Why Jordan Burroughs doesn't want a LeBron moment
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RIO DE JANEIRO — Imagine you are an Olympic athlete. You’ve tortured your body for decades, fine-tuning it for that one moment when everything is on the line, when all that work and sweat and sacrifice come down to a few brief moments in some arena halfway around the world.
There are the early wake-ups calls and the demanding practices and the injuries. There are the strange beds in foreign lands, unfamiliar food, someone who always seems to want a piece of your time.
Imagine you’ve gone through all that and and you’ve finally done it. You’ve won a gold medal.
It would be, it seems logical, a moment of sheer exultation. And, for a brief, fleeting moment, it is. And then, well, let someone who has lived that explain it.
American Jordan Burroughs is the reigning gold medalist in freestyle wrestling in the 74-kilogram weight division. From his earliest days, all he could think of was winning an Olympic gold medal.
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He went to a New Jersey high school that couldn’t even afford singlets for all of the team members. Burroughs was a 135-pounder in high school and had to share a singlet with the team’s 119-pounder.
“I’m gritty because of [my upbringing],” Burroughs said. “I recognize I’ve been on both sides of the track. I’ve been in a high school gym with very few fans. Now, I’m at the Olympic Games. When I was in high school, we had 14 guys on the team and only 10 singlets. When our 119-pounder would wrestle, he’d have to take his singlet off in the locker room and give it to me at 135 so I could wrestle.
“We didn’t have enough uniforms for our entire team and now I’m getting thousands of dollars of free gear on the biggest stage in the world.”
He’s won just about everything there is to win. He won 69 consecutive matches on the senior level, an American record. He’s won the world championship and the World Cup and just about everything else.
It all led to that pursuit of gold in London. Burroughs created the Twitter handle @AllISeeIsGold, and the night before he wrestled in London, he tweeted, “My next tweet will be a picture of me holding that Gold medal!!!”
It wasn’t cockiness – Burroughs might be the most down-to-earth, least cocky athlete among the 500-plus the U.S. sent to Brazil – but more a reflection of his belief that he’d done all that could be done to win.
After Burroughs won the gold, though, he had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn’t clutching the medal against his chest, allowing his closest friends and family members hold it and take photos with it.
He’d reached the pinnacle and suddenly, the exultation was gone. The next Olympics, he realized, were four years away and there was work to be done.
“I tell these guys all the time,” he said of his Olympic teammates, “it’s really not about the winning. It’s about the pursuit. You spend every waking moment preparing for a particular event. It’s almost like Christmas. You say, ‘I can’t wait until Christmas. I want to open my presents early. Mom, Dad, what did you get me? I’ve got to see it. The presents are under the tree. Let me open it.’ But once you open them and you play with them, you realize, it’s over. There are 364 days until the next event. For us, it’s over a thousand days to the next Olympics.
“I don’t want to have an Olympic hangover. I want to have a peacefulness within me that understands, ‘You enjoy every single moment of these Games.’ You soak it all in. You eat it up. You hope for the best. But I’ve got a family that reminds me there is a lot more to do between now and Tokyo, [which is hosting the 2020 Games].”
Because of his sport, he’s never going to collect dozens of gold medals like Michael Phelps. He’s never going to have the fame of a LeBron James, whose entire adult life has played out on live television.
But he wants to make his mark on these Games and the Olympics in general in a very Burroughs sort of way.
“There are very few singular moments throughout an athlete’s career that puts him in a place forever,” Burroughs said. “I keep going back to LeBron James [in the 2016 NBA Finals], being down 3-1, going back to Cleveland, playing against the reigning MVP and the reigning NBA champions. When everyone counted him out, he won. That singular moment cemented him as a legend.
“People appreciated LeBron for a long time, though he was a great athlete and a great player. But now, he’s a leader. He’s one of the best players of all time. That’s subjective and arbitrary. Like, I don’t know. Maybe there are people who think I’m the hots. That’s all up to personal opinion. But for people who think I am, I want to give them something to cheer for.”
The last thing, he wants, however, is to have those fans on their feet, roaring, as he mounts a furious late rally to win.
That was OK for James and his story, coming back to win three consecutive games to claim a world title for a city that had gone a half-century without one, but that’s not what Burroughs has in mind.
In that sense, he doesn’t want his own LeBron moment.
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“Hopefully, I’m not down,” he said. “Hopefully I lead the entire Games, all four matches. I want to dominate. I don’t want to wrestle to my opponents. I don’t want to just win. I really think the reason Phelps is so cool, and Katie Ledecky and all these different athletes, is that they just don’t win. They dominate. They break records. They do it consistently. Domination, consistency: Put those together and you’re a legend.”
It was suggested to him that he’s wired the same way they are, that he’s the kind who will dominate round after round, match after match, meet after meet and year after year.
Burroughs grinned broadly.
“I am,” the reigning gold medalist said, shaking his head affirmatively. “I am.”
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