Lee Roper was 7 years old when his father taught him one of the most important lessons of his life.

Sitting around a campfire in the woods, his dad showed him that no matter how hard you strain to see what’s on the other side of the fire, you never really can — not from where you’re sitting. The only way to gain a new perspective is to get up, walk around the fire and look at it for yourself.

Now the executive director of the Cowboy Regional Training Center for elite wrestlers and MMA fighters in Stillwater, Roper tells that story to athletes who need to take a different view of what is right in front of them.

In fall 2025, he told that story to Oklahoma State University MBA student Wyatt Hendrickson.

It turns out, the man who authored perhaps the greatest upset in NCAA wrestling history, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and commissioned first lieutenant who had just gone undefeated through the entire collegiate season for OSU, dethroned an Olympic gold medalist in front of a national television audience and saluted the president of the United States, needed to hear it more than most.

He just didn’t know it yet.

Philadelphia

With 41 seconds left in the 2025 NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships, Hendrickson found himself in an unfamiliar spot. He was losing for the first time all season.

A heavy underdog entering the championship match, Hendrickson was down, 4-2, to Minnesota’s Gable Steveson, a two-time NCAA champion and the reigning Olympic gold medalist who had not given up a takedown all season.

The sold-out crowd at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center was buzzing with nervous energy. Steveson needed only to survive. Hendrickson needed a takedown.

He got one. 

Hendrickson’s forward lunge turned into a textbook high crotch, which he twisted into a double-leg takedown with 23 seconds on the clock. Fans couldn’t believe their eyes. Did that just happen? The roar was deafening.

The takedown gave Hendrickson a 5-4 lead he would not relinquish, completing what the screaming TV commentators immediately heralded as the greatest upset in the history of college wrestling.

“I made up my mind,” Hendrickson said. “I don’t care if I had to rip my arms off. I was holding that man down and winning that match.”

What followed was everything you might expect. Thousands of new social media followers each day. National TV appearances. Podcasts. Wrestling camps. UFC fights. Hendrickson even had a wheat variety named in his honor by the OSU Department of Plant and Soil Sciences.

For a man who spent the previous five years unceremoniously grinding through his college career largely outside the public eye, the spotlight and the financial windfall was sudden and all-encompassing.

He admits now that he lost himself in it.

“I had a big head,” Hendrickson said. “I was riding high, and I told myself I’d have fun for a month and get back to training. Then, six months went by.”

Six months after Philadelphia, Hendrickson walked into the 2025 Senior World Championships in Zagreb, Croatia. The most celebrated American wrestler of the moment, Hendrickson was abruptly dispatched in the opening round by Russia’s Abdulla Kurbanov on a 14-4 technical fall. One match. Done. And he knew walking in that it was about to happen.

“I hadn’t earned it,” he said. “The night before, I couldn’t sleep because I knew I hadn’t done what I needed to do.”

Earning It

Hendrickson came back to Stillwater from Zagreb humbled in a way Philadelphia never could have prepared him for.

Luckily, Roper was waiting.

Their relationship had begun a couple of months earlier when Roper joined the Cowboy RTC staff, and from the start, it was different from any coach-athlete dynamic Hendrickson had ever known. Roper wasn’t there to teach him how to wrestle. Hendrickson already knew how to do that. Roper was there to teach something far more difficult.

“At this level, I don’t have to teach the bears how to hunt,” Roper said. “They’ve already done that. They’ve hunted, they’ve fed themselves, and they’ve turned into this big, alpha Kodiak bear. My job is to keep them from eating themselves.”

What Roper saw in Hendrickson wasn’t a talent problem or even a preparation problem — it was a consistency problem, and not just on the mat.

“Training is only about 8-10% of an athlete’s day,” Roper said. “So, if we can only get consistent in that small percentage, it’s not enough. We have to carry that consistency into everything else — his marriage, his business interests, keeping his house in order. We take that one mindset and spread it through the majority of his day.”

That’s what the campfire story was really about. Not wrestling. Not even discipline in the conventional sense. It was about learning to see your own blind spots clearly enough to do something about them before the bright lights come back on.

Hendrickson heard the message loud and clear. Roper had helped him stand up and walk to the other side of the fire. Now, he was beginning to see things more clearly.

“The past couple months have been the best training I’ve had since my college days,” Hendrickson said. “I know what I need to do now. I know I’ve earned it.”

The Deal

Dr. Matt Bowler made a deal with Hendrickson, and he plans to collect.

With one course standing between Hendrickson and his MBA, Bowler, the director of OSU’s MBA program, agreed to structure it as an independent study to accommodate Hendrickson’s demanding travel schedule. The terms, however, were non-negotiable. When Hendrickson walks across the stage in December 2026 at his graduation hooding ceremony, Bowler gets to put him in a headlock for a photo.

“I thought about just doing it without warning him,” Bowler said, laughing. “But I was afraid I’d end up in the fourth row.”

It’s the kind of story that makes Bowler light up when he talks about Hendrickson, not because of what happened on a mat in Philadelphia, but because of who shows up in his classroom. To Bowler, the most remarkable thing about Hendrickson has nothing to do with wrestling.

“He is the most humble, others-oriented, servant-leader you’ll ever meet,” Bowler said.

Bowler is quick to remind you that Hendrickson is under no obligation to finish his MBA now that his NCAA eligibility has been exhausted. He doesn’t have to sign up for hours of homework, group projects and case studies. He does it for the challenge and because he knows how much it’s going to help him, even with his exhausting schedule.

His day starts at precisely 7:17 a.m. with a cold tub plunge, followed by morning practice with Roper and his RTC teammates. Twice a week, he has two-a-days, and the other three days he gets in a weightlifting session. In the afternoon, he attends class at the Business Building, and his evenings are spent at home with his wife, Emily. Somewhere in between, he manages his personal matters, business opportunities and prepares to represent his country on the world stage.

Bowler has noticed that the little things matter to the 6-foot-2-inch, 265-pound heavyweight. While still wrestling for OSU, Hendrickson and a couple of teammates were in an MBA course that had a special event in Tulsa one night. During the 90-mile drive, the wrestlers had to pull over during a torrential rainstorm and were going to be a few minutes late. Hendrickson took the initiative to track down Bowler’s cell number to send him a text to let him know.

“Nobody does that,” Bowler said. “And especially not somebody with his level of notoriety. Wyatt didn’t have to do that, but it shows you the type of person he is.”

In the classroom, Hendrickson brings the same standard he carries to the mat, which is exactly what the program asks of its students. In January, OSU’s MBA jumped into the top 10 of U.S. News & World Report’s Best Online MBA Programs list, capping a meteoric rise. In the last seven years, OSU’s online MBA climbed from No. 40 to No. 10 in the country. The top MBA program in Oklahoma is also ranked as the No. 8 program in the nation for veterans.

“In wrestling, if you don’t put in the work, you end up on your back — literally,” Bowler said. “There’s no hiding behind teammates, no excuses. The MBA isn’t all that different.”

Hendrickson is already putting his education to work. The entrepreneurship course he took introduced him to a framework for building a business in its first 100 days. He is using it right now to build With Honor, an apparel brand whose initials happen to match his own. Built around the idea that whatever you do, you do it with integrity, the brand made its public debut on social media this fall, the first step in what Hendrickson envisions as something much larger.

For Bowler, all of this adds up to something larger. It points to a young man who has figured out that how you do anything is how you do everything.

“He’s not just passing through the world,” Bowler said. “He sees it.”

The World Stage

In June, Hendrickson swept Mason Parris, a 2024 Olympian, in two matches at Final X to earn his spot on the U.S. Senior World Team. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to his journey.

Thanks to those wins, Hendrickson will step onto the mat in Astana, Kazakhstan, for the 2026 Senior World Wrestling Championships in late October. He will do so as a man who has already been there, already felt the weight of showing up unprepared, and he’s already decided that he will never feel that way again.

“Last year, my goal was just to make a world team,” Hendrickson said. “This year, my goal is to win worlds. My training is guided a lot differently with that mindset.”

Beyond Astana is Los Angeles and the 2028 Summer Olympics on home soil. It is the destination Hendrickson has been pointing toward since long before Philadelphia, and the U.S. Air Force is pointing there with him.

As a member of the World Class Athlete Program, an elite initiative that allows exceptional military athletes to delay their service commitments in pursuit of Olympic glory, Hendrickson’s current assignment is straightforward: train, compete and become the best heavyweight wrestler in the world.

He is one MBA class away from a degree he didn’t have to finish but chose to anyway. He is quietly building a business in the background, patient by design. And back in Stillwater, every morning at 7:17, he slides into the cold plunge before his brain has a chance to talk him out of it.

“I feel unstoppable,” Hendrickson said. “Because I am unstoppable when I train the way I want to train.”

This time, he’s earned it.

Story by: Stephen Howard | Engage@Spears magazine
Photos by: Cole Weiberg and provided by OSU Athletics

Frequently Asked Questions