Kreidler, Mark 1959-

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Kreidler, Mark 1959-

PERSONAL:

Born 1959, in TX; married; children: has sons.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Feature writer and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune and Sacramento Bee; columnist for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

WRITINGS:

Showdown in the Desert: The Official Book of Super Bowl XXX, Woodford Press (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

High-school sports in the United States can be brutally competitive, with scholarships, future careers, parental aspirations, and regional reputations often hanging on the outcome of a single play. In this atmosphere, young lives are often defined by how well they perform athletically. In Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland, journalist Mark Kreidler explores the lives of two young high-school wrestlers from Iowa as they struggle and train on their way toward winning an unprecedented fourth high-school state championship each. In the process, the young men's stories illustrate their own hopes and steely determination, as well as the pressures placed on them to win in a sport where competition is everything and winning is the final step to greatness.

"Nowhere is wrestling more revered than in the state of Iowa," where even high-school level wrestlers can achieve legendary status, noted Booklist reviewer Wes Lukowsky. Kreidler offers incisive portraits of the training, personalities, and motivation of Jay Borschel, who is from a town near Cedar Rapids, and Dan LeClere, who grew up on a farm in the small rural town of Coggon, as they work to become the fifteenth and sixteenth state champions. In his narrative, he explores why the sport of wrestling is important to its participants and to those around them, who help train the athletes and support the competitions. Kreidler's "deftness in Four Days is in turning a niche sport into one as accessible as baseball or basketball," observed Richard Sandomir in the New York Times Book Review. The wrestlers profiled in the book "will not achieve fame outside their state, or fortune, at least not from looking to pin opponents. But they are as captivating—if not nearly as outrageous and absurd—as if they were seeking toeholds and takedowns inside a steel cage at Madison Square Garden instead of gymnasiums in eastern Iowa," Sandomir remarked. Lukowsky called Kreidler "an observant, intuitive, and inspired scrivener." The road to the championship is difficult for both Borschel and LeClere. "Whether they get their fourth crowns or not, there's something regal in the purity of their pursuit," remarked Hank Hersch in Sports Illustrated.