Reilly on the boy wrestler who wouldn't...

SF_Express, you make an interesting point. But the facts are against you: The boy and his parents did not at all cite close contact with a girl as a reason for his refusal. That wasn't it at all. They just said it wasn't right to subject her to a violent sport.

(My guess is that earlier in the year the boy pinned in about 30 seconds some other boy who was far more at risk of injury than this girl, who has won some matches.)

But no matter what their reason, you don't get to decide whom you compete against. If you're going to wrestle for your high school, in the state high school association, then you wrestle whoever is in your bracket. If you have an objection, a reason to think that the other wrestler shouldn't be a wrestler (or that a co-worker of a different religion or sex or color shouldn't be working alongside you), the right answer is: This is none of your business. Shut up and wrestle. That's a good life lesson to learn, at least by the time you get out of high school, whether home-schooled or not.

 

So he wasn't there? He writes it like he was:

[quote author=Rick Reilly]She was surrounded by 20 of us Friday not for how she wrestled (she wound up being eliminated two matches later) but for how she didn't.

"I couldn't get focused," she said of the swirl around her. "I finally had to find a quiet place to try to lock in." Her coach took her cell phone away from her as well as Internet access, but it was all anybody here could talk about. Yes, she becomes the first girl in the 85-year history of the Iowa state wrestling tournament to win a match, but thanks to the Northrups, it's forever splattered with all this.

"I went out for wrestling," says Cassy. "I'm going to face what I'm going to face. This wasn't my choice, it was his."

"What Cassy wanted was to lock horns and see who was better," says her dad.

Could she have beaten him?

"I don't know," she says. "I've never wrestled him before. But from what I've heard, it would've been a close match."

...

The last I saw Northrup, he was crying. After the default, he entered the consolation round, where he won his first match, then lost a heartbreaker in overtime, 3-2. He jogged past the scrum of reporters waiting to talk to Cassy, tears streaming down his face, unnoticed. He was done, with no chance to medal.

Neither he, nor his coaches, nor his dad, had any comment. He was reportedly on his way back home to Marion, Iowa, where his mom was about to deliver her eighth child.[/quote]

 

Agree completely. This was particularly disappointing because there was so much potential for a great column here.

 

For purposes of THIS discussion, I don't care about whether the wrestler(s) made the right choice. I care about whether Reilly was there and did the research. Or was it just another case of a columnist who thinks he can pontificate without knowing the facts?

 

I could be reaching, but my hunch is the "patronizing" statement is in lieu of the boy/father's truer concerns, that boy didn't feel comfortable in such intimate proximity to a girl. I'm not sure how such a statement would have played, however.

 

From the column, Reilly indicates his sources of information were:
1) He talked to Cassy and her father in a scrum of 20 reporters.
2) He saw Northrup crying.
3) He read the Des Moines Register one morning.

With the resources at his disposal, that is disappointing.

Assuming that every kid that she's ever wrestled was mum that day, he could have found other sources outside of the tournament. How about women hockey players and the guys that have played full-contact with them? What about looking at the high school gender regulations around the country?

As the conversation here and elsewhere has shown, a complex issue was breached -- if unintentionally -- and a national columnist should bring perspective and insight when writing about that issue, not a few cliches and a handful of hyperbole-stuffed statements like "The Herkelmans -- and most of the state of Iowa -- praised Northrup for being a boy of faith."

 

Ummmm... Hey, guys, there's this from the original AP story:

Jamie Northrup is a minister in the Believers in Grace Fellowship, an independent Pentecostal church in Marion that believes young men and women shouldn't touch in a "familiar way," said Bill Randles, the church's pastor.

 

Just imagine if he faced her and did the butt drag. Then we'd have issues.

 

If we're going to get into real world analogies about not hiring women workers, is it unfair to note that in a real world setting the contact in question could be termed domestic assault? There's no analogy for boy vs. girl. There's a reason there's no checking in women's hockey.

On Reilly, if the kid didn't want to wrestle that's his choice. The girl doesn't need a columnist "defending her rights." She seems to be doing quite well on her own.

 

Da man, just for the record: Both the wrestler and the pastor made much more of the violence than the "familiarity." At least in their public statements.

From the AP story you mention:

The wrestler: "Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times," Northrup said in a statement released by his high school. "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. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

Maybe "engage a girl in this manner" refers to the close contact. Maybe the violence. Maybe, as has been suggested, lack of clarity was a goal. Maybe there's a lot more to the statement than AP quoted.

The pastor: "We believe in the elevation and respect of woman and we don't think that wrestling a woman is the right thing to do. Body slamming and takedowns, that full contact sport is not how to do that."

 

Didn't say no one mentioned the violence aspect, just that the "familiar contact" did come up as a factor.