The injury occurred when the team was playing away at Thief River Falls, a remote section of Minnesota which had a small junior college. Details of the injury remain chiseled in his brain.

Running down the field on a bomb pattern his own teammate accidentally hit him which caused his leg to break when he fell.

"It was like the snapping of a dry twig," Nikita recalls.

His leg ballooned to three times its normal size. With no ambulance or physician in sight, coaches attempted to treat Nikita. By this time Nikita was sprawled out in agony on the field before a stunned crowd.

Even though they were old hands at the sport, it was the first time his coaches had to deal with such a severe injury.

"They freaked out, they didn’t know what to do," Nikita said. "I was on the field for more than an hour. I kept saying ’Why me? Why me?’ " Finally, mercifully, a parent of an opposing teammate drove their station wagon onto the field and Nikita was carefully hauled into the back of the car.

Driven to a nearby hospital, Nikita underwent surgery to repair the leg. He spent 17 days recovering at the hospital.

Peltier kept a constant bedside vigil on his friend trying to lift his spirits. Always physically active, the experience of having to sit and watch others tend to him left Nikita feeling low.

To make matters worse the 18-year-old was dumped by his girlfriend.

"If ever I was in a depression, I was in a depression that year," Nikita said. Even thought he couldn’t play, he got a shot in the arm emotionally when his team got into the playoffs. Although Golden Valley didn’t get into the finals, the fact that Nikita had a least a small part in helping the team get into the playoffs meant the world to him. Forced to wear a leg cast for four months, Nikita thought his days as an athlete were over. He got inspiration from an unlikely source. He returned to his high school that spring and bumped into his old high school football coach. The coach told him he never knew of a player who came back from a broken leg.

"I told myself, ’I’ll show you,’ " Nikita said. "From that moment on it became my motivational factor." Nikita hit the weights with gusto. By that summer he grunted and groaned his body back into great shape. Named captain of his team Nikita was ready to take on the world.

It just wasn’t meant to be though. One day at football practice Nikita was hit on his broken leg. Racked with pain he thought it was broken again. A X-ray showed there was no new break but Nikita was red-shirted that year.

Taking the spring off he came back to Golden Valley in the fall and earned an associate arts degree.

Nikita also took on a back-breaking job of working at a local meat packing plant. His job was unloading heavy sides of beef from trucks.

"It was the hardest job I’ve ever had," he remembers.

However, the job did have a payoff as it netted him $2,500 in eight weeks - a tidy sum for a college student at that time.

Working out all the time Nikita thought he was set to take over his starting spot at tight-end. Unfortunately, another player with better speed got that job. Nikita played against him during his high school football days.

Who was the player?

None other than Dan Johnson who went on to join the Miami Dolphins and reached one of the pinnacles in the sport by playing in the Superbowl.

Golden Valley coaches though knew Nikita had talent and made him a defensive end. That year the team only lost one game and went on to the playoffs again. A good accomplishment but Nikita was disappointed the team didn’t get into the finals.

This was a time when his father re-entered his life. Attending Golden Valley games, he and Nikita would chat in restaurants over meals.

"It wasn’t like we were father and son," Nikita said. "We talked as if we were friends." Nikita’s father had changed his lifestyle. He stopped drinking, became a Christian, and wrote his former wife a lengthy letter asking for her forgiveness. Although his play at defensive end didn’t capture the attention of major colleges, scouts from Moorhead State University, in Moorhead, Minn., showed an interest. A NCAA Division II, and a NAIA Division I college, Moorhead wanted Nikita to play tight end.

Offering a scholarship, and having the chance to once again catch the ball, Nikita jumped at the offer.

When he stepped into Moorhead’s training camp as a junior that summer, Nikita weighed in at 230 pounds. He immediately fulfilled all the coaches hopes. In his two years at Moorhead Nikita set the world on fire. He had 60 receptions for 2,100 yards and 10 touchdowns.

It was during the off season of his junior year at Moorhead that the NFL scouts began checking him out. Scouts were impressed that he could bench press nearly 400 pounds. They also gave him a written test which he breezed through.

Disappointment came when scouts clocked him at 5.1 seconds in the 40-yard dash - by NFL standards that’s practically slow motion.

"That became a new motivating factor for me," Nikita said. "When I came back home that summer I asked the high school track coach for help to increase my speed." The coach had an answer. He drilled Nikita on a program developed by the Russians to increase the running speed of its athletes. Dubbed the Russian Downhill Sprint Program, that name would become an ironic twist for Nikita when he later began his professional wrestling career.

After going all out on the program Nikita saw his time in the 40-yard dash plunge to 4.7 seconds, a nifty speed for a tight end.

By the fall Nikita was ready for football again at Moorhead. Extra weightlifting in the off season increased his weight to 245 pounds.

Again the NFL scouts came out to give him a look. When they put him through the paces the 40-yard dash they were astounded.

In the first race Nikita registered a time of 4.68 seconds.

"I’ll never forget the look on their faces," Nikita said. "They looked at their watches, then they looked at each others’ faces." They asked him to run the 40-yard dash again thinking their stop watches had to be off. This time he ran it in 4.7 seconds.

Asking Nikita to run one more time just to be sure the scouts clocked him at 4.69 seconds.

"My offensive coach said that he had been coaching for a long time and he never saw someone cut his time by four-tenths of a second," Nikita recalls.

Keeping true to their nature, the scouts didn’t tip their hand as to whether they would invite Nikita to an NFL camp. With a good time in the 40-yard dash, Nikita liked his chances.

At the beginning of his senior season at Moorhead Nikita was burning up the field with catches. Once again though lady luck was not on his side.

Towards the end of the season he played in a game where Moorhead was up 46-6 with two minutes to go in the first half. Coaches called Nikita’s number for a pass play.

As the play unfolded Nikita ran full throttle downfield. The quarterback fired the ball right at Nikita which he snatched from the air. Tucking the ball in his arm his legs began churning downfield.

In that moment a linebacker struck him and as Nikita fell he cringed as he once again heard the sickening sound of breaking bones.

Once again it was leg, only this time it was his left leg. But this time the break was far worse, a compound fracture.

All too familiar with being on field with a broken leg, Nikita literally coached the team’s trainer through emergency measures that needed to be taken.

He wound up in the hospital mending his leg while Moorhead finished the season with a perfect record. The team eventually was beaten in the playoffs. Seeing a player with a broken leg, NFL scouts lost interest.

It was at about this same time a man began to emerge from the boy who grew up in the Twin Cities.

Nikita threw himself into studying. He devoured books as if they were opposing football players.

This time the workout he gave his brain served him well. He graduated cum laude from Moorhead with a bachelor’s degree and received the distinguished honor of being named an Academic All-American.

Still, Nikita wasn’t ready to throw in the towel on an NFL career.

"I thought that I came back before from a broken leg and I could do it again," Nikita said.

Graduating in 1982 he moved back to the Twin Cities. Friends found that Nikita had become an true "gym rat." He spent every free hour of his day pumping iron at a local training club, called The Gym.

A light day at the gym for him was six hours. Eight-hour days were more typical and it got to the point where he packed a lunch so he could eat it at the gym.

He earned a living by bouncing at a bar at night figuring if he whipped himself into shape an NFL team was sure to give him a shot. Just as it seemed he was back in top-notch shape more bad luck struck.

Bouncing one night at the bar Nikita saw two men fighting and tried to stop them. In the melee his legs got entangled and he felt searing pain flow through his left leg.

Carted off to the hospital an X-ray showed he had a hair-line fracture. In other words, he broke a leg for the third time.

Only this time surgeons were called in to insert a steel rod in his leg to give it needed support and strength. He still carries that rod in his leg. Rather than falling into a funk, Nikita took on the experience as another challenge.

For all of 1983 he spent every waking hour pumping weights to build his body. His strategy was that by the summer of the next year he would be ready to get an NFL tryout.

Looking for a little adventure while he was recovering, Nikita packed up his bags and moved in with a friend in Atlanta, Georgia.

Arriving in Atlanta on Jan. 1, 1984, Nikita well knew his friend was a wrestler with Georgia Championship Wrestling - a mom-and-pop regional wrestling operation.

As he talked with his friend about wrestling, Nikita became fascinated with the sport. Soon, he was attending wrestling matches in the evening and worked out in the day. Workers compensation from his bar injury sustained him.

Three months later he returned to the Twin Cities and got a job as bar disc jockey. By then Nikita’s body was a massive 6-foot-2, 285-pounds.

This was hardly a case where he needed to go on a diet. With a 34-inch waist his total body fat was less than 10 percent - an astounding feat most Olympic athletes can’t reach.

In April of that year he got a call from his friend Joe "Animal" Laurinaitis with news about a wrestling job. At the time, another friend of Nikita , Gordon Solic, who did play-by-play for WTBS Wrestling in Atlanta, had line up a tryout for Nikita with the Tampa Bay Bandits in the newly-created USFL.

But Laurinaitis told Nikita that Jim Crockett, who headed the National Wrestling Alliance in Charlotte, N.C., was searching for new wrestlers. A common practice in wrestling is to search for new talent when ratings are down.

NWA was in a ratings dip and Laurinaitis thought Nikita fit the bill of a wrestler.

Even though he didn’t have an ounce of wrestling experience, Nikita decided to give the profession a stab.

"I thought that if it didn’t work out I still had a tryout with the Bandits," Nikita said.

So Nikita called Crockett and told him he was interested in slamming bodies as a wrestler. True to form, Nikita also told Crockett he had never been in a ring.

"He pulled my chain a little bit," Nikita recalls of the conversation. "But he told me to be in his office by June 4 with my head shaved bald." Months before his meeting with Crockett Nikita decided to shave his head. Back then that was an unusual sight.

Walking among the public he drew stares.

"People kept asking, ’Who is this guy with the shaved head,’ " Nikita remembers.

When the time came Nikita traveled to Charlotte and opened the door to Crockett’s office.

Looking at Nikita’s skimpy waist and colossal muscles Crockett was shocked at his size. His eyeballs bugged out even more when Nikita took off his size 54 sport jacket and removed his shirt. Each muscle had perfect cuts. Crockett immediately fetched Ivan Koloff, and Don Kernodle. Both men Crockett’s top-of-the-line wrestlers. Koloff played the role of mean wrestler from the Soviet Union while Kernodle’s character was that of an American defector who sided with the Russians. The two men formed the championship team in the wrestling enterprise and they were looking for a third partner.

As soon as Koloff and Kernodle saw Nikita they knew they found their man.

Kissing a chance at playing football good-bye, Nikita signed up as a wrestler with the NWA.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I grow up wanting or knowing I would be a professional wrestler," Nikita said. He was told to play the character of a Soviet wrestler, look mean and wear a chain. Nikita felt he was ready for his first match but Crockett wasn’t so sure.

Ivan convinced Crockett to give Nikita a chance.

"If he trips," warned Crockett, "he’s history." In his first match Nikita pinned his opponent in 10 seconds - a record time.

From there on Nikita found a career. For the next two months he served as a lone wrestler battling individual opponents throughout the Mid-Atlantic.

Playing the part of a Russian during the cold war was about as evil as it got. It was a role that Nikita took seriously, extremely seriously.

He was so good fans booed him like no other wrestler.

He was so good death threats against him were common because fans believed he was a threat to America.

He was so good several times fans jumped into the ring ready to pound the daylights out of him to defend America’s honor. On the "Great American Bash" video in 1985, fans climbed into the ring wanting to beat him to a pulp. "It was pretty interesting to say the least," Nikita said.

Deciding he needed to go the extra, extra mile, the man named Nelson Scott Simpson legally changed his name to that of his character - Nikita Koloff.

Nikita developed the character as a Soviet wrestler who was suppose to compete in the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles which was boycotted by the Soviets. The character was suppose to be a superstar athlete who was gunning to win medals in track, field and wrestling.

A unique feature to Nikita’s character was that he spoke no English. o great in 1986 he wrestled in 456 matches.

Nikita also came close to landing a movie role in Rocky IV with Sylvestor Stallone. In the movie Stallone’s boxing character was training to fight a no good Russian boxer.

A casting call went out for someone to play the bad Russian and Nikita was on that short list. He was flown out to Los Angeles and performed in a screen test with Stallone. Another character, a smooth looking blond, won the part. During 1986 Nikita reached the top for those playing the bad guy. He was voted by fans as the No.1 most-hated wrestler.