Myles Amine's eye-popping performance while wrestling with essentially one eye quickly became one of the NCAA Championships' more intriguing storylines. 

Especially as images of the Michigan senior's badly-swollen and reddened left eye began surfacing on social media. 

The gruesome injury was the result of an accidental headbutt with Wyoming's Stephen Buchanan during their 197-pound quarterfinal match.

Amine held off Buchanan, 7-6, but his eye gradually swelled all but completely shut as his semifinal match against wildly-talented Oklahoma State true freshman A.J. Ferrari loomed later that evening.

Amine dropped a 5-1 decision to Ferrari, the eventual champion, but with a wrap around his head and the eye still nearly closed, he roared back the next day to finish third. 

"I wound up getting hit square in the eye, and, yes, it was looking pretty bad, but there was no way I was not going to continue wrestling," said Amine, who is wrestling for San Marino at the upcoming Olympics. "I had the semifinals coming up and there was too much wrestling left to do. That was my mentality. Fortunately, the (tournament) doctor agreed I could keep going."

Amine became just the fourth Michigan wrestler with four top-four finishes at the NCAA Championships after also placing third as a junior and sophomore and fourth as a freshman.

Other members of that elite club are Jarrett Hubbard (1971-74), three-time NCAA champion Mark Churella (1976-79) and John Fisher (1985-89). Overall, Amine is one of seven four-time All-Americans in Michigan's history. 

"Unbelievable career by Myles Amine," Mason Beckman, a two-time Lehigh All-American, tweeted. "A guy who never competed or handled himself with anything but class. Fun to watch, easy to root for, impossible to not respect. Tip of the cap to one of Michigan’s all-time greats."

Amine, who has not yet indicated if he will take advantage of an extra season of eligibility, raised his collegiate record to 95-19, including 34 wins by major decision (19), technical fall (nine) or pin (six). He has gone 25-15 against All-Americans.

He has also placed in the top three at the Big Ten Championships four times, including this season's title-winning performance. 

Amine is one of three All-Americans from his extended family. His father, Mike, was an NCAA runner-up in 1988 while cousin, Cam, finished seventh at 165 pounds this year. 

"This is what a Champion Trophy and a warrior looks like on and off the battlefield," beamed Mike Amine on Twitter. "So very proud to call him my son !!!"

The eye incident is not the only adversity that has been thrown Amine’s way during the past six months.

At a press conference following his 5-3 win over two-time All-American Jacob Warner of Iowa for third place, Amine revealed why he did not wrestle his first match until Feb. 12, more than a month after the season began.

Turns out, Amine suffered a fractured thumb and torn ligament while helping Cliff Keen Wrestling Club capture the RTC Cup in December. The injuries required surgery and followed by a two-month recovery period. 

A setback for sure, but anyone who knows Amine knows he responds positively to such news. 

"The timing was still perfect because I knew I could still wrestle a few duals and be ready for Big Tens and the NCAA Championships," he said. "That was important because I've always loved the team aspect of wrestling and have always taken a lot of pride in wearing the block M."

After two straight runner-up finishes, Amine captured his first Big Ten championship with a 7-3 decision over previously unbeaten Eric Schultz of Nebraska, a four-time NCAA qualifier. Amine was also third as a freshman. 

Entering the NCAA Championships unbeaten and seeded first, Amine won his first two matches by a combined 12-2 margin before edging Buchanan. 

Unfortunately, Amine had trouble generating offense against Ferrari and put himself in too great a hole after giving up a first-period takedown and a 2:30 riding-time advantage. The quality of opposition did not lessen much thereafter, but Amine rebounded nicely to overcome eventual fifth-place finisher Rocky Elam (Missouri), 8-6, before knocking off Warner and finishing the season with an 11-1 record.

“I felt really confident going into the NCAA Championships, but sometimes things don’t go your way,” he said. “Not winning a national title really stings and will sting for a while. As with any setback I’ve ever experienced, I used it in a positive way to motivate me even more as I continue training for the European Championships and Olympics.”

Roughly a month after the NCAA Championships, Amine was in Warsaw for the European Championships. He earned a third straight medal, decisioning 2017 World Championships silver medalist Boris Makoev (Slovakia), 6-4, for bronze in the 86-kilogram freestyle competition. 

Amine opened with a 4-0 decision over France's Akhmed Aibuev before falling to Russia's Artur Naifonov, 2-0. The World bronze medalist previously defeated Amine 6-0 and 4-0, but scored only passivity points this time. 

Amine won a European silver medal last year just before the pandemic began and bronze in 2019.

“I hold myself to a pretty high standard and always go to a tournament intending to win it, but I feel how I did at the European Championships is a good sign for Tokyo," Amine says. "I closed the gap on Naifonov. I mean, he didn’t score any points directly on me. It was more of a referee’s decision that gave him points.”

Amine, 10th in the current world 86-kilogram freestyle rankings, has beaten four World medalists in recent years, including the 17th-ranked Makoev, No. 11 Ali Shabanau (Bulgaria), No. 16 Sohsuke Takatani (Japan) and Georgia’s Sandro Aminashvili.

In all, the four have combined for seven world medals and four Olympic berths. 

Amine is a dual citizen of the United States and San Marino because his mother’s grandfather came to America from there in the early 1900s.

He became the Amine family’s second Olympian back in October of 2019 with a fifth-place showing at the World Championships. Grandfather Nazem Amine, who died in 2017 at age 90, wrestled for Lebanon in the 1956 and 1960 Olympics. 

Myles then took an Olympic redshirt for the 2019-20 NCAA season to prepare for the Games. That preparation was going as planned until the coronavirus pandemic changed everything and delayed the Olympics a year.  

Thanks to his family’s strong wrestling heritage, Amine was able to continue training with partners even when Michigan shut down. 

He practiced in the basement of his parents' home with older brother Malik, a former Michigan wrestler and two-time NCAA qualifier, and in his cousin Jordan's garage, along with Jordan's brother Cam. Jordan also wrestled for Michigan in addition to Myles’ father and Jordan and Cam’s father, Sam. 

Jordan’s garage training facility is known as The Cave and features a drawing hanging on the wall depicting a cartoonish, grinning, muscular bear flexing its bulging biceps against a backdrop of pine forests and mountains. The words "The Cave" are inscribed toward the bottom. 

At the same time, however, the family was struck hard by COVID-19 not long after the first case was reported in Michigan on March 10, 2020. Amine said many family members, including himself, tested positive. One of his uncles died from the disease.

"It was a scary time because some people in family became pretty sick," he said. "Fortunately, I just lost my sense of taste and smell for a while."

Myles resumed training on Michigan's campus with a limited number of teammates and a single coach in July. Those numbers gradually increased and he finally returned to competition at the RTC Cup in December, beating two-time Indiana All-American Nate Jackson and two-time Minnesota All-American Brett Pfarr. 

"Getting back into the training room with the guys really accelerated my training process, but it was little strange at first with only a few of us allowed to train at one time with one coach," Amine says. "We were so grateful when the whole team was finally able to train together (in late December) with a full coaching staff and we could put in work while having fun, joking around with each other again."

Amine will continue Olympic preparation in Ann Arbor under the guidance of, among others, Cliff Keen Wrestling Club head coach Sergei Beloglazov, a two-time Olympic champion. Amine is also slated to compete in a pre-Olympic competition in Warsaw next month.

His training partners include Alex Dieringer, who won three NCAA titles at Oklahoma State and Michigan All-Americans Logan Massa, Dom Abounader and Cam Amine. 

“I’m in a perfect situation for training here with the best freestyle workout partners and coaches you can ask for,” Myles said. “I’m really excited to have one more tournament to test myself at before the Olympics and hopefully I can improve my final seeding. It will be loaded, though, with other guys trying to do the same thing.” 

Amine will depart for Tokyo in early July with one regret – that no family members will be there to watch him in person. Organizers announced earlier this year that fans from other nations will not be allowed to attend.

"It will honestly be tough not to see my parents in Tokyo because they have always been my biggest supporters and have been to nearly all of my matches throughout the years," he says. "I know we are going to be in kind of bubble there with regular testing and other rules, but all that is just background noise. I will be focusing on wrestling and fully expect to medal. Looking at my results in other major tournaments, I’m not a longshot to do that at all."

After Tokyo, Amine intends to complete work on a Master’s degree in sports management and make a final decision on whether he will return for one more season with the Wolverines and one more shot at an NCAA title.

Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena is hosting the 2022 NCAA Championships, not far from where Amine won two state championships at Detroit Catholic Central.  

“With the NCAAs in Detroit next year, I could really regret it if I don’t come back, but all that is officially TBD (to be determined) at this point,” he told media members at the NCAA Championships.