Just a few seconds of listening to Bob Justice will erase any doubts about the power of inner determination.
Justice’s sport was wrestling, and he learned at an early age there are no shortcuts to the winner’s circle. Anyone competing in wrestling not willing to reach down for that little extra is destined to have his hand raised very few times.
Through his inner strength and dedication, Justice won a state championship in 1964 for coach Joe Klune at Abraham Lincoln High School. Four years later, he won an NCAA championship at 177 pounds while coached by Linn Long at the University of Colorado.
And for good measure after high school, Justice allowed only two points in eight matches in Japan in a Colorado-Japan exchange program.
“When I went to Japan on the exchange program, I had been out of the state once to Oklahoma and once to Laramie,” he said. “It was an enormous experience for me.”
Something drove Justice to excel. Was it to impress a missing father he doesn’t remember seeing? Was it because of his mother, Margaret, whose advice was to do his best at whatever he was doing? Justice focused only on wrestling and dreamed of being an Olympic champion while in the ninth grade at Denver’s Kunsmiller Junior High School.
“The key to my wrestling was determination and being in superb condition,” Justice said. “I’d run up Lookout Mountain on weekends to build leg strength. My endurance late in a match was a key to my success.”
Klune was a father figure as well as a coach. Long took Justice to the advanced level required to win an NCAA championship. Justice respected teammates as well as pillars of the sport, taking in any knowledge he could from Joe Romig, Dean Lahr, Jim Hanson and Ken Johnson at CU. Justice cherishes memories of high school teammates John and Bob Coombe and Conard Metcalf and Scott Patten from the exchange program.
“I had great coaching,” Justice said. “I always was an eager learner. Coach Long gets credit for polishing up my wrestling style that enabled me to do what I did. It was an accumulation of things that gave me the edge over most of my opponents.”
Lahr, a state champion at Denver North and an NCAA champion at CU, in 1963 and 1964 at 177 pounds, told Justice that in tough matches it was mental attitude that won matches.
When it came time to pick a college, it was as if Long’s criteria picked Justice.
“The first thing Coach Long did when he came to a high school was visit the guidance counselor,” Justice said. “If you had a single absence on your record, he might look the other way. He said he didn’t want to babysit people. CU was the right balance of sports and academics.”
Justice took his attitude on the mat with him into the business world. He attacked the job as if making a takedown. He entered the natural gas processing business with stops in Tulsa, Okla., Colorado Springs and Denver. He once led a project with a budget of $250 million.
While wrestling was the elixir of his early life, he parted the sport on unhappy terms.
Before Justice’s senior year, Long left the CU coaching staff. A knee injury slowed Justice’s preparation for the season and new coach Shelby Wilson moved on without him.
“It was incredibly humiliating and painful when he said I couldn’t come out,” Justice said. “It meant my wrestling career was over.”
Justice’s knee injury halted his dreams of an Olympic Trials.
Justice went to Oklahoma City in 1970 to trace his father, but learned from relatives that he had died two years before.
He takes heed from a speech delivered by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
Bob Justice
Born: Feb. 5, 1947, in Denver
High school: Abraham Lincoln
College: University of Colorado
Family: Partner Cammy, daughters Aimee and Sunny
Hobbies: Fly-fishing, photography
