too. Jake was an intellect and he was not shy about telling you about it. His lecture to the Philomathean Society, which came during the period that honorable group terms its “renaissance” and which Jake claimed was “the best thing that ever happened to those guys,” headlined the Daily Pennsylvanian.

He graduated from Penn’s Law School. Jake loved to tell how he was the toughest litigator ever to enter the courtroom, which he did often during a career in which he worked for the National Labor Relations Board and the Postal Service.

Over the years, Big Jake kept getting bigger and bigger. His passion in life was breeding Bouvier de Flanders dogs.

Sofman, in many ways, was the opposite of Big Jake. Diminutive in size, he entered Penn with no thoughts of wrestling. Instead, he sat in the back of a shell and called instructions to one of Joe Burke’s freshman crews. How he got into a shell and from there to the wrestling room are stories lost in the mists of time. But, under Frey’s tutelage he was good enough to make it to the NCAA national championship meet. He graduated from Penn in 1965 with a degree in accounting. A year later he was the AAU National Wrestling champion at 125.5 pounds. But, his star kept rising: he went on to win two more AAU National Championships; won championships at the Maccabiah Games, the World University Games, and the Pan American Games; and, was named the New Jersey Amateur Athlete of the Year.

Richie and Big Jake were fast friends in college and a bit of Big Jake’s “character” rubbed off on him. For example, after winning the prestigious Wilkes Open wrestling championships numerous times, Rich was denied entry because he refused to shave off his beard. In 1973, prior to departing for Israel where he was to win a Maccabiah Games title, Richie was quoted in the New York Times: “I’ve been disliked and mistreated because of my thinking and habits, but I feel in sports everybody is an individual. No one has to live a puritan life style just to please coaches. A lot of coaches look down at me and they let their views interfere with what’s fair. And it irks me that there are people who use athletics for their own personal hang-up.”

Throughout his life, Sofman never gave into convention. He did things his way, sometimes engaging in activities which others might have characterized as self-destructive. But, through all of his battles with all runners come; they are townsmen of a stiller town.personal demons, Richie tried to give back to the sport which gave him so much success. He coached whenever he could, at Montclair State and the New York Athletic Club.

Now these two, pals who laughed together, wrestled together, won and lost together and probably didn’t see much of each other in the last quarter century of their lives, are gone. They have run the road all runners come and are townsmen of a stiller town.