The two quickly formed a close relationship, with Woods taking on increasingly advanced competition in New Mexico and Martinez pushing him every step of the way. “I was looking for a young man who I could bring to Chicago and take advantage of the opportunity … and after the second day, I knew Real was the guy.” “The golden ticket was the unheard thing that I didn’t announce publicly,” Martinez said in the documentary. Woods was the only wrestler who stood out, Martinez said. Years earlier, Martinez had invited a group of local New Mexico wrestlers to attend one of his training programs. The man in charge of the move was Israel Martinez, a wrestling coach who ran training programs for the top wrestlers in the country.

My dad taught me that, he taught me how to love growth.”įast forward a few years and a 14-year-old Woods is making the decision whether to leave his family and the life he knew in New Mexico to attend high school in Chicago. I’m competitive, I’ve always been competitive, and that’s one of the biggest things that has helped me succeed. “I was a hard worker, you know? I could do some crazy things and I would try to compete with these college athletes when I was seven, eight years old. “They would be doing workouts and I would just show off,” Woods said. While his father ran college football practices, Woods would camp out for hours on the sidelines or in the weight room, trying to show that he could compete.

“You’d yell out ‘do this,’ and there he would be, doing the same thing on the damn mat.” Real Woods always had something to prove, he said.

“He was like a remote control since day one,” Woods’ father, Ray Woods, said in “The Real Story,” a recent documentary made by Keep Stanford Wrestling that follows Real Woods’ journey to Stanford. Within his first two years of wrestling, Woods had won local tournament after tournament, defeating kids older and bigger than him. And right away it just came naturally to me.” So my uncle asked my dad if he could throw me into wrestling and see how that went. “But I was never the biggest kid, so we knew that wasn’t going to be much of an option. “My dad was a football coach,” Woods said. Woods started wrestling at the age of six, when his father’s friend, a wrestling coach who Woods calls his uncle, introduced him to the sport. It was not the loss of two more years of Stanford wrestling that hurt the most, but the loss of the dream that he has sacrificed so much for since he was an undersized kid with a fire in his heart, Woods said. It was almost like losing someone close to you, someone you love.” “It was something I had never experienced before. “There is no word that could explain really what it felt like,” Woods said. But when he read in July that Stanford was planning to discontinue its wrestling program following the 2021 season, Woods felt like there was nowhere to go. In short, Woods is well-acquainted with giving up almost everything in order to achieve his goals. To get to Stanford, he had to give up four years with his family for a chance to wrestle against elite competition, forego carefree high school afternoons for tireless hours in the gym and leave his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the unfamiliar city of Chicago, Illinois. “All the boys in the family.”įor Woods, family is everything, and sacrifice is the norm. “We’re all gonna do it,” Woods said about getting the tattoo.

It’s a W, symbolizing Woods, the family name, struck through by two linked diamond shapes, representing sacrifice. If you click pause at the split second right after redshirt sophomore Real Woods pins his opponent down, right before he springs up to pound his chest in victory, you might be able to see the tattoo on his upper back peeking out of his Cardinal singlet.

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