News flash! I have my Dr. Greco shirts. I picked them up yesterday and they look great! You can find more information in the Promotional Fund Raising section! Contact me to get one.

Get em while they’re hot!!

http://www.allcustomstores.com/rcjohnson/

I’ve created a section that I will keep updated with information on my shirt. You can look over on the right hand sidebar at the “Promotional Fund Raising” section or you can click here to go directly there.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I’ve finalized my first t-shirt design!! As I write this I am in the process of getting a good printer to get things printed!! If you couldn’t tell by reading this, I’m pretty excited about everything. I’m also simultaneously working out how to do the sales portion of this endeavor. My idea for the shirt is to raise money for tournament travel and other wrestling related expenditures.

For the design of this shirt I enlisted the help of my former teammate and great friend Paul Johnson over at www.spintopdesigns.com. Without his help I doubt I could have created such a cool design. If you’re ever in need of any sort of design for anything from a simple logo to a full website, I would recommend you to him.

Last but not least, here are images of the front and back of my t-shirt. I hope you think it’s great and will want to get one and help the cause. If you don’t like it, let me know. If you do like it (and I’m thinking you probably will), let everyone know!

As I write this, I don’t have much time to fully comment on the experiences that I had at this year’s World Team Trials. The trials this year took place May 30-31 in Council Bluffs, IA. The summation of it all is this: I came, I wrestled, I got my hand raised last. Included in this post is my post championship match interview. It’s pretty cool and it’s on youtube if you’d like to check it out directly at
96 kg GR World Team Trials champion R.C. Johnson (Sunkist Kids)

Hopefully I’ll be able to finish this post soon and try to give a more complete accounting of the days events…

In my all to familiar effort to catch this thing up do date I thought I’d say a thing or two about the time between Nationals and World Team Trials. That puts these things between mid April and the end of May. During this time not much happened and a lot happened all at once.

Later in April, the 24th to be exact, a good buddy of mine had his PhD defense and I tell you what, this guy is good. I’ve always respected the work he does and am glad to know the kid. I think it was a good for me to have witnessed the defense, because when it’s my turn I’ll already have some sort of idea of the process (at least for the defense itself). Long story short, you write a book, give a lecture on your new stuff and then get peppered with questions from your committee members and the peanut gallery. Fun, fun, fun.

After that, there were good times and not so good times, lots of work on and off the mat in prep for trials, and other different events. One of the more interesting events involved the filing of a patent; the details of which are only really interesting to a few people at this point, but hopefully many more down the line. It was an interesting experience to file my first patent. The process is interesting in that you do all your research, pay a good lawyer to help you file, file, and then sit and wait (up to a couple years!) for someone to review it and finally start the dialogue (there’s apparently lots of back and forth communication involved once the process starts) for weather or not you can get it granted. It was entertaining and hopefully it won’t be the last one I work on.

Other than these two events, the time in between the two tournaments was spent finishing up my last semester of classes (ever, I do believe!) and working on improving myself as a wrestler. Something funny about that last part (improving myself) is that while I don’t like to comment about policies that have been implemented at certain places that I frequent, I feel it is necessary to say that removing key pieces of direct support does not improve a situation in which that support is crucial (speaking of past and present times) it only destabilizes it. But hey, champions persevere… right?

So there you have it, not much, and yet quite a bit, occurred in the time between Nationals and Trials.

Good times.

In an attempt to get up to date with this blog, I’m going to try to recall some history. Since I have such a great memory (if you know me, you know what I’m talking about), this should be an interesting endeavor.

The US Open was in held in Las Vegas this April 8-11. It was a fairly good tournament with good competition (as it usually is). Unfortunately for me I didn’t win (haven’t before, so what else is new!), but I did take 2nd (for the second year in a row). Why didn’t I win, you ask? Because it wasn’t my time. As I’ve told many people who have asked me, there are many factors that go into a winning performance. From one certain training session a month before a tournament to what you have for breakfast to what song is playing on your iPod as you arrive to how good your warm up is just before you step on the mat. Sometimes these make a big difference and sometimes they don’t. Hindsight being 20/20 I could point out a dozen or so reasons why I wasn’t the last man to have his hand raised but in reality, it doesn’t matter. Why you ask? Because everyone loves a winner, period. You can have all the excuses in the world and no one will truly care, they only want to know weather or not you won. It’s just life.

Moving right along.

It’s always nice to be back in Las Vegas for that tournament. Many people go there because of the casinos, but because I don’t really enjoy gambling, they’re not a draw for me. I enjoy the area because of things like the Hoover Dam (there’s something to be said about a dam that was started in 1931 and is still curing today… look it up if you don’t believe me) , the nice climate (great to visit, not to live), and the plethora of buffets (what can I say, I’m not small and I really like food).

As with all tournaments, I enjoy going to compete and seeing different places, but mostly I have fun at them because I get to see my parents. From the start they’ve been my inspiration to do great things (do… or do not, there is no try – Yoda).