LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) – Mioshia Wagoner needs only one class to complete her master’s degree in conflict management and dispute resolution.
But first she would like to lay somebody out with her knockout punch.
Wagoner is a boxer. Soft-spoken. Pretty smile. Friendly. And a southpaw, light-heavyweight granddaughter of a Navajo medicine man.
She could also be one of the next Kansas City area athletes to vie for an Olympic medal.
Wagoner, 27, trains at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, where she did her undergraduate work in American Indian studies. She went to China two years ago for the World Championships and brought home a silver medal for Team USA.
She’s headed to the national boxing championships at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. She has not fought for nearly a year because of an injury.
Her goal: London 2012. For the first time, women’s boxing will be an Olympic event.
No question that she is different from previous Kansas City area Olympic hopefuls. First off, there’s the fact that she studies peacemaking for a career and punches people in the nose for sport.
She grew up on a reservation. Her mother is Navajo; her father Chickasaw. In junior high, she played quarterback on the boys football team. Her father tells the story that in the final minute of a tight game in which she scored the go-ahead touchdown, she then asked to play defense and clotheslined an opposing player trying for the winning score.
She is fairly new to her sport, with only a handful of bouts. Three of those were in China, where she defeated fighters from Egypt and Romania before losing to the gold-medal winner from the host country.
She plans on returning to the reservation in New Mexico after finishing her degree at Baker University and later hanging up her gloves.
“I have family there, and they’ve helped me so much,” Wagoner said before a workout. “There are problems there. And I have been given the opportunity to learn things so that I can go back and help. That’s what I have to do.”
Her father didn’t know what to think when he first heard about his little girl taking up boxing. But he was used to her taking the path less traveled.
“Tell her she can’t do something and her eyes light up,” Jim Wagoner said by telephone from California.
So how’s she doing?
“Good footwork, but I think she should go to the body more.”
Here’s something else different about Wagoner, who also goes by “Yosh”: She might be the first newspaper reporter to cover a boxing match and contemplate: “Gee, I think I’d like to try that.”
Happened to her in 2006 while working for The Indian Leader, the Haskell college newspaper.
She covered an amateur fight night at the Haskell Boxing Club. Most of the evening was ho-hum until two women fought.
One was higher-skilled, quicker and, in Wagoner’s words, kicked butt.
She walked into the gym not long after that and announced she wanted to box. Darren Jacobs, a trainer and coach, wasn’t impressed. She wasn’t the first girl who had seen “Million Dollar Baby.”
“But from the first punch, I knew she was born to fight,” he said.
And now? He smiled. “She’s fast and hits real hard.”
Yosh Wagoner had always been athletic, like her parents, both of whom played college basketball. After high school, she walked on in basketball at Cochise College in Arizona and later was given a partial scholarship.
At Haskell, she played softball and basketball until boxing took over.
Wagoner’s first fight took place at Haskell. She was nervous. Especially when she saw her opponent. Buff and fast. They split the early rounds.
“Then she started talking trash and I’m thinking, ‘No, this is my gym,’ “ Wagoner said. “I went off on her then and that was pretty much it.”
She won the Native American Championships in 2007 and 2008. She finished second in the Ringside World Championship in 2008.
That was also the China year. She was a huge underdog going over there because she hadn’t had many fights, Jacobs said.
“She only finished second in the world.”
It’s 90 degrees, the air conditioner is out and Yosh Wagoner is pounding the punch mitts on Jacobs’ hands in the boxing club’s hot gym.
Hands up, chin down, feet moving, sweat rolling, fists popping like fireworks.
Amanda Edinger watched. She is the boxer Wagoner saw the night she was a reporter. The two have since become good friends.
“Girls come here and think they want to fight,” Edinger said. “Then they get popped and it’s not nearly as much fun. But this girl, she takes it. She’s a fighter.”
Earlier the two had sparred. Edinger is smaller. That means she’s quicker, right?
Not really.
“You can’t catch her,” Edinger said, shaking her head. “I can’t anyway.”
Wagoner wants the Olympics. She wants to join Native American greats such as Billy Mills and Buster Charles.
But she hasn’t fought in nearly a year because of an ankle injury. She knows, too, that her life is more than being a boxer.
“I’m a Navajo woman,” she said. “I’m a student, a daughter.”
She is aware, though, of the burden of carrying the hopes of a people. When she returns to the reservation, children crowd around her. They know about China. They know all about “Yosh.”
Two years from now, the whole world may know, too.
About the Native American peacemaker with the wicked straight left.