In the second year of Varsity competition, Donald G. Herring '07 won the intercollegiate heavyweight championship in record time, throwing one opponent in sixteen seconds, another in thirteen. He was a dapper heavyweight, sometimes appearing at professional wrestling matches in Newark in white tie, tails, and topper.
Five years later, in 1911, Princeton won the Eastern intercollegiate team championship when George W. Prettyman '11, Franklin C. Wells, Jr. '11, Alexander T. Ormond, Jr. '12, and Jacob H. Frantz '13 took four of the six individual titles. Ormond's brother, Harold H. Ormond '12, won an individual championship in 1912 as did Harold H. Gile '15 in 1913. The 1911 welterweight champion Jacob Frantz (twice a cane-spree winner) successfully defended his intercollegiate title in 1912 and 1913 to become Princeton's first three-time champion. Frantz had but one hold -- the front chancery and bar lock -- but he was very proficient at it and lost no time in applying it to his opponent after the customary opening handshake. In three years of varsity competition he was never thrown; the only match he did not win was lost by a close decision: all the others he won by falls.
In the twenties four Princetonians won Eastern intercollegiate individual championships: Charles C. J. Carpenter '21, Robert Morrison '23, Theodore V. Buttrey '26, and William A. Graham '29. Heavyweight champion Carpenter, later Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Georgia, further distinguished himself by scoring a technical victory in a handicap match with the professional wrestler ``Strangler'' Lewis.
Buttrey and Graham won their titles under Clarence F. Foster, who coached from 1924 through 1934. Other Eastern intercollegiate champions coached by Foster were William D. Barfield '30, Russell H. Hooker '34, and Thomas Snelham '35, as well as Julian Gregory, Jr. '35 and George B. Treide '36, who both went on to win second championships under Foster's successor, Jimmie Reed.
A former two-time Eastern intercollegiate champion at Lehigh, Reed was varsity coach for thirty years through 1964. His 1936 and 1937 teams were undefeated, and his 1938 team won seven successive meets before losing their final encounter with Lehigh, thus extending Princeton's unbroken string of victories to twenty-one. The 1937 and 1938 teams took second place in the Eastern Intercollegiates, and the 1941 team tied Yale for first place. Reed's wrestlers won the Big Three title in the years from 1936 through 1939, from 1941 through 1943, and in 1947, 1949, 1950, 1953, and 1957.
Reed's roster of Eastern intercollegiate champions was impressive. One, Bradley M. Glass '53, also won the 1951 NCAA heavyweight championship, Princeton's first national title. Richard B. Harding '40 and Robert C. Eberle '41 won Eastern championships in each of their three years of varsity competition. Charles A. Powers '38, who won twice, was awarded the coaches' cup as the most accomplished wrestler in the 1937 Eastern championship meet. W. Eugene Taylor '43 and Bradley Glass were also double winners. Other Eastern champions were Morris S. Emory '38, Charles H. Toll, Jr. '38, and David A. Poor '50.
John Johnston, a former national champion at Penn State, succeeded Jimmie Reed as coach in 1965, and Princeton soon became a formidable power in Ivy competition, winning sole possession of the League crown in 1967, 1970, and 1971, sharing it with Penn in 1972 and with Cornell in 1973, and winning it outright again in 1975, 1977 and, with a phenomenal 19-0 season record, in 1978, when it also won the Eastern intercollegiate tournament. In 1972, Emil A. Deliere '72 won the Eastern intercollegiate championship in the 190-pound class, and reached the finals of the NCAA championship tournament, where the recurrence of a back injury compelled him to default. Captain John Sefter '78 won the Eastern intercollegiate championship in the heavyweight class in 1977 and 1978, and reached the finals of the NCAA championship tournament in 1978. Steve Grubman '78 won the Eastern intercollegiate championship in the 142-lb. class in 1978, and the same year, along with Keith Ely '79 in the 177-lb. class, reached the quarterfinals of the NCAA championship tournament.
One of Princeton's strongest competitors was Donald Rumsfeld '54, who reached the finals of the Eastern Intercollegiates in the 157-pound class his junior year and the semifinals as captain in his undefeated senior year, and who later became congressman from Illinois, ambassador to NATO, and secretary of defense.