Carroll County Commissioner Dennis Frazier coaching wrestling at Century High School.
by Barbara Pash photography by Bill Ryan
When Dennis Frazier was a competitor on the TV show “American Ninja Warrior” in 2012, he didn’t do as well as he wanted. It was late and he was tired, although he isn’t making excuses. But Frazier’s days as a ninja warrior may not be over. The show’s producers want him back. They keep calling with another shot at fame and, possibly, fortune.
“I didn’t do it last year because I’d just won this,” Frazier said, referring to his 2014 election as District 3’s Republican commissioner on the Carroll County Board of Commissioners.
Frazier, a Westminster resident, married to Debbie Frazier, a Carroll County public school teacher, and the father of two adult children, spends two days a week at his commissioner’s office in the county office building. His trophies – a silver bowl and an Olympics-style gold medal – sit on a shelf, won in a different kind of competition.
At age 58, Frazier, a rangy 6’2” and 190 pounds, is a testament to a lifetime of fitness. And well he should be. He works out six days a week, alternating between 45-minute cardio bike rides over a hilly course and 45-minute strength training in a home gym.
His career has been devoted to fitness, too. He has spent 36 years as a physical education teacher, currently at East Middle School, and an even longer 38 years as a wrestling coach, currently at Century High School.
“I dabbled with football and gymnastics. But once wrestling took hold, that’s all I did,” Frazier said of his own high school days in Florida. He graduated from then-Towson State University and quickly began coaching.
“I like wrestling because it’s an individual sport,” Frazier said. “You win or lose on your own.”
Frazier’s knowledge of wrestling is encyclopedic, from the three main styles to the best techniques for each. The Olympics uses Greco-Roman and freestyle; American matches are played folkstyle. American wrestlers who qualify for the Olympics attend training centers to become familiar with the other two styles.
Matt Postlethwait, a former assistant wrestling coach at Century High School who also coached with Frazier at South Carroll High School, said Frazier is a true scholar of the sport.
“He knows how to motivate the kids,” Postlethwait said.
Frazier has coached individual wrestlers and a high school team to state and national championships respectively. In 2002, he won a championship himself, the Iron Man World Wrestling Championship in the master’s (age 40 and over) category, held in Nashville, Tenn.
“It was my first and last Iron Man,” Frazier said. He entered on a whim, signed up as an individual and found himself competing against members of the U.S., Canadian and other countries’ master’s teams.
Steve Willingham, assistant wrestling coach at Century High School and a Howard County police officer who has known Frazier for over 25 years, said the competition isn’t the same caliber as, say, a World Cup soccer tournament.
For amateur wrestlers, though, he said, “Winning the Iron Man is quite an accomplishment.”
But of Frazier’s forays into the spotlight, perhaps the best known, at least to wrestling aficionados if not the general public, is his appearance on “American Ninja Warrior.” The popular national television show requires individuals to progress through a series of obstacles.
“It’s mostly upper body strength, your grip,” Frazier said of the obstacles. “You are competing against the course, not the other competitors.”
Frazier was 55 years old at the time. While the show doesn’t have an age limit, 90 percent of its competitors are in the 21- to 30-year-old age range. Plus, most have professions like rock climber and gymnast, not public school teacher.
But Frazier had a reason. He’d had a total left knee replacement not too long before and he figured that just applying to be on the show would motivate him.
“I thought it would make my workout better,” he said. “That was my goal.”
A four-page application form and a six-minute video later, Frazier was accepted for the show. He is convinced that the clincher was his video – of bit of his workout and a shot of him, then a Westminster City Councilman, sitting at his official desk.
“It made for a different story,” he said, “and it got me on the show.”
The show was filmed on a weekend in March, the course set up at Rash Field in Baltimore City’s Inner Harbor. The preliminary event was the city qualifier; the top 30 qualifiers went to the city finals; the top 15 city finalists went on to Las Vegas.
Frazier never got beyond the qualifier. In fact, he never got past the first of the five obstacles in the course.
The way he tells it, the first day of competition was supposed to be on Saturday. Of the 105 competitors in the city qualifier, he was in the mid-70s, not a bad position. But it rained all day, delaying the competition overnight. When it finally got started, about 2 p.m. on Sunday, he drew 104, the next to last spot.
Even then, “there were a lot of delays [in filming]. There was a dinner break,” said Frazier. When his turn finally came, at 1:30 a.m., “I was in a terrible mindset. I just wasn’t into it mentally,” he acknowledged.
As disappointing as the outcome was, “I may do the show one more time,” said Frazier, especially since the producers don’t seem to have forgotten him.
“It was an interesting experience,” he said. “Next time I’ll know what to expect.”
