LEWIS, SCHERR, SEAY AND HANCOCK ELECTED AS DISTINGUISHED MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL WRESTLING HALL OF FAME 
 An Olympic champion, a World champion and two champion coaches have been elected Distinguished Members of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. 
 Wrestlers in the Class of 1998 are Randy Lewis, an NCAA champion at the University of Iowa and an Olympic gold medalist in the 1984 Games at Los Angeles; and Bill Scherr, who won collegiate honors for the University of Nebraska and earned five consecutive world-class medals, including a World gold in 1985 and an Olympic bronze in 1988. Both are natives of South Dakota. 
 The coaches are Joe Seay, who won nine NCAA team titles at Cal State-Bakersfield and Oklahoma State, then led the USA to milestone victories in the Goodwill Games, World Championships and Olympic Games; and the late John W. Hancock, who established wrestling in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountains and captured 30 consecutive conference titles at Northern Colorado. 
 Swelling the rolls of Distinguished Members to 112, they will be inducted at the 22nd Honors Banquet June 6, 1998, in Stillwater, home of the Hall of Fame and national museum. The Honors Weekend also will mark the induction of three more Outstanding Americans and presentation of the Medal of Courage, the Order of Merit, Lifetime Achievement Awards for Officials and the Dave Schultz High School Excellence Awards. 
 From the age of 11, when he won his first national age group championship at 65 pounds, Lewis was destined for stardom. He was a three-time state high school champ at Rapid City, going 89-0 those three years with 83 fallsÑincluding a national prep record, since broken, of 45 in a row. He was outstanding wrestler of the Junior Nationals and won a gold medal in the Junior Worlds in 1977. 
 As an Iowa freshman, Lewis reached the NCAA finals at 126 pounds, and he returned the next two years to win championships. During his senior year, he was riding a winning streak of 74 matches when he suffered a horribly dislocated elbow. Wrestling the rest of the season virtually with one arm, he had enough left to place at the national tournament and become a four-time All-American. 
 Throughout his career, Lewis was known for wrestling with style and flair. His collegiate record for the Hawkeyes of Dan Gable was 127-11-1 with 64 falls.  
 Lewis made the 1980 Olympic team, stymied by the boycott, placed fourth in the 1982 Worlds and won Pan American championships in 1983 and '90. But his crowning glory came in the 1984 Olympics when he won the gold medal with a string of one-sided victories. He made a serious run at the 1988 Olympics, upsetting World champion John Smith in the early trials before Smith rallied in the finals. 
 Scherr was a two-time South Dakota high school champion at Mobridge and won the Junior Nationals in 1980. He was a three-time All-American at Nebraska, with a record of 133-8, and won the NCAA championship in 1984 at 190 pounds, just a few minutes after his twin brother, Jim, had won at 177. 
 Competing for the Sunkist Kids, Bill won six national championships in freestyle and one in Greco-Roman. He was World freestyle champion in 1985 at 198 pounds, then moved up to 220, primarily because Jim had outgrown the 180.5-pound limit and needed to scale up one class to 198. 
 Bill won silver medals in the 1986 and '89 Worlds, bronze medals in the 1987 Worlds and 1988 Olympics. He won a gold medal in the Pan American Games in 1987 and was World Grand Champion in '89. Jim was his teammate along most of that stretch, winning two silvers and a bronze in the Worlds, a bronze in the Pan Am Games and fifth place in the 1988 Olympics. 
 One of Bill's most spectacular and meaningful triumphs came in the Goodwill Games of 1990. Trailing Andrei Golovko 1-0 in the closing seconds, Scherr unleashed a winning two-point throw just as time expired to win the gold medal and give the USA its first-ever dual meet victory over the Soviet Union. 
 That result, before a roaring, sellout crowd at the University of Washington, spurred the Seattle media to vote wrestling the No. 1 attraction among the 33 sports, and the wrestling finals the most spectacular event of the entire Goodwill Games. 
 Another individual who was more than a little carried away by that outcome was Seay, the USA coach. 
 Seay, a 1964 graduate of Kansas State, wrestled there three years and later won three national Greco-Roman titles while placing second twice in freestyle. But it was as a coach at all levels that he earned lasting renown. 
 Starting with eight years at Bakersfield South High in California, he compiled a record of 177-12-2 and was national high school coach of the year. Moving across town to Cal State, he coached a dozen years and won seven Division II national championships with a record of 189-56-2. At Oklahoma State, from 1985 to Õ92, he went 114-8-2 with back-to-back Division I crowns in 1989 and '90. 
 His folkstyle record adds up to 480 victories and an .859 winning percentage. He is the only coach to win collegiate team titles in both divisions, and he was named national coach of the year five times. 
 When his collegiate coaching career ended in 1992, Seay quickly stepped into a major role on the international scene. Already closely affiliated with the Sunkist Kids program, he became their head coach and continued the club's still unbroken streak of national freestyle championships. 
 He coached the USA to its first-ever World team championship in 1993 and repeated two years later, also leading a Pan American Games victory in 1995. And at the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta, Seay's freestylers won the medal count. 
 Forty years before Seay launched his coaching career, Hancock was an All-America football tackle on Iowa's 1924 Rose Bowl team. 
 He was not a wrestler, but when he began coaching football and track at Northern Colorado in 1925, he also started a wrestling program. He left the Greeley campus briefly to coach track at Mississippi State and football, track and ice hockey at Marquette. But he returned to UNC in 1933 to coach wrestling for 34 more years, track for 30, football for 21 and even basketball during World War II.  He also served as director of athletics until his retirement in 1966. 
 Hancock originated the Mountain Intercollegiate Wrestling Association, for years the primary wrestling conference in the Rockies, then proceeded to win 30 consecutive conference championships. He had two NCAA champions in Len Lordino, 1961, and Jack Flasche, 1962, and several other All-Americans. He served 16 years on the NCAA rules committee, which he chaired in 1962-63, and was president of the National Wrestling Coaches Association the same year. 
 Although he was a successful college coach, perhaps his greatest contribution to the sport was origination of the high school wrestling tournament in Colorado. The first of these was held in Greeley in 1936, with nine teams and some 40 wrestlers. Hancock personally went through the community knocking on doors to find families who would house the visiting wrestlers. 
 The tournament tripled in size the next year and by 1941 had grown so large that it had to be moved to Denver. Hancock is known as the "Father of Colorado high school wrestling." He also fathered two sons who became two of the state's most respected coaches. Jack recently retired as wrestling coach at Colorado Mines and Tom has retired as football coach and athletic director at Lakewood High School.