Wrestlers Without Borders founding member Gene Dermody has written to the FGG with breaking news regarding the Chicago Wrestling Club (CWC), which has won the Veterans Team Championship Title at USA Wrestling Nationals in Las Vegas.That's right... the club that we all created for the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago has now become an awesome institution.
Josh Watkins, the guy I threw around the floor of the Gil Rec Center in 2004 to motivate him to start a local Chicago club has achieved something we can all be very proud of. Josh took 11 wrestlers to Las Vegas last week to both compete and officiate, and did us all quite proud in probably the toughest annual USA tournament there is.
This performance is in the tradition of over 10 years of Wrestlers Without Borders competitors at US Nationals. Besides Josh Watkins of CWC this year, Kevin Martin, our main Chicago mat official in 2006, took a second in Greco-Roman wrestling, and a third in Free Style wrestling this year. Kevin has been our lead mat official since the 1994 Gay Games in NYC.
Past WWB/Gay Games competitors have also included Bryan Northam (Golden Gate Wrestling Club, San Francisco) and Ed Lindsay (NYC Twin Towers) in 2000... plus many others I just have to go look up.
In 1998 I personally coached GGWC's Rochelle Robinson and Tekla Balukas to a 1st and 5th place respectively at the 1998 US Nationals in Orlando.
Unless you really know wrestling, you may not get the competitive significance of all of this, so trust me, this is a major step forward in our athletic credibility on the elite competitive side of what the Gay Games Mission is all about.
Josh will probably be his self deprecating self, and not want to talk about it, especially since most of his team are straight Russians. But he has earned the respect of a lot of people for our WWB programs.
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