“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 returns 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 in the state the state, exemplifying just how competitive wrestling is in New Jersey.
“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 a 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.
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, he Green, already a good wrestler, found himself learning about the sport. And after his coaches told him that they saw some of Jordan Burroughs in him, that’s where he became a 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.
“When I got here, I was waking up at 160, so I was like ‘I could be 157, I could lift weights, I don’t have to cut weight,” he said.
Then reality slapped him in the face.
“I was wrestling people who weighed less than me and they were beating me up. People that were above me were beating me up. People at my weight class were beating me up.”
That lead to self-doubt, which can be a very dangerous place if visited for too long.
Fortunately for Green, he figured it out. He became more disciplined, improved on the mat, got on a schedule, learned how to train in the weight room and balanced classwork and sports.
Yet he still lost his first two matches.
But adjusted and ended up finishing seventh in the nation that season as a true freshman, something he repeated as a sophomore.
After graduating from Nebraska in 2016, he later became a father and they eventually moved to Virginia where he joined the staff at the Southeast Regional Training Center in Blacksburg.
Then nagging injuries surfaced, and after ignoring them for so long to make the World Team, he finally had to address them, which led to his “soft” retirement, as he put it.
But he was still involved in the sport, working at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado.
In February 2023, he had a partial hip replacement and was able to start walking again in March in time for the NCAAs, which he attended and drew inspiration from to return to the mat, which he did in June of that year.
He and the family then moved back to Nebraska and while he made his 7th World Team, he failed in his pursuit of an Olympic spot in 2024.
This past April, Green returned to Blacksburg, this time as an assistant coach for the Virginia Tech Hokies, the program which produced 3x All-American, 2019 165 lbs. NCAA champion, and New Jersey native, Mekhi Lewis.
Three months later, Green, 33, is back home at the Prudential Center, where he will attempt to make his 8th World Team. To accomplish that, he will have to defeat 2x NCAA champion and 5x All-American, David Carr.
“It’s always cool to come back and wrestle in Jersey. I have a lot of friends and family coming up, and I’ll have a nice little ‘James Green’ section,” he said.
And on facing a young, successful wrestler like Carr.
“He’s a competitor, he’s going to be excited to wrestle….but so will I.”
It’s great to hear he’s still excited about a sport he had no thoughts of competing in as a six-year-old aspiring football player.
Fortunately for him, his family, Nebraska and the sport, his team lost in the playoffs the very next day following the wrestling coach approaching him, otherwise fans might have seen him on the college gridiron for a different Big Ten school.
Now, hopefully fans will get to see him make his 8th World Team and then cheer him on in LA in 2028 as a member of Team USA.
