Friday, February 26, 1999

Girls vs. boys on mat isn't progress

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BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sarah Van Skaik of St. Bernard is the first girl in Ohio to qualify for a district tournament. | STORY |

        Somebody chicken wing-me into the 20th century, before it becomes the 21st. Convince me that if I don't think a girl wrestling a boy is a great idea, then it's my problem, not the girl's.

        Tell me it's perfectly sporting to have 16-year-old girls and boys groping, er, grappling, for five or six minutes straight, in the name of “opportunity.”

        Tell me how the boy feels when he loses.

        Or even if he wins.

        How does he win?

        If he beats the girl, he's supposed to. If he doesn't, he's laughed at for days. That's not me talking. It's society.

        This is a battleground for two of the touchy-feeliest topics of our time. In this corner, Opportunity. In that corner, Self Esteem.

        When girls wrestle boys, how do you satisfy both?

        I wrestled a lot of years. I never saw a girl on a wrestling team. If a girl stood across the circle from me, I don't know how I'd feel. Tentative, probably. Queasy, definitely. I'm thinking, what do I do now?

A question of contact
        This isn't football. It's not block and tackle, stick and move. It's not basketball, soccer or tennis. It's six minutes of nearly nonstop contact. There's nothing else like it.

        So ... where can I touch? Is a high crotch ride OK? Lots of pinning moves mean chest-on-chest contact. Do I avoid those? Do I use cradles instead?

        These aren't silly questions. They don't paint you as an out-of-touch Cro Magnon. They're likely the wonders invading the head of every guy who ever wrestled a girl.

        It's funny. We allow a lot of things on the fields and in the gyms that we'd be punished for anywhere else. Berate a co-worker or a customer the way a college basketball coach berates a referee and you're planning new career moves by 4:30.

        The things that happen on a football field or a hockey rink would be grounds for assault charges just about anywhere else.

        We make allowances. But this?

        Sarah Van Skaik, the senior at St. Bernard-Elmwood Place High, wrestles today in the district tournament. Good for her. Wrestling teaches self-discipline and mental toughness and accountability. There's nobody to blame (or praise) but you.

        When wrestling isn't demanding that wrestlers lose excessive weight, it's a noble sport. For Van Skaik to succeed under all those conditions, plus the added, obvious one, she must be very special.

        But I see her wrestle a guy and I think it's wrong.

        A high school coach in town told me Thursday he had a wrestler not long ago who “toyed” with his female opponent. He got way ahead on points, then his concentration shifted from wrestling moves to moves of another sort. Do we really need this? It's an athletic contest, not a drive-in movie.

        You could say the kid was a knucklehead. You could also say he should never have gotten that chance.

Sex bias like race bias?
        Dexter Carpenter had four girls on his team at Northwest High this winter. His wife was a state women's champion at 135 pounds a year after having a baby. Carpenter asks, “When do we teach males to work with females in the workplace? Isn't this doing that? Our (male wrestlers) are the most well-adjusted guys around.”

        Carpenter, who is black, is a long-time supporter of girls wrestling. He wrestled at all-white Deer Park High in the 70s, where he says he was not well received on the wrestling team. “I beat out a senior captain. If my pigmentation didn't tick them off, that did,” he said.

        Carpenter feels Van Skaik and other girls are tarred by the same broad brush. He has a point. But here's another: If girls want to wrestle, great. Let them wrestle other girls.

        Meanwhile, good luck to Sarah. Hopefully in college she won't have the notoriety or the controversy she has now. She's going to Cumberland College in Kentucky. They have a women's wrestling team there.

        Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.