School fetes judo champ

After Steve Seck was beaten up several times at the age of 9 in his hometown of Watertown, his parents thought he probably should learn how to defend himself.

"They enrolled me in judo classes in Minneapolis, and every week they would drive the 35 miles," Seck, 51, said recently.

It proved to be a good investment. Seck developed such a talent for the sport that he became the only Watertown athlete ever to make the U.S. Olympic team.

That was in 1980. Seck was not only the best judo athlete in the country, but quite possibly the world.

Unfortunately, that was also the year the United States boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow, and he never got a chance to win Olympic gold.

"I was at my peak," said Seck. But his Olympic dreams came to an abrupt end when President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the Moscow games in order to punish the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan.

"We were all disappointed," said Owen Seck, his father. "We couldn't understand what [Carter] was doing, mixing sports and politics."

More than a quarter century after he was denied a chance at Olympic immortality, Steve Seck returned to Watertown earlier this month for induction into the Watertown-Mayer High School Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame, established three years ago, held the ceremony during halftime of the school's homecoming game on Oct. 5.

"It's an honor," Steve Seck said. "I graduated 33 years ago, and it's kind of nice that people still remember me. Although there were a lot of people who hadn't heard of me."

Although he doesn't dwell on the Olympic boycott, it still makes him angry when he reflects on it.

"I'm still bitter," said Seck, now a physical education teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District and at two community colleges.

Carter "did it to increase his popularity and win re-election. The polls said the American public agreed with him, although history says now that obviously it was big mistake."

Seck, whose parents still live in Watertown, said he had no idea at that time what was going on in Afghanistan or the global politics involved in the invasion.

"It's easy to look back now and see what he was trying to do," Seck said. "At the time I thought, 'What is he doing?... He wants to use the Olympics for military purposes.'"

Owen Seck said he knew his son could be good in judo from the time he was 6 or 7.

"I'd come home and he'd be behind the door hiding and then he'd jump at me and say, 'Come on Dad, let's go,' and we'd start rolling around on the ground," Owen Seck said.

By age 12, Steve Seck was traveling to judo tournaments all over the country.

By junior high, he was an accomplished judo athlete. He used that expertise to become one of the state's best high school wrestlers.

He was so good that he wrestled on the varsity team from the time he was in seventh grade. He finished second twice at the state tournament during the six years he wrestled. When he graduated, he held the state record for most victories by a wrestler: 139.

Although he liked wrestling, his true calling was judo. Two years after graduating from high school he finished second at the U.S. Olympic trials and was the alternate for the 1976 Olympics.

By the time the 1980 Olympic trials came, Seck had been national judo champion for two years. He would add a third title that year. In 1980, he also was selected the judo athlete of the year by USA Judo Inc., the national governing body for judo.

In 1980, he also was elected into the Black Belt Magazine Hall of Fame for winning the judo National Championship, Olympic Trials and U.S. Open in the same year.

Seck retired from judo competition in 1984 after winning a gold medal at the Rodriguez Cup in Cuba. He defeated Brazil's Onmura, the bronze medalist at the 1984 Summer Olympics. But he did not qualify for the Olympics that year.

"I try not to think about it," Seck said of the Olympic boycott in 1980. "I felt [Carter] took away my big chance. I had a chance to get a medal, but of course I never got a chance to prove it."

Herón Márquez Estrada • 612-673-4280