Jim Bregman
American judoka
James Steven Bregman (born November 17, 1941, in Arlington, Virginia) was a member of the first American team to compete in judo at the Summer Olympics. A founding member and President of the United States Judo Federation, in his competitive career he was a bronze Olympic medalist (1964), a World Championships bronze medalist (1965), a Pan American Championships gold medalist, and a Maccabiah Games gold medalist (1965).
Biography
Bregman is Jewish. His father had a grocery store in Green Valley, Virginia, and the family lived above it on the second floor. Bregman started Judo at the age of 12 and spent many hours in Judo training at schools first near his Virginia home and then in Japan.
Early training
Bregman suffered as a child from asthma and bronchitis, and to build endurance tried several indoor sports before recognizing he could succeed at Judo. He was bussed to Fairlington Elementary School and was an honor graduate of Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. From an early age he trained at the Judo Club associated with the Officer's Athletic Club at the Pentagon, and at the Washington Judo Club, winning his Black Belt at 15. After High School, he enrolled as an economics student at Tokyo's Jesuit-run Sophia University. While a student at Sophia, he pursued long hours of Judo training at Tokyo's Kodokan Judo Institute, and later received more advanced training at Meiji and Waseda Universities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jim Bregman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.