January 5, 2008
Saturday

The art of living is like that of wrestling; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.
          — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 121-180
Roman Emperor (161-180) and philosopher

We’ll call her Anne, because she looks like Anne Hathaway, especially as she appeared in The Princess Diaries. She’s fifteen and in ninth grade and only a few months ago she announced to her family that she was going out for wrestling.

In Pennsylvania, and probably everywhere else, wrestling is a boys’ sport. As this piece makes clear, however, it is more accurate to say it is traditionally a boys’ sport. Its season runs concurrently with basketball’s, which has separate teams for boys and girls.

In the school district where I taught, wrestling was almost a religion for the boys, as was field hockey for the girls. We had winning teams and outstanding individual wrestlers every single year. Basketball and baseball are my favorite spectator sports and though I can’t say that I ever actually attended a wrestling match while I was a teacher, I supported the team and not infrequently talked to the wrestlers in my classes about their participation or read what they wrote about it.

I can’t remember exactly when traditionally sex-segregated sports were opened to both genders. Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that demanded equal athletic opportunity for male and female athletes at schools that receive federal funding, was passed in 1972. From time to time after that there would be national publicity when a girl wished to play football or to wrestle, rights they would have since there is no comparable girls’ team for them to participate with. In all of my time at Lower Dauphin, I recall no girl who wished to play football, and only two girls chose to wrestle. When Lynn played high school field hockey she twice encountered male participants on opposing teams. One was an exchange student from a European country where field hockey is traditional for boys, and one was a large and aggressive young man who played goalie. Lynn sustained a concussion in a collision with him, giving me my opportunity to be the distraught mother who runs out on the field to watch while the trainer and the coach determine the extent of the injuries.

Much of what I know about girls’ participation in high school wrestling I’ve learned from reading the material at Girl Wrestler, a site that promotes a PBS film about the experience of Tara Neal, a Texas teenager determined to continue to participate in the sport she loved despite living in one of only two states that prohibits girls from wrestling boys in high school. (Hawaii is the other one). Texas circumvents Title IX by establishing girls’ wrestling teams, and although it leads the nation in the number of girls who participate in wrestling, their opportunities for interscholastic competition are severely limited.

Currently, 5000 American girls compete at the high school level, compared to 250,000 boys. These young women are not interested in entertainment wrestling where women in skimpy outfits go at each other in mud pits. They are serious athletes who should be given encouragement and respect.

I became interested in the experience of the Anne Hathaway lookalike because her grandmother is a close friend and I knew her mother and her uncle from the time they were children. I followed her saga from her first efforts to convince her family to sign off on this endeavor through the family’s meeting with school officials who tried to talk her out of it. Coached by her mother to be poised and assertive, she answered their questions with confidence. Why did she want to do this? they asked. Because she wished to participate in a winter sport. Then why not girls’ basketball or swimming? Because she is not attracted to those sports. She wants to wrestle. Didn’t she realize she would be competing against boys who have been trained in the sport since third grade? All the more challenging, she said.

When I asked for an update on her experience, I learned that although she hasn’t won yet and indeed has been pinned every time, it is taking longer and longer into the bout for her opponent to secure victory. Anne lives about two and a half hours north and west of here. Wrestling meets are usually on Thursday and Saturday nights, starting at 7:00. My friend expressed a wish to see Anne wrestle but felt daunted by all that driving, especially the return trip late at night, with the only alternative being to stay over, thus tying up a lot of time.

Anne would be wrestling in a large tournament on the first Saturday in January. Now I ask you, what inveterate gallivanter, three weeks refreshed from the trip back from Wyoming and committed to writing something every day for her online journal, wouldn’t see this as an opportunity?

We left early this morning and arrived in Cresson, Pennsylvania, a town slightly west of the Middle of Nowhere, just after Anne had concluded her first bout. “She lasted into the second period,” her mother told us. She went into the losers’ bracket and was scheduled to wrestle again in bout #674.

I think the numbering started at 100, not 1, but still, that’s a lot of wrestling. Each bout takes about five minutes (three brief periods with about ten seconds between periods for the opponents to regroup). They were running four bouts at a time, three on the gym floor and one in a practice room upstairs. You had to watch a board where the bout numbers were posted in four columns. When you saw your wrestler’s number go up at the bottom, you knew what mat to watch and that it would be less than twenty minutes until he (Anne was the only she) had his moment.

I sat in the bleachers with Anne’s mother and grandmother and assorted parents and come-along siblings. The atmosphere at such an event is something like that in a busy airport and if you are a casual fan like me waiting for just one bout you can feel as if you are in chairs outside Gate #42B trying to keep your thoughts straight amid the buzzers, bells, shouts, and pages for a coach from some school you never heard of to report to Mat #2. As it happened, bout #674 did not take place. The youngster Anne should have met head to head on the mat left or withdrew for some reason. She was declared the winner by default and moved into the next bracket, bout #854.

Thus it was more than five hours before we saw what we had come to see. We had the good fortune to see it on Mat #4 in a small room insulated from the crowd noise and far less crowded than the main floor.

Anne is a slender girl who wrestles at 105 pounds. As I said, she’s Anne Hathaway ten years ago, without the makeup and the confidence that professional training and years in front of the camera could give her. Yet she carries herself with all the grace a ninth grader can muster. She looks determined and focused and when you watch her put on her headgear and shake hands with her opponent you see not a girl out of place on a boys’ team but an athlete ready to do her best.

Her best in bout #854 on Saturday was enough to allow her to go the distance and to force her opponent to earn his victory by decision and not by pin. Her coach praised her for her determination and told her the things he wanted her to work on in practice the next week so that she can continue to improve.

I doubt that I’ll see Anne wrestle again this season. The regular dual meets (contests between just two schools that take far less time than a multi-school tournament) for the rest of the season are on dates and in locations that fit neither my schedule nor Anne’s grandmother’s.  But if she continues next year, and I have a feeling she will, you can be sure I will once again want to be there at least once, if only to be reminded what it means to stand firm and be ready.

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