SUPERIOR — When Joe Reasbeck left Wisconsin-Superior in 1968, he was a two-time Wisconsin State University Conference wrestling champion, but he didn’t expect the sport to dominate the rest of his life.

Despite finishing fourth at the 1968 Olympic trials, Reasbeck said, instead of a coach and educator, he planned to become an FBI agent.

Fate may have had something else in mind.

Following a tour in Vietnam, Reasbeck, a U.S. Marine Corps officer, rotated to Okinawa and saw in the base newspaper an interservice wrestling tournament. He called to say he wanted to compete, but there was a problem. The Marine team didn’t have a coach. “With my next breath I said, ‘I’ll coach,’” Reasbeck said. “I had never coached in my life, I had never run a tournament in my life. I never did anything in my life and here I am running one of the biggest wrestling tournaments ever.”

Instead of going to work for the FBI, Reasbeck returned to Superior and spent a year as an assistant with Joe Dowler at UWS. A year later, he became a teacher and coach at Superior High School, a position he would retain for the next 20 years.

Reasbeck would also continue to compete and win wrestling tournaments into his early 70s.

For his lifetime of contributions to the sport as a coach and competitor, Reasbeck will be inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame May 15.

Reasbeck began wrestling as a high school freshman in Ohio for legendary coach John “Corky” Vortos and continued to compete for UWS’s own legend, Americo “Mertz” Mortorelli.

“Wrestling, for some reason, pulled me in in a way that no other sport did,” he said. “I played basketball, I ran track and cross-country, but it pulled me in because it was me on the mat and there was nobody else involved in the sport as far as whether I was going to win or lose and that stuck with me. The teaching aspect as a coach also stuck with me.”

Current Superior football coach Bob DeMeyer was a hockey player when he was younger, but started to look at wrestling as a pursuit after he became friends with Reasbeck’s son, Joe Reasbeck IV.

“He was a Marine, a stereotypical wrestler — just a tough dude, but the guy’s got a heart of gold,” DeMeyer said. “He truly did everything he could to connect and reach all of his athletes and help them any way that he could — on and off the wrestling mat.”

Reasbeck’s toughness was on display when DeMeyer was still a Spartan wrestler and Minnesota Duluth’s David Viane was looking for someone to practice with.

Viane was a wrestler and football player for the Bulldogs who went on to play a couple seasons in the NFL for the New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers.

After none of the Spartan wrestlers could handle the 6-foot, 5-inch, 275-pound Viane, Reasbeck stepped onto the mat. Even after tearing his bicep practicing with Viane, Reasbeck continued to compete, despite the fact that he was in his 40s and Viane was an excellent college athlete in his prime.

“It didn’t seem like the difference was that important, it was the fact that I believe I could still stay with him,” Reasbeck said. “When I went up to wrestle that young man, I just went up with the idea that I know what I need to do, I know what he needs to do — we needed to work him so he could get better.”

In 2002 and 2003, Reasbeck was the AAU Ironman World Champion and at age 70, he represented the U.S. at the 2016 World Championships in Athens, placing second in freestyle and fourth in Greco-Roman wrestling.

While his accomplishments on the mat are impressive, Reasbeck had a greater impact on the lives of his athletes and was a great influence on DeMeyer’s own coaching style.

“He impacted a lot of lives for a lot of years and more than just in the wrestling capacity,” DeMeyer said. “I have tried to emulate that and do that same type of thing in my career. It’s obviously very important that we care about every one of our student athletes as young men and women and we do what we can to help them be successful in and outside of athletics. Joe was certainly one that did that for many of us.”