“I believe about five percent of couples can pull it off. There are very few couples who want to be together 24/7 and it’s not how much they love one another.”

— Azriela Jaffe, Wall Street Journal Online, 2006

By Mike Finn, W.I.N. Editor

It’s a good thing that Patricia Miranda and Levi Weikel-Magden … and their marriage … are atypical. Otherwise, the opinion of the syndicated columnist and founder of Anchored Dreams, which supports married couples in business, might suggest that the venture between the Olympic wrestler and her husband/coach might not be successful.

“She’s from California and I am far removed from being typical. When I first met her, I made her look traditional,” said Levi, who grew up in a very liberal home in otherwise conservative eastern Oregon.

And nobody knows more than Patricia and Levi how non-traditional their relationship has been since they first met as freshmen wrestlers and workout partners at Stanford University in 1998.

“I wasn’t typically attracted to the general wrestler, but he was so not the typical wrestler,” said Patricia, who was also the only woman on the Cardinal team until 2002. “I was very concerned about the chemistry of being on an all-guy wrestling team, where I was still trying to find a place for myself on the team.”

“She actually weighed more than me. She was 130 and I was 118 when we first met,” said Levi, who eventually added enough weight and experience to qualify for the NCAA tournaments as a 141-pound junior in 2001 and 157-pound senior in 2002. Patricia, meanwhile, earned very few chances to compete in a Stanford singlet, but did excel in freestyle on the international level, winning a silver medal for the United States in the 2000 Worlds; the first of four medals won by the native of Manteca, Calif.

Nearly a decade later, an injury prevented Patricia from competing in the 2007 World Championships at 112.25 pounds.

But a bigger goal is the 2008 Olympics, where Patricia expects to cut down to the Olympic weight of 105.5 pounds and hopes to improve on her 2004 bronze medal, which was the first Olympic medal earned by an American woman. In fact, Patricia came off a one-year retirement — while she started law school at Yale — for one more shot at Olympic gold … and she turned to Levi for help.

“He said, ‘Let’s look at the reasons why you decided to come back. What is it that you want to accomplish?’ ” recalled Patricia, who completed law school last May. “A lot of it had to do with his vision for how to help me reach the next level in wrestling performance.

“At the end of Levi’s college career, he truly understood what it was to compete freely and know yourself enough to be a great competitor. I did alright up to 2004 but there were a lot parts in my wrestling that I did not quite understand; basically all the time in between the shots. It was sort of like move, move, move, shoot.”

“Prior to the 2004 Olympics, she was working out eight hours a day,” Levi said. “It was crazy. She was as dedicated as she could be. But in that process, she sort of lost sight of what it takes to compete well. She was trying to do everything that she could to do well so that she wouldn’t have any excuses for winning.”

Levi believed he had to change Patricia’s style after she finished third at the 2006 Worlds, where she lost to Japan’s four-time gold medalist Hitomi Sakamoto, who like Miranda will have to move down to 105.5 if she hopes to compete in the Olympics.

“(Sakamoto) wrestles with superb technique,” Levi said. “She always attacking. She’s basically the prototype of the Japanese. I don’t think we can think business as usual or we’ll continue to lose to the Japanese. It caused me to study what Patricia does. Now I begin to see holes that I missed while I was focused on just getting her wrestling again.

“I started attacking Patricia’s style,” Levi said. “You have to realize that Patricia is very hard-working, uses a very mechanical process in her successes. In high school, this was a girl who used to show up at 8 a.m., go to school all day and then to wrestling practice. Then she’d come home and do homework at the dinner table until 1 a.m. Then repeat the process every day from her sophomore year on. That’s how she got into Stanford and later into the No. 1 law school in the nation.

“Here I’m this coach that she said she trusts but doesn’t trust to this level because now I’m telling her we need to throw that process out. I told her she had a very mechanical idea of what wrestling is; this tie-up is going to lead to this shot. But you are going to get in a fight with this girl who is so fluid.”

Patricia understood Levi’s suggestions, but did not necessarily agree.

“I felt that we needed to elevate Patricia’s game, which means I was attacking components of Patricia’s wrestling, which she was relying on and expected to rely on through 2008,” Levi said. “That’s when the trouble began.”

“At the beginning, you are all excited and we thought it was going to be easier than it ended up being with the whole husband-coaching role,” Patricia said. “In about a month or two into it, we started hitting our first growing pain of learning, where one role ends and where another one starts.

“As an athlete, I started feeling a little suffocated and that deference that you have to give a coach; that complete trust that allows him to do the thinking for you so that you can be more efficient at what you do. I had a really hard time relinquishing that control, apparently. Intellectually, I don’t have a problem doing it. But emotionally, it totally threw off my whole marriage balance.

“I had a real problem being that subservient in the wrestling room. I would just argue with everything. I don’t know if I meant to do this consciously, but I was super-heightened for any slip-up in wording or observation that he might make in the wrestling room.

“I would say, ‘See, see, you don’t know what you are talking about.’ ”

Debating opposing views is nothing new to Patricia and Levi.

“My parents can’t stand being around us because we will argue about what a sign means in Spanish. We’ll talk about it for an hour and thoroughly enjoy it,” said Levi, who also earned his law degree from the University of Virginia in 2005, which meant the pair spent their first year of marriage separated by nearly 500 miles while Patricia was in Connecticut.

ut by then, Patricia was convinced that Levi was her life-partner. She knew that their first year at Stanford.

“We were friends, debate partners and workout partners for about a month and I said I can’t shake this guy,” recalled Patricia, who eventually was the one who suggested they take their relationship to a higher level. “I sat him down on the memorial fountain at Stanford in October and informed him that we were dating in a way. I told him I need to know if you are going to pursue me romantically because if you are, let’s get on with it.”

It became a relationship that was cemented by two marriage ceremonies: first at the Valley of Fire state park in 2004 after Miranda won the fourth of six U.S. National championships in Las Vegas, Nev.

“He proposed and after I said yes, he told me it was all set up for the next day,” Patricia recalled. “I had no idea. I thought I was saying yes to something that we would plan for something later. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it either while we were driving up to the Valley of Fire.”

Amidst the beautiful rock formations in the park and before Levi’s friend, Shannon Slover, and a minister, the pair enjoyed a unique ceremony, where Levi first showed Patricia a tattoo with her name across his chest.

“During that ceremony, Levi read his vows and handed me a Sharpie and said, ‘In a return gesture would you please write your name across my heart and opened his shirt, which was the first I saw of his tattoo. Apparently he took off his shirt while I was preparing for the nationals. I guess it was a testiment to how little I pay attention to him while I’m preparing for a tournament because I never paid attention.”

Patricia and Levi created another unique ceremony a year later after they and a group of family and friends took a white water rafting trip in southwestern Oregon.

“I do a river trip every year and what we did was rafting the North Umpqua River and only the people who survived the actual trip were invited,” Levi remembered. “There was only 20-30 of our friends and the ceremony was designed by my sister.

“The second ceremony was anything but conventional. It was basically a lot of story telling. Patricia dressed in a pair of curtains, woven into a dress and I think she looked really good. It certainly was not a $2000 wedding dress.”

But when it came to wrestling, both Patricia and Levi wanted the best, which also forced them to separate their roles and wife/husband and athlete/coach.

“The type of coach I modeled myself on had always been a little more domineering and a little beyond questioning,” Levi said. “But that goes out the window when you have to go home and live with that person as well.

“Ultimately, I backed down and realized that I could not be that kind of coach. I had to open up the communication line and explain everything that I was doing. Even then, when I’d get her on the same line and move forward until I’d try something slightly different, the emotions in her would come charging up again.”

y last spring, shortly before Patricia went after and eventually earned her sixth U.S. National title in Las Vegas, she finally accepted his suggestions.

“I wish I could make it sound better than this but I was running out of every other option,” she said. “I was that much of a little brat. I tried every other possible combination of retaining my own control but giving him a little bit in this area or that area.

“He started setting up rules where I couldn’t talk back in the room, but I would find the lawyer in me and would step outside the wrestling room before I questioned him. Or technically, we weren’t talking about wrestling.

“It finally hit me in the face that in the poor performances, I wasn’t really doing what it was that I needed to do in competition. Something was holding me back from breaking through to that kind of pressure and freedom, which was the whole style we worked on for months.”

Patricia admitted that she feared their marriage was in jeopardy.

“Levi said I was completely irrational, but the emotions were so real and I hated him so much and I felt betrayed when he would downgrade me in practice,” she said. “I felt terrible when he asked me to trust him and then I felt like I failed when I would relapse after promising to do so.

“I’m not the person who promises things easily. It came to a point where I wondered why I chose to keep hurting him and I apparently could not keep my word. Why can’t I understand that I love this guy in the heat of the battle of the moment?”

If Patricia had to write a book about their experience, she said she would give it a title that also helped her make sense of their joint endeavor.

“The title that comes to mind had to do with when I really realized in order for us to win or fail in this endeavor, I would rather do it on this joined path. If I chose to go back to my own way, I would not have come back and retired,” she said.

“That conversation was culminated in the phrase, ‘There is no other option.’ The only other option was not to pursue this endeavor. I don’t want to see how I can get a silver or bronze again. I know that I can do that. I want to know if this joint adventure will succeed. I’d rather do it this way or not at all.” n