Wrestling is one of the world’s oldest sports, with cave drawings of wrestlers dating all the way back to 3,000 BCE and Olympic wrestling starting in 708 BCE. The sport offers two main types: Greco-Roman (in which athletes use only the upper body to attack and hold) and freestyle (using the entire body).
Wisconsin has always had a rich wrestling heritage at the youth and high school levels, and the state can boast an Olympic gold medal (Benjamin Peterson in 1972) and several silver medals (Peterson in 1976, Russ Hellickson in 1976, Andy Rein in 1984, and Dennis Hall in 1996).
World champion Dennis Hall went on to inspire a young neighbor in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to strive for his own Olympics journey. Hall lived next door to a boy named Ben Provisor. The boy’s parents were not athletes—his father had been a musician with the band the Grass Roots—but the young Provisor liked wrestling and soon found himself frequenting the World Gold Wrestling Club, run by Hall.
“First time I saw him, I knew he was somebody who could possibly get to [the Olympic Games]. It was what I saw inside him—his dedication, his heart and how he loved to compete,” Hall told a reporter in 2012.
Hall encouraged Provisor to skip eighth grade and live in Bulgaria for a year to train with some of the top Greco-Roman wrestlers on the planet. Provisor grew even more passionate about the sport, but he was not yet a star. Wrestling at Stevens Point Area High School, he never finished higher than third at the Wisconsin Wrestling High School State Championships. Despite this, he dropped out of Northern Michigan University after one year to move to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. His dream was London in 2012, and he spoke to Hall about it over the phone several times every week.
“I try and help Ben with the mental side of the game,” Hall said in 2012. “[At the Olympics] everyone is chiseled—there’s not one guy who doesn’t look [like] an Olympic athlete. The difference between the guys who win and those who don’t is the mental focus they have.”
Even as he was encouraging Ben, Hall was nurturing his own dream. At the age of forty-one, he decided to enter the Olympic qualifications himself. He wondered how far he could go; if he still had what it took. Hall and Provisor wrestled on the same day in Iowa City, Iowa, with a ticket to London in the balance for both of them.
Hall’s match was first. He was trying to become just the third wrestler to make four Olympic teams. He lost in the first round of the 132-pound Greco-Roman competition but still had a chance in the consolation bracket. It started off well with a win, 3–3, 4–0, 1–0, but his bid came to an end with a 1–0, 0–1, 0–1 loss to Marco Lara of Colorado.
Just a few hours later, Provisor took the mat at 163 pounds, and Hall joined a huge cheering section from Wisconsin in the stands. Provisor breezed through the opening rounds, not yielding a point, which set up a final match with the top seed, fellow Wisconsinite Aaron Sieracki of Richland Center. It was a best of three, and each man won a match. Then came the third and decisive match. The twenty-one-year old Provisor edged the thirty-seven-year-old Sieracki, but only after appealing a judge’s ruling that had given Sieracki a point for a final-second push-out. The replay was in Provisor’s favor, as it showed that part of Sieracki’s body had been out of bounds before the push-out, giving Ben a 1–0, 0–1, 1–0 victory.
“I wasn’t 100% positive I’d win the appeal but, hey, I was aggressive the entire time,” Provisor told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I never stopped. Always move your feet. Never stop wrestling. That’s a lesson to every kid out there. You never know what’s going to happen.”
Provisor did not let the moment pass without praising Hall for the training and support that got him there. “I owe everything I did to him,” he said. “He’s taught me everything, and my mental attitude is the way it is because of him.”
Ben Provisor, in red, wrestles Aaron Sieracki in the finals at the 2012 Olympic Trials. REESE STRICKLAND—USA TODAY SPORTS
Provisor and Hall put their heads together before the Olympics and pored over details on all of the international wrestlers, studying their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. Hall traveled to London with Ben’s supporters to cheer his pupil on.
On August 5, 2012, Ben beat Alexei Bell of Cuba in the opening round. But his journey came to an end with a tough match against Zurabi Datunashvili of Georgia in round two. He missed a chance to wrestle in a wrestle-back (rematch) when Datunashvili lost in the semifinals. Provisor would return home without a medal. “I wrestled my best, and I’ll learn from this experience,” he said. Hall had announced that he would retire from competing after the trials.
For a while it appeared that those 2012 Summer Games would be one of the last Olympics to include wrestling. The sport was voted out by the International Olympic Committee in 2013 and was slated to end in 2020, but the IOC reversed its decision following a six-month campaign by wrestling body FILA (Fédération Internationale des Luttes Associées, known in English as the International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles) to reshape and modernize the sport.
The reinstatement of wrestling to Olympics status marked “the most important day in the 2,000-year history of our sport,” FILA president Nenad Lalovic told the Associated Press. “We feel the weight of that history. Remaining on the Olympic program is crucial to wrestling’s survival.”
Ben Provisor married fellow Team USA wrestler Leigh Jaynes, and they live in Colorado Springs with their daughter, Evelyn, born in 2013. Ben won the Bill Farrell International Wrestling Tournament in 2014 and the Dave Schultz Memorial International in 2015. Since then he has been recovering from hernia surgery and helping coach his wife. “This is a wrestling family, and we hope to keep it that way,” Provisor said in an interview in 2015.