Saturday, September 23, 2000
Haworth's medal worth the weight
SYDNEY, Australia -- She's big. Five-foot-nine, 300 pounds, shoulders the size of a studio apartment. Legs that are a three-day drive. House big.
She's strong, too. Strong enough Friday to win Olympic bronze, the youngest American ever to win a medal in Olympic weightlifting. Strong enough to like herself, in spite of the rest of us. Strong in all ways.
In the middle of a news conference the other day, a Norwegian journalist handed 17-year-old Cheryl Haworth a cocktail napkin and requested she sketch a self-portrait. Haworth attends an art academy in Savannah, Ga.
Haworth doodled a minute before stopping: “Wait, my legs are way bigger than that,” she said.
They're calling these the Glamour Games. Swimmers wear waterproof makeup. Runners paint their fingernails. The gymnasts don't apply their makeup with a brush; they haul it in on trucks and dump it over their heads.
Everyone, it seems, is in tent on showing skin.
It has been suggested here, not totally facetiously, that the TV ratings would soar if they played the women's water polo in the nude. Don't tell NBC.
Cheryl Haworth just gets on with it. She will not appear in a naked-jock calendar. She won't go topless in a national magazine, prompting yet another debate on the place of sex in women's sports.
Haworth won't flaunt her sexuality, or deny it. She will simply make the question irrelevant. It's a lightweight issue, compared with what she's doing here.
Because it's never who people think you are that defines you. It's who you know yourself to be.
Glamour is open to interpretation. Haworth gave us a good look at one version Friday. With he world's sports media asking her what foods she ate, Haworth delivered a show as tough and polished as her lifts.
“I have been successful so far in the way I carry myself and the way I let myself feel,” she said. “Strength is glamourous. It's beautiful and it's fun.” And you just know there are catwalks full of glamorous supermodels less comfortable in their own skin than Cheryl Haworth is in hers.
She gets the weight question every day. She dealt with it Friday by saying this: “I don't let it bother me. I'm a weightlifter. I'm a super heavyweight. I'm not trying to be small. I'm just trying to be strong.”
She admits she's never been on a date. She wonders how that might go. She wonders what it would be like to be small. But then she wouldn't be a weightlifter.
On Friday, the combined weight of Haworth's six lifts was 1,743.5 pounds. She easily won the bronze, playing it safe with a lighter weight on her last lift. “She's a child,” said her coach, Michael Cohen. “She can lift a lot more, and she will.”
Haworth lifts 25 tons in training every day. When boredom sets in at the gym, she and four partners lift cars and move them to the other end of the parking lot.
She's doing some other heavy lifting, too: The cleaning and jerking of perceptions. There's nothing wrong with being Jenny Thompson, the semi-clad swimmer in Sports Illustrated. But there's nothing wrong with being Haworth, either. What the two look like is incidental. In the end, they're both athletes.
Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at (513) 768-8454.
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