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November 14, 2003
WARRIOR SPIRIT Friends remember Beatty soldier
By RICHARD STEPHENS
Nicholson was a member of a fairly close-knit group of friends whose usual school day routine was to go to the Burro Inn together for breakfast and then gather and hang out in the town park after school. And Kilpatrick says that it was at the park where Nicholson got much of her practice in out-wrestling the boys. She says Nicholson and her friend Tabitha Hoiland had a reputation among their peers as the "tough little girls" of Beatty. Nicholson, says Kilpatrick, was always wrestling with the guys in the park, chasing them, and tackling them. The guys were scared. "When we had things like water fights, she was always the roughest. She was more tomboyish than anything else. But the horseplay was all in fun. She was feisty, but I never saw her get mad, says Kilpatrick. She was always happy. That is the way BHS government teacher Jerry Adcox remembers her, too. She was a person who was always laughing, he recalls. She enjoyed participating in class activities when you could laugh and joke and have fun. She always had a smile on her face. Nicholson and Hoiland were so close they invented their own secret language that no one else could understand. They used it to carry on conversations in the classroom, frustrating teachers and classmates who wondered what they might be talking and laughing about. Nicholson and Hoiland didn't associate much with other girls, says Kilpatrick. They preferred to hang out with a group of boys; like buddies or little sisters, going four-wheeling or riding old pickups in the desert. Nicholson even had a brief career on the stage in Beatty. The year Kilpatrick won the Miss Beatty Pageant, Nicholson was the drummer in a small, more or less impromptu musical group that also included Josh Ball, Adam Pendergraft, Skylar Stephens, and David Torstenson. BHS wrestling coach Vern Nelson chuckled at the report that the Iraqi man Nicholson subdued had drawn himself into a fetal position and cried when he discovered a woman had beaten him. He noted that Nicholson was among the first girls to participate in the sport in the area, and that he had seen boys walk off the mat crying after being beaten by girls. Now, says Nelson, there are many more girls wrestling, and some of them are really good, so the boys don't feel so disgraced anymore if they are beaten. He said the girls are particularly effective in the lighter weight classifications in which they will often have more muscle, pound-for-pound, than do the boys. As for Nicholson's heroics in Iraq, friend Kilpatrick says, "It's kind of cool to see she did something with her life. A lot of people get in with the wrong crowd. She started to. I'm impressed." |
