Braxton Amos at the UWW JR Trials earlier this year (photo courtesy of Sam Janicki; SJanickiPhoto.comBraxton Amos is telling a funny story about his roommates, Ethan Rotundo and Graham Calhoun. They have a wall in their house in Wisconsin, a Wall of Fame, or Wall of Shame, where letters and certificates and other things are on display.
"My bronze certificate will go up there," Amos says with a chuckle, referencing his recent bronze-medal finish at the Junior Greco-Roman world championships.
The rest of his newest awards - the actual bronze medal, plus the freestyle gold, the first-place certificate, the world championship belt - will go home with him to West Virginia. It's been a busy summer, and Wisconsin students don't start class until after Labor Day, so he planned a trip to see his family before the fall semester begins.
When he returns to Madison, he will leave his medals, certificates, and championship belt behind. This is by design, Amos explains. He does not need reminders of what he's done because he would rather focus on what he wants to do next.
And Braxton Amos has some big, big plans.
"The belt and medals, I'll leave them with mom and dad," Amos says. "It's good to sit back and smile and look at the medals and the belt for a little bit. To some extent, it's sunk in, but there are other goals we're chasing.
"My goal is not to be a world champ. My goal is to be an Olympic champ. And at the end of the day, my job is to keep winning and not relax until we have an NCAA trophy sitting in the team room."
'It's going to be good for me, it's going to suck for him, and it's going to be a lot of fun for everybody else'
Amos became one of the wrestling world's newest darlings over the last six months. Surely you know the results by now.
At the Last Chance qualifier in late March, Amos qualified for the Olympic Trials in both freestyle and Greco at 97 kilograms (213 pounds). At the Trials a week later, he made the Greco finals by beating Eric Twohey, a long-standing contender; Lucas Sheridan, a three-time national team member; and Nick Boykin, a U.S. Open champ. G'Angelo Hancock swept Amos in the finals, but the message was clear: he had arrived.
A month after, in May, Amos made both the men's freestyle and Greco Junior world teams at 97 kilos. He went 10-0 with 10 technical falls across both tournaments and outscored his opponents by a combined 101-4. He wrestled a total of 12 minutes and 19 seconds across those 10 matches, including 3:50 total in his five Greco matches. He won them all in the first period, and won six in less than a minute.
"I felt great," Amos says. "It actually made my dad mad at trials. He would say things like, 'Hey, this kid is really tough,' and I'd be like, 'Who cares? It's going to be good for me, it's going to suck for him, and it's going to be a lot of fun for everybody else.'
"That's just how the training had my confidence. I had confidence in who I was training with, where I was training."
The onslaught continued at the Junior World Championships in Russia. Amos stormed to a freestyle title, outscoring his four opponents 36-9. He punctuated his gold-medal run with an explosive 5-point throw in the finals, capping an 11-4 win over Turkey's Polat Polatci. He was the first of three men's freestyle world champs for the United States, which finished third in the team standings behind Iran and Russia.
Four days later, Amos went 3-1 and won bronze in Greco. He is just the third American to win medals in both freestyle and Greco at the Junior world championships in the same year, joining Gary Albright (1983) and Adam Coon (2014). He is the only one of those three to win a title while doing so.
Taken altogether, Amos's last six months have looked like this: a 28-5 overall record at the Junior and Senior levels; a collective scoring advantage of 251-69; 18 shutouts; and his five losses came to Ben Honis, an All-American from Cornell; Kollin Moore, an NCAA finalist and Olympic Trials finalist; twice to Hancock, an Olympian, and Russia's Aleksei Mileshin in the Junior Greco world semifinals.
He did all of this, by the way, after separate bouts with both COVID-19 and mono in December 2020. Amos says his training basically started from "rock bottom" to start 2021 and they built up from there. He only hoped to qualify for the Olympic Trials in Greco and "maybe third or fourth" in freestyle.
Not bad, kid.
"When we first got him 12 months ago, he wasn't talking like this," says Jon Reader, Wisconsin's associate head coach. "He wasn't this confident. The progression he's made over the last year, you see a guy who's blossomed into a killer.
"The reason he's so special is because he's willing to do whatever it takes. It's really special to see a young kid come in, recognize it, understand it, wrap his head around it, and just go to work. He's bought in on every level."
That's what's going to make his collegiate encore so intriguing.
'He expects to be a national champion … we are fired up to get this season started'
Because of his performance over the last six months, the expectations for Amos - as well as the Wisconsin program - have surged skyward. Consider: between 2015 and 2019, seven U.S. wrestlers combined to win nine Junior men's freestyle world titles:
All seven have either won an NCAA title or at least made the finals.
In that same span, 14 other U.S. wrestlers have won medals at the Junior world championships:
Eight of them - Micic, McKee, Deakin, Valencia, Moore, Brooks, Arujau, Hidlay - have become NCAA All-Americans. Valencia and Brooks both won titles. Micic, Moore and Hidlay all made the finals. (Also, that's not including Fix's two other Junior world medals; he won bronze in both 2016 and 2018.)
Four others have qualified for the NCAA Championships: Butler (bloodround), Elam (bloodround), Berge (bloodround) and Davison (round-of-16). Tagg spent two years at North Carolina before entering the transfer portal, and Pico forwent a college career to fight, but also reached the finals of the 2016 Olympic Trials.
And that's not even counting both Keegan O'Toole and Rocky Elam, the two Missouri stars who won men's freestyle world titles alongside Amos in Russia after earning All-American finishes for the Tigers in March. Or even Taylor LaMont and Cohlton Schultz, both Junior Greco world medalists who became NCAA All-Americans, too (Schultz won Greco bronze in 2018, then gold in 2019; LaMont won Greco bronze in 2016).
There are some high expectations here, in other words, and Amos, only a true freshman for the' 21-22 season, is perfectly fine with that.
"This was something we expected," says Chris Bono, Wisconsin's head wrestling coach. "He expects to be a national champion. That's why we recruited him. He expects to wrestle at the highest level and be the best version of himself."
Amos will step into a Badger lineup that could be sneaky good in' 21-22. He plans to start at 197, sandwiched between two-time All-American Trent Hillger at 285, and, possibly, Chris Weiler at 184, who reached the NCAA quarterfinals for Lehigh in 2018 before transferring to Wisconsin and qualifying for the NCAA Championships in 2021.
Elsewhere, the Badgers have plenty of talent and potential. Eric Barnett returns at 125 pounds after earning All-American honors in 2021. Kyle Burwick, an NCAA qualifier at 133, is also back. Wisconsin also added a pair of immediate-impact transfers: Austin Gomez, a past Cadet and Junior world-teamer who reached the bloodround in 2019, and Andrew McNally, a 2021 MAC champ who reached the bloodround in 2021.
The collective talent will make Wisconsin a team worth following throughout' 21-22. If all things go according to plan, the Badgers could be a quiet darkhorse contender for a trophy at the NCAA Championships. More realistically, they'll be highly-competitive in the top-half of the Division I ranks, a welcomed change after going 1-6 and finishing 12th at last season's Big Ten Championships.
At the front of that surge will be the 20-year-old freight train that is Braxton Amos. He became a star this past spring and summer, and is only expected to shine brighter over the next five years in Wisconsin - and perhaps decorate that Wall of Fame, or Wall of Shame, a little more along the way.
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