There aren’t a lot of video clips of Luke Fickell the high school wrestler, which is strange given he won 106 consecutive matches and three state titles his last three years at St. Francis DeSales High School in Columbus. One clip is easily found, though.

It’s Fickell in the state heavyweight final his senior year. His opponent is Akron Hoban’s Ray Edmonds, a massive presence who’d committed to playing defensive line at Michigan. Fickell had done the same for Ohio State. The advance hype centered on the future rivalry. You guessed it might.

Fickell was 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds of lanky. Strong, but not in a weightlifter’s way. Edmonds was 6-3, 270 pounds, none of it shy. Edmonds looked like a pop star’s bodyguard. He’d lost once in 35 matches that year. Fickell was 38-0.

Fickell pinned Edmonds in 54 seconds. Tossed him around like pizza dough. About 30 seconds into the match, Fickell dropped Edmonds with a single-leg takedown; some 20 seconds later, he turned Edmonds with an arm bar. The whole blink-and-miss-it match looked so simple for Fickell. And maybe it was. After all, he’d been practicing the single-leg and the arm bar nearly every day for half his life.

"The thing about wrestling is, it’s not just about the best athlete or the most skilled guy," Fickell explained recently. "It’s really the guy that dedicates the most, that works the hardest who’s going to be the best in the long run. Guys who grind their butts off and work their craft, they have a chance to be better than some of the others."

It’s not a stretch to extend the metaphor. You can stretch it to include, oh, a football game that occurs on Friday at 3:30 p.m. Alabama is favored by a couple touchdowns to beat UC in the Cotton Bowl, in the first national semifinal. The Crimson Tide is legendary; the Bearcats are "feisty." Unless they’re scrappy, plucky, pesky, gritty or spunky.

Do the Bearcats work harder than ‘Bama? Doubtful, given the Tide’s coach is Nick Saban. Will they enter the game confident and prepared, with zero tolerance for losing?

Look at their coach. What do you think?

Fickell remembers the losses. Wrestlers by nature own an encyclopedic recall of their matches. An 85-year-old former wrestler might lose his keys every couple minutes, but he can tell you who beat him in the sectional finals his junior year. Fickell recalls losing twice in the district meet his freshman year. The second loss, a wrestle-back to a kid from Perrysburg High, kept Fickell from qualifying for the state tournament.

Since he was small, Fickell had two goals: To win an Olympic gold medal and to be a four-time state champion, following the lead of former DeSales star Mark Zimmer. Zimmer was the first Ohio high schooler to win four state titles.

Fickell would have to settle for three. "To this day, I’ve never set foot in Perrysburg High School," he said.

He lost his only college match, to Penn State’s Kerry McCoy. McCoy was a senior, twice a national champ and later, twice an Olympian. Fickell was a freshman football player who’d just returned from playing in the Rose Bowl. McCoy won, 12-2. "I wasn’t quite ready for biting off the national champ," said Fickell.

The match was on Super Bowl Sunday. "We had a Super Bowl party at my apartment," recalled Fickell. "I never came out of my room."

Said Luke’s younger brother Michael, "It was a humbling experience for him. I’m sure he has used that to keep him grounded."

It was the last match Luke ever wrestled. Unless you count a roll-around he had with Michael, when Michael was a senior all-American wrestler at Penn. Luke was four years older, 40 pounds heavier and a bit out of shape. Mike took down big bro. At least that’s how Mike recalled it.

"I took him down. He was more mad than anything. It turned into a fistfight," said Mike.

"Didn’t happen," said Luke. "I wouldn’t officially say that was a takedown. It might have been as close as he ever got. I have no recollection of it being an official takedown."

Fickell said the losses his freshman year, and the loss to McCoy, inform his thinking to this day. They still drive him. "The greatest thing that ever happened to me," he said. "They made me who I am."

Who is he? How has wrestling defined him?

When he was 6, he tagged along with his uncle Wayne Hiles to practice at Bishop Watterson High School, where Wayne coached. Luke weighed 100 pounds at age 8. He started wrestling the 98-pounders on the high school team. Wayne would sign Luke up for tournaments in the offseason. "He’d say, we entered you in two age groups. The age group above you and the age group above that," Fickell remembered.

By the time he was a freshman at DeSales, Fickell was better than anyone on his team. A returning senior captain who’d wrestled in the state meet the year before lost two challenges in two days to Luke. The guy told the coach he’d drop a weight class rather than not wrestle varsity. He ended up qualifying for state at the lower weight.

The problem became finding competition for Luke to wrestle in practice. Hiles brought in former champions from DeSales and Ohio State. He even grappled with Luke himself. For 30 minutes every day after practice, Wayne and Luke drilled single-leg snatch takedowns and worked Dan Gable’s arm-bar series.

"Do it again, do it again, do it again," Hiles told his nephew.

Remember Fickell’s match with Ray Edmonds? Single-leg, arm bar, adios.

"No matter what it took to win, he found a way to do it," Hiles said. Hiles likes to tell the story of Luke’s loss as a freshman to Kevin Randleman, who’d go on to win a national title at Ohio State. "I’m never losing again," Uncle Wayne recalls Luke saying afterward.

Except that’s not quite true. Luke lost to Randleman, then twice in the districts. Good story, though, and not entirely inaccurate.

"The mindset, the work ethic, the tenacity. He’s applying that to his career and getting that across to his players," said Mike Fickell.

Mike’s not just being nice. He is, after all, the little brother. He also recalls enjoying eating ice cream in front of Luke when Luke was trying to cut weight for wrestling his freshman year at DeSales. Mike also remembers Luke had a habit of overturning card tables whenever he was losing a card or board game to his siblings.

"Being a good loser isn’t a strength" of mine, said Luke. "I trained that if I could win by a point, I wanted to win by 10. I’d get mad if a guy scored a point on me."

Not many did. One was Stephan Terebieniec, from Lakewood St. Ed’s. Terebiniec was a state champ the same year as Fickell; both were seniors, Stephan in Division I, Fickell in D II. Luke beat him twice in the regular season, but didn’t pin him, which pains Fickell still.

Fickell beat Terebieniec 12-3 and 10-2. Stephan said his only points came when Fickell let him off the mat, so he could take Terebieniec again. "He’d beat the crap outta you, pick you up, then beat the crap outta you again," Terebieniec explained.

In the summers, the two roomed together while wrestling for the Junior National team. Fickell won two of those titles, too. "He wasn’t brutal, just very intense and very skilled," Terebieniec said. "He owned quite a bit of refuse to lose.

"He was a regular guy. That’s what I loved about him. That’s one of the keys to major success, remaining grateful and humble and letting your results speak for you."

Luke Fickell will never get another shot at Kerry McCoy, Kevin Randleman or that kid from Perrysburg. Or from the four-time state champ Mark Zimmer, who sadly died last year, of ALS.

Fickell gets a shot at Alabama on Friday, though. And if UC wins, a shot at another national title. Would that be as good as beating Kevin Randleman?

Fickell chuckled. "We’ll have to wait and see," he said.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Paul Daugherty: Luke Fickell's rare wrestling losses still drive him