There is no swagger in Greg Parker's voice as he tells the story of his triumph in the semifinals of this year's NCAA tournament. Sitting on his bed in a tiny room in Cuyler Hall, Parker's voice rises and trembles, his excitement clearly building as he runs through the match.
He is in Albany, New York, his hometown. Otto Olson, Michigan, the opponent, the top seed, a three-time All-American, 39-0 in his senior year. Parker, Princeton, a junior, the fourth seed, 33-1. Parker has warmed up in a Harry Potter T-shirt. Sometimes he takes things too seriously. He gets nervous, makes mistakes. So he wears these T-shirts to keep his mind above the moment. Last year it was the Grinch. This year, at the NCAA Championships in front of 15,000 fans, it's an 11-year-old wizard.
Olson, confident and aggressive, takes Parker down, scores first. He thinks he has found a weakness. He lets Parker back up. He'll try the same sequence again.
Parker stops him. Not by dodging or slipping Olson's grasp, but by attacking. Parker shoots in on the favorite and heaves him to the mat. The hometown crowd explodes. The out-of-town crowd explodes. Parker settles in.
The two trade points back and forth over the next few periods, bringing the score to 8-8 in the waning minutes of the final period. Parker scores again. 10-8. The seconds tick away, and Olson desperately lunges for the last time, but Parker turns him away. Another point. 11-8. Time expires.
Suddenly Parker was the hero of the tournament. Fans told Princeton head coach Michael New that "it was so loud, you could see the noise." New, lost in focus and then jubilation, only remembers silence.
Reporters hounded Parker for the story of the local boy made good. Fending off 30 to 40 interviews a day, Parker began to struggle under the pressure. Nerves and sleepless nights left him weary by the final match against West Virginia's Greg Jones on March 23. While Parker was making a fairly ordinary move in the early going, a rib just below his right pectoral muscle cracked. He wrestled on, and did not go down easily, but in the end the quick Jones was too much for a wounded Parker and took a 12-5 win.
And so a championship year ended with a second-place finish. After losing his second match of the season, 3-2, to Jones in November, Parker reeled off 32 consecutive victories. Along the way, he was 5-0 in Ivy League matches and won Princeton's first Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association title in 16 years. He is the first Princeton wrestler to reach the NCAA finals since 1985.
Despite these impressive achievements, it was still very difficult to decide whether Parker should be the Daily Princetonian Athlete of the Year. Clear in many people's minds as the symbol of Princeton's athletic prowess is senior Tora Harris, who has been consistently astounding in the high jump over his four years. This year Harris won the NCAA indoor title, and just recently tied the meet record at the prestigious Penn Relays, re-setting his own Princeton record in the process with a jump of 2.30 meters – seven feet, six and a half inches. The height makes him a likely candidate for the U.S. Olympic team in 2004.
But what gave Parker the edge over Harris was his significance to the Princeton wrestling program. While the track team has been unfailingly successful in recent years, the wrestling team has often struggled while trying to regain a place among the sport's powers.
With a wrestler of Greg Parker's caliber in the stable, though, Princeton wrestling is no longer a lightweight. Thousands of young wrestlers turned to ESPN for the championships, and there they found Parker, in Princeton's glowing orange singlet, representing the University at the highest level.
New has been somewhat amused lately by some negative changes in his recruiting as a result of Parker's performance. A few very good wrestlers now tell him that they're concerned about coming to Princeton if they'll have to wrestle the likes of Parker. Somehow the upshot small-school boy in the Harry Potter T-shirt is intimidating. Somehow Princeton wrestling, off the map for so many years, now commands respect.
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