Johnnie Waters had no idea what the future
held when he suggested that his cousin William try wrestling.
Johnnie, who was four years older, was a
wrestler at Flint Northern High School while William was in seventh grade.
“He came over to my house one day and
talked to me about it,” William said. “I decided to come out and fell in love with the sport. I was at
Holmes Junior High, and the coach there was Jerry Walters. He was a great disciplinarian, a no-nonsense guy, so I
decided to come out for the team my eighth-grade year.”
For an 80-pound kid who was beginning to
realize he was too undersized to play football, wrestling seemedlike the perfect fit.
“It was just something where I got a chance
to compete against people my size, so it was a lot of fun,” Waters said.
It took a couple of years for Waters to
really immerse himself in the sport. He competed in 10 matches in eighth grade, then moved to a school in
Arkansas that didn’t have a team.
When he returned to Flint for 10th grade,
he came out for the team at Northern. He had a solid season, going 24-17, but there were no signs of the
greatness that lay right around the corner.
“Some of these younger kids have goals to
be Olympic champs and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “I had no goals set at all. I just wanted to come
out for the team. I thought it was fun when I did it in eighth grade.”
With only 51 lifetime matches through his
sophomore year, Waters joined a wrestling club called the Black Cats, which was run by Northern coach
Francis Bentley. Waters was transformed into a new wrestler after competing in about 40 matches in the spring
and summer before his junior year.
He fashioned a 48-6 record as a junior,
with three of those losses coming on tie-breaker criteria. He took second in the state Class A tournament at
105 pounds, losing 4-3 in the final to Ed Curtis of Temperance Bedford.
“I really picked up the sport fast, I would
say,” he said.
Waters branched out the following summer,
wrestling on the national level. That prepared him for a senior year in which he went 54-0 and rolled
through the state tournament, winning 16-6 over Steve Brown of Troy in the 1983 Class A 112-pound final.
“Once you start wrestling at tournaments
throughout the country, the state meet is small,” he said.
Waters’ phenomenal senior season caught the
attention of the University of Michigan, which offered him a full-ride scholarship.
At Michigan, Waters placed second at 118 in
the 1985 Big Ten Conference tournament and took third each of the next two years.
“We had a really good team each year that I
was there,” Waters said. “I had great coaches and great teammates. It was a really great
experience, because the Big Ten Conference is the toughest wrestling conference in the nation, so week in and
week out you’re going against some of the top guys in the country.”
The 1988 Olympics were around the corner
when Waters graduated from Michigan, but he didn’t make an attempt to qualify. He began life after
wrestling by getting married and using his degree to get a job.
“To train for the Olympics, I couldn’t
afford to because I had a wife,” he said. “That was a decision I made to go that way. My high school teammate
John Fisher, he went the other way. He became a two-time Olympic team alternate.
“Our paths were different. I love
wrestling, but I really look at wrestling as my way to a better life. Getting
my degree from the University of Michigan was
my No. 1 priority; making the Olympic team wasn’t.”
Waters returned to Northern from 1992-95,
working as an assistant coach on the 1995 team that won the state Class A championship. He’s been a
physical education teacher at Bridgeport High School for 24 years.
“This year I’m going to help bring back our
middle school program,” Waters said. “I agreed to do that for the varsity coach, so I’m looking forward to
doing that this year. Get little kids in the sport and make it fun for them.
Maybe there’s another kid that just grabs
ahold of the sport and loves it and goes to the next level with it.”
