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Most 13-year-olds can be found playing video games or hanging out at a mall.<\/p>\nYOUTH SPORTS: A Superior 13-year-old takes his zest for wrestling to national levels.<\/p>\n
BY DALTON WALKER<\/p>\n
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER<\/p>\n
Most 13-year-olds can be found playing video games or hanging out at a mall.<\/p>\n
Nikola Bogojevic can be found in his basement tossing weights around for three and a half hours a day. That’s the routine of a national wrestling champion.<\/p>\n
Bogojevic, of Superior, helped Team Wisconsin win the Schoolboy Dual National Championship for sixth- through eighth-graders June 19 in Indianapolis. He also returned with an invididual title, winning the 225-250-pound division with a record of 17-1.<\/p>\n
“I always loved wrestling,” said Bogojevic, who stands 5-foot-9 and weighs 220 pounds.”My main goal is to make it to the Olympics.”<\/p>\n
The Olympics are a few years away, but another competition awaits. Bogojevic will wrestle in the Kids National Championships on Wednesday in Green Bay.<\/p>\n
In Green Bay he will compete alone, not as a member of Team Wisconsin. He said he wouldn’t want it any other way.<\/p>\n
“Step up to the plate,” Bogojevic said. “I can’t be afraid of who I go against. Human to human, no reason to be afraid.”<\/p>\n
Bogojevic wrestles three styles — Greco-Roman, freestyle and folk, the style sactioned by the governing body of Wisconsin high school athletics. In Green Bay, Bogojevic will compete in Greco-Roman and freestyle.<\/p>\n
Joseph Reasbeck, 62, has been training Bogojevic since February. Bogojevic credits much of his success to their two-hour training sessions each Tuesday and Thursday. Reasbeck stresses technique and patience.<\/p>\n
Bogojevic’s size sometimes is his worst enemy. In two recent tournaments he took first place without breaking a sweat, winning because he was the only entry in his category.<\/p>\n
“He would walk around hours looking for an exhibition match,” Kim Bogojevic, Nikola’s mother, said. “Nobody would want to wrestle him.”<\/p>\n
TURNING POINT<\/p>\n
Kim Bogojevic spends $200 a week on groceries, but she doesn’t mind. Two years ago she was diagnosed with epilepsy and confined to a wheelchair. Today she walks with help of a walker.<\/p>\n
The time Kim Bogojevic spent in the hospital left her son home alone. He took up wrestling as a first-grader and made it his focus while his mother was hospitalized.<\/p>\n
“I was home alone, stressed out,” Nikola Bogojevic said. “I started to work hard. I lost 30 pounds.”<\/p>\n
Nikola Bogojevic was named after King Nikola Petrovic of Montenegro. His father was born Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n
Nikola’s father, Zoran Bogojevic, was born in Yugoslavia and arrived in the United States in the 1970s. Kim Bogojevic first worked for Zoran Bogojevic before they got married.<\/p>\n
Zoran Bogojevic, 51, works 20 hours a day to support his family, and it’s from him that Nikola Bogojevic has learned discipline.<\/p>\n
Kim Kogojevic says her son is a gentle giant wrapped in a man’s body. His bedroom is full of medals and posters of World Wrestling Entertainment stars. When friends visit Nikola, they sometimes wrestle downstairs, dressed costumes mimicking pro wrestling stars, Kim Bogojevic said.<\/p>\n
“We’re very proud of him. We’ll push him all we can,” Kim Bogojevic said “I really feel he will be in the Olympics one day.”<\/p>\n
DALTON WALKER can be reached at (218) 723-5390 or e-mailed at dwalker@duluthnews.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
YOUTH SPORTS: A Superior 13-year-old takes his zest for wrestling to national levels. BY DALTON WALKER NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER Most 13-year-olds can be found playing video games or hanging out at a mall. Nikola Bogojevic can be found in his basement tossing weights around for three and a half hours a day. That’s the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wrestling"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2B7Di-lJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}