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Grapple of her eye
Olympic hopeful wrestles with gender role

By WAYNE COFFEY 11/22/03
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Late on a Sunday afternoon in Madison Square Garden two months ago, a future Yale law student named Patricia Miranda stood behind a blue curtain, a 5-0, 105-pound mess.

She had just lost in the finals of the women's world championships to her archrival, Ukrainian Irini Merleni. She was sobbing. Her knees were giving out beneath her. Her coach, Terry Steiner, tried to comfort her, but there was no comfort to be found.

"I was crushed. I was cut in half," Miranda says.

"She hurt as much as anyone I've ever been around," Steiner says. He probably shouldn't have been surprised, but was, when he heard from Miranda two days later, her five-pronged plan for improvement complete.

"Right away, she was picking the match apart, doing something constructive with her pain," says Steiner, the U.S. women's national coach. "She's very incredible, and very unique. I've been around some great athletes, and I'd put her up there with any of them."

Women's wrestling will be the only new sport on the Olympic plate next summer in Athens. The U.S. is one of the heavyweights, and Miranda, 24, of Saratoga, Calif., a Brazilian-Japanese-American and the reigning U.S. champion at 105.5 pounds, is a principal reason why. Ranked No. 2 in the world behind Merleni, Miranda captured the Pan Am Games title last summer in the Dominican Republic, and the World Cup title last month in Japan.

She has done all of this in a pursuit that her father, Dr. Jose Miranda, vehemently opposed, and hoped for years that she would drop. In a surreal twist in this era of Title IX, he even threatened to sue Saratoga High School for allowing her to compete - and placing her at risk of injury.

"It's not the most feminine sport you can think of," Dr.Miranda, a family practitioner, says. "It's a very violent sport."

Ultimately, father and daughter struck a deal: Patricia could wrestle, as long as she got straight A's. She did, and didn't let up when she got to Stanford, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

Miranda was an avid basketball player as a girl, and competed in gymnastics, too.

Everything changed when she was 10, when her mother, Lia, died suddenly of an aneurysm at age 42. Patricia found herself looking for something new. She was in a weightlifting/fitness class in gym when she heard about tryouts for the wrestling team. She showed up, and never stopped showing up, unfazed that she was the only girl on a team full of boys.

"You know the fight or flight response?" Miranda says. "I had a lot of flight. I would freeze up. I basically wouldn't move. Things that I'm good at I get bored with quickly. The sport hooked me from the beginning, mostly because I was really bad at it."

Miranda was fully supported by her high school coach, Lloyd Asato, and competed on varsity for three years. Some of the guys on the team were not so open-minded, and let her know it.

"If they wanted me to quit, that was the No. 1 dumb thing to do, because it only solidified my resolve," Miranda says.

Miranda captained the Saratoga High team as a junior and senior, winning more than half of her matches - all against boys - in her final year. With no women's team at Stanford, she joined the men, wasting no time displaying her trademark intensity.

Near the bottom of the depth chart, she had limited chances to compete, but never relented in her training. In her senior year, she went 3-13 wrestling at 125pounds (the lightest classification in NCAA wrestling), winning her first match against a male college wrestler by a score of 7-3.

"Am I a joke? Am I delusional? Those questions haunted me all through high school and college," Miranda says. "That match was very important to me. I put together a good seven minutes and did enough right to win."

Miranda was admitted to Yale Law after getting her degree in economics and a masters in international relations, opting to defer admission so she could prepare for the Olympics. She looks at law school in much the same way she has always viewed wrestling: as a daunting and delicious challenge. It is what has long driven her. Is it a surprise that her favorite release from the rigors of the mat is whitewater rafting? Or that, even as a young gymnast, Miranda would fall off an apparatus and keep getting back on?

Her father still isn't the world's foremost fan of women's wrestling, but he is there for all of Patricia's biggest matches, and knows high achievement when he sees it.

"Whatever she wants to do, she's going to go after it," Dr. Miranda says. "I think it's her greatest trait. She is not a natural athlete. She has worked for everything she has gotten. I am immensely proud of her."

What Dr. Jose Miranda's daughter is going after now is a spot at 105.5 pounds on the U.S. Olympic team at the trials in May, and then a trip to Greece.

Nine months from Opening Ceremonies, she already feels an acute sense of urgency.

There is so much to do, so much to learn. She writes about her moves and goals in her wrestling journal. She does a lot of visualization. Every day, she says she relives the pain she felt at the Garden, the deep cut of defeat. It is a feeling she never wants to experience again. There is only one result she can think about in Athens.

"It's got to be gold," Patricia Miranda says. "I've seen everyone out there and I believe if I wrestle my best I can beat anybody in the world. I really believe the facts point to that. Anything else would be settling."

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Girl battling cancer learns 'friends come with great smiles'

By John DeWeese -- Daily World Writer 11/22/03

Sometimes Sandy Calica can't believe her daughter Nikita has cancer.

Ask 12 - year - old Nikita what's the worst thing about missing school for chemotherapy treatments at Mary Bridge Children's Hospital in Tacoma, she'll probably say not being able to wrestle for Hoquiam Middle School.

Nikita wants to follow in the footsteps of her role model, Montesano wrestler Arielle Bradbury - the first girl to qualify for the high school state wrestling tournament in 1998.

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Goldsmith wins gold at Cougar Women's Open, as UM-Morris is second in team race

11/24/2003
Doug Reese/UM-M

Regina, Saskatchewan - In their first competition of the season, the University of Minnesota-Morris women's wrestling team placed second in the traditionally tough University of Regina Women's Open wrestling tournament on Saturday, November 22nd. All six of the UM-Morris women placed in the event.

Sophomore, Megan Goldsmith (Black River Falls, WI) won the gold medal posting a 3-0 record at 80 kilos/176 pounds. Goldsmith placed 2nd, earning All-American honors in the Junior National championships last season and was an alternate to the Junior World Championships.

Sophomore, Tabithia Ramsey (Austin, TX) placed second at 53 kilos/116.6 pounds. The effort was Ramsey's best in her collegiate freestyle career. Last season Ramsey earned All-American honors with a third place finish in the US Junior National Championships.

Sophomore, Ranae Faaborg (Radcliffe, IA) placed second at 65 kilos/143 pounds. Faaborg a University All-American a year ago recorded her best finish in the sport this weekend.

A pair of freshman Adriana Cervantes (Petaluma, CA) and Gabrielle Portillo (El Paso, TX) each placed fourth in their weight classes. Cervantes placed fourth at 57 kilos/125.4 pounds, and Portillo placed fourth at 61 kilos/134.2 pounds. This was the first freestyle competition for both this former high school wrestling stars.

Senior Katie Ross (Greensboro, NC) place fifth at 57 kilos/125.4 pounds. Ross is a two-time University National All-American.

"It was a great effort by our team," said UMM head coach Doug Reese. "They have been working hard for months, and they were hungry for competition. I am not surprised at all by the results."

The University of Regina won the tournament with 34 points, UM-Morris placing second with 23 points, and the University of Saskatchewan placing third scoring 20 team points.

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