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Seeing is believing
By Kamon Simpson/The Gazette
They enter the gym in waves, about four groups an hour, dozens of tourists
following a guide, holding their videocams or Instamatics, old men wearing
dark socks with
Bermuda shorts, women in four layers of mascara, children in T-shirts from
souvenir shops around the country.
This stop of the Olympic Training Center tour brings them into a long,
narrow room carpeted in thick padded mats and filled with some of the
nation's best amateur
wrestlers.
Rock music jumps out of speakers, a few men ride exercise bikes, and a
trainer wraps a wrestler's arm in tape, as partners roll around on the
floor, grappling with each
other, trying to impress coaches. The visiting party sees little of it.
They're gawking at something else, something completely unexpected.
"Hey, those are women out there," one man says to another, in a tone that
suggests he doesn't quite believe his eyes.
We've nearly reached the end of the 20th Century and, as a culture, we've
lost a lot of our prejudices concerning gender boundaries in sports. Female
athletes are no
longer subordinates to their male counterparts. Like the commercial says,
"Anything you can do ..."
Put a woman in wrestling togs on a mat with another woman or, heaven forbid,
a man, and that old creeping societal dread seems to come back again. Female
wrestling
could be the last athletic taboo.
The tour guide's voice tries to grab the attention of the gawking tourists,
telling them that women's wrestling is vying to be included in the Olympic
program in time for
the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Greece. Will they really believe it before
they see it?
"I'll believe it when I see it," said Tricia Saunders, one of the women in
town the past week for the U.S. women's world wrestling team camp. "I didn't
get into this with
the idea of going to the Olympics. I figured women's wrestling would never
be an Olympic sport. I'm really happy to hear it might happen. It could
really open some
eyes. But we'll see."
Saunders has a right to be skeptical. The only U.S. wrestler ever to win a
gold medal at the Women's World Championships, which will be held Sept.10-13
this year in
Boden, Sweden, Saunders is a nine-time national champion. She's won three
world championships and is making her eighth appearance at worlds. Saunders,
33, is living
proof that women's wrestling is no newfangled idea. She's been doing this
most of her life.
She's been fighting for the right to fight nearly as long.
Today, high school girls around the country frequently have to rely on
lawsuits in order to be allowed to wrestle on their high school teams, but
Saunders was the
trailblazer, the first little girl at the center of a legal battle on the
issue.
In 1975, when she was 9 and had beaten every boy her age and weight in both
her state and her region, Saunders was turned away from an AAU youth
wrestling
tournament in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. She ended up suing both the
AAU and the University of Michigan, which hosted the event. Organizers
relented. She
finished second nationally.
It was around the time of Billy Jean King's tennis victory over Bobby Riggs,
a turning point for sports in society. Title IX was in place but barely
enforced. Saunders
became a kind of cliche for male chauvinists who thought the sky was
falling.
"I remember people kept asking me, 'Why are you wrestling?' and I said, 'I
don't know. It's fun,'" Saunders said. "I was 9. I didn't have a big
political agenda."
She still doesn't. The world's dominant female wrestler at 101.25 pounds,
Saunders has somehow found time to fit a family -son Townsend and daughter
Tassia are 2
and 41/2, respectively, while husband Townsend Saunders is a two-time
Olympic wrestler who won a silver medal in 1996 - and a job as a
bacteriologist back home in
Phoenix, around her wrestling.
She may be better known internationally than at home, since nearly 50
nations compete in women's wrestling. No stigma is attached to the sport in
the Orient, where
females have been competing for generations in combative sports thanks to
the martial arts, or in Europe, where Paris alone has more than 20 clubs for
women
wrestlers.
In America, however, young female wrestlers are faced with one opportunity,
and one tremendous challenge: to pursue their sport, they must compete
against boys. It's
not necessarily as difficult for the girls as it is for the boys; and the
boys' coaches.
"Boys need to learn that it doesn't mean you're a failure as a man if a girl
beats you at something," Saunders said.
"I've been in hundreds of gyms where nobody really cares if it's a female
wrestling against a male, but there's always a coach somewhere who is going
to tell a boy it's
completely unacceptable to lose to a girl. I think that lesson could lead to
some pretty big problems in life."
It's not that people are uptight about seeing women wrestle. They're just
not sure what to make of women wrestling men. In that way, young girls who
want to wrestle
aren't much different from, say, girls who want to play Little League
baseball.
Times are changing, though. This summer proved that. Saunders received phone
calls from friends all over the country immediately after the U.S. victory
over China in
the championship game of the Women's World Cup. Saunders understood why.
"When people called, they said, 'We watched those women and the first person
we thought of was you,'" Saunders said. "I had tears in my eyes watching
that game. It
wasn't just about those players, it was about all of us.
"People are starting to understand that you can be big and strong and tough
and a great athlete, and that can be a feminine thing. It has nothing to do
with men."
Not even in wrestling, long defended as one of the rites of "manhood." Some
people still can't believe their eyes the first time they see women on the
mat, but pretty soon
not even the tour groups will give the scene a second look.
Copyright © 1998-1999, The
Gazette
---------------------------------------------
All in the family Yamamoto gets her chance to
emulate big sis at world mat meet
Yomiuri Shimbun
The Daily
Yomiuri (Tokyo)
September 9, 1999
Seiko Yamamoto has been to two world women's wrestling
championships, but only as a spectator to watch her older sister Miyu win
two of her three titles.
Now it's finally her turn to shine.
"As long as I'm going to take part, I want to win,"
Yamamoto said on competing in her first world championships, which start
Friday in
Sweden.
The 19-year-old Yamamoto began wrestling at age 5,
rolling around the mats as her father taught Miyu and their brother.
"It looked like playing," the Yokohama native says. "It
was fun, so I did it."
Miyu's winning of the 1991 gold medal at age 17 in the
47-kilogram class stoked the fires in Seiko, who was just 11 at the time. "I
want to
be a champion, too," she said, beginning her dream.
Yamamoto brought the same aggressive style and
determination to the mat that her sister showed and in 1997, at 17, she won
the Asian
title in the 51-kilogram class.
But in the national meet that served as the trials for
the world championships, she wrestled poorly and failed to make the team.
The next year at the national championships, she lost a
heartbreaking overtime decision to Fukuoka University's Atsuko Shinomura in
the
second round, and again the ticket to the world
championships eluded her grasp.
The worlds that year were in Poland and she went as a
training partner for Miyu, who was making a comeback after getting married
and
having a baby.
It was there she received a shock.
Shinomura, with whom she had such a close encounter,
plowed through the field, easily winning the world title.
"Why didn't I try just a little bit harder (during our
match)?" Yamamoto thought as she watched Shinomura's ascension.
Yamamoto, a first-year student at Nihon University, came
into this season determined to finish on top.
In March, she defeated Shinomura in the final of Japan
Queen's Cup, which earned her a spot on the team to Sweden.
"She's the type who is extremely tough on herself," says
Miyu. "I really respect her."
The only regret Seiko has going to Sweden is that she
and Miyu are not teammates. Miyu failed to make the squad.
"Someday, we'll go to the world championships together
and both win," Seiko says.
It will be something to see.
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Wrestler sets tough goals
Calgary
Herald
January 5, 1999,
If you want proof that there are women in our community
who are strong and independent, look no further than Christine Nordhagen.
She just may, in fact, be the strongest woman around.
Since she took up the sport eight years ago, the 27-year-old Calgary
schoolteacher
has taken the wrestling world by storm. She's a
seven-time national women's wrestling champion, won gold medals last year at
the
Pan-American championships and the world championships,
and was named the 1997 female wrestler of the year by the Canadian
Amateur Wrestling Association.
If that's not enough, last year Nordhagen travelled to
Poland, where she successfully defended her world title in the 68-kilogram
class of
women's wrestling.
Still, the muscular athlete isn't resting on her
laurels. "I have tons to learn yet," she said in a recent interview. "I
still get my butt kicked in
practice by the (University of Calgary) varsity men.
They throw me around. Overall, I still have a lot of technique to learn. The
more you
know, the more you don't know."
Nordhagen got hooked on wrestling while studying at the
University of Alberta in the early '90s. She decided to give the tough sport
a try
after being encouraged by one of her coaches. "It's
about how hard you can push yourself; it's intense," she explained of her
unusual sport.
The third of five children, she was raised on a farm
near Valhalla Centre in Northern Alberta, and now pays the bills by working
as a
part-time physical education, math and dance teacher at
Ernest Manning High School. Five afternoons a week, she can be found
perfecting her moves at the University of Calgary's
combatives room.
In the past couple of years, Nordhagen has become a role
model, speaking to groups of young women at conferences and seminars. Her
future goals include coaching, so she can pass on her
passion for the sport of wrestling to a new generation.
Last evening, Nordhagen was featured on Calgary 7 News,
as part of the Woman of Vision series, which celebrates the accomplishments
of outstanding women in the Calgary area. Produced and
aired by Calgary 7 Television, the series is hosted by Linda Olsen and will
run
the first Monday of every month.
The Woman of Vision series will highlight the talents,
success and great achievements of women who have made a difference in the
community and in their field.
The Calgary Herald and Alberta Treasury Branches are
proud to sponsor this series along with Calgary 7, and each month will
feature an
interview with that month's Woman of Vision. Watch for
our Woman of Vision profile the first Tuesday of each month in the Living
section
of the Calgary Herald.
