By Berry Tramel
The Daily Oklahoman

OKLAHOMA CITY - When I was a kid, OSU wrestler Yoshiro Fujita amazed me. Quick. Agile. Dominant.

I’d watch Cowboy matches with my dad and rave about Fujita, who went 48-1 as a Cowboy from 1970-72, losing only when he defaulted due to injury in the ’72 NCAA Championships.

“He’s good,” my dad would say. “But you should have seen Uetake.”

Monday night, I finally did. Yojiro Uetake Obata, OSU’s undefeated, three-time NCAA champ and Japan’s two-time Olympic gold medalist, was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. And on a night that as much as anything celebrated the Cowboys’ grand tradition on the mat, a night that included three stage appearances by the Smith brothers, the First Family of Wrestling, Uetake was the star.

Not often can you safely proclaim someone the greatest ever in an esteemed fraternity. But Uetake was the greatest of the great. The best Cowboy wrestler of all time.

“He was never really challenged and he went undefeated,” said Lee Roy Smith, a Cowboy great himself and director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. “There’s nobody else that fits that category.”

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