Takedown Report

Black History Month: How great black wrestlers impacted Jordan Burroughs’ life

By Jordan Burroughs | Feb. 20, 2019,

When I began wrestling as a kid, I knew very little about the sport, or its heroes. Growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood, very few of my buddies were wrestlers. As I peeked around the wrestling landscape as a young man, I noticed there weren’t many black kids from other neighborhoods wrestling either. I remember traveling to team tournaments years ago only to come to the sad realization that very few individuals looked like me. It was uncomfortable, and for a period of time I was convinced that this wasn’t the sport for me. This was before social media and widespread internet access.  Unless you subscribed to a major wrestling publication, you were out of touch when it came to the best wrestlers in the world. In short, I had no idea who the heroes in the sport were, and I was definitely unaware of any of them who looked like me.

There was a time when I tried to quit the wrestling team so that I could play basketball instead. I’d had enough of “being different.” But instead of quitting, I finally did my research, and dived into the history of this sport. I found out who the greatest wrestlers were and was surprised to see that many of them were brown like me. This discovery changed my life forever. At the time, there were two legends named Kenny Monday and Kevin Jackson — the only two black men to ever win a Olympic Gold medals in wrestling. Kenny earned one in 1988, and Kevin in 1992. These men paved the way for me to be great. I believed that if they could do it, I could do it because they had done it first. In 2012, I joined the greats. I became only the third African American to be crowned an Olympic gold medalist in freestyle wrestling. It was an iconic moment for me, particularly because I got to join two of my heroes. Rest of the story at https://www.teamusa.org/USA-Wrestling/Features/2019/February/20/Black-History-Month-Burroughs-Column?mc_cid=0574fb79af&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

March 3, 2019 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized