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Competitors voice pride in being pioneers as women's wrestling makes debut

Monday, August 23, 2004
BY STEVE POLITI
Star-Ledger Staff

ATHENS, Greece -- This was not one for the books. It was one for the looks.

How many times had Sara McMann seen the look? She would tell people she was a wrestler, and their eyebrows would immediately shoot up their foreheads before scanning her body to see what they were missing.

"They always say, 'You're a wrestler?'" the Colorado Springs resident said, "like they anticipated that I would be bigger, have two teeth and a hunchback and look like an ogre."

So yesterday afternoon, when McMann needed just two minutes to complete the first pin in women's Olympic wrestling history, she thought about the step her sport was taking to gain acceptance. That maybe someday, a few Olympiads from now, a girl can start wrestling in high school without everyone thinking she is a circus freak.

McMann, 23, is one of four Americans to compete in the first women's wrestling tournament ever at the Olympics, and while they are trying to win gold medals, they realize they are also competing for something more important: acceptance.

"Look at us. See the sweat. See the tears. See the triumphs," said Patricia Miranda, who wrestles in the 105.5-pound weight class. "It is as intense as any other sport -- any other male sport.

"The Olympics are a place where someone might turn the TV on for more than two minutes and see everything we love about sport and say, 'Yeah, why can't women wrestle?' And every girl in America will know they can."

It was a day of mixed results for the U.S. women. Two of them, McMann (139 pounds) and Miranda, advanced to the semifinal round today and can win gold medals with a pair of victories. The other two, Toccara Montgomery (158) and Tela O'Donnell (121), lost in pool play and were eliminated from medal competition.

"The fact that two people didn't advance on a team of only four is painful," Miranda said. "We're very closely knit."

The four U.S. women arrived here last week and answered the same questions they have answered from the moment they first stepped on the mat. Really, it is just one question.

Why?

Why choose one of the most male-dominated sports? Why cause ripples at high schools that don't have -- or want -- a girls wrestling program? Why put the boys in a no-win situation, forcing them to wrestle against girls in tournaments and risk the humiliation of losing?

Why?

"I was a teenage girl and everyone was telling me 'no,'" said Montgomery, a Cleveland native. "And when somebody says 'no,' you know we're going to do the opposite."

They all have their stories. Montgomery needed another sport so she could win the "top female athlete" award in her high school. McMann attended wrestling power Lock Haven (Pa.) University watching her brothers wrestle. Miranda and O'Donnell were just looking for something to challenge them.

O'Donnell, who grew up in Homer, Alaska, was turned away when she attempted to try out for the eighth-grade team in her hometown. She kept coming back.

"I guess there was a girl wrestler earlier who beat some of the boys and their parents were upset," she said. "I talked to the school board members, wrote letters and made phone calls.

"Eventually they let me stay on the team as a practice person," she said. "Since high school, I've been treated like a wrestler. When somebody is doing a sport because they love it and they're taking it seriously, then it's hard not to take them seriously."

Montgomery will go home without a medal, but when she gets back in Cleveland, she will get a different reception than she used to when she first started in the sport.

"There were opposing teams that refused to wrestle me, or coaches that wouldn't let their athletes wrestle me," she said. "I can go back now and I have guys coming out and asking me if I would wrestle with them. It's definitely changing over the years."

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Athens 2004: WRESTLING: New sport brings painful initiation

Mike Tierney - Staff
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Athens, Greece --- On a joyous night for women's wrestling, Sara McMann
found no reason to celebrate.

A gold medal having eluded her by a single point, she stood on the
middle perch of the medals podium, tears soaking her U.S. warmup.

Ten minutes later, she sat glumly at a news conference, head down the
entire time, eyes red and damp.

Her sport had just been initiated into the Olympics, its cry for
attention finally heard. McMann was the only American in the four weight classes
to surface in a final.

Two-thirds into the six-minute match, McMann had scored a pair of
takedowns and led Kaori Icho of Japan 2-0. But she throttled back on her
aggression and suffered three takedowns, losing 3-2 and the 63 kilogram (139
pound) gold.

Pressed to describe her emotions, McMann wiped her eyes and said, "I
don't think there's anything more painful in the world."

Teammate Patricia Miranda wore a less valuable medal but was beaming
over her bronze in the 48 kilogram (106 pound) class after crushing
Angelique Berthenet of France. Miranda, the face of her fledgling sport, is a
Stanford graduate headed for Yale Law School --- next week.

Not much time to savor the first acquired medal of her sport in Olympic
history.

"The idea is to start at the bottom of another mountain and see how
high I can climb," Miranda said, hinting she might put wrestling aside.

Miranda fought against the tide of predictable prejudice against female
wrestlers, even the objections of her father, a political refugee from
Brazil, to attain pioneer status.

"I probably can't count how many people were skeptical about my
wrestling," she said.

Miranda said she hopes Olympic exposure will advance her sport "by
leaps and bounds" but does not foresee it getting weekly time slots on ESPN soon.

With a lawyer's logic, she maintained that any male sport in the Games
should have a female counterpart.

McMann could have used a laugh. She dedicated the Games to older
brother Jason, who taught her to wrestle. Jason was killed five years ago in a
bar fight.

"It comforts me to know that my brother would be proud of me, either
way," she said. "I feel like I worked very hard and did everything I could."

She paused as the tears gushed, then choked out, "It just wasn't good
enough."

Five minutes after leaving the news conference, McMann was wandering
through the arena, in search of her boyfriend. The tears had yet to dam up.

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Raising Women's Wrestling From Mud

August 25, 2004
By JOANN KLIMKIEWICZ, Courant Staff Writer

It's a pretty predictable conversation.

Whenever I reveal to someone my brief stint in women's wrestling, there's a line of questioning and a string of stale quips that's almost certain to follow.

They have women's wrestling? Did you wrestle men or women?

What did you wear? (This usually from the male of the species).

And finally there are the inevitable references, also courtesy of the gents, to mud and to Jell-O. And, of course, to G.L.O.W. - the campy, hypersexual Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling who thrashed about in the 1980s with their glittery spandex and teased, poofy hair.

So, as the sport made its Olympic debut this week in Athens, if there was one thing I was glad for, it was that women's wrestling might now be better understood by the masses and become legitimized in a culture so eager to sexualize and dismiss it.

And I also hoped it might mean the need for fewer instances of confirming that, yes, women wrestle; that, as the sport suggests, I mainly wrestled other women; and that, just like the men, we wore body-concealing singlets about as sexy as thermal underwear.

It also settled, for me, a debate that simmered during my two years of wrestling at New York University over whether enough women would be interested in grappling to make the sport thrive.

I joined NYU's women's wrestling team in 1997. I was entering my junior year and looking for something to anchor me at a big school in a big city where it's easy to feel lost. I had seen a flier recruiting for the team, which, still in its infancy, was run as a club sport.

I was fascinated, but it was a leap for me, considering I had spent my middle and high school years prancing on the cheerleading squad.

My friends thought I was nuts. My parents had visions of broken bones and cauliflower ears. But I was intrigued. It wasn't some grand feminist statement I was trying to make. I wasn't trying to prove any point. I was just curious - about the sport and whether I had it in me.

And after the first few practices, I saw that I did. I was addicted. Whereby in other sports you need to lean on your teammates, in wrestling it's all you. There you are on the mat, just you and your opponent.

The coaches at NYU were supportive of our ragtag team and eager to teach us the nuts and bolts of grappling. We traveled to tournaments around the Northeast, not knowing if we would find ourselves matched up against a high school girl or a thirtysomething brute raised in a wrestling family and wielding arms that made one shudder. (You want me to step onto the mat with her? Have you seen the guns on that one?)

I won't lie. I never won much. And I had just two years to dabble in the sport. But there was an excitement in knowing that sometimes I could kick some serious tail and, on occasion in practice, take one of the guys down to the mat.

But underneath all that excitement bubbled a sense that we were just an experiment, a Title IX constraint hanging over the men's team. With just a half-dozen dedicated women on the team a couple of years in, doubts loomed about whether enough female interest existed to sustain the program. To some, we were just a novelty that inspired resentment.

I had always argued that it was too soon to make that type of judgment. Anything so fresh needs time to grow legs and a commitment to flourish. You can't call it quits before giving something a chance to get off the ground.

A few years ago, I learned that women's wrestling at NYU had fizzled out. I'm not sure if it was the dearth of women or a change in focus from the coaching staff. Either way, I was saddened to know it was over but glad I at least had the opportunity to see what I was made of and meet a fierce group of women.

And this week, with women's wrestling making a fitting Olympic debut in the ancient Greek city, I felt my point was proved. Not enough interest? Here were women from all over the world - and four from the U.S. - with enough dedication to get them to this international stage. And here was one wrestler, Sara McMann, bringing us home a silver medal.

Where women's wrestling goes from here is anyone's guess. But here's a chance to move the sport up a notch, to end all of the snickering and the tired Jell-O jokes and see these athletes for who they are.

"One of the great things about being in the Olympics is that you don't have to have the obligatory 10-minute conversation with someone when they find out you are a woman wrestler," Tricia Saunders, a U.S. coach whose name once induced terror among my NYU teammates, told the Los Angeles Times.

"You won't have to explain what it's all about. People will know from watching the Olympics."