Twenty years ago, Jim Swanson, Steve Neely and Grant Miller landed in the same wrestling weight class to create the greatest three-way individual competition perhaps in any sport in NIC-10 history.
Over an entire season, the trio would lose only one match that wasn’t to each other. They claimed three of the top four spots at that spring’s IHSA Class AA 189-pound wrestling tournament.
They wrestled in the golden age for NIC-10 wrestling. Beginning in 1995 and running until 2003, nine wrestlers from four schools won 12 state wrestling titles. There were several years where two different wrestlers from what was then the NIC-9 placed at state at the same weight, but this remains the one and only year with three.
At the start of the 2000-01 wrestling season, Swanson was the consensus pick by conference coaches to add his name to the list of wrestling state champions. Although Swanson had yet to win a NIC-9 conference title, he’d placed fourth at state at 171 pounds as a junior and had grown into the 189-pound class.
“I started wrestling at age 5 or 6,” said Swanson, who now is a physical therapist in Dayton, Ohio. “My dad was a power lifter in the 1980s and beginning in fifth grade he’d get me up in the mornings to train. I’d get weight benches for Christmas.”
Swanson started out his high school career at 140 pounds and just kept packing on muscle. He was the No. 1 ranked wrestler at 189 pounds going into the season and no one was in better condition.
Although East’s Steve Neely was born in Rockford, he grew up in Cincinnati before moving back in 1997. He didn’t start wrestling until eighth grade, and his first full season wasn’t until he was a freshman at East. By his sophomore year, he’d already advanced to where he went 24-8 and qualified for the state tournament as a heavyweight.
“I was only 190 pounds wrestling guys who were 275,” Neely said. East had Joel Powers for heavyweight in 2001 so Neely could move down to a more natural weight even though he knew he’d be going against Swanson.“He was so strong, and he had a lot of skill,” Neely said. “It was an honor to wrestle Jim Swanson.”
The two were undefeated when they finally met for the first time at an East-Harlem dual meet.
“That first match, I’m not going to lie, I was nervous,” Neely said. “The house was packed. I was trying to figure out how to attack.”
Neither Neely nor Swanson remembers the final score. They thought it was either 5-2 or 5-3 with Swanson winning. What Swanson remembers is that he quickly realized that he couldn’t bully Neely.
“I almost always felt like strength was my advantage,” Swanson said. “But Neely — I don’t know if he worked at it or it came naturally — but he was one of the few I ever wrestled who was as strong as me.”
The upstart
Normally, a wrestler as talented and accomplished as Hononegah’s Grant Miller was going to be celebrated. For much of 2001, when it came to discussing 189 pounds, Miller was kind of an afterthought.
Miller was naturally the biggest of all three. He started wrestling seriously in sixth grade when he already was 170 pounds. He liked the sport right off and soon he was spending most of his weekends in national tournaments in places such as Reno, Nevada, and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
By the time he was a sophomore, he had a ton of trophies and confidence. Neely put him in his place in the first dual meet of the year.
“What a beast,” Miller said of Neely. “Joel (Powers) told me he was pretty good, but (Neely) hadn’t done anything super huge. This was my first match of the season and I have a picture where I have him almost taken down. He has one hand on the mat and his legs are underneath me … and he ended up getting out of it.
“When it was over I thought ‘I’m going to have to wrestle him three or four more times if I want to get where I need to be.’”
His first match against Swanson went even worse. The two wrestled in an annual tournament in Harvard and Swanson nearly beat him by a major decision.
“Jim was ahead of me and I had to try some things and he put me on my back for a five-point move,” Miller said.
Miller fared better in his dual meet match against Swanson. Foreshadowing of the shift in fortunes to come.
“I don’t remember the score, but it was a lot closer,” Swanson said. “Hononegah had a coach (Marty Kaiser) who could coach how to beat you. I don’t know if they watched film, but I felt in control of the match the first time I wrestled Grant. I never quite felt in control after that first match.”
Still, heading into the postseason, Swanson was undefeated and ranked No. 1, Neely was No. 2 with the one loss and Miller was No. 3.
Hononegah had won the NIC-9 wrestling titles in 1999 and 2000 and Kaiser, looking to maximize the team’s points, moved Miller to 215 pounds, where he cruised to a conference title. It didn’t work. Harlem won the conference title behind six different Huskies claiming conference titles.
Swanson wasn’t one of them. Neely and Swanson squared off for the 189-pound title and Neely handed Swanson his first loss, 3-1, in overtime.
“The first time we wrestled, I learned some things that I thought might work when we wrestled again,” Neely said. “The thing with Jim was that he was really aggressive. You had to be ready for a lot of different moves.”
The three were back in the same pool for the Class AA IHSA regionals. Neely and Miller met for the second time in the semifinals with Neely winning 9-6. That earned Neely his third match with Swanson and he made it two in a row, winning 3-2.
All three moved on to the sectional, but all three weren’t in top form. That week, Swanson came down with shingles, a viral infection that causes painful rashes.
“I wasn’t going to bring that up because I don’t want to make excuses,” Swanson said. “I was in bed two or three days straight. I couldn’t eat. I lost 15 to 20 pounds. I had gained some of the weight back by the weekend, but I wasn’t at my best.”
Swanson’s goal that weekend was simply to qualify for state. He gutted his way through to the semifinals where he ran into Miller, who beat him for the first time, 3-0. Neely improved to a perfect 3-0 against Miller, though, winning the sectional title, 6-3.
“Neely had my number that year,” Miller said. “Nothing I tried worked.”
At state, a familiar script was unfolding. Like sectionals, Miller and Swanson were on the same side of the bracket. The top-seeded Neely was on the other.
Miller and Swanson easily made the semifinals and Miller again won, 3-0.
“Jim wasn’t right at sectionals, but at state it was game on,” Miller remembered. “It was a pretty crazy match. There were times where I was holding on by my fingertips to keep him from spinning out. My dad recorded that match and you can barely watch it because the camera is shaking so much.”
The match ended just before the big shock of the day. Neely was toying with Matt Joseph of Arlington Heights Hersey when Joseph put him in a headlock and pinned him.
“Steve was up something like 14-3 and he got lackadaisical,” Miller said. “I’d wrestled (Joseph) the year before and he got me with a headlock. That was his specialty.”
Neely said he was trying to finish Joseph off when he heard the Hersey coach say “hit it.”
“They must have seen something in the first period that I was doing,” Neely said. “I was up 10 points, but he locked it in and flipped his hips and it was over.”
Miller had mixed emotions.
“You know, when you wrestle at our level, it’s hard to beat someone four straight times,” Miller said. “I thought I had a chance just because of that, but when Steve lost I knew I was going to win a state title because all you had to do was stay away from (Joseph’s) headlock.”
Miller cruised to a 10-6 win to become the first sophomore to win the 189-pound title in state history. Neely and Swanson wrestled one last time for third place. Neely won, 9-4, in a match neither talked about because neither cared.
“Of course I was disappointed,” Swanson said. “If you don’t win the tournament, it’s always a disappointment.”
Neely said he still thinks about the semifinal loss.
“When you work so hard and you know that’s something you should have had,” Neely said, “it makes you think ‘I want to do it over.’”
Swanson ended up 40-5 on the season, 3-5 against Neely and Miller. Neely finished 33-2, going 6-1 against Swanson and Miller. Miller, the state champ, was 43-5, going 2-5 against Swanson and Neely.
The three never wrestled each other again. Swanson, of course, graduated. He had a scholarship to wrestle at Northern Illinois University. He went for a year and felt burned out. He transferred to Rock Valley, started getting more into powerlifting, and was coaching at Harlem when a couple of coaches talked to him at a tournament about giving it another shot.
Swanson transferred to University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse and wrestled at the Division III level. He qualified for the national tournament all three years, finishing fifth once and second in 2006. He looks back at his career now as a series of near misses.
Neely and Miller were both back for the 2001-2002 season, but Neely quit before the first match, came back for a couple of weeks, then quit for good.
“I’d just moved out of my dad’s house. My head wasn’t in it,” said Neely. “Now, I tell kids all the time, the partying can wait. You only get one shot at this stuff.”
Miller returned to state in 2002 at 215 pounds, but he didn’t feel as sharp without Neely and Swanson to test him and he was upset in the semifinals. He proved his sophomore state title was no fluke, though, by winning the 2003 state heavyweight title with a perfect 44-0 record as a senior. Miller easily is among the most accomplished wrestlers in NIC-10 history.
In college, though, he ended up gravitating to football. He had a scholarship to wrestle at Ohio State and also wrangled an agreement to be a preferred walk-on to the football team. That gave him the honor of getting beat up in practice by the likes of A.J. Hawk, Will Smith and Darrion Scott.
Although Miller talks about how amazing it was to be around talent of that level, it was quickly clear that he was never going to progress much beyond tackling dummy. He transferred to Dominican University in River Forest and got a degree in accounting. Today, Miller is a CPA in Northbrook.
For years, Harlem hosted an Old-Timers Wrestling Tournament. When asked, if someone were to try to resurrect it, would the three of them put on the singlet one more time, Neely was enthusiastic.
“I would love to do that,” said Neely, who is a machinist at Barnes International in Rockford, raising a 17-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son. “You tell those guys I said hello.”
Swanson, who continues to train but no longer competes as a powerlifter, was less enthusiastic.
“I got on the mat four or five years ago to help my cousin train,” Swanson said. “The moves came back pretty quickly but the lungs didn’t. There’s no way I could go hard the way we used to.”
Miller was an emphatic no.
“I’m so far removed from being an athlete. I’m a desk jockey nerd now,” Miller said. “I’d ruin whatever memories people have of me.”
