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There’s the shared love and passion for their sport that has grown with time. For Ogunwole, it started when his high school’s wrestling coach saw him playing football and had instant dreams of getting the quick and powerful athlete on the mat. For Preston, wrestling education began before he learned how to read...
Take away the contrasting demeanors, substitute the textbooks and PlayStation controllers for a mat and pads, and you’ll find two men who are remarkably similar. Ogunwole and Preston are united in their determination and will...
Wrestling runs in the Woody family the way music may run in yours. Two brothers wrestled, a cousin is on the Annapolis team, and her uncle is one of the coaches. Her other uncles wrestled too. Strict Christians, they are not enthusiastic about boys facing girls on the mat. They think it's immodest, and it somehow upsets their notion that females should defer to males. Her uncles are not alone. Girls who wrestle boys routinely endure heckling, forfeits and what they feel are unfair calls. But Woody, an Olympic hopeful for 2008, will not be deterred...
...Olympic event has moved the sport to the élite ranks. The U.S. took two medals--a silver for Sara McMann and a bronze for Patricia Miranda--at Athens in 2004. Women's wrestling is growing in the U.S., where girls have gradually gained access to the mat, thanks to Title IX's gender-parity provision. Schools are required to give the girls a shot with the boys if there aren't enough females or funding for a girls team. And so about 7,000 female students from grade school through college are working out and wrestling against guys...
Parity does not equal popularity, and coed scholastic wrestling remains a contentious issue. For the very young--in some wrestling clubs, coed matches start as early as age 6--it's just cublike fun. As children mature, however, many critics find problems with coed contact. The demands of the mat--raw and primal aggression--seem to go against the qualities our culture instills in girls. And for boys, wrestling against girls seems to contravene the lessons they were taught about not hurting girls and keeping their hands to themselves. Texas and Hawaii ban coed matches in high school, so these...