Kelly’s a true competition junkie GRAPPLING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS
by Gary Abbott
The winningest No-Gi grappler in USA Wrestling history is truly a competition junkie. There is no other way to describe Michael Kelly, who won his seventh career World Grappling medal for Team USA this year in Antalya, Turkey in October, claiming the silver medal at 77 kg/169.5 lbs. A Wisconsin native, Kelly started wrestling at the age of four, and has never stopped. Now at age 41 and counting, Kelly is best known these days for his grappling success. But he still enters international-style and folkstyle wrestling tournaments all year long, testing himself against the best athletes he can find. Kelly was a Wisconsin state champion and three-time medal- ist for St. Croix Falls High School, placing fourth as a sopho- more, winning the title as a junior and taking third as a senior. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps and wrestled on the All-Marine wrestling team for three years, predominantly in Greco-Roman. Next came college, where he was a Junior College All-American for Harper College in Chicago, then spent three seasons as a varsity starter for Div. I Eastern Illinois. While at Harper, Kelly entered the Midlands Championships and found out that the record for the most consecutive Midlands was set by Mike Schmidlin with 15.
“I have the record for the most Midlands in a row with 16. It’s something I wanted to do. I started kind of late. I was out of the Marines and went there in junior college and saw the record. I said I want to break that. Everybody said I was crazy. A couple years ago, I broke it. I never made the top eight. I won five matches. I beat Rashad Evans one year. I had some good wins there over some quality wrestlers. I was probably a match away four different times,” he said.
Kelly became a wrestling coach and a teacher, but never hung up his shoes. He actually picked jobs based upon the abil- ity to get off work in time to attend practice. “Everything in my life revolved around getting to practice. I was coaching at Harper Junior College, so I took a job that was near the college. When I went into interviews, I tried not to make it too obvious, I’d ask, ‘when does it get out?’ If it got out when I couldn’t make practice, sorry, I’m not interested and went to the next one. I found one where I could drive and make it to practice every day,” he said. He enters tournaments that the wrestlers he coaches are competing in. Each year, he researches open competitions and sets his schedule so he can get in additional matches. “I’ve done college opens, even after I was out of college, every year. I’ve won one tournament every year since I was four years old. It was harder when I was in the service, but I have won one every year. It might be a smaller one. A lot of sum- mers, I’ll go to a bunch of local opens with our kids. Summers, I get 35-40 matches. Sometimes it’s old timers, sometimes it’s young college kids. You never know who shows up,” said Kelly. It was because of his wrestling background that Kelly started training and competing in Grappling. “In 2001, I was coaching at Harper, and one of the wrestlers was (current UFC fighter) Clay Guida. He and his brother came in one day and said they were fighting and needed a good wrestler at their gym, which was Gilbert Grappling, run by Michigan wrestler Joey Gilbert. It was far from my house, an hour and 50 minutes away. They kept harassing me. I went
36 USA Wrestler36 USA Wrestler
Michael Kelly works for position during the Grappling World Championships in Turkey. Robbert Wijtman photo.
there, practiced a couple of times. Joey said I should do this Grappling thing, that I’d be great at it. I went to a couple weeks of practice. I went to a NAGA event, and Joey said I should go advanced. There was a Brazilian brown belt, who ran a gym, and in the finals I beat him,” he said.
Joey Gilbert also was the one to point Kelly towards USA Wrestling’s Grappling program.
“He called me in the middle of the night, around midnight and said, ‘Mike, USA Wrestling just revived your career.’ I asked what he was talking about. He said USA Wrestling started Grappling. He said, ‘this is all you, 100%, it will fit your style. You will do well.’ I went to the qualifier, and made the team in Turkey in 2007. It’s been non stop since then,” said Kelly. Kelly took a bronze that first year in 2007, and has kept going
back. The medals have piled up, with a silver in 2012, and more bronzes in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2014. Kelly has discovered that Grappling better fits his physical abilities as he gets older. “As you get older, you can still grapple. At Old School Gym (in Illinois), older guys come in and grapple, and can go into tour- naments. If you grapple for an hour, you feel great the next day. If I go into a college room and beat the guys up, I can’t hardly move the next day. It’s a little less on the body. You can choke and all those things. My style, for whatever reason, is good in Grappling. I’m a position guy. I say I wrestle in a box, and never get out of my comfort zone. If I beat you 1-0, great, or I submit you, great. All I am doing is looking for the win,” said Kelly. Kelly was tied with women’s star Tara LaRosa with six No-Gi medals going into the Worlds this year. He opened with a 2-0 win over Aydin Can of Turkey, then scored a submission over Adam Falatovics of Hungary. In the semifinals, he stopped Vassililos Korozidis of Greece, 5-0, putting him in the finals and Continued on page 37
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44