Wanna Lose to a Girl?

Written by Alan Hirsch on Friday February 25, 2011

Last week, high school wrestler Joel Northrup was ridiculed nationally for refusing to wrestle a girl. Sadly, he is taking the fall for our own prejudices.

Last week, high school wrestler Joel Northrup made national news for refusing to wrestle against a girl in the Iowa state tournament.  Citing religious beliefs, he forfeited his match with Cassy Herkleman.

“Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times,” Northrup explained in a news release.  “As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner.”

ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly pounced on the high school grappler:

Does any wrong-headed decision suddenly become right when defended with religious conviction? In this age, don't we know better? If my God told me to poke the elderly with sharp sticks, would that make it morally acceptable to others?  And where does it say in the Bible not to wrestle against girls?

I’m rusty on scripture, so I’ll leave the religious question to others.  But as a former wrestler, I’m qualified to weigh in on the larger issue of cross-gender wrestling.  It’s a tough subject, plagued by misconceptions about the sport.  Take this assertion by Reilly, later in his diatribe against Northrup: “Remember, Northrup didn't default on sexual grounds.  Didn't say anything about it being wrong to put his hands in awkward places.”

Only a non-wrestler could have written that.  (I know Reilly never wrestled, because he mentions the sport’s “body slams and . . .  gouges in the eye” – the stuff of the World Wide Wrestling Federation, not real wrestling.)  Reilly seems to suggest that a “sexual” objection to wrestling against a girl might have merit, an idea that plays into regrettable stereotypes.  I suppose it’s conceivable that some wrestlers get their jollies from the “intimacy,” just as some people may play sports in order to see nude bodies in the shower.  Such phenomena, if they exist at all, are rare and should be ignored.  No boy should refuse to wrestle a girl because of concern about the body’s “awkward places.”  Wrestling isn’t sex.

Once we get passed that shibboleth, we can acknowledge this politically incorrect truth: cross-gender competition in any sport is problematic.  Pitting males against females is unfair both to girls (who, for physiological reasons that need no belaboring, usually lose) and boys (who face humiliation when they lose).  But the unfairness is particularly acute in wrestling, which features direct physical combat and the macho ethos that naturally accompanies it.

Reilly may be right that a religious objection to wrestling a girl is flimsy.  But perhaps Joel Northrup’s religious convictions were augmented by a different misgiving he didn’t dare admit (even to himself), something more worrisome than a hand inadvertently encountering a boob or crotch.  Perhaps he was afraid of losing.  If so, can you blame him?  Bobby Riggs never recovered from losing to Billie Jean King, and he was a 55 year old man competing against a champion in her prime.  And Riggs, of course, engineered the match, catering to his lust for the limelight.  Joel Northrup didn’t sign up for humiliation when he joined the wrestling team.  What high school kid does?

Northrup said something to the media that warrants scrutiny:  "It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

That’s bang-on, except he didn’t need to say “high school” or “Iowa.”  Once you reach middle school, cross-gender competition is rare for any sport anywhere.  How ironic that wrestling, the sport where athletes have the most justification for resisting cross-gender competition, is the one that involves such competition.

Again, the resulting unfairness goes in both directions.  Cassy Herkleman’s forfeit win over Northrup was her only victory in the tournament.  She got pounded in her two actual matches.  This exceedingly talented athlete, like every girl wrestler, faces a stacked deck.  Even so, she managed to win 20 matches this season, leaving a trail of embarrassed boys who likely received some nasty teasing from teammates.  Joel Northrup had more to fear than God if he took the mat against Herkleman.  (Perhaps in a future enlightened society, gender will be a matter of indifference to athletes.  But the key words there are “perhaps” and “future.”)

Wrestling throws boys and girls together, to the detriment of both, for a simple reason: there are too few participants to sustain girls’ wrestling as a separate sport.  We need more female wrestlers, but that development faces a major impediment: the sport is, well, macho.  Which, of course, is why it’s so problematic for boys to face girls.  There’s no easy way out of this conundrum, but this much is clear: attacking a skittish boy amounts to blaming one of the victims.


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