Ex-Patriot Braxton Amos keeping busy

PARKERSBURG -- Wisconsin's Braxton Amos is packing his bags a little sooner than expected.

Since May 14, the former two-time Robert Dutton Award winner and Parkersburg South graduate has been training at the USA Wrestling team camp in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.

Following that experience, he had planned to fly back to Madison and do some relaxing along with working out at the Wisconsin Regional Training Center before leaving in June to fly to Croatia for a two-week training camp. After that, he'll head back to Georgia for another Olympic team camp as he prepares to represent the United States during the August Junior World Championships in Ufa, Russia.

However, 97kg Olympian G'Angelo Hancock had to bow out of the Senior Pan American Championships in Greco-Roman, which opened the door for Amos to head to Guatemala City, Guatemala.

"Something happened with his flight. I'm not entirely sure," Amos said of Hancock, who defeated the ex-Patriot in the finals at the U.S. Olympic Trials, not being able to make it to Atlanta to fly out with the team.

"I'm flying out Monday. It's your job to be ready as the number two. When your starter is the number four guy in the world, you don't really plan on getting called up, you know. I'm excited. It will be fun."

Amos will compete on Thursday with preliminary and consolation rounds. The finals are slated for that evening.

The Badger said despite the fact "I don't have any of my competition gear," Team USA is taking care of all that.

"It kind of just all sunk in really quick that this is real," he said. "I still am the young kid that everybody is trying to teach and I'm still trying to learn the ropes. At the same time it happened real quick as far as 'hey, you got to grow up and go represent the United States at a senior level capacity, and oh by the way we want you to win the thing because why not.' Everybody has been super helpful since then. You name it, they hooked me up with it because I needed it."

While Amos has been working hard and trying to learn as much as he can from the best minds in the sport, it's not been smooth sailing to say the least, especially when it comes to his hotel elevator.

"We were in the hotel. It was me, two heavyweights and one of the women's athletes, Dymond Guilford," Amos said.

"I think it was Dymond that goes 'there's a lot of weight in here' and we all started laughing.

"(Dymond is like) 'the elevator is pretty new it will be all right. I wonder what would happen if someone jumps up and the elevator stops.' We were going up to the sixth floor and it stopped somewhere between the top quarter where the elevator was at the fourth floor."

Although no one actually jumped, after being stuck for 45 minutes Amos said, "the firemen got the door pried open just enough for the four of us to get out and they closed down the elevators. We hit the emergency button and said 'we're like, hey, we are stuck.' We had meetings that night we were going to. We were texting the coaches saying we were stuck. Not super trusting of the elevators at this point."

Amos, who turned 20 earlier this month, is actually wrestling two categories above his Junior status. After the Junior level, there is U23 and then Senior level, like he'll be competing at in Guatemala.

"I'm not really going down expecting anything," he admitted. "There's not really a whole lot riding on this tournament in the really big picture. I still want to go and do well obviously and represent my country, but the big picture as long as we make weight it's just kind of go out and do and compete for the sake of competing."

Contact Jay Bennett at jbennett@newsandsentinel.com