Episode 115 of the Late Night Shots Podcast
We were joined on episode 115 of the Late Night Shots podcast by World and Olympic Champion Kenny Monday. Monday is a 3x Olympian winning a gold and silver medal along with a world championship gold medal on top of that.
One of the big first topics for conversation were the recent events with his sons Kennedy and Quincy. Quincy just recently had a solid performance at the national tournament placing second and Kennedy decided to come back to college for his last year of eligibility and has listed his top 4.
Next we talked about his most iconic match which most would call it being the 1989 world finals where he had a super match with Soviet legend Arsen Fadzaev. He talked about how he did not even know that Fadzaev would be in his bracket until about 10 minutes before weigh ins. As well as mentioning how he watched Fadzaev growing up at they wrestled once while he was in college and he got his butt kicked.
He talked a lot about his battles domestically with guys like Lee Kemp, and Dave Schultz and how it was to be apart of such a legendary era in the the sport of wrestling with those guys domestically and names like Sergei Beloglazov, Arsen Fadzaev, and Alexandr Karelin internationally.
We did touch on the topic of the USA boycotting the 1980 Olympics and Kenny Monday talked about him becoming the first black Olympic Champion saying essentially that if the US Competed in the 1980 Olympic Games that Lee would have walked through it with no problem.
Diving into the boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, according to Kenny it somewhat tarnished the meaning of any medal won in 1980 and 1984 due to the fact that one of the best nations was not there competing. Russia would later go on to boycott the 1984 Olympics that were held in Los Angeles.
He dived in to the evolution of the sport and how cool it is to see the guys back when he was competing compared to the new age guys such as Jordan Burroughs, Zaurbek Sidakov, and Kyle Dake that are tearing up the scene nowadays. Also talked a lot about how guys such as himself, Fadzaev, the Beloglazov brothers, and John Smith really set the path for how this sport developed as a whole.
We did touch on the Spire Academy where he has taken up a head coaching role at the boarding school and looking to turn it into one of the biggest powerhouses alongside schools such as Blair and Wyoming Seminary.
Overall this is one of the greatest podcasts we have done and we really enjoyed getting to speak with Mr. Monday.
