Team Members (l-r) Paul Maruyama, Jim Bregman, George Harris and Ben Campbell)
On October 22, 1964, native Arlingtonian James Bregman won a bronze medal in judo in the Olympic Games.
James was born in 1941 and started judo at the age of 12. After high school, he went to college in Japan to study judo. Bregman returned to the United States just before the 1964 AAU Championships, where he defeated the Brazilian Pan-American champion to win the middleweight crown.
Judo was first included in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. At the time, Bregman was a third-degree black belt. He won a bronze medal in the middleweight category and was the only American on the four-man team to win a medal in judo that year. In 1965 he won a gold medal at the Pan American Championships and he also won a gold medal in the Maccabiah Games that same year. Additionally, in 1965, Jim Bregman became the first American to win a medal in the World Championships held in São Paulo, Brazil where he won another Bronze medal.
Bregman continued to be involved in the American judo community, serving three times as President of the United States Judo Association the organization which helped found in 1968. In 2018, Bregman was promoted to the highest judo rank of Judan (10th Degree Black Belt) by the United States Judo Association. Outside of judo competitions, Bregman served for many years on the Board of the Arlington Outdoor Education Association (otherwise known as The Outdoor Lab).
