LARAMIE – There are some seemingly unbreakable records in sports.
 
Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game, Wayne Gretzky's 2,857 career points and Jerry Rice's 22,895 receiving yards are among the sport's most untouchable records.
 
At Wyoming, hundreds of wrestlers, including a list of All-Americans, have chased Ron Whitman's place in the record book over the past 40 years.
 
None have caught him, and the math simply doesn't work out well for future Cowboys to compete with Whitman's 47 individual victories during the 1984-85 season.
 
Two of Whitman's teammates, Mike McNaney (46 wins, 1985-86) and Wes Gasner (45 wins, 1983-84), are right behind him on the list of single-season wins at UW, along with four-time All-American Joe LeBlanc (45 wins, 2008-09).
 
The 2025-26 Cowboys placed 12^th at the NCAA Championships, yet no wrestler on the team competed in more than 32 matches over the course of UW's 13 duals and five tournaments.
 
By comparison, the Pokes competed in 11 duals and nine tournaments during the 1984-85 season.
 
"I'm kind of humbled by it because there's been a lot of good wrestlers at Wyoming and they have some good ones in the program now," Whitman said. "I don't think they wrestle as many matches as we used to. The philosophy has changed a little bit, but it feels good to have some of those records."
 
Whitman – a three-time Western Athletic Conference champion and a two-time Mountain Intercollegiate Wrestling Association champion – will be inducted into the UW Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame on Sept. 12 in the Marian H. Rochelle Gateway Center.
 
The two-time NCAA Championships qualifier was a member of the Cowboys' 1983 and 1985 conference championship teams coached by the late Joe Dowler.
 
"He was all Wyoming," Whitman said of Dowler, who was inducted into the UW Athletics Hall of Fame in 2005. "He kept the wrestling program going and he was a Wyoming Cowboy through and through. He kind of talked to me about (the hall of fame) clear back then."
 
Whitman grew up on a dairy farm in Wellington, Colo., and was recruited by Colorado State during a standout career at Poudre High School in Fort Collins.
 
"But then once I talked to Dowler and he brought me up here on a recruiting trip, just meeting some of the guys like Tom Seamans and Billy Hodges and Lonnie Currier, you could just tell they had a commitment. It kind of convinced me, wow, this is a good place to be."
 
Whitman made an immediate impact at UW on the mat, earning honorable mention freshman All-American honors and being named the WAC Freshman of the Year in 1982.
 
He won the WAC in 1983 and 1984 at 158 pounds and in 1985 at 167 pounds, qualifying for the NCAA Championships as a junior and senior.
 
During the 1984-85 season, Whitman set the program's single-season record for victories while serving as team captain. Hodges, Mike Hamel, Scott Rardin, Scott Chipperfield and John Bragg also won individual conference championships for the Cowboys.
 
UW won three different invitational tournaments, the MIWA championship and dominated rivals BYU (30-13 in Provo) and Colorado State (42-8 in Laramie). The most impressive win of the season may have been the 26-21 grinder against Central Oklahoma State, which won five NAIA national championships and four NCAA Division II championships from 1984-96.
 
The Pokes won the WAC championship on March 1, 1985, in the Fieldhouse. Whitman was named the most outstanding wrestler of the WAC Tournament and was voted as winner of the Everett Lantz Most Outstanding Wrestler Award by his teammates.
 
"The WAC championship was in Laramie. We knew we had a good chance to win it, but I don't think we thought a lot about it because we were looking at the national tournament," Whitman said. "It was tough to qualify (for the NCAAs) then, you almost had to win the conference tournament to go to nationals. All of us had some tough matches in the finals. I had a tough kid from New Mexico who had probably beaten me before and I ended up winning it.
 
"I remember the home crowd. We had a lot of Wyoming guys in the finals. It was packed, standing room only, and it was pretty awesome to have all the fans there cheering."
 
Whitman and his wife, Brenda, raised four children in Laramie, all of whom graduated from UW, including former Cowgirl cross country and track standout Abigail Whitman.
 
The back-to-back WAC championship teams of 1984-85 and 1985-86 were included in the 2023 UW Athletics Hall of Fame class. Now Whitman joins Dowler, Gasner and Hamel as an individual inductee from one of the greatest eras in Cowboy wrestling history.
 
Follow Ryan for more stories on Wyoming athletics on X at @By_RyanThorburn on Facebook at Wyoming Athletics and Instagram at wyoathletics. Also follow him at Pokes Insider at Gowyo.com/pokesinsider.
 
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