Matt Lackey's NCAA Championship Gets Cooler and Cooler the More You Look Into It

If you want to continue reading the story that starts in the image above, go to this link of the article about 150 years of ILLINI making history. In the article you'll find a heart-warming story of a coach being a great coach. 

But there's more to the story. 

A lot more. 

This is the coolest stuff I've found in a long, long time. 

The ILLINI great Matt Lackey won a National Championship in 2003. He did it in the most spectacular fashion with the footsweep heard 'round the world. This is what that looked like:

There is no video of the entire championship match, which is one of the uncoolest things I've encountered in a long, long time. But, if you dig a little deeper into the Matt Lackey story, you'll find this gem from The Daily ILLINI:

“Growing up in Moline, we got Iowa public television, which televised every single Iowa wrestling meet,” Lackey said. “Everyone out there watched Iowa wrestling back then. They had some great wrestlers there back then, and, of course, I wanted to go to Iowa.”

Everything changed in 1992 when Illinois handed the reins of its wrestling program to Mark Johnson, who grew up in neighboring Rock Island in the Quad Cities area.

Lackey recalls his first encounter in sixth grade with the then-recently hired Johnson, when Lackey introduced himself at a Moline High School football game.

“I had walked over to the concession stand with my mom, and she spotted him sitting the stands and said, ‘Hey there’s Mark Johnson, the coach of Illinois! Let’s go meet him,’” Lackey said. “I went up there, and he was very gracious as we said our hellos, and we were on our way. I didn’t really think anything of it.”

A week later, Lackey came home to discover that Johnson had remembered his interest in wrestling, mailing him a Fighting Illini wrestling T-shirt.

“From that point on, I was sold,” Lackey said.

But the coolness doesn't stop there. 

You see, if you dig still deeper, the video of the footsweep above has some comments attached to it. As I was reading the comments, I thought I recognized a name:

I'm not 100% certain that dapitbull2009 was referencing Gabriel Flores' comment as the posts were separated on the youtube page and were two years apart. But, in fact, Gabe Flores did know Matt Lackey, and Gabe Flores would follow Matt Lackey to the University of ILLINOIS.

Gabe's comment is 13 years old. In the interim, he would join the ILLINI wrestling team and have a fabulous career winning lots of big matches--inspired by that footsweep by Matt Lackey. 

And to top it all off, the coolest part of the coolest story ever, you have that beautiful, wonderful, amazing, scintillating, magnificent footsweep. When that footsweep is timed to perfection--late in a close championship NCAA final--and when it is executed to perfection--what you have is an entire universe of cool. 

(As a final aside, I would argue that Johnny Kreese of Cobra Kai had the duty to sweep the leg of Danny LaRusso. If an athlete enters a competition injured, then that athlete must expect his opponent to attack his weakness. What should've happened is that Child Protective Services and the police arrive to interrogate Mr. Miyagi about his endangering the health or welfare of a minor.).