I’ve covered the fortunes of several athletes at the Beijing Olympics now, but this was the first time I actually felt nervous for the kid I was watching — and writing about.

You talk to the guy, you meet his mom and his wife and his high school coach, and it’s odd how you can come to feel you know a guy semi-well in a matter of a few hours.

So it was with a Greco-Roman wrestler named Adam Wheeler.

A lightly regarded 211-pounder, Wheeler won three of four matches to walk out of the Chinese Agricultural University gym with a bronze medal.

He was good, but he was lucky, too.

And at the end, it seemed like a good guy had something good happen to him.

I got a little edgy for him (because of him) when he got to the semifinals, in the middle of the day, which were right on deadline for the Antelope Valley Press, the paper I was writing for.

(Here is a link to the story on the AV Press website.)

The jitters reappeared about four hours later, when Wheeler went against a Korean kid for a bronze medal. A guy I’d never laid eyes on before Thursday morning …. by Thursday night I was at least a little emotionally invested. Or my nervous system was, anyway.

He won with a daring move, and before I was out of the arena I’d given his wife a USA Wrestling media guide (she said she couldn’t get one, and wanted one for his scrapbook) … and Adam’s mother, Julie, had given me a hug. Just cuz I was representing her hometown paper, I guess.

Many times these ultra-local stories are the best. The ones about real people, and their 20-person rooting section, and the signs they make with Magic markers and the T-shirts they all wear, and the square-jawed future policeman who beats people probably better than he is, nine days out of 10, and he wins a medal that will be cherished forever by him and his family.

It was fun. It was cool. I was glad to be a part of it. And it reminds me that recording these moments for posterity, in this modest field we call journalism, is a big reason why I got into this in the first place.