It’s Official: This Ref Has Feminine Side

Grappling for the physical advantage captivated Kelly Jolley when she was hardly bigger than a winner’s trophy.

She doesn’t know why she wanted to wrestle. Her brother played hockey. Her mother was pretty and perfumed.

Maybe the attention her hockey-star brother won fueled Kelly’s aggression. It didn’t matter. Her junior high school in Anchorage, Alaska, wouldn’t let a girl wrestle in 1976.

But Kelly found another way into the sport, climbed to the top ranks and paved the way for other women without relinquishing an ounce of femininity.

She became a mat official.

“I’ve always been one who wants to be the first in things,” she says. “Someday, I want to referee at the Olympics.”

Women and wrestling may stir visions of mud pits and skimpy outfits, but Kelly doesn’t fit into that scene.

She blows the whistle for athletes, not performers, and loves the sport so much that she decided to become a wrestler to improve her refereeing skills.

“It’s been flippin’ hard,” she says, as she prepares the bar she tends at Tito Macaroni’s restaurant in Coeur d’Alene. “But I’ve learned about body positioning, blocking. Things are much more obvious to me now.”

Kelly hardly fits the female wrestler stereotype. She’s 132 lean pounds topped with a swirl of marbled blonde hair. She’s model pretty, graceful and poised as a ballerina.

Her mother taught her to appreciate every facet of herself.

“Mom is very feminine, but she hunts bears,” Kelly says. “Dad was gone a lot, so Mom had to be tough. She finished building our house.”

Coaches wouldn’t let Kelly wrestle in school, but they made her a trainer. She wrapped injuries as a freshman, attended sports medicine camps and traveled with the high school wrestling and football teams all over the Northwest.

As a sophomore, she and a junior wrestler, Tom Jolley, started the first wrestling club for kids in Anchorage. Kelly married Tom and followed him to Coeur d’Alene where he wrestled for North Idaho College for two years.

After college, Tom ran a wrestling club in Anchorage. Kelly helped and had babies while her wrestling interests deepened and her softer side cried for attention.

To answer those cries, she entered and won the Mrs. Alaska International pageant in 1992, then represented Alaska in the Mrs. U.S.A. pageant. She left with the Mrs. Congeniality title, then entered and won the Mrs. Alaska America pageant.

That win sent her to the Mrs. America pageant, where her confidence took a beating.

“When I didn’t make the top 10, it was very hard,” she says. “I hugged my husband a lot.”

At about the same time, a friend suggested Kelly become a wrestling official. Kelly hadn’t hidden her irritation at officials she thought were unskilled and biased.

Club wrestling in Alaska needed officials. Gender wasn’t an issue. Kelly knew the moves and what was fair. The officials’ director told her to show up at the next competition wearing white pants and shirt, red and blue arm bands and a whistle.

Shadowing other officials, she learned where to position herself on the mat for falls and how not to detract from the wrestling action. She refereed locally, regionally, then nationally, testing to climb to each new level.

“In the nation, there are maybe 10 women at her level,” says Mark Scott, U.S.A. Wrestling’s director of state services. “We’re always looking for more.”

Male officials sometimes steered Kelly to the scorekeeper when she arrived to work, but welcomed her as an official after she proved she knew the moves.

Fans were tougher.

“People scream in my face, call me foul names,” she says. “I have to understand it’s in the heat of emotion. I never really get mad, but it used to hurt my feelings.”

Women are the harshest.

“They look at me as a woman on the mat and not an official,” Kelly says. “I’ve actually been told, ‘How could you let my son get hurt?’ They tell me I don’t belong.”

Shortly after Kelly and her family moved to Coeur d’Alene in 1996, a few officials told her she’d never be a great referee until she competed. Kelly took the bait.

At 34, she began weight training, running and wrestling with the Kootenai County Matmen, a new club she and Tom formed. Tom coached her.

She wasn’t in shape. It hurt, but she stuck with it. She wrestled with her 15-year-old son, who worried she’d take it out on him at home if he held her down. She promised she wouldn’t. Coeur d’Alene businessman Rick Miller agreed to sponsor her.

Her first competition against another woman is later this month, but Kelly already agrees with the officials who steered her into competing. It’s sharpened her calls.

Now, she’s lobbying for women’s wrestling in the Olympics. She’s also planning a run this year or next at the Mrs. Idaho title.

“My husband says that no matter what I do in wrestling, people will look at me like a woman,” she says. “Good. I don’t mind that at all. I feel blessed I can be me and earn respect from other officials.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo