Brooklynite Holds Highest
Judo Rank of U.S. Women
By Caitlin McNamara
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN -- Rusty Kanokogi is a fighter. A fiercely strong, deep-voiced woman who knows how to stick to her guns. Fueled by a pivotal, crushing moment 50 years ago in Utica, N.Y., she fought a grueling battle to take women’s judo from an unrecognized sport to an official Olympic game.
For her perseverance, the Coney Island native is internationally hailed as the “mother of women’s judo.” Friday she will be given back the first medal she ever earned — but wasn’t allowed to keep.
The fateful day was in 1959 in Utica, when the Brooklyn Central YMCA judo team faced the Utica YMCA team in a fight for the state championship. When a Brooklyn team member was injured, the coach chose Kanokogi to fill in. Women weren’t expressly barred from participating in Y tournaments because, as Kanokogi says, “It was never expected that a woman would ever want, or be able, to fight a man on an equal boundary.”
To better blend in, she flattened her chest with an Ace bandage, and she already wore her hair short. Her coach advised her not to try to win, just to cause a draw. “As soon as I took a grip I didn’t want to fool around,” she says. “I went for a big play and it worked. I threw him. The guys looked at me like ‘what’d you do that for?’”
They won the title and were given gold medals and a team trophy. They all bowed out, she says, excited to go celebrate over dinner, when an official called Kanokogi into an office.
“He said, ‘Are you a girl?’ He wouldn’t even give me the credit of being a woman,” she says. “If I didn’t give the medal back he said they would disqualify the team. When the boys saw I wasn’t wearing mine they wanted to give theirs back, too. But I said no. It was a solemn ride from Utica to Brooklyn.”
“I think it was the hand of fate, because I said, ‘This can’t happen to another woman.’” So began her crusade.
Women’s judo was rejected from the 1980 games in Moscow on the grounds that women didn’t have enough world-class competitive experience. To address this, she organized the first women’s judo world championships in New York in 1980. She and her husband, Ryohei Kanokogi, mortgaged their house to cover costs. More than 25 countries had to participate, according to International Olympic Committee stipulations, and they pulled in 27.
Despite this, judo was rejected from the 1984 games. She said in a lecture recently: “I can’t even express my emotion of what I felt that day. It was a terrible disappointment, but just like in sport, we don’t give up so easily, especially in judo. So my direction was through legal maneuvers, lawsuits, the press, international law associations to file complaints against the IOC for discrimination against women in sports, specifically in judo.”
Through her efforts, women’s judo was admitted as a demonstration game to the 1988 Seoul games. With Kanokogi as coach, the three-woman U.S. team took a silver and bronze medal — a record that still stands — but the medals were not added to the final country count. “They always have to be dragging you over rocks,” she says.
At the 1992 Barcelona games, women’s judo became the first official full-contact Olympic women’s sport.
Saved by Judo
Kanokogi’s ferocity was shaped on the mean streets of Coney Island in the 1940s and early ’50s, where in her teens she was the head of a gang called the Apaches. Her given name, Rena Glickman, was too “girly” for the neighborhood, so she took the name Rusty from a mean mutt with a serious bark. She calls fighting a “Coney Island treat.”
When she was 19, a friend showed her his judo techniques. “He picked me up on his hip and I said ‘What the heck is that?’ I could fight, that was too easy. This I had to learn.”
In 1962 she studied in Tokyo at Kodokan, which is considered the “international Mecca” of judo. She started her training in a women’s dojo but soon was moved to the men’s dojo. “Their form was excellent, but I was already passed that state. I was a fighter. Not that I didn’t have a lot to learn, but I couldn’t keep knocking their women down,” she says with a chuckle. She met her husband, who is also a black belt in judo and karate, while in Japan, although they didn’t date until he moved to New York.
Kanokogi has been president of New York State Judo for more than 20 years and was inducted into the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1994. In November Japan recognized her as the mother of women’s judo, presenting her with the Emperor’s Order of the Rising Sun, one of the nation’s highest decorations.
She holds a seventh degree black belt, the highest rank held by an American woman.
Still Fighting
At 74, now a grandmother, Kanokogi still teaches and coaches — she is head referee at Berkeley Carroll Athletic Center in Park Slope — although she has recently taken on new adversaries: kidney failure and multiple myeloma, cancer of the white blood cells. She is on dialysis and undergoing chemotherapy.
“I use a cane, and my husband is a fantastic caregiver. He’s strong as a horse,” she says, adding that if she didn’t have the dialysis to contend with she would be on her way to the world championships in Rotterdam next week.
“I haven’t lost any of my spirit. And I know how to use that cane as a samurai sword, so stay away!” she says with a laugh.
Friday, in a private mid-morning ceremony atop the Prospect Park YMCA, Kanokogi will be re-awarded the medal that was taken away back in Utica in 1959.
“Judo is such an equalizer,” she says. “In the beginning it’s physical. After that it’s a way of life.”
