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Hogan's Belamide thrived in three sports

By KEN HART, Times-Herald sports editor 6/23/04

You know that famous Always a bridesmaid saying?
Well, dont ever say that around Reenie Belamide. If you do, she may put you in a headlock.

The recent Hogan High graduate had plenty of battles on the wrestling mat, the tennis court and the badminton court for the Spartans this year. And she won most of them.

But there are just two more that she wishes she could have won: championship matches.

Belamide couldnt quite become an individual league or state champion this year. But she still has plenty of credentials to be a 2004 Times-Herald Female Athlete of the Year finalist.

Her favorite sport was wrestling, where she fared well in the 114-pound class. Belamide lost to Balboas Hannah Paarlberg by technical fall in the finals of the California Girls Wrestling Championships at Bottari Gym on Feb. 7.

After my match I really cried. I didnt expect my opponent to be as good as she was, Belamide recalled. But after a while, I was like, 'I got second place.' That's not bad.

At Hogan, Belamide became a pioneer and an ambassador for girls wrestling. As a freshman, she was one of only three girls who wrestled. Just one year later, however, the number grew to 18.

That number was not welcome by Hogans boys team, who felt that the girls didnt belong in the practice room. But it was Belamide who helped ease the tension between both genders.

Reenie was one of the people that bridged the gap between the guys and girls. The relationship is good now, partly because of Reenie, Hogan girls coach Mike Bryant said. Because she trained with the guys, she had to do everything they had to do. The guys started to have a lot of respect for the girls.

Bryant also saw plenty of potential in Belamide, even when she was a freshman.

A lot of kids boys and girls they take their lumps and dont come back. She took her lumps and came back. She just kept working and getting better and better, Bryant said. Even in matches that she was losing (against boys), she was scoring points. It was just going to take time.

Her time came this year. Belamide won the Castro Valley Tournament in January then later won the Region II Tournament to qualify for the state event.

Badminton was Belamides spring sport of choice. But just like wrestling, she fell just short of becoming an individual champion.

Belamide reached the finals of the Solano County Athletic Conference tournament, where she fell to Bethels Stacy Cabales 13-10, 11-3. Once again, she had to settle for runner-up.

I was not happy with it at all at that point. I was like, 'I am so sick of second place.' So I was pretty disappointed. she recalled. But one of the girls on the team said, 'A lot of girls look up to you.'

So I thought, I dont have to be No. 1. If I inspired some girls on the team, thats good enough for me.

Belamide did become a champion in tennis. Last fall she worked her way up to become Hogans No. 1 singles player. The Spartans went on to win the SCAC team title.

She said she was glad to finally see the Spartans become league champs.

I felt like it was about time. We were pretty confident that we could do it this year, she said. I think the biggest reason we won was because we supported each other. We felt like family.

Belamide also reached the semifinals of the league singles tournament.

Though she had enough drive to compete in three different sports, Belamides tennis coach said she would become a star if she just focused on tennis.

Shes mostly a baseline player. When she gets her timing and tempo in, shes a good player for a seasonal player, Ted Ballesteros said. Shell be awesome if she could concentrate year round.

Next year, however, Belamide wont be playing sports at all. She will be a student at Solano Community College instead. When asked if shell miss playing sports, Belamide answered with a resounding absolutely.

I'm not going to have anything to do after school anymore, she said. That's going to be a big change for me.

Some familiar faces to Belamide will be her competition for the Female Athlete of the Year award. Cabales, Vallejo tennis player Herzyl Legaspi and Vallejo wrestler Eunice Tjon are the other finalists for the honor.

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Summer Olympics to Include Women's Wrestling

Kerry Sheridan New York
25 Jun 2004, 15:06 UTC

The United States' wrestling team is sending four female athletes to compete in the first-ever Olympic wrestling competition between women.
The sport of wrestling is among the oldest in history, but has long been considered a men's sport. Women have been wrestling at national and world championship matches for almost two decades, but never at the Olympic games, until now.

This year, a team of four American women will break that barrier, along with about 40 of their counterparts from around the world.

The achievement has been a long time coming. Coach Tricia Saunders has been fighting for years to get women's wrestling into the Olympic games. She began wrestling when she was eight years old, but was banned from the sport when she turned 12.

"It was real disappointing because it was the team my brothers wrestled on, my teammate wrestled on who I had beaten. I was a four-time state champ and regional national champ. And my town had a meeting and said, 'We are not letting her on this team. No way, no how.' And it held, and I didn't wrestle anymore," she recalls.

She began wrestling again when she turned 23 and has since earned eight national titles and three gold medals at World Championship matches, but those memories remain.

"Why can you sit and teach history to both girls and boys and then walk into the wrestling room and kick your students out of the room and not teach them this? Why are they allowed to learn history and math, or you can teach them how to run and swim, but you can't teach them how to wrestle? I still don't really get that," she adds.

Many of the women on the Olympic team spent years developing their skills by wrestling against boys, because women's teams were non-existent. A communications representative for the women's Olympic wrestling team, Gary Abbott, says now the number of women wrestlers in the United States is on the rise.

"We have probably about 5000-6000 females wrestling, in comparison to maybe three quarters of a million men, so it's a much smaller part of the wrestling community but it's something that's growing very quickly. But there are still parts of the United States and the world where the idea of women wrestling is still new and something that people are still learning about," he says.

The opportunity to figure so prominently in an historic moment is not lost on 25-year-old Olympic wrestler Patricia Miranda. At 48 kilograms she will be among the first female wrestlers to compete for the United States because she is in the lightest weight category.

"I feel so honored for this chance," she says. "I know a lot of men and women have been working for decades really to get us included in the games I feel I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to step out on the stage for the first time. But I owe a lot to them. I feel very indebted."

She says she has grown accustomed to hearing people make jokes about women wrestlers. Now, she says, she has a chance to win over anyone who doesn't believe women's wrestling is a serious sport.

"We get a lot of that, you know, mud-wrestling comments, but my attitude has devolved," she says. "I don't really mind what brings them to watch, whether or not it is that they know women can be tough and love their sport or if it's that they look sexy in a singlet. Whatever reason they come to watch, I believe if they watch for more than two or three minutes they are really going to be won over by the tragedy and the triumph that they see in the middle of our matches."

Her teammate, 21-year-old Toccara Montgomery, weighs 72 kilograms and competes in the heaviest weight category. Her coach calls her a "powerhouse." Ms. Montgomery says she is ready to go.

"I may not be as fast as other girls but like, pound-for-pound and strength-wise I think I'm a really, really powerful wrestler. I hit things hard. Not as fast, but definitely harder than anybody else," she notes.

She exudes calm and confidence, but her enthusiasm is contagious and she says wrestling has made her the person she is today.

"It really, it teaches you a lot about yourself, a lot of self-confidence, self-respect and things like that," she explains. "And it is something you don't really find in team sports, like you can always blame somebody else for not making the basket or catching the ball or something like that. But in wrestling if you don't step up it is solely your responsibility."

The Olympic women's wrestling competition is scheduled for the second week of the Olympic Games, which begin August 14 in Athens

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A Homebody Blazes a Trail Abroad, Wrestling for Her Family and Country

By THOMAS GEORGE

Published: June 27, 2004

he first United States Olympic women's wrestling team filed into Buster's Garage, an indoor-outdoor sports-theme restaurant in Lower Manhattan where the owner treated the athletes to a sampling of big-city hospitality on Wednesday night. Curious patrons kept turning their heads, unsure of the group but certain that something special was in their midst.

Toccara Montgomery, a 21-year-old from Cleveland who will compete in the 158-pound class at the Athens Games in August, found a seat near the edge of a row of tables and scanned the menu. A gold medal favorite full of striking yet quiet presence, she soon asked for a quarter. She closed her eyes, then she flipped it.

"I'll take the jambalaya," she told the waiter.

What was that, she was asked?

"When I order, it's like a little tournament," she said innocently, in the way only a good-natured, down-to-earth college-age dreamer can. "I always have a lot of decisions to make, and I always take every side in mind. So, when it comes to ordering, that's tough, because I like a lot. Normally I choose four things and keep the tournament going until I'm down to one. Tonight I chose two for the finals and made it between a cheeseburger and the jambalaya."

And why a quarter?

"I've got big hands," she said. "But they do come in handy."

This wrestler, an underdog, she says, throughout most of her young life, has always found different ways to show her competitive spirit. She embraces it in her own calm way and that has lifted her from tragedy, doubt, loneliness and an aching heart into world-class competition.

These Olympics will be the first to include women's wrestling, and Montgomery and her teammates are the beneficiaries of a tough, circuitous road that gives them the chance so many dynamic female wrestlers missed. The team was training in New York last week.

The wrestling community shares a rare bond - you say you are a wrestler, every one of them knows what that struggle means in terms of the sport's grind, popularity and acceptance. It is more intense for women because, even in the wrestling fraternity, there remains the old-school axiom among men: girls don't wrestle.

Montgomery has faced all of that, and more. Besides the tomboy labels all female wrestlers endure, there are the cultural differences she faces being among the few African-American women in the sport. In fact, she will probably be the only African-American woman wrestler at the Olympics.

She constantly battles the belief that her race is the reason she is such a strong athlete and that her strength is the reason she is such a dominant wrestler, with those concepts often overshadowing her intelligence, knowledge and work habits. She is studying elementary education at Cumberland College in Kentucky and is on the team there; many wrestlers of her caliber postpone their education to train.

Her father, Paul, 42, is serving 30 years to life in a prison in southwestern Ohio for a double murder in 1998, when she was 15, something else that makes Montgomery unlike her peers. Her genesis toward wrestling is particularly singular.

"Toccara was and is very close to her father," Tara Montgomery, her mother, said. "And even when she was 7, they used to roughhouse each other on the bed and she just wanted to do it again and again. They both love reading and would go to the library together, get books, and he would read to her and she would read to him. When this tragedy happened, there was a period where she was angry and hurting. It was something deep she was dealing with. It was something I couldn't touch. But never once did she complain."

Her mother continued: "She used sports to deal with her pain and tried basketball, softball, track and weight lifting. Wrestling found her and she found wrestling. She was angry with her dad for a while and would not speak to him when he called from prison. But then one day she did and they bonded again, and she became a protector of me and her little brother, Patrick. She's stronger. She's blossomed. But she's still so quiet. People say, because of that, 'She's a wrestler?' "

Montgomery said she learned to listen more than talk. Her personality, however, is outgoing and full of adaptability, qualities she insists are essential to wrestling.

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ON THE MAT TAKEDOWN

Issue of 2004-07-05
Posted 2004-06-28

Last week, in case you missed it, was women’s-wrestling week here in the city—or, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, in his official proclamation, “United States Olympic Team for Women’s Freestyle Wrestling Week.” Bloomberg delivered the good news in a luxury box at the Staten Island Yankees game on Monday night, where he was joined by the squad, the country’s first ever. (Women’s wrestling will début as an Olympic event in Athens this August.) According to those present, the Mayor also announced that he had declined a suggestion from a friend that he wrestle with the girls, naked, in the mud.

The next day, the women wore T-shirts and gym shorts, mostly, when they assembled for the opening of the squad’s training camp, at the Di Silvestri Wrestling Center, at Staten Island’s all-male Monsignor Farrell High School. The Wrestling Center, which is next to the school cafeteria, smells and feels like an indoor swimming pool, not a mud pit. It features wall-to-wall mats (washed each morning with chlorine), and there was no air-conditioning to absorb the humidity—of which there was plenty, even before the trainees, practicing their headlocks, chicken wings, and leg attacks, began to sweat.

All told, there were twelve grapplers—four prospective Olympians, one in each weight class, and eight alternates—and they ranged in build from soccer captain to gymnast to don’t-mess-with-me. One female observer noted that the athletes were all “walking” between ten and fifteen pounds over their competition weights, and marvelled at their evident “cutting” abilities. (The women, unlike high-school boys, tend to eschew spit cups and trigger fingers as weight-loss methods, and stick to saunas and salads.) She pointed at Tela O’Donnell, who was entangled in an opponent’s gut wrench—essentially a prone Heimlich maneuver. O’Donnell competes at a hundred and twenty-one pounds.

“Look at her, she’s my size,” the onlooker said. “And I weigh one-thirty-two.”

Judging from the display that the women put on, Bloomberg would have fared poorly, clothed or not, in a head-to-head match with any of them. “Yeah, he wouldn’t stand a chance with no one,” said Toccara Montgomery, who competes in the heaviest weight class, a hundred and fifty-eight pounds. “Not even Patricia.” (Patricia Miranda, who specializes in high-crotch takedowns, wrestles at a hundred and five pounds and is the smallest woman on the team.)

With regard to the Mayor’s earlier comments, Montgomery said that she had heard just about enough of the old mud and jello jokes. “It makes you want to buckle the guy’s knees or something,” she said. “You know, if you’re standing behind him.”

Montgomery described herself as “an explosive wrestler” and an expert practitioner of the blast-double move, which makes knee-buckling sound like a bargain. “Basically, I try to get my shoulders a little lower than yours, and I drive on into your chest while pulling your legs in,” she said. “I’ve knocked the wind out of a couple opponents here and there, and it takes a couple seconds in the match for them to regain themselves, but I’ve never, like, put anyone in—well, once I broke a girl’s collarbone.”

After practice, the team was briefed on the evening’s agenda: dinner at the Staten Island Hotel with the borough president, James Molinaro. (Dress code: casual, but not sloppy; jeans, but not ripped jeans.) “I don’t know if you’re familiar with what a borough is, but he’s like the mayor of Staten Island,” Gary Abbott, the team’s communications director, explained.

Outside the gym, Toccara Montgomery waited for a few straggling teammates before heading over to the hotel to change. “This is killing my plans, just killing them,” she said. “I was going to let my hair down and do braids.”

The dinner guests were impressed just the same. Stanley Friedman, the hotel’s manager (and the former Bronx Democratic Party chairman, who served four years in jail for bribery), sucked on an unlit cigar, surveyed the scene, and said, “To tell you the truth, I was picturing big Russian women.” He straightened his shoulders and puffed out his chest. “But they’re lovely and charming.”