Why Jordan Burroughs wants to lead U.S. wrestling renaissance

— -- RIO DE JANEIRO -- On the darkest day in American wrestling history, the boy was only 7. There were no Olympic dreams. No clues that he would someday grow up to become the most dominant wrestler on the planet. Instead, Jordan Burroughs was merely a scrawny second grader who hid under gym bleachers and cried every time he lost. His mom lured him out with open arms and the promise that she was still proud. Then his dad would show up and remind the boy he wouldn't need to hide or cry if he just would have taken care of business. If he just would have won.

Back then, the boy had never heard of seven-time world and Olympic medalist Dave Schultz. He wasn't aware of billionaire philanthropist John du Pont or the Foxcatcher wrestling team. But on a cold late-January day in 1996, that all changed, when Leroy Burroughs told his son that a man had shot and killed an Olympic wrestling champion. The boy was scared, stunned and confused. But from that moment on, Jordan Burroughs vowed to never forget the name Dave Schultz.

Now, 20 years later, Burroughs has grown into one of the most dominant athletes in American sport. He's a four-time world champion with a career record of 124-2. On Friday he will look to become the first American wrestler in 24 years to win back-to-back Olympic golds. And yet his ascension to world dominance is perhaps one of the most unlikely stories on the entire U.S. roster. Consider: Burroughs is the first member of his family ever to compete in organized sports. He wasn't recruited for a college scholarship until April of his senior year of high school. And his freshman year at Nebraska he finished 16-13 and didn't place at NCAA championships. Yet now he's one of the baddest men on the planet.

"There just aren't many stories like his. And that's a testament to how incredibly hard he works," said Burroughs' coach, Mark Manning. "He's a killer, like Michael Jordan was in his prime. Winning isn't enough. He's simply never satisfied."

In Rio, Burroughs' quest to repeat is about far more than fame, glory or living up to his bold @alliseeisgold Twitter handle. It's about defending his family, chasing John Smith's record six world titles and, perhaps most importantly, continuing to build the platform he believes he needs to save USA Wrestling. As a tribute to Schultz.

"That awful day set us back so many years," Burroughs said. "It changed the way we train. It changed so many things. I don't believe USA Wrestling has ever been the same. I want this to be my legacy -- to return my country to prominence. This is why I have to win in Brazil. There's no other choice. I have to win."

It's early March in Frisco, Texas. With beads of sweat bubbling above his brow and slaloming down his cheeks, Burroughs grabs a pitcher of water and dumps it over a bed of hot coals, increasing the humidity in an already sultry hotel sauna. Burroughs and a few of his USA Wrestling teammates are sweating out the last couple of pounds before weigh-ins for the Pan American Championships. The No. 1-ranked freestyle wrestler in the world at 74 kilograms, Burroughs is an overwhelming favorite at the tournament, a role he isn't particularly fond of. It isn't so much the fans, meet organizers or competitors constantly asking for selfies. It's knowing there's nothing to gain and everything to lose. One small mistake, one brief lapse in judgment and shockwaves will be sent through the wrestling world.

"Every person I wrestle, it's the biggest match of their career," Burroughs said. "They're Buster Douglas. But what's the honor in being Mike Tyson and beating Buster Douglas? I win and move on. They win and it's a game-changer for the rest of their lives."

He has learned this lesson the hard way, twice. Once, in 2014, in a Buster Douglas-like upset at the hands of fellow American Nick Marable, snapping his 69-match win streak. Then again that same year to Russian rival Denis Tsargush, a three-time world champion and the man Burroughs dethroned in London as the king at 74 kilos.

That year at world championships, Burroughs was hobbled by a sprained ligament in his knee when he wrestled Tsargush -- a fact that wasn't lost on the Russian coaches, who instructed Tsargush to target Burroughs' ailing limb. Still, Burroughs makes no excuses. And the image of Tsargush sitting atop Burroughs' back with his arms flexed will never be erased -- literally. It's still saved in his phone.

"He partied on me," Burroughs said. "I'll never let anyone make me feel like that again. Whenever I'm having a down day or I'm tired of training, I pull that photo out to remind me."

In the aftermath of those two losses the wrestling world buzzed that Burroughs had lost it. He'd recently gotten married and become a father, so the narrative was all too convenient -- the champ had gone soft. The criticism stung. And yet at the same time it represents the conflicts that race within Burroughs.

On one hand, there is the man he wants to be -- and away from the mat so often is -- humble, kind, caring, courageous. Walking to practice one bitterly cold day in February, Burroughs said hello to every stranger he passed on the street. "That's how I want to represent myself," he explained. But then there's the man on the mat -- the vicious, unrelenting, coldblooded assassin who fights like hell to avoid the pain he felt losing as a little boy.

"I know this will sound borderline freaking psychotic, but I'd rather die than lose," Burroughs said. "I don't know if people are willing to put it on the line like that."

Lauren Burroughs, Jordan's wife, hears her husband say this. She rolls her eyes.

"Come on," Lauren said. "You would not rather die. That's not realistic."

Jordan refuses to give in.

"Babe," he said, "it's life or death. That's how I treat it. I'm not going to die, obviously. I'm not saying if I don't win this tournament, shoot me. There's just this level of intensity. I'm going to do everything within the rules to exploit my opponent, but if I am down and I have to break my opponent's leg to score I'm going to break it. If that's what's necessary, I wouldn't think twice about it."

Replied Lauren: "Yeah, but you're not a dirty wrestler. That's the way the rest of the world tries to beat you."

Back in the sauna, Burroughs revealed that in the lead-up to Rio he has had nightmares that he's being pinned. Sometimes it's a worthy opponent, other times it's a stranger. In one dream he tried to climb atop the medal podium only to be scolded to get down.

"They were like, 'Burroughs, you lost. You're second place. This guy is the gold medalist,'" he said. "'Here's your silver. You can cry later.' It was awful. I wake up from those dreams and I think to myself, 'Thank God it's just a dream. Thank God I can still win that gold.'"

The winding road of a rather unspectacular New Jersey kid to wrestling world-beater was forged on the dirt path between Burroughs' boyhood home and that of his best friend and neighbor, Vince Jones.

Jones, a prized wrestling recruit his senior year at Winslow Township High, was Burroughs' best friend. The two wrestled in each others' living rooms and hung out frequently enough that a dirt trail was created between their homes where grass was no longer able to grow. On the day Manning, Nebraska's wrestling coach, came to visit, Jones was a state champion, the No. 4-ranked wrestler in the country at his weight. Burroughs sat in on Manning's presentation, after which Jones and his father suggested Manning should recruit Burroughs a year later. The coach all but rolled his eyes.

"People say that thing all the time," Manning said.

After finishing second in the New Jersey state tournament his junior year, Burroughs assumed college coaches would begin calling on the first day they could -- July 1. So he fully charged the cordless phone from his home and took it with him to Jones' house, carrying it in his pocket fully expecting it to ring. But it didn't. So Burroughs walked back home, assuming the phone was out of range. It wasn't. Nobody wanted to talk to him.

"I got zero calls," he said. "Zero. I was so hurt. I mean look, if you don't have one person call you that day you stink. I didn't know what to do."

Meanwhile, Jones was impressing at Nebraska. He convinced an assistant coach to watch Burroughs' first tournament of his senior year, Beast of the East. The first day he went 3-0 and made it to the quarterfinals. Then he lost back-to-back matches and didn't even place.

"They told Vince I was no good," Burroughs said, "that they didn't want me."

Burroughs kept working. He won a state championship. Still, no one recruited him. So after state, his father and high school coach took him to senior nationals, a tournament with several senior champions who had already earned college scholarships. The message to Burroughs was simple: You have to win.

"I didn't know if I was capable," he said.

He was. Manning saw the potential that Jones had been touting. A week after senior nationals, Manning sat in Burroughs' living room and offered him a full-ride scholarship.

"It was amazing," he said. "My parents couldn't afford to send me to any school. So that was a stepping stone in life. You talk about instrumental moments."

But that didn't mean the work was done. And just like Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady, Burroughs refused to take the chip off his shoulder.

"I take a lot of pride in beating guys like Kyle Dake or David Taylor or these guys who have been basically bred to do this from Day 1. The best camps, the best high schools, the best universities. I never had that. It's not necessary, but I never had any of the frills a lot of those guys had."

After going 16-13 his freshman year, Burroughs went 34-6 as a sophomore and finished third at NCAAs. He then won national championships in his junior and senior seasons, going 71-0. In 2008, Doug Schwab represented the United States in Beijing at Burroughs' weight class. Burroughs was just a sophomore, but in exhibition matches he realized he could hang with Schwab.

"I remember thinking, 'He's an Olympian; I'm just some young chump. But I can beat this guy,'" Burroughs said. "That's when I started to reevaluate where I was and where I wanted to go."

Before each of his childhood tournaments, Burroughs would follow his dad into the trophy room so the boy could visualize the hardware he was going to bring home later that day. And when it didn't go that way, the boy struggled. At one such county championship in which Burroughs took second place as an 11-year-old, he asked his dad to retrieve his trophy. Leroy Burroughs refused.

"He told me if I wanted the trophy I should go get it myself," Burroughs recalled. But the boy didn't. He pouted and walked out of the gym, convinced his dad would cave. He never did. By the time they reached the car, Burroughs turned around and went to get his trophy. Even now, some 17 years later, he can still remember the name of the boy he lost to.

"I'll never forget," Burroughs said. "I was so ashamed."

At the Pan American Championships in Frisco, north of Dallas, there would be no such issues. Only dominance. In his second match, Burroughs experienced a completely new method to try to slow him down. A young wrestler from Puerto Rico lifted his right hand attempting to cover Burroughs eyes. At one point he motioned to the ref, who blew the whistle. At that point when the wrestling was paused, the Puerto Rican wrestler shot at Burroughs' legs. Burroughs snapped, grabbed the kid and nearly WWE'd him off the mat. Burroughs won 10-0.

"It's disrespectful," Burroughs said. "I didn't like that. But people try everything against me."

In his next match, Burroughs won again by technical fall 12-2. He was disappointed; he had set the goal of not giving up a single point the entire tournament, wrestling's version of a no-hitter -- a feat he has yet to accomplish in his career. "I had a mental lapse, and he took advantage," he said. "It was my mistake."

For every major final of his career, Burroughs wrestles in gold-colored shoes that bear his name. But for this lesser tournament, he left the gold at home. Yet they were on the mat for the final anyway, on the feet of his Colombian opponent. Like most every other match for Burroughs, the final began with other wrestler believing he had a chance. When the opponent scored early to tie the match at 2-2, the few thousand fans in attendance erupted. There were chants of "COLOMBIA! COLOMBIA! COLOMBIA!" The Colombian coaches jumped up and down in their corner. The American fans responded even more loudly.

Soon after, Burroughs lifted his opponent in the air and slammed him to the ground. Burroughs raised his hands above his head. He's a showman. He wanted it louder. Within a few short minutes, it was 10-2 and then 12-2. It was over. The Colombian hugged his coaches, and then stormed off to the warm-up mat where he lay in a bed of tears.

On this night, Burroughs would take the top step on the podium. During the national anthem, his mind would turn to Rio. It does anytime he's on a podium. Rio is the meet that matters. That's when the whole world will be watching. In the stands up above, Burroughs' 20-month-old son, Beacon, has just spilled his blue ICEE. He stops dragging his hands through the sticky mess to look up at the scoreboard and see the American flag rising above the others. He points to the flag. "Dada!" he says.

Two weeks earlier, the west Nebraska town of Sidney had all but shut down for a youth wrestling tournament when Burroughs rolled in. Organizers led him into a locker room where a handful of high school wrestlers sat in awe. "What's up, champs?" Burroughs asked with a smile and round of handshakes. After a speech to a group of elementary-aged kids, Burroughs emerged in the jam-packed gymnasium. For two hours he stood behind a table and signed autographs. With each signature, Burroughs smiled, shook hands and often bent over to place a hand on each child's back. "This is what it's all about," he said. "A wrestling gym on a Sunday morning -- this was my childhood."

But for all the smiles, there are moments Lauren Burroughs reveals when her husband isn't grinning. It most often happens at meets in the United States -- often trials for world championships or the Olympics -- when he senses American fans turning against him. "He's the Patriots. He's the Yankees," Lauren Burroughs said. "A lot of fans want him to lose. People root for the underdog."

On one hand, Burroughs says he doesn't care. He insists he doesn't wrestle for the admiration of others. But at the same time, he's puzzled. He's arguably the most dominant wrestler in the world. Why would a U.S. wrestling fan want anyone but him representing the red, white and blue at the Olympics or world championships? He has long wondered if race is an issue. The majority of wrestling fans are from small-town America. They are often white. Burroughs is an African-American from New Jersey.

In Sidney, it wasn't lost on Burroughs that he, Lauren and his son were the only African-Americans in the gym.

"I don't think it's a dominant part of it, but absolutely it plays a role," he said. "A lot of kids can't identify with the things I've done and where I'm from and who I am as an individual. That's why I've tried to be a person and live my life in a way that can be identified by all cultures."

This is his motivation, to live his life by an unwritten code of conduct. He refuses to curse. Or drink. After London, he admits he lived the life of a celebrity athlete. But when Lauren told him she was no longer interested in a relationship if he wasn't going to be faithful, he quickly changed, calling every woman he had ever dated to say he was no longer available. He'd found the one. And he was going to propose. He apologized if he had hurt anyone.

"That was hard," Burroughs said. "But I didn't do that for Lauren; I did that for me. I've always felt it's easier to live your life if you hold yourself accountable by putting it out there. So that's what I did.

"Not everyone is going to be 165 pounds with 3 percent body fat and crazy explosiveness. But I wanted to create something identifiable to everyone. And I knew who I was and who I dreamed of being, and they didn't align. You can't create a persona and live a different lifestyle at home. So I decided to change."

In every drill of every practice, Burroughs refuses to give in. That's the work ethic that has led him to this point. But in the lead-up to the world championships in 2013 it almost cost him his career. That's when, in the last sprint of the day at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, Jordan was trying to win a full-speed race and refused to slow down. Instead, he tried to run up the wall, and he heard a snap. He had broken his ankle.

"At first somebody said it wasn't broken," Burroughs said. "But I'm an Olympic champ. I'm not some chump. And it hurt like crazy."

That night he would have surgery. Twenty-eight days of grueling rehab later, he would take the mat at the world championships. And win gold.

"There was all this talk, like 'Don't send this guy out there on some courageous suicide mission because he thinks he's tough,'" Burroughs said. "But they were wrong."

A year later, the mystique was gone. Burroughs got married. Had a baby. Suffered the first two losses of his career.

"That sucked," he said. "It was embarrassing. Shameful. A great year for our family. A bad year for me. I felt bad for Lauren and Beacon. They said I was domesticated. Burroughs stinks now. But that was silly. Ridiculous."

After the first loss, Burroughs said teammates and other wrestlers asked if he was all right, if he was going to be OK.

"A month ago I was invincible, now I was a bum," he said. "My mentality was pretty simple: I'm going to be back on top before you are."

The next year, 2015, was a redemption tour. Proof that Burroughs could have a family and win. He would end up back on top of the podium at world championships.

"I can be a husband and a dad and still whip all your butts," Burroughs said.

On the night before wrestling competition began in Rio, Dave Schultz was posthumously inducted into the International Wrestling Hall of Fame. He was represented by his widow, Nancy. Burroughs was unable to attend, but that didn't make the occasion any less impactful. For it is Schultz's memory that is among the many things pushing Burroughs in Rio.

It was Schultz who helped create the Foxcatcher training camp that Burroughs believes helped build one of the greatest eras in U.S. wrestling. It was also what led to his murder by John du Pont, who financially supported Foxcatcher. Today, American wrestlers are spread throughout the country, training mostly at various colleges that have regional training centers until they gather in the final weeks before major competitions to prepare at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.

Burroughs is driven by recreating what Schultz began, where the best Americans would train against each other day in and day out.

"We need this," Burroughs said. "And I'm probably going to ruffle a lot of feathers because it's against the current system, but that's not working. We have not been in the top five as a country in four years. It's not working."

Burroughs says he'd want to assemble the greatest team in the world with the best coaches. And there would be one goal: winning.

"The rules would be simple: If you aren't serious about winning, then step aside and let the next guy in," he said. "We are the best sports country in the world. You can't argue that. But we should dominate this sport at all levels and weight classes. And we aren't right now. That's what I want my legacy to be."

A legacy that he hopes gold in Rio will help build.