Prepares for 1992 Games : Olympics Next for Judo Medalist

No matter how liberated, many men still believe women should be protected from society’s harshest excesses--including contact sports.

Jan Trussell thinks differently. She doesn’t want any protection. And that’s not just feminist bravura. Those are fightin’ words from a judo champion.

Trussell won a gold medal in the 123-pound women’s division at the Russian Invitational, held two weeks ago in Lithuania. When she returned home to Gardena, she placed the new medal among 30 others and almost 200 trophies collected during 15 years of competition.

She would like to add some Olympic gold to her collection but realizes that her chance to win a medal at the 1988 Summer Games is almost nil. But the 1992 Olympics will be hers, she vows.

An impressive finish in January’s world championships would have assured her one of eight Olympic openings in her weight class, but injuries kept her from competing. A selection committee will fill a few remaining spots in the next week, but Trussell is not optimistic about her chances.

“I’d cut off an arm if I could make this Olympic team, but being realistic, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” said Trussell, who is ranked second in the nation’s 114-pound class and third in the 123-pound class. “I made a mistake of getting injured and ruining my chances, but in 1992 I know I’ll make it.”

Trussell, 25, is upset because women’s judo is only a demonstration event in the Olympics. Men’s judo became an official event in the Games in 1968.

“You have to prove that you are at the same level as men, and I think women are there now,” she said. “We should have been in the 1984 Olympics. Women have to pay their dues and prove that they’re valid, and we’ve paid our dues.”

Why women could not compete in judo until 1988 is unclear. Trussell thinks it was a lack of world-class competitors. Frank Fullerton, president of the El Paso-based U. S. Judo Inc., believes it was because women pushed for the creation of a separate women’s judo event when the International Olympic Committee would have agreed to simply a women’s competition within the judo event.

“They could have gotten in more quickly,” Fullerton said.

The slow influx of women into competitive judo relates to learned athletic skills, Trussell said. “Women aren’t brought up to be as good athletes as men are,” she said. “We didn’t get to play football and those kind of sports when we were kids.”

Only women who push for their acceptance in judo break down stereotypes, says Fullerton. Trussell literally fights for acceptance.

“I guess (judo is) violent,” said Trussell, who has suffered at least five serious injuries. “It is rougher than a lot of sports. Judo is fighting and wrestling. You get somebody out there trying to break your arm or choke you to death and body-slam you to the ground. The chance for injury is always there.”

Judo is a combination of wrestling and jujitsu. It became a sport in the 1880s when an Oxford University scholar introduced Western wrestling to jujitsu artists in Japan. Among the five ways to score are arm bars (one player locks opponent’s arm by pushing against elbow joint from the rear), choke holds and throws. Trussell said a competitor’s jacket makes the throws higher and harder than those in wrestling because an opponent can use the jacket for leverage. All moves are dangerous.

“If you get arm-barred, you have to give up,” Trussell explained, “and if you don’t, (your opponent) can break your arm and that would end the match. It’s not really a bone-break, but it’s a severe hyper-extension. If you get a choke hold around your opponent’s neck, either she gives up or she’ll just pass out and you win.”

In the gold medal match of the Russian Invitational, Trussell had to hyper-extend her Russian opponent’s arm because the Russian would not submit to an arm bar.

“That happens in big competitions,” Trussell said. “That girl did not want to lose to an American in her own country. But most people will not hold out as long as the Russian girl. They’ll reach a point where they’ll give up because they can’t take the pain.”

When Trussell first walked into her all-Japanese judo club in Gardena with her husband, John Ross, a woman asked her if she wanted to help serve coffee while Ross worked out.

“I said that I’d kind of like to work out also,” Trussell recalled, “and after I’d gone in and proved myself, things changed. Still, the Japanese seem to have a disdainful attitude toward women. It’s like they think women don’t belong in the sport, that they shouldn’t be doing it, that they should leave it to men.”

Trussell also felt disdain in 1979 among Americans at the U. S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“All the athletes had dinner together and the men asked the ‘wenches’ to clear the table,” said Ross, Taiwan’s 1965 national champion and a 14-time U. S. champion.

“I wanted to hit (the men),” added Ann Maria Rousey, who trains periodically with Trussell. “But I told them they had diarrhea of the mouth and that I’d knock them over if they said it again.”

Rousey, a doctoral student at UC Riverside, turned the tables in 1984 when she captured the nation’s first judo world championship among women or men. The men did not gain the honor until last year.

Success also has comforted Trussell. When she first started training, men would only train on their side of the gym. Now, said Ross, she gives clinics to men.

She often trains more than 40 hours per week. And her effort and desire to reach the Olympics aren’t lost on the media. NBC ran a 10-minute spot on Trussell in a special about Olympic hopefuls.

Jumping rope before the camera, Trussell gave her training philosophy: “I know that someone, somewhere in the world is laying down and sleeping while I’m training, and that keeps me going. I want to prove that I’m better than them and I know that I have to put out more than they are putting out to beat them.”

While living at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center before she moved to Southern California in 1986, Trussell became king of the hill--literally. She consistently sprinted up a sand hill 80 yards high as teammates succumbed to the unsettled mount.

“Then there was another hill across the road after the sand hill,” said John Saylor, judo coach at the Training Center, “and she’d go ahead and do both when most would stop at the road.”

Saylor said Trussell’s determination explains all those medals displayed in Gardena.

“Her mental stamina allows her to totally dominate a match,” Saylor said, “and it’s also an ability to train super-hard over a long period. You have to be able to do the things you don’t feel like doing not just before a match but over time, and Jan can do that.”

Which is fortunate, Trussell says, because time favors judo competitors. It takes strength to throw an opponent over your shoulder, but to win, it takes smarts that a competitor gains with maturity.

“I’m really strong, but I fall behind a little in the brain part,” Trussell said. “Judo is a thinking person’s sport. I don’t think well enough and that’s why I say the 1992 Olympics will be better (for me). It’s like I don’t have control over my mind in a contest, but I’m starting to get that slowly.”

Trussell lacked control as a teen-ager growing up in Independence, Miss. From age 13 to 18, she drank and used drugs constantly and did judo occasionally. She dropped out of school, alienated her family, stole a car, went to jail for drunk driving, ran away and finally lost friends to drug-related deaths.

Judo seemed her only alternative.

“I guess I’m kind of an obsessive person,” she said. “When I find something I like, I throw myself into it 100%, whether it’s good or bad. What I did with drugs is kind of what I’ve done with judo, except it was (at the opposite end) of the spectrum.”

She was supposed to attend yet another keg party in 1981 with friends. But her brother-in-law phoned to tell her that Ross was holding a judo clinic in town on the night of the party. She went to the clinic and never got high again.

“Jan hadn’t been doing any judo really unless I came to town,” Ross recalled. “She came to train with me in Oklahoma and she really became a completely different human being in one day.”

“Jan was overweight and terrible,” Rousey remembered. “At first, we used her for target practice. But a few years later she was tough. She went from nothing to one of the top three (judo competitors in the country) in a couple of years.”