D That the father of modern men’s judo was a small, quiet, disciplined Japanese man named Jigoro Kano should come as no surprise, Gary Smith wrote in 2008 in the Sports Illustrated. “The mother of women’s judo, on the other hand? A big, loud Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn. And every day good for a surprise.”
Rusty Kanokogi was born on July 30, 1935 as Rena Glickman in New York. She had been working after school since the age of seven, and learned to stand up for herself. In the fifties she founded a girls’ gang; there were regular brawls. Until the moment when her clique deserted her and she suddenly found herself surrounded by police officers alone.
Sport had long been a part of her life; with her brother’s dumbbells and a punching bag she trained, usually alone.
In 1955, after a short marriage she was already divorced and mother of a son, when a friend showed her a judo technique. He was smaller, lighter, and yet threw her to the ground effortlessly. Rusty began training and proved quickly to be talented. She had to disguise herself as a man in order to be allowed to practice judo at all.
With Bound Breasts
In 1959 she entered as a substitute at the YMCA Championship in New York. Women were not explicitly excluded; they simply did not appear, on the registration form there was no field for “Gender.” Rusty cut her hair short and bound her breasts. When a team member was injured, she was allowed to fight. The coach advised her to hold back, the team gold was anyway secure. Rusty ignored the advice and won.
In her posthumously published memoirs she describes the medal ceremony: “I trembled with pride. That was my Olympic moment.” Soon after, the tournament director demanded that she return the gold medal; otherwise her team would be disqualified. He knew that she was a woman; her participation had been illegal. Rusty handed him the medal, although, as she put it, “all I had done wrong was simply to be a woman.” She never forgot this humiliation—and used it as motivation again and again.
In 1962 she went to Tokyo to the Kodokan, the oldest judo school in the world. Women were allowed to train there since 1926, but they trained separately from the men. Rusty became the first woman allowed to train with men, reached the 2nd dan and met her future husband, Ryohei Kanokogi, a black belt in judo, karate and jōdō. They married in New York in 1964.
Afterwards began her real pioneering work; she also had two more children. In 1966 she organized the first women’s tournament, in 1977 she assembled a Jewish women’s team for the Maccabiah Games. The first women’s world championship in 1980 at Madison Square Garden would not have come about without her; she organized the tournament and financed it with a mortgage on her own house.
Her goal remained grand: to make women’s judo Olympic. In 1988 it finally happened, not least because Rusty had threatened the IOC with equality lawsuits. She participated as a coach of Team USA; her athlete Margaret Castro won bronze.
The price was high. The apparently “gentle” sport treated her harshly: a broken nose, along with fractures to the arm and both collarbones, roughly twenty broken toes, as well as a dislocated shoulder. Many of these injuries, she later said, were also because men could not bear losing to a woman. “I was a threat to them. They didn’t just throw me out; they tried to throw me down to the basement.”
That she was used to ignoring pain became her downfall. Shoulder problems she left unaddressed for months, until a doctor diagnosed an aggressive multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. Three years later, on November 21, 2009, Rusty Kanokogi died at the age of 74.
Shortly before, she was honored: in 2008 with the Order of the Rising Sun for her contributions to Japanese culture, and in 2009 with a YMCA Gold Medal for her life’s work.
