‘I feel like a champion’ Swain wrestler is a winner on and off the mat
By Chris Womack
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BRYSON CITY, North Carolina (WLOS) — The anticipation has reached a fever-pitch inside the gym at Swain County High School. Every wrestler, fan, and coach has turned their eyes to the center mat. In one corner is Nolan Griggs, bopping up and down with a championship belt flopping up and down against his stomach.
He looks across the mat and yells, “You’re going down! I’m going to give you the cradle!”
The cheers hit a crescendo.
In the other corner his opponent smiles wryly. “We’ll see,” chuckled Austin Jenkins. “We’ll see.”
To understand why this is the match of the day at the Devil Duals Tournament, you need to understand Nolan. He was born with Down Syndrome, but he has the kind of smile that’s unforgettable and an attitude of gratitude that is remarkable.
When he was on Pre-K he met Adam Jaimez, now the head wrestling coach at Swain County.
“Nolan and I go way back,” smiled Jaimez. “It’s just one of those things where you develop that relationship and he always told me he’d wrestle. But I never thought he would to be honest with you, because I didn’t know if he’d still like it. I didn’t know if he’d still remember me.”
Nolan did, and when he got to high school he joined the team. He’s at every practice, sometimes rolling around on the mat with a teammate, sometimes sitting off to the side reading his Bible, sometimes sitting cross-legged listening to his coaches while flipping the long black spoon he always carries with him.
“That’s my favorite part of all of it, to be with this team,” said Nolan.
This year Jaimez began letting Nolan wrestle some of his teammates during meets, each progressively getting more challenging – but all ending the same.
“Every match I win because I feel like the champion,” beamed Nolan.
That brings us back to Devil Duals. Jenkins is his latest teammate to step into the ring, but the first to do so in such a raucous atmosphere. Literally nobody in the county wants him to even score a point.
“We’re going to have a title match — for the heavyweight championship of the world!” bellowed Jeff Marr over the PA system. As his entrance music begins to resonate through the rafters, Nolan struts around the mat smacking the belt on his waist.
A couple of teammates come over and remove the belt like this was a Showtime Pay-Per-View fight of the year. The referee blows the whistle and Jenkins, true to the process of increasing the challenge, takes early control of the match under a chorus of boos.
About a minute into the tussle Nolan takes control, flips Jenkins on his back, and with a tweet of the whistle and a hand smacking the mat the ref sends the crowd into a frenzy. Nolan has won by takedown again.
“Kind of surreal,” remarked Jaimez. “I guess we kind of started that out just for him, just for us and it took on a life of its own. Just super grateful that people recognize how special he is and just how much fun he’s having.”
As two members of the Enka girls wrestling team place the title belt back around him and lift his arms in a victorious salute, Nolan yells to the crowd, “Thank you! Thank you!”
It should really be everyone else thanking him, not just for a world title match in a crook of Western North Carolina but for teaching everyone in attendance a lesson.
“Just accept people as they are; Nolan believes he’s a normal kid and so do we,” said Jaimez. “He doesn’t want anything more or less than that and I think he just wants to be a part of something.”
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