“I’m not doing no wrestling. I’m focused on football,” said a defiant, six-year-old James Green when a coach asked him to try wrestling.
Oh, how wrong he was.
Green, like many young athletes, had no interest in wrestling because of sports like football and track. In his mind, he was starting at a young age so that he could eventually play for The Ohio State Buckeyes.
But like so many of our journeys, the path diverted and Green followed a route that he was meant to be on.
On Friday, the native New Jerseyan returned home to the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ seeking his 8th senior World Team selection at Final X, USA Wrestling’s flagship Senior-level event and Beat the Streets New York annual benefit event.
While the return home is a happy one for he gets to reunite with friends and family, Green’s journey to the event makes it even more special.
After finishing his football career as an 8th grader, the aspiring wrestler anticipated competing at 103 lbs., but that summer he hit a growth spurt that pushed him to 125 lbs., which changed his 9th grade dramatically.
“My freshman year, I didn’t get to place. I had a great year…I went undefeated,” Green told me during our interview. Unfortunately, he didn’t finish in the top in New Jersey, a state that doesn’t have groups, exemplifying just how competitive wrestling is in the Garden State.
“I was small. I wrestled a lot of juniors and seniors, people that were more developed,” he said. “And that ate at me and motivated me.”
That motivation carried him to successful sophomore and junior years, the latter in which he bulked up to 140 lbs., started to carve out a name for himself and had scouts paying attention.
And that attention changed his thought process from “maybe I’ll wrestle in college” to “I can wrestle at a big college program.”
“I started to get some buzz, started to get some more confidence, and I started to believe in myself a little more,” Green said.
That belief resulted in more exposure, more wins and more calls, one of which was from the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
“They were the first school to believe in me,” he said. “Every school has different needs and a lot of schools saw me as ‘Well, you’re either going to grow or not. Maybe you’re a 141 or 149 pounder and Nebraska said ‘you can be a 157 pounder.’”
That was perfect for Green, who didn’t want to take a step back from his continued growth in size.
Yet while he had his sights set on the Midwest, he still had one tough competitor to face before he could commit to the Cornhuskers.
His mother.
“Without even having to go look at Nebraska, I knew I was going to go there. But my mom, she didn’t want me to go,” he laughingly told me. “I’m the oldest of three kids and her only son, so she didn’t want me to go all the way out there.”
He even had a chance to attend high school in Northern NJ, but she said no; she wanted her son close, so the “fight” to go out of state was lining up to be a massive challenge (and who could blame her? It was her only son).
He had thoughts of attending the University of Maryland as he had family close by in the DMV area, but the Terps were committed to a wrestler in his weight class while the Cornhuskers made that weight an open option to Green. That made his future in the Midwest even clearer.
So after some family discussions, and a senior year that saw him ranked #2 in the country, undefeated and a state champion, his mother was convinced to let him leave the nest and his path to Lincoln, NE was cemented.
Once there, Green, already a good wrestler, found himself learning about the sport. And after his coaches told him that they saw some of former Cornhusker Jordan Burroughs in him, he became a student and fan of the sport, for you don’t get compared to a 2x NCAA Champion, 4x World Champion and Olympic gold medalist unless you’re truly special.
That motivation spurred him to a successful college career, finishing as a Big Ten champion, a 4x All-American with two third place finishes at the NCAA Wrestling Championships, and another highly accomplished Black collegiate wrestler.
But that career did not come without doubts, pain and sacrifice.
