Olympic Moments ...

A Couple Grapple for Love, and Love of Achievement
By GREG BISHOP

LAS VEGAS — Friends say Patricia Miranda and Levi Weikel-Magden argue like an old married couple, but really, they argue more like what they are — married wrestlers with law degrees.

Most couples start out dating. They started with constant debating, with topics ranging from “Star Trek” to immigration policy, with Miranda occasionally throwing a head butt to make a point.

It took eight years before Weikel-Magden made the most persuasive argument yet — he persuaded Miranda, a women’s wrestling pioneer and bronze medalist in 2004, to come out of retirement for one final shot at an Olympic gold medal — with a twist that held potential for disaster and delight. He wanted to become her coach, and he did in September 2005.

“We’re going to look back at this chapter, this amazing chapter, as the point where we really learned to trust one another,” Weikel-Magden said.

They met at Stanford in 1997, two overachievers who were teammates and friends before all the dating and debating. From the first day, their teammate Warren McPherson said they were inseparable.

Weikel-Magden came from an eastern Oregon town so small the closest movie theater was two and a half hours away. He sent a recruiting tape to Stanford coaches filled with all his losses and somehow managed to secure a scholarship.

Miranda arrived from Silicon Valley, the only female on the team, the daughter of Brazilian immigrants, including a father who once threatened to sue the school district if she wrestled.

She had decided not to date teammates, out of respect for team chemistry, but something kept drawing Miranda and Weikel-Magden together. They started dating shortly after a Halloween party at which Weikel-Magden showed up at her dormitory room without a costume and ended up borrowing her clothes to dress in drag.

Miranda, who turned 29 on Tuesday, can pinpoint when she knew they would make a life together. The summer after their freshman year, after her future husband had cracked the varsity lineup “looking like a 12-year-old, still a year away from puberty,” she received a telephone call from his parents.

Levi is in the hospital ... Crohn’s Disease ... massive infection ... complications ... surgery.

Upon hearing the predicament, her father, incapable of anything other than brutal truth, said, “Oh, that one’s gone.”

Earlier that day, Weikel-Magden’s small intestine ruptured. He spent nearly three hours on the couch, pain. Family members rushed him to the hospital.

“I’m screaming bloody murder,” he said. “I wish I was tougher. But screaming at the top of my lungs was all I could do to make it manageable.”

Doctors diagnosed Crohn’s, an autoimmune disease that confuses the immune system and causes inflammation in the digestive track. By the time Miranda arrived the weekend after the operation, Weikel-Magden had lost 30 pounds.

They were lying together on the hospital bed when doctors explained that Weikel-Magden would live with the disease the rest of his life. Weikel-Magden flashed, of all things, a smile. He considered himself fortunate.

“That’s when I knew,” Miranda said. “I’d rather spend 10 years with him than 50 with anyone else I ever met.”

After graduating from Stanford, Weikel-Magden went to law school at Virginia, while Miranda deferred her enrollment at Yale to train for the 2004 Athens Games — the Olympic debut for women’s wrestling. He helped coach her to the bronze medal, the first Olympic medal for an American female wrestler.

Miranda then retired and went to Yale Law, adding to an undergraduate degree in economics and a master’s degree in international policy.

She missed wrestling, but not in the way that she expected. She did not miss the glory, the accolades or the applause, she said. Rather, she missed the serendipity that came with being a world-class athlete — being stranded in a Russian airport while the airline lost her luggage, bumming around Sweden for a week while waiting for teammates to arrive.

Mainly, she missed the moments shared. And Weikel-Magden, in the persuasive argument, wanted to share them with her.

The pitch: “You are so close to just dominating,” he said he told her.

“He’s a good salesman,” Miranda concedes now. But for the first six months of the experiment, she wished she had stayed retired.

Folding the worlds of husband and wife, coach and athlete proved difficult. She promised trust but felt betrayed when her husband scolded her at practice, only to later feel like a failure for not trusting more.

This spilled into their home life. One time, Weikel-Magden took home a new toothbrush and started teaching Miranda how to use it. “You can’t coach me on how to brush my teeth!” she said.

Early on at Stanford, the couple shared a wrestling weakness: too much thinking in a sport where instinct dominates. During matches, they would think about things like the color of the ceiling, what they would tell their parents if they lost, whether the sweat on their coaches’ hands indicated frayed nerves.

“It’s overthinking, and it’s intellectual,” Weikel-Magden said. “And wrestling is anything but intellectual. We can be our own worst enemies that way.”

He taught himself to compete instinctively, and something surprising happened. Weikel-Magden found he loved fighting, enduring pain and hurting people. Even after surgery, he did not miss a practice.

He needed to tap into Miranda’s violent vein, conjure emotions like anger and hatred. This did not come naturally for Miranda, who took a personality test at Yale expecting to score opposite her classmates because of wrestling. Instead, she scored similarly to them.

“It’s actually very counterintuitive, but it’s learning to be poised and angry and relaxed,” Weikel-Magden said. “It’s not being more focused. It’s not doing more work.”

Added Matt Huttner, a friend, “Even in the toughest times in their relationship, what made it work is Levi had a plan.”

To stop her from worrying and overthinking, Weikel-Magden took over the household chores, cooking and cleaning, and imploring Miranda to rest. Eventually, Miranda started to catch on. She breezed through the nationals and now needs to win only twice this weekend to qualify for the Olympics. Along the way, they learned a level of trust neither knew existed.

Weikel-Magden said that this made for a stronger marriage, that it would make them stronger parents. Miranda said her first thought every morning was, “Wow, I’m so lucky to have you.”

Three years after the persuasive argument, Weikel-Magden admits to dreaming about the end — his wife, on the podium, in part because of him.

“They’ve put together quite a trophy case,” their friend McPherson said. “That would be like the crown jewel. All the years they put in, all the sacrifices they’ve made. They put everything on hold for this one goal, this one dream. It’s right there.”

Both the principals agree. For once, there is no argument.

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This piece was in the NYT on June 12th and a colleague and fellow blogger, Joe Fav, passed it along with a note to consider it for my Olympic previews. A good suggestion for a good piece: