TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
June 16, 1985
Author: GENE WEINGARTEN Herald Tropic Editor

The last time Peter Richmond wrote for Tropic was Super Bowl Sunday, when he advanced the singular argument that football has become an effeminate sport. The article was satire, lampooning the macho lunacy of professional athletics. It was fun to write; it was fun to edit. "The Building of Jo Wood" was a different story.

This one nearly leveled Peter. It left him emotionally disabled, despairing for the woman he was writing about, despairing for himself, despairing for his own profession. "Sometimes I can't stomach what I have to do," he told me, with not a little bitterness, when we were done.

Peter was writing about Jo Wood, a young Kendall weightlifter who is one of the strongest women in the world. After his first few interviews, Peter was elated. He was getting, he said, an incredible story: He had found a woman, pretty and intelligent, who was actually turning herself into a man with drugs, and maybe risking her life, in order to compete in a man's athletic world. Steroid abuse is an ongoing scandal in gyms all over the country, an open secret formally denied by everyone in the sport. At last, Peter had found someone willing to talk about it, frankly, for print. Jo Wood wasn't a freak. She wasn't at all unusual. She was just unusually honest.

And so Peter spent weeks with Jo. And came back with a story every bit as powerful and shocking as he had promised, one of the finest things he has ever written.

And then he wanted me to kill it.

He was in the throes of some private torment. The story, he said, would damage Jo Wood with her family and in her sport. He said the hypocrites who run that sport would see to it: they know of steroid abuse and make no efforts to control it, but once Jo embarrassed them in public, they might ostracize her.

We can't do this to her, he said.

"Peter," I said, "I don't understand. You went after a story and you got it, exactly what you wanted. Jo is an intelligent adult. You didn't trick her. She knows the risk she is taking." I was getting angry.

"Just what is the matter with you, anyway?"

And then it came out, reluctantly, almost as if it were a confession:

"Jo Wood is my friend," he said.

And suddenly, with absolute clarity, the two of us were facing journalism's most unnerving conflict -- when the requirement of professional detachment collides with the human impulse to feel, and care.

Peter Richmond had come to like Jo Wood. He admired the drive and passion that made her want something so badly she was willing to discard convention and normalcy and go for it. He wished he had the same courage.

In the end, Peter and I reached an uneasy truce. We came to agree that this story had to be told, because the use of drugs in the sports world is a malevolent and dangerous thing and has gone too far, because the story had been freely offered to us by someone who understood the risks, and, most important, because it might just help -- and not hurt -- Jo Wood.

The one thing Peter had never resolved to his satisfaction was just why Jo Wood chose to tell her story at all. She says she was fed up with the hyprocrisy of a system that silently condones drug use and publicly denies it. I think that is part of it.

Peter believes also that she is telling the world her body is hers to do with as she wishes, that she is not ashamed. I think that is part of it, too.

But I think also that Jo Wood may have gotten herself so deeply into something that she sees no way out. This story, and its ripples, may give her that exit.

Whatever her reasons, this young woman from Kendall has done something very courageous, and very important.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald

"The Building of Jo Wood," by Peter Richmond