The Campaign for Sustained Leadership

It was two weeks after his last wrestling season before Brett Matter walked into the weight room again. “That was the toughest thing: the first time I walked in there without a goal,” says Matter, who in March was a Wharton senior and had just become Penn’s first NCAA wrestling champ in 58 years.

Matter, the all-time winningest wrestler in Penn history with a 128-14 record, beat Larry Quisel of Boise State University 4-2 to win the 157-pound weight class championship at the NCAA tournament in St. Louis. As a team, Penn finished ninth, its highest since it finished eighth in the country in 1942. That was the last time that Penn had a national champ, Richard DiBatista.

"It’s pretty incredible when you think about how we’ve done, placing ahead of all those Big Ten, those big Midwestern teams,” says Matter. “Penn is the best cross between wrestling and academics that there is."

Matter has a legacy both in wrestling and at Wharton. His father, Andrew, was a national champion at Penn State in 1971 and 1972. His brother, Clinton, graduated from Wharton in 1997 after being the captain of the wrestling team in both his junior and senior years.

"Clinton had an incredible influence on me,” says Brett Matter. “He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. When I was a freshman, he was a great presence around here. He is just a solid, strong person."

Clinton continues to be a presence for his younger brother. When the Wharton Alumni Magazine talked to Brett last spring, he planned to begin an equity research job with Salomon Smith Barney in New York, where he is rooming with Clinton, a fixed-income researcher at competitor Morgan Stanley. They won’t, however, be wrestling.

"At this point, I’m retired,” says Brett Matter. “You could go to the Olympics, but not given my time commitment on the job. If I come back and get an MBA, maybe I can think about the 2004 Olympics, but not now.”

Though he started wrestling in the third grade, he says his father never pressured him to pursue the sport. “A lot of people assume that, but it’s not true. He just wanted me to enjoy wrestling,” says Matter, who was a two-time New Jersey state champion at Delran High School. “My parents made a lot of sacrifices to send me to Wharton. I could have easily gotten a full ride to another school, but my father was one of the first people to tell me to come to Penn.”