Travis Hammons is poised to make wrestling history.
He’s more interested in overcoming it.
The Hubbard senior is a favorite to become the first Chicago Public League wrestler in 17 years to win a state championship.
That’s fine with Hammons, but what he really wants to do is just write a happy final chapter to his high school wrestling career.
He desperately wants a state title because that’s the only thing that can rinse the awful taste of defeat from his mouth.
That taste has lingered since he lost 5-4 to Providence’s Sean Reynolds in the 140-pound quarterfinals in the Class AA individual wrestling tournament last year in Champaign.
“It was devastating,” says Hammons, who was undefeated entering the match and believed for a moment he had won it. “I felt like dying.”
His mother had to help talk him into continuing in the tournament.
“You would have thought Travis had just lost . . . maybe me,” Tanya Hammons says. “It really just blew his heart away.”
Hammons, however, rallied emotionally and finished third at 140. Reynolds finished first.
Had Hammons done that, he would have become the Public League’s first state champ since Toby Willis of Morgan Park won at 155 pounds in 1988.
Instead disappointment consumed him and left him determined to get it right next time.
“My whole mind-set changed,” he says. “It hit me on the stand I was just third . . . it really hit me.”
Hammons quit Hubbard’s football team to focus solely on wrestling and redemption. He is so driven that he regularly follows up his Hubbard practices with evening sessions with the Harvey Twisters, the south suburban wrestling club with which he starred before high school.
After returning to his South Side home, he runs and jumps rope.
“I wanted to make sure what happened last year would not happen this year,” he says. “I’ve kept pushing myself.”
It reminds Tanya Hammons of a famous boxing film.
“He’s training like Rocky did when he had that big fight,” she said. “He’s in a whole other world but focused, very focused.”
The results have been impressive. Hammons, who now wrestles at 160 pounds, has not lost a high school match since facing Reynolds, and he has already wrestled some of his strongest competitors for the state title in invitational meets.
Wrestling has mattered to Hammons since his mother took him to a Twisters practice when he was 5 years old.
“The first day I was loving it,” he says. “I loved the aggressiveness and the contact, how physical it was.”
Hammons won several state titles with the Twisters.
He enrolled at Thornwood but left after his freshman year, his mother said, because he wasn’t accomplishing what she hoped for on the mat or in the classroom.
Hammons immediately became one of the Public League’s top wrestlers, which wasn’t all that difficult.
Since 1990, Public League wrestlers have won just a dozen individual state medals.
The biggest problem is that Public League coaches get few freshmen with significant wrestling experience, something league administrators are trying to change.
Hubbard coach James Brown credits Hammons for working with the team’s neophyte wrestlers.
“He takes kids aside and encourages them and says, `This is what Coach is talking about,’ ” Brown says. “He’s everyone on the team’s big brother.”
Facilities also are a problem. Before Hubbard’s wrestlers can begin practice, for example, they must move desks set up for a class in a third-floor gym that they sometimes share with other teams.
Monday the wrestlers had to spend 75 minutes lugging seven heavy red wrestling mats from the first-floor main gym, where they had been used for the Hubbard regional meet two days earlier, up the stairs to their practice facility.
“This is time we could be practicing,” says Brown, whose team will compete Friday and Saturday in the Morton sectional. “Travis is getting ready for two huge meets, and he has to move mats.
“Do you think the guys he’s wrestling against are moving mats?”
Hammons acknowledges he faces distractions his state tournament opponents don’t, but he refuses to dwell on it.
“In the suburbs you probably have a wrestling room built for you,” he says. “Here, a lot of stuff goes on to break your focus, but it doesn’t stop me.”
Hammons plans to wrestle in college and, he hopes, in the Olympics, but right now his attention is trained totally on the state tournament.
“I daydream about it,” he said. “I dream about it at night. I’m anxious, real anxious.
“I dream about the finals. I get the last takedown to win it. My hand is raised.
“It’s long overdue.”
So is ending the Public League’s drought, but Hammons regards that as a happy byproduct.
“It’s not really big to me,” he says. “The biggest match to me is the match I lost last year.
“That’s my motivation. Every time I think about it, I work harder.”
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btemkin@tribune.com
