Prep Wrestling: Remembering Jerry Godinho at The Rock
Jerry’s Kids — Castle Rock wrestling grapples with the loss of a forefather
Jordan Nailon / blastzonenews@gmail.com
CASTLE ROCK — It’s not difficult to determine success and failure in athletics, after all, that’s what final scores are for. But in wrestling, as in life, the true story is often found somewhere in the middle of the messy details.
Sure, wins are what make the wheels go round in any program. But in wrestling not all victories are equal and not all losses carry the weight of shame. There are bad wins and there are quality losses. There are momentary lapses in reason, there are mistakes, and there’s that precious time allotted to each athlete on the mat to make the most of whatever their circumstance happens to be at the exact moment.
Are you on your feet? Time to secure a takedown.
Are you scrambling on the mat? Time to register an escape.
Are the walls closing in and defeat is at your door? Time to do whatever it takes to not wind up pinned.
This is life. This is wrestling. And nobody understood the value of fighting the good fight until the bitter, or glorious end, better than Gerald Godinho.
If you’re from Castle Rock you already know all of that. And chances are, you probably already knew Jerry. Even if you were a basketball player who was otherwise entirely unfamiliar with the inner workings of the wrestling world. That’s because Jerry Godinho was everywhere, wearing his trademark Navy veteran ball cap, and rooting for the underdog to find a way forward.
He could be found sitting mat-side at wrestling matches and running the scoreboard at softball games. For decades before that he could be found with a camper full of youth wrestlers headed to and fro for the next tournament. And for a few years in the middle he could be seen rooting on his own children as they chased their own glory on the mats.
Now, he’s gone. And it’s impossible to overstate the significance of his sudden absence for those who had grown so accustomed to his presence in life, in wrestling, and everything.
The End
Jerry Godinho died of a heart attack on Nov. 20 at the age of 83. It was a natural, and yet entirely unexpected, end to a life of service and love.
Less than one month later, and just two days after his funeral service at St. Mary’s Church, an even more appropriate gathering was held in his honor — a wrestling match.
And it wasn’t just any wrestling match. It was a family reunion at The Rock.
With the Union Titans making their way up the freeway to Exit 49 and then navigating beyond the corner of PH 10 and Westside Highway, the traditional dual became something more than a wrestling match for the hometown Rockets, and everyone else who knows what it means to bleed red and white.
You see, Union is coached by John Godinho — Jerry’s son. And Castle Rock is coached by Kyle Godinho — Jerry’s grandson. And that’s not all. Not by a long shot.
For the previous three decades, up until last season, the Rockets were coached by Joe Godinho — Jerry’s oldest son. And on Dec. 18, with the Titans in town, Joe Godinho assumed the role of lead official on the mat alongside his son — another of Jerry’s grandson’s — Shawn Godinho, who coaches baseball in the summer.
And that’s still not the end of the Godinho family coaching tree that was represented within the brick confines of the gymnasium at Castle Rock High School. The Rockets are also coached by Levi Godinho, another of Joe’s sons and Jerry’s grandchildren (alongside Kyle and Shawn), and the only State champion in the heavily-medaled bunch.
And then there’s Junior Godinho, an assistant coach with Union with hopes of continuing the family tradition by taking over the program someday. And there were wive and daughters-in-law in the corner, bouncing Jerry’s great-grandchildren on a knee while the big boys went to work beneath the spotlight. It will be their turn soon enough.
And even then, that’s not all.
At mid-court there was a chair reserved for Jerry, his weathered ball cap holding his place. To the right was John Godinho, coaching his adopted Titans with a knot in his heart. And to the left was Jennifer Godinho — Jerry’s daughter — a former high school volleyball and softball coach in her own right, who now moonlights as a volleyball referee in her spare time.
And still, that only covers the blood relations, which are numerous to be sure. But in the grand scheme of things, Jerry Godinho’s impact on his community may have been revealed on the faces in the packed crowd who sported ill-fitting letterman’s jackets and well-worn “The Rock” sweatshirts. The kind that used to be white before time and toil conspired to slowly stain the telltale garb of North Cowlitz County’s most inclusive club — Castle Rock wrestling.
“Basketball players come and go. They just want to tell how good people are,” Joe Godinho said. “But it didn’t matter with wrestling. You could always come back and say, ‘There was an important match that I won, once upon a time.’ It might’ve only been one but you did something.
“It’s a family. It’s not about you. It’s about a team winning and losing and coming together.”
And when the Godinho family was in its most delicate time of mourning, that’s exactly what the community did. They came together once again, just like Jerry would have done for them.
“I wanted my brother to referee and I wanted Shawn to referee,” John Godinho said. “That’s what I always thought this match would be — just me coming home and enjoying my community that I grew up in.”
That’s not to say that the Godinho Bros. didn’t get after one another in that extra special way that only brothers (and/or mortal enemies) can do. And in that regard, the matchup between Castle Rock and Union provided a most appropriate space for the extended family to gather and pay homage to a forefather of The Rock wrestling in their own way.
“It was exciting that Shawn and I got to ref that. It was different for me,” Joe Godinho noted. “You know I never want to lose. And sometimes John and I would battle pretty heavy, so it was nice to be on the other foot watching our boys do what they do.”
Prior to the non-league dual, with both teams standing at attention and wearing Team Godinho shirts, John Godinho delivered a speech to the crowd. As he fought back tears, the tough old coach thanked that community for showing up once again, just as it had done so many times in the past. He paid tribute to his father for the work he put in behind the scenes to help curate such a rare enclave of competitors and well-wishers that has only grown stronger over the last half century.
“You have the wrestling piece, but it’s the emotional piece. The family piece,” John Godinho noted after his team emerged with a narrow victory over the Rockets. “He would give anything to one of his wrestlers. He had to watch them and he always called them ‘His kids.’
“He cared about every one of his kids. He liked underdogs, so if a kid was struggling he was there for him.”
And in case you were wondering, Jerry Godinho never mixed allegiances. Even when John prodded his father to mix in some Union black to go with his Castle Rock red and white, Jerry never took the bait. He was a Rocket to the core, so when a 1A school was slated to lock horns with a 4A school, there was no need to ride the fence. He always wanted The Rock to roll.
The Beginning
For outsiders it may seem curious that a man who was never the head coach at Castle Rock High School could have had such an elemental impact. But with a little digging, it became obvious that Jerry Godinho’s secret to forging connections with the local youth was about as simple as can be — he was always there when they needed him.
“He supported the high school, but his passion was the youth,” John Godinho noted. “We were our own little community and Dad was a huge part of it. And he just kept on going coaching the youth.”
With little more than gumption and a pickup truck, Jerry Godinho helped to turn Castle Rock youth wrestling into what it is today — a well oiled machine that continues to churn out a fresh crop of State caliber wrestlers year after year.
But before the glory that comes with climbing the podium, there’s a whole lot of behind the scenes work that helps to turn a soft body in a singlet into a bonafide wrestler for The Rock. And if some folks thought Jerry Godinho’s coaching methods were somewhat odd, it’s equally as true that his unique approach to the sport is precisely what made the difference between schools that wrestle, and Castle Rock — a wrestling school.
“We had this little truck with a camper and we’d go to the tournaments,” John Godinho said. “He’d stop on the road and kick us out. Then he’d drive up the road two miles, stop and get out and make us lunch. And we’d have to run to the camper to get lunch.”
Which might seem harsh to today’s helicopter parents, but it’s also what made the Rockets believe in themselves. It was a choice they had to make. Do you get out and run with your teammates? Do you give up and walk? Or worse yet, do you stay in the truck and opt for the path of least resistance by quitting before ever getting started.
For Jerry Godinho, the only failure was not trying. It was the work that was the measure of a man, young or old, and for those who got out and ran it was the beginning of an unbroken chain that still has everyone in red and white pulling in the same direction.
“He’d get off graveyard at night, we’d drive to a tournament and we’d wrestle at a tournament, and he never pushed me. He just gave me options,” John Godinho said. “He’s never yelled at me on the mat. He’d just tell me to go!”
That approach is still a hallmark of Castle Rock youth wrestling, where fun comes first and the winning comes naturally.
“A lot of people grew up in this town having my dad coach them at one time, much earlier than when they came to me as a coach,” Joe Godinho said. “They first started down at first grade, second grade, and my dad was there screaming out ‘Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown!’”
The Charlie Brown, for those who don’t know, is a wrestling move of Jerry Godinho’s own creation that he believed any wrestler could pull off when the time was right. And why was it called the Charlie Brown?
“Because that’s a name that every kid could remember,” Joe Godinho explained.
Brilliant.
Castle Rock’s current head wrestling coach Kyle Godinho knows full well he’s got it good with a farm system of young wrestlers always moving up through the ranks. He noted that the youth coaches are almost always alumni of The Rock, so the expectations don’t need to be explained. They are already ingrained in the blood, sweat and bone marrow of those volunteers who simply want to pay back a little bit of what they were given back in their younger days.
“They don’t pressure kids. It’s about having fun and the wins come,” Kyle Godinho said.
And that’s an important distinction.
In a sport with high stakes and nobody else to blame, wrestlers can easily become jaded to external pressures. And when play becomes work, the fun quickly fades, which leads many in the sport to step away before they’ve reached the pinnacle of their potential.
By design, that’s not a problem that the young Rockets are burdened with. But for the cream of the crop, those pressures are only amplified if they choose to continue wrestling at the collegiate level, as John Godinho did at Pacific Lutheran University after placing second at the state tournament for the Rockets as a senior.
“A lot of kids get burnt out, but you’ve got to still have that love for the sport to keep going, because it’s a job,” John Godinho explained.
Jerry’s Kids
And while winners are remembered forever at Castle Rock, the rest of the bunch never gets forgotten. That starts on the first day any young person becomes brave enough to step on the mat to test themselves in a sport with no relief valve.
That was true for the wrestlers with pedigree, just the same as it was for the proverbial stray dogs from the pound.
“When you came into wrestling you got the same singlet as everyone else, and if you didn’t have shoes we gave them to you,” Joe Godinho said. “You didn’t look like the poor guy on the street. All you had to do was go out there and perform. And if you performed, people shook your hand and patted your back and said ‘Great job!’ and all that stuff. And your heart just grew. It just grew.”
And to be sure, The Rock has had more than its share of dogs from the pound that put in the work to earn those accolades. And that respect. Jerry Godinho wanted to make sure every dog had its day, especially the underdogs.
“His boys aren’t the head, macho guys who are winning all the medals. His boys were the people who had a rough childhood,” Kyle Godinho noted. “Before he even knew their background, he’d fostered so many kids in his life, that he could see they did not have the best home life. He considered those kids to be ‘his boys.’ I have a couple of his boys on the team right now and they took it pretty hard when he passed.”
Not all of Jerry Godinho’s “adopted” boys went on to storm their way through the state tournament bracket, but there were plenty who found their way to the podium and even more who helped to make Castle Rock a perennial Top-10 finisher in team points at the Mat Classic.
“I always called those guys Dirt Clods when they came in. We just had to mold them into something,” Joe Godinho said. “You had these guys who had rough, tough times, but if you look back in the history of Castle Rock wrestling, the best wrestlers often came from the shittiest families, because you gave them an outlet to succeed.”
And again, win or lose, it’s the refusal to give up that counts most in life and wrestling.
“In his mind they were all State champions,” Joe Godinho said of his father’s boys. “He believed in every one of them, and they believed in him. They’d come off the mat crying and he’d wrap them up in a huge bear hug.”
And Jerry Godinho’s affinity for the underdog extended far from the mat.
Take for instance his love for farming and his legendary ability to breathe life into things that lesser men would simply walk away from. No story gets to the heart of the man like the tales that still circulate around the stockyard at 4 Corners Farm and Garden. Especially the ones that tell of Jerry Godinho rescuing seemingly stillborn piglets by wrapping his lips around their snouts and breathing the warm breath of life into their previously cold, limp bodies. Then he’d put them under the heat lamp and keep feeding them just to see what they might one day become.
And if the blue ribbons on the wall and all that sausage in the deep freezer are any indication, they grew up to be quite a lot.
Jerry Godinho saw Castle Rock wrestlers the same way he saw those pigs — a hog pile of potential that simply needed some attention and space in order to grow big and strong.
“That’s the underdog. That’s the kid you root for. That’s who he gets,” Kyle Godinho said of his grandfather. “He makes them feel part of the team. Makes them feel special, and that someone cares about them. They might not have a mom or dad in the stands watching, but they’ve got Jerry in the corner.”
Making Memories
As you may have noticed, wrestling is a family affair for the Godinho clan. But that distinction is not one that needs to be confirmed by the results of a DNA swab. Rather, the bonds of Castle Rock wrestling are formed through contributions of blood, sweat and tears on the mats, in the weight room, and deep within the shadowy bowels of every gymnasium from White Salmon to the Tacoma Dome.
“It’s a family and it’s been a family forever. Once you become a Castle Rock wrestler, you’re a lifer,” Joe Godinho said.
Joe is two years (but just one grade level) older than his brother John, and it was Joe’s early success that sucked his younger brother into the sport like a Rocket into the black hole beyond the event horizon.
“Joe brought home a medal and I said, ‘Where’d you get that?’ He said, ‘Wrestling.’ So I signed up the next year,” John Godinho remembered. “A lot of my journey was through my brother and my dad, and we wanted to be good. It’s too hard of a sport to lose… He’s a great older brother.”
And while their “training sessions” no doubt spilled over to the family living room from time to time, it was the fun rather than the fights that stood out so many years later.
For instance, wrestling allowed John Godinho to travel to heartland locations like Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma, and to tournaments as remote as Alaska, and all the way across the Pacific Ocean to compete in Japan. But some of the most lasting memories were made right up the road at Castle Rock’s favorite pizza parlor.
“We weren’t big travelers so I got to see a lot of the country through wrestling,” John Godinho said. “We worked hard. We farmed. We didn’t have a lot of money, so when we got a meal ticket to go to Papa Pete’s it was a fun time with just a couple quarters to put in the arcade to play Asteroids and Donkey Kong.”
Losses that Hurt
This weekend Castle Rock wrestling will host the annual Jim Bair Memorial Tournament. It’s an event named after the former Castle Rock high school wrestling coach, and it’s yet another opportunity for the community to show up and show how much the people who make the program mean to them.
Over the years the Godinhos and Bairs have had their share of battles, but those were (mostly) behind the scenes, and were a natural/inevitable result of two competitive families who have committed to doing everything they can to keep Castle Rock wrestling as close to the top as possible at all times.
John Godinho didn’t mince words on the topic when he began his pre-dual speech in Castle Rock back in December.
“I’ve lost the two most important people in my life — Jim Bair, and my dad, Jerry Godinho,” Union’s head coach said to a sea of red and white in the stands.
Jim Bair was the head coach when both John and Joe were wrestling for the Rockets, and Joe Godinho took over the program after Bair stepped away from the program in 1988. But to separate them and their contributions would be like trying to fully understand an elephant simply by grabbing its trunk. There has always been a synergy to The Rock wrestling that can’t be confined to just one man, let alone one surname.
“I think it just starts with family,” Kyle Godinho said. “Everyone starts at the youth level and by the time they get here we’re all connected somehow. And who connected all of that was my grandpa and Jim Bair.”
Now tasked with putting all the bells and whistles together for the Jim Bair Memorial Tournament in his second season as head coach, Kyle Godinho has quickly come to appreciate the mob of former wrestlers (and wrestling parents) who return season after season to help out in whatever way they can.
“We don’t move away,” Kyle Godinho said. “We just stay in Castle Rock and we grow up and we don’t know any better.”
When Union was in town the gym was not just filled with Godinhos. There were also Bairs in the building.
Parker Bair, a freshman at Castle Rock and Jim Bair’s grandson, took his shot on the mat against the Titans and will be looking for revenge next season. Parker’s father, Joe Bair (another former wrestler/youth coach/referee), was also in attendance along with his daughter, Natalie Bair. Judy Bair, more appropriately known as Mama Bair, was also in the brick house to offer her support to the wrestlers and coaches who continue to make her late husband's shared vision for the program come to fruition time and time again.
And if you don’t believe me, just ask John Godinho, who brought the principles he learned at The Rock with him to Union and has been busy instilling those virtues ever since.
“I think a lot of that is also Jim Bair. He coached me and he taught me lessons I didn’t even know when I was wrestling,” the Union boss said. “Like giving, helping out, opening doors for old ladies. Just things that make you good people.”
Last Words
If they’re doing it right, a person gets into coaching in order to build something bigger than themselves, that will last longer than their own time on this mortal coil.
And to that end, there’s no denying that Jerry Godinho has accomplished what he set out to do.
At Castle Rock there’s an award that’s bestowed upon the top sixth grade wrestler each season and it’s called the Jerry Godinho award. More than several state champions have first earned that honor as they began to carve out their place in a storied program.
And while the loss of Jerry Godinho in the midst of an active wrestling season left an empty seat in the gym, and an empty spot in many hearts, the timing also provided the people who loved him most to come together to celebrate his life in a way that seems most fitting to his nature.
Sure, he was a devout Catholic who received a proper service, but he was arguably even more devout to “his kids” from Castle Rock wrestling Even the ones who are all grown up now.
“I don’t know exactly what he’d say but he’d just be happy knowing he’s sitting there watching his kids coach, his grandkids wrestle, and being a part of something,” Joe Godinho said. “I don’t know if he’d have said anything, but he would’ve just had that huge smile. He’d have been happy just to sit there and watch.”
Amazing tribute to Jerry. I met the “farmer” Jerry at the Castle Rock Fair when my daughter was 7. Jerry was a friendly face and a kind word during the hectic fair days. Rest Well Jerry.
What a beautiful tribute to a man who devoted his life so well to the service of others and to building true men and the community.