Women grapple for attention as they make debut on wrestling mat
By John Niyo / The Detroit News
ATHENS, Greece--Long ago, the novelty wore off for these U.S. women’s wrestlers, the ones whose sport makes its Olympic debut beginning today in Athens.
Their greatest hope is that, four years from now, the same will be true for the rest of us.
Remember this if you’re channel surfing today and you find yourself watching something you’ve never seen before: Women wrestling, and not something part of some silly, misogynistic Vince McMahon production.
This is their chance. And ours, too.
“Athens is our stage to say, ‘Hey, look at us. Look at us as more than a sideshow or to think about us mud wrestling,’” said U.S. star Patricia Miranda, a 5-foot, 103-pound dynamo who also happens to be a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Stanford. She put off Yale Law School for this chance.
“Look at us and see our sweat, see our tears, see the triumph that is sport. It’s as intense as any male sport.”
If not more so, considering what they’ve been through, as pioneers in a sport that’s as old as sport itself — and old-school, too.
There are four women on the U.S. team in Athens, and they’re top medal contenders at all four of the weight classes.
Each of the Americans has a remarkable story to tell about getting from there to here, from petitioning school boards for the right to compete to pinning the opposite sex when it came time to prove they belonged — again and again.
Miranda, the daughter of a Brazilian-born doctor and social activist, first had to convince her father sports wouldn’t interfere with academics. Then she had to endure the taunts when, as the only girl on a boys high school team, she was named captain.
Sara McMann, a 138-pound world silver medalist, still hears those taunts, and some of them, she said, even come from members of the U.S. men’s team.
“Everyone will act normal to your face, but later it’ll be an elbow nudge, ‘Ha-ha-ha. Girl wrestling. What a joke,’” said McMann, who followed her brothers into the sport in wrestling-mad Lock Haven, Pa. Townsend Saunders, a former U.S. Olympic wrestler and one of the coaches of the women’s team, compared these women’s struggle to that of Jackie Robinson in baseball. Saunders, an African-American, should know: He’s married to the former Tricia McNaughton, an Ann Arbor native whose pioneering efforts in the sport — for more than two decades — helped make today possible. A four-time world champion, she wrestled until she was 35 hoping to get a chance at the Olympics, but it never came.
“I lived with her for 15 years,” Townsend said. “I would be there when she’d come home crying because some athletic director or some coach or official wouldn’t let her compete.
“And it still goes on. We’re here at the Olympics, but back home people are saying this is wrong — morally wrong.”
Tricia Saunders, 38, who is a U.S. assistant, nods her head sadly.
“I still don’t get it,” she said.
Hopefully, after this weekend, more of us will.
“It’s not that every woman has to wrestle, or that every girl should,” Miranda said. “It’s that every girl in America can know she can.”
You can reach John Niyo at jniyo@detnews.com.
credit:
http://www.detnews.com/2004/olympics/0408/22/d09-249743.htm
