A world of learning from the mat

For Peckham, wrestling served as a passport

Talk wrestling with Jim Peckham and the 79-year-old Weymouth resident starts from the beginning.

"Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle," Peckham said. "The great minds of antiquity . . . It's the oldest sport of man."

Peckham speaks with depth and authority, yet his education didn't come in a classroom. Wrestling provided Peckham with a key to travel the world while the roads, trains, and museums became his classroom.

In the former Soviet Union, he observed life in the midst of the Cold War. In Australia, he questioned locals about their culture.

The details were sealed in his mind and revealed through colorful stories to his comrades, often including word-for-word dialogue emphasized with appropriate accents.

Peckham, who held a high school diploma and took a few night courses, went on to wrestle, and coach, as an Olympian, and work as a college athletic director and Ivy League coach, serving as an inspiration to many.

"I consider him like Abe Lincoln, the man in the log cabin who educated himself to the very top," said Joe DeMeo, who served as Peckham's assistant coach at the 1976 Olympics Games in Montreal. "That's how I felt about him at that time, and that's how I still feel."

From a young age, Peckham wanted to wrestle in the Olympics. He grew up in Quincy, the son of Al and Clevelyn Peckham. As a teenager, he discovered the Boston Young Men's Christian Union, a gym where he learned about competitive wrestling. When he was a student at Braintree High in the late 1940s, wrestling was not offered as a sport. Peckham made wrestling his extracurricular activity at the BYMC and it developed into a lifelong profession.

His diet was limited to natural foods and little meat, a habit picked up from watching his father, who gave up white flour and sugar decades before it was a fad. He developed training rituals, running to the top of the Blue Hills, while carrying a friend on his back. He rode his bicycle from his home in Weymouth Landing down Route 3A to the Cape Cod Canal and back.

"I worked at conditioning," he said. "It wasn't something I took lightly."

In 1956, Peckham hitchhiked to California to compete in the Olympic Trials. At the time, he and his wife, Jean, were raising two young children, Matthew and Diana, and Peckham was working as a lineman at Braintree Electric Light Department. But when he earned a spot on the US team, he was not granted paid leave to compete.

Jean entered the work force, while Peckham's mother helped care for their children and he left for the Olympics in Australia.

"He didn't train all year to make the Olympic team and then question the decision," Jean Peckham said.

Although making the Olympic team was a dream, his experience was dimmed by controversy. In a match, a side judge and referee agreed Peckham had pinned his opponent, declaring him the winner. Yet overnight, according to Peckham, a protest was filed about the decision and a judge changed his ruling.

"The first five years afterward, I could spit nails," Peckham said of the loss. "I thought I got robbed, and a whole lot of other people did too."

But the incident did not sour Peckham on the sport. He became a fixture at the BYMC, where teenagers would come in and seek his guidance.

Peckham extended his coaching duties to Emerson College, while also leading US teams to several international competitions. In 1972, he served as an assistant coach for the US Olympic team in Munich before taking the reins for the '76 Games in Montreal.

He coached Dan Gable and Ben Peterson, who both captured gold in 1972. Four years later, Ben's brother John captured gold in Montreal.

Peckham "was willing to do most anything we needed, including getting on the mat," Ben Peterson said. "We were much younger and he had the ability to keep us in line. . . . He guided us like a big brother at times. He was a very personable coach to the point of being like our dad."

Peckham connected with his athletes through speeches. He would gather his team and with his slow, deep, and deliberate voice, tell a tale of history and sport.

Peckham's words echoed in his wrestlers' heads. He often repeated, "You have to earn the right to win."

"I remember going home on buses and trains and living on every word he used to say because it was so inspirational," said Ken Mallory, who trained with Peckham as a high schooler in the 1970s.

High school athletes from across the country would show up on Peckham's doorstep in the summer for his tutelage. Over the course of 10 weeks, 16 athletes would spend a week at the Peckham home, training in the garage and eating Jean's home cooking. Out back, a 35-foot-long rope dangled from an oak tree, where athletes were met with their first challenge. Peckham could climb it and expected his athletes to do the same. When they reached the top, it created pride, he said.

"The best story you could ever tell about him is that he makes every kid feel like they are the most special thing that ever walked," said David Breen, a longtime high school coach in the area who attended the camps and later took his athletes to work with Peckham.

His professional career expanded when he became the athletic director at Emerson, and he eventually applied for the Harvard wrestling coaching position in 1986. His name was so revered that Paul Widerman, a Harvard graduate, withdrew his application when he heard Peckham had applied instead asking to be his assistant, which he did for five years.

Wrestlers were often engaged by Peckham's ability to tell a story. Rod Buttry, a longtime friend and former Boston College coach, said his wrestlers gathered for Peckham's stories and then retold them to each other in his distinct style weeks afterward.

"He had a good rapport with a lot of wrestlers, and he was respected as a coach," Buttry said.

In 1994, Peckham retired as AD at Emerson and coach at Harvard. Jay Weiss took over as Crimson coach and said Peckham laid the groundwork for his program and helped provide a younger generation with "an appreciation for the sport and its history."

After years of passionate devotion to the mat, Peckham was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2000. The career that helped him educate himself also provided a foundation for his two children to go on and graduate from college, Diana from Springfield College and Matthew from Columbia. They learned from his life and also share in his admiration.

"My father earned everything he ever got," Matthew said.

For Peckham, it never felt like work.

"I liked what I was doing, and I believed in it," he said.

Monique Walker can be reached at mwalker@globe.com.