Any users that want to post their own news now can. I didn’t realize that new user’s couldn’t before. Oops.

If you have registered for an account in the past, or if you do in the future, you now can login and write a story and save it. Then, when it’s ready to be published, let me know and I’ll make it live.

You can post on anything related to amateur wrestling, martial arts or boxing. Thoughts, views, opinions, product reviews, poems whatever you want. I’m pretty open.

By Michael Cole

“My body is so beat up and run down, I can’t even think straight,” Kurt Angle tells WWE.com in an exclusive interview Saturday concerning his early release from his contract with World Wrestling Entertainment. Angle and WWE officials mutually agreed to end Angle’s relationship with the company on Friday.

Angle says seven years of non-stop wrestling has taken a major toll on his body, his mind and his family. “I need my body to reheal and rehab, I have done this for too long without a break. I haven’t been able to really enjoy my life. I haven’t seen my family, I’ve had problems with medication - I’m just fried physically and mentally.”

Angle’s business manager David Hawk claims, “Kurt’s in a tremendous amount of pain, he’s used prescription medication to deal with it. Kurt has come to the conclusion that unless he can get in the ring without the use of pain medication then he doesn’t need to be in there. He realizes he was just endangering himself and his opponents.”

Due to personal issues, Kurt Angle has been granted an early release from his contract. WWE looks forward to establishing a new relationship with Kurt in the near future.

The only Olympic gold medalist in WWE history, Kurt Angle arrived in 1999 and quickly became one of the most decorated champions in sports-entertainment history. “The Wrestling Machine” is not only a six-time World Champion, but also held the Intercontinental Championship and WWE Tag Team Championship; he also won the 2000 King of the Ring tournament. Recently joining ECW, Angle’s unmatched intensity was rivaled only by his technical and athletic in-ring prowess.

Angle was a two-time NCAA heavyweight champion (1990 and ‘92) and Olympic gold medalist at the 1996 Atlanta Games. 

Preseason practices just aren’t what they used to be.

If you have been lounging on the couch all summer playing video games, or spending July days working on your tan, odds are you probably will not be starting this fall on your high school sports team.

And maybe you have already been cut.

The world of high school athletics is a lot tougher and more competitive these days than when athletes’ parents or grandparents were in school.

Football teams have been going through two-a-days, while practices for sports like soccer and volleyball have been lasting three or four hours.

If you weren’t working out this summer, running miles and hitting the weight room, you have probably been hurting for the past week.

“We’ve reinforced it, when they come into camp, they better be able to run and be ready,” Penns Valley girls’ soccer coach Jeff Wiest said. “We go on several-mile runs every day initially and a lot of conditioning anyway. Several years ago some girls learned the hard way, when our program was in its infancy, they wouldn’t do anything and see how hard it was.”

RANTOUL - If you were looking for a gladiator to battle the toughest, meanest, nastiest son-of-a-gun on earth and had the entire University of Illinois athletic kingdom to choose from, the best choice might not be an athlete.

It might be a coach.

Mark Johnson is part pit bull, part chainsaw and all guts and grizzle. He’d take out Bad, Bad Leroy Brown with the back of his hand just for the stretching exercise.

Most people think it’s an exaggeration, but the Illini wrestling coach can still step onto the mat and whip any of his wrestlers, heavyweights included. That’s no small task considering that Johnson is now closing in on 50 and Illinois has produced seven individual national champions under his watch.

A former member of the U.S. Olympic team, Johnson is still in tip-top shape, and as he scours the nation for the best recruits, and it goes without saying he has an eye trained to spot athletic prowess and athletic imposters.

So while in Decatur the other night helping to raise money for Project Success, Johnson’s honest thoughts on the state of the Illini football program were heard with keen interest.

Hank Kornblut - OhioWrestling.Net

On December 22, 2005, Notre Dame College, a liberal arts school of 1400 students in South Euclid, Ohio, announced it was adding men’s wrestling to its athletics program.  There were no coaches in place.  There was no wrestling room on campus.  And there was certainly no team.

Eight months later, NDC is almost finished constructing a wrestling room.  Two full size, custom cut mats will fill out the space.  The coaches’ office is built into it.  The school’s weight room is being expanded and new equipment has been purchased.  A seasoned full-time head coach and two quality assistants have been hired.  Perhaps most impressively, however, is the list of wrestlers who have committed to NDC.  Forty-two young men and counting will be part of the inaugural squad.  One is a former NHSCA Senior Nationals champion; three have won state titles.  Fourteen others have placed at the OHSAA state championships at least once — some on multiple occasions.  Most of the rest qualified for the Ohio state meet during their careers.  In addition, two more former state champions are likely to sign — perhaps by the time you are reading these words.

MIKE KUHNS
Record Sports Editor

Angelo Borzio, the former wrestler and coach at East Stroudsburg University, is supposed to be lounging on the beach these days, not wrestling on it.

But wrestling was exactly what Borzio was doing last Saturday in West Palm Beach, Fla. at the first ever USA Beach Nationals.

Borzio won the heavyweight class 240-270 pounds and a bid to the World Championships in Turkey Nov. 1-5. The former wrestler who rose as high as No. 3 on the U.S. Olympic ladder, placing third at the U.S. Nationals in 2000, admits he didn’t know what to expect when he entered the tournament.

“I don’t know how to take it serious,” said Borzio, who wrestled in the Olympic trials in 2000 and ‘04. “What do I do, go to the beach and push people around?”

Once thought to have ended his competitive wrestling career, Borzio just couldn’t resist giving beach wrestling a shot.

“I looked at it as an opportunity to have fun,” he said.

The sport emerged last year and consists of a rope that is laid in the sand which forms a 20-foot diameter circle. A takedown is a point and getting any part of your opponent out of the circle is a point.

By Sharon Robb
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

SINGER ISLAND - Eric Albarracin no longer travels light.

Unlike his early years in wrestling when the Coral Springs High graduate slept on friends’ couches, walked five miles to practice and lived on money he got for his birthday and Christmas to keep his Olympic dream alive, the 29-year-old now has a place to call home, hang his medals and cook a meal.

He spent $3,000 on airline tickets and hotel rooms for his EA Kombat Wrestling Club to be a part of history at the first USA Wrestling National Beach Championships on Saturday at the Hilton Oceanfront Resort.

“Back in the day I could have lived on $3,000 for three years,” said Albarracin, an Army captain based at Fort Carson, Colo., and 2008 Olympic hopeful in Greco-Roman style wrestling. He is a five-time Armed Forces champion and this year qualified for world-level competitions in three different styles.

“Those were the days, living off happy hours, ordering water and then eating all I could for free because that was my meal for the day,” said the 5-foot-4, 121-pounder.

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Written by Koy Kosek

In November of 1993, the Ultimate Fighting Championship was organized. The concept was brilliant in its simplicity: there were only two major rules regulating the fighters – no biting and no eye-gouging – and the rounds were 10 minutes each in length. Presumably to look good on television, fighters were put into an eight-sided cage dubbed “The Octagon” with no way out during the match. Each competitor would try to secure a victory, either by knocking out, choking out, or forcing the surrender of his opponent. As an example of how vicious the competition was, none of the matches in that first event even went the full length of the first round. Royce Gracie was crowned the original UFC Champion in what is now known as UFC 1.

Originally, the sport of mixed martial arts (abbreviated MMA) was billed as a mixture of sports more than as a sport unto itself. Early matches pitted jiu-jitsu experts against boxers, boxers against karate fighters, karate fighters against wrestlers, etc. In its early form, the MMA movement was a kind of mix-and-match of fighters with various backgrounds.

Fast forward to 2006.