‘Little Giant’: Larry Nelson, who towered in regional prep wrestling as coach, dies at 90
Larry Nelson was not a big man, but he towered in reputation and in legend.
He said little, but his words resonated as a coach, a mentor and a decades-long English teacher. Nelson’s coaching friends fondly called him “Little Giant.”
The founding wrestling coach at Vacaville High School who darted across the mat as a 145-pound ball of energy and determination up to his mid-80s, Nelson died Friday morning of natural causes. He was 90.
A native of Wisconsin, where he was a state high school champion in 1949 before winning Big Ten titles at Michigan as a 123-pounder, Nelson started the wrestling program at Vacaville from scratch. For the next 55 years, Nelson stressed that athletics were an extension of the classroom, that teaching works in any setting and that students owed it to themselves to expand their horizons, to work their minds and bodies.
Nelson remained fit as an example of a coach practicing what he preached. For years, he would outlast his top wrestlers in distance conditioning runs. He wowed onlookers by doing dozens of push-ups from his finger tips.
Path to multiple halls of fame
Nelsom’s first Vacaville team in 1961 included one athlete. By the time Nelson was done as the Bulldogs head coach in 1994, the roster filled a school bus. It meant something to compete for that program under Nelson’s influence.
Over 35 seasons as head coach, Nelson won 533 dual-meet matches, second-most in state history. Nelson won a remarkable 52 championships, making Bulldog wrestling the most dominant prep program in the history of Solano County and as successful as any sports program in the history of the Sac-Joaquin Section.
Nelson worked as an assistant to the Bulldogs wrestling program up until he was 86 years old, once explaining, “This is what I do. I coach.”
Nelson is a member of multiple wrestling halls of fame, including the California Wrestling Hall of Fame.
“Larry was the real deal, the best, but he’d be the last to say so because he never wanted to be defined by wins; he was defined by his wrestlers. He was a Midwestern kid, polite, give you a nod and wouldn’t say much,” said longtime Vacaville sports writer Cecil Conley. “Larry had his wrestlers wear their championship medals on their letterman’s jacket. All of these kids would come into the gym before a match, and you’d hear all the medals clanging, and it was, ‘Oh, God. Look who’s here!’”
From 1964-94, Nelson’s teams won 26 league, 15 sub-section and 11 section team or dual championships. His legacy carried over to those who coached after him. The momentum continued to pick up steam, including recent seasons under co-coaches Clint Birch and Armando Orozco. Both wrestled for Nelson and both continue to use lessons they learned on their current rosters.
Nelson also left an impact on rival coaches.
“Larry was one of a kind, an old-school coach, an on-campus teacher, a good man, and everyone respected him,” said Richard Fox, the retired Ponderosa wrestling coach. “Great competitor, heck of a guy, someone we all looked up to. I would call him, ‘little giant.’ He was small in stature but that was not a man you’d want to mess with.”
Fox said a few words from Nelson shaped his own career. The coaches had a brief talk during a mid-1980s wrestling tournament. Fox was an up-and-coming coach and Nelson already well-established.
“During a match, I got ticked off and pushed my chair back hard, but it wasn’t a Bobby Knight chair-throwing thing,” Fox said with a laugh. “Larry saw it. He waited a few moments, then came over. I’ll never forget this. He said, ‘Richard, if you want to last in this sport, you’ll have to settle down.’ That’s it. That’s what he said. If someone else had said that to me, I might have told them to mind their own business.
“But this was Larry Nelson. I took what he said to heart. I never had another incident, and I did last a long time. Think of the thousands of lives Larry impacted. It will be felt for generations.”
An all-time Vacaville great
Nelson was a voracious reader and a photography buff. He also enjoyed videotaping Vacaville football for decades.
Years ago, during a wrestling tournament that bears his name, another image of the Nelson impact sunk in. Someone alerted tournament officials that an older man was in the stands with a flash bulb on his camera, a distraction. The tournament director said, in so many words, “That’s Larry Nelson. This is his tournament. He can do whatever he wants.”
Yes sir.
Stu Clary recalled attending Nelson’s English class at Vacaville in 1980 and ’81, awed by the very presence of the man. Clary is now the championship baseball coach at Vacaville and the school’s assistant athletic director. To know Nelson, Clary said, was to know someone special.
“Respected him to the utmost, all students did, no question,” Clary said. “Proud man, great man. Larry would climb that old ladder in the football press box to film games up to his 80s. For years, you drove in downtown in Vacaville, and there was Larry, on a run, fit and feisty. At the Vacaville Hall of Fame a few years ago, Larry’s speech was maybe three words. He wasn’t one to toot his horn.”
Nelson was part of the section’s first Hall of Fame class in 2010. The section office asked each inductee to offer a quote on what their high school career meant to them. Nelson’s quote was brief, “Bulldogs on three!”
The emcee of that event counted out “1, 2, 3’ and a crowd of some 650 belted out, “Bulldogs!”
Clary said Nelson is an all-time Vacaville great, beyond wins and losses, right up there with famed football coach Tom Zunino and Steve Green, who coached a lot of sports. They’re all gone now.
“Coach Z, coach Green, Coach Nelson, they’d all be on a Vacaville sports Mount Rushmore,” Clary said. “The thing those three had in common is they transcended their sport. People didn’t just play sports for these guys. They were deeply affected by these men.”
Adam Wright met Nelson in the early 2000s when he started teaching and coaching in Vacaville, including a stint as co-head wrestling coach. Wright is the principal at Willis Jepson Middle School in Vacaville and will become principal at Vacaville High at the start of the next academic year.
“It’s been a sad couple of days here,” Wright said. “Our school has some real legends, people who built this foundation we’re living on, guys you just can’t replace. One thing I always appreciated about Larry is he let Clint Birch and me carve our own path in coaching. He could have come in and said we needed to do this or that. We asked him to come in and work with our kids each week and he loved that.
“We’d email Larry for insight, and he’d write back, ‘Have the kids run more hills!’ Now that’s a coach.”
This story was originally published April 19, 2020 at 4:00 AM.