Kamal Bey on Wednesday!

KAMAL BEY

The ILLINI Regional Training Center is not finished. On Wednesday, Kamal Bey will wrestle in New York City in Final X. He is the fourth IRTC team member to make the USA World Team, but he wants more than that. He wants to be the American representative at the World Championships. 

To do that, he will have to go through a teammate. 

This is the hype provided by USA Wrestling:

Bout 1 – 77 kg GR - Britton Holmes (Army WCAP) vs. Kamal Bey (Army WCAP)

Britton Holmes and Kamal Bey will kick off the action at Hulu Theater in what will be their first match up in recent years. However, that is not the say the two aren’t familiar with each other. Bey and Holmes are teammates who train together every day with Army WCAP. The match in New York City will be an extension of their battles in the practice room.

Holmes, a 2021 U23 World Team member, has been etching his name into the Greco-Roman conversation at the Senior level for some time now. To earn his spot in New York, he won the semifinals at the 2021 World Team Trials Challenge Tournament after upsetting the No. 1 seed, RaVaughn Perkins, 4-3. The win over Perkins displays the level that Holmes is wrestling at. Perkins is a 2016 Olympic Team Trials champion, two-time Dave Schultz Memorial champion and 2022 Pan American gold medalist. He was also the 2022 U.S. Open champion. Holmes has also been at nearly every stop of the Greco-Roman road to success after spending time at the OTC in Colorado Springs, NMU-RTC and now training at Army WCAP.

Bey, a 2017 Junior World Champion, has been a name that highlights Greco-Roman conversation. Bey wrestles an exciting style that people like to watch. He can score in nearly every position and is dangerous to lock up with. Bey competed on the 2018 Senior World Team, took silver at the 2019 Pan American Championships, won the 2019 Dave Schultz Memorial International and placed fifth at the 2018 Junior World championships. To earn his spot at Final X, he defeated 2021 Senior World Team member and 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials champion Jesse Porter.

I think we can do a little better than that, no? Here are some Kamal Bey highlights set to Coolio's Gansta's Paradise:

That video has over 50k views, which isn't as much as Coolio's original--coming in at 978m--but for a Greco video, that's pretty legend. 

But why stop there? Here's video of Bey's Gold Medal match against Akzhol Makhmudov of Kyrgyzstan, who is listed in Wikipedia as a "Master of Sport":

That video has 1,748,344 views at this telling. That's absolute legend! But you have to watch the video on Youtube because the UWW is a bunch of paranoid ****heads.  The American won 16-11 in a rather high-flying affair. 

HOW TO WATCH

For reasons only known to princes and fools, USAW and Flo decided to put the New York City Final X on a Wednesday, June 8. The best of three matches will be streamed on FloWrestling, a pay site, starting at 2:00 pm (Eastern). Kamal is listed as having the first bout. 

His second bout and any third one if needed, will be in the afternoon session, which starts at 6:00 pm (Eastern). Go Kamal! 

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Photo and Video credits: Top, UWW; Middle, Throwdown Highlights; Bottom, UWW