FORT WORTH – In December of 1979, the world came to Fort Worth.
Russians. Romanians. East Germans. Chinese.
Communists all. They were the world’s best gymnasts.
News accounts of those 20th Gymnastics World Championships mostly describe a sedulous affair, orchestrated and scored with Euro-Asian precision, as the sport itself was in those days.
Nadia Comaneci and Emilia Eberle were members of the Romania team. Nellie Kim was the gold-medal headliner for the Soviets.
But things change. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Chinese now manufacture our iPhones. And Nadia is 57 with a teenage son.
And so, too, has gymnastics changed, nowhere more so than among the athletes competing at the Convention Center this weekend to decide the women’s championship of the NCAA.
Four schools – Oklahoma, UCLA, LSU and Denver — advanced from Friday’s semifinal sessions and will compete for the team title Saturday night.
But consider yourself forewarned. If it’s some old-school, Olga-and-Ludmilla-style gymnastics you’re hankering for, maybe Saturday’s finals won’t be the meet for you.
Sara “D-D” Breaux has coached the LSU gymnastics team for 42 seasons. She surpassed Kentucky’s legendary Adolph Rupp two years ago as the longest tenured coach in any sport in the history of the Southeastern Conference. Breaux has coached the Tigers in 1,228 gym meets, winning 798 of them.
She has seen the women’s sport evolve from its toddling AIAW days, when the hundred or so spectators would mostly be families and friends, to today, when Breaux’s ladies attract an average attendance of 11,000 and regularly outdrew the men’s basketball team.
How did women’s gymnastics get to this point? It’s complicated. It’s a metaphor for the times. And, if you can hear me over the din, it has its own soundtrack.
D-D Breaux
For the sake of disclosure, I have to admit I’ve been a D-D Breaux fan for all of her 42 coaching years. I worked in the sports information office at LSU in the 1970s, trying to help assistant director Jerry Walker fill some of those gymnastics meet seats. And D-D was the fresh new face who had come from nearby Hammond, Kim Mulkey’s hometown.
My ultimate boss was the same as hers, athletic director Carl Maddox, a man who stooped to pick up every penny. Knowing Mr. Maddox, I’m guessing his main instructions to D-D were to turn off the lights when she left the room and use McDonald’s coupons for team meals whenever possible.
The evolution of women’s college gymnastics came in stages. First was the recognition that theirs was a culturally different sport from the somber, medals-driven prepubescent gymnastics that most Americans see every four years at the Olympics.
Elite level gymnasts aspiring to the Olympics often practice as many as 40 hours a week. They are often home-schooled. Their days are scripted for them. The lines of authority are clearly drawn.
College gymnasts, on the other hand, can practice no more than 20 hours per week. They go to football games. They have boyfriends.
“We’re limited to 20 hours – that’s all the NCAA allows us — which is plenty,” Breaux said. “Our training facilities and for most of the schools here, we have multiple, multiple equipment, duplicated areas, six balance beams, tumbling areas where you can tumble soft. It’s to protect our student athletes and try to keep them as safe and healthy as we can.”
As female gymnasts reach the end of their Olympic road, they have a sometimes-difficult decision to make.
“A lot of the kids who compete at that highest level,” Breaux said, “they decide they’re going to take the Wheaties box.
“But a lot of kids don’t do that. A lot see the value in an education, something that will give to them for the rest of their lives, and they really enjoy the collegian experience.”
Part of that education and coaching can be in the challenging emotional and physical issues inherent in simply growing up.
“A lot of it is that, because these kids have grown up, they’ve gone through puberty, and for a lot of them it kind of slowed down their growth,” Breaux said.
“When they go to college and they’re not training those many hours anymore, their body changes. A lot of what we do as college coaches is help them to understand that and manage that. We have team nutritionists. We have sports psychologists, trainers, our strength coaches, a village of people that help contribute to the wellness and well-being of our student athletes.”
Miss Val
But the care and feeding of the 80-something women’s gymnastics teams in the NCAA was only part of the makeover. The sport had to move to a different drumbeat.
Literally.
A long time ago, I was there in the Montreal Forum when Nadia Comaneci made her famous 10s. It was a captivating week. We were watching history.
But as I recall, nobody left the Forum whistling Nadia’s floor exercise music. (Which was not, by the way, that music that has become to be known as Nadia’s Theme, contrary to popular belief. Nadia performed to a medley of Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby and the Harry Belafonte calypso ditty, Jump in the Line.) Nobody left whistling that, either.
The only music heard during Olympics gymnastics seemed to be heavy with violins or Russian rhythmic folk-clapping.
It fit with the political times. And with the rigid training regimens.
As UCLA coach Valorie Kondos Field described it, “Those girls were taught to obey authority without question.”
Obey, without question, the coaches. Obey . . . the team doctor.
The environment was ripe for a monster such as Larry Nassar.
When Nassar was brought before the judge, more than 150 gymnasts bravely took the stand and told of the abuse they had suffered at his hands.
The story of women’s college gymnastics is complicated. Nassar’s main job was as sports physician at Michigan State. When the stories of abuse came to light, then-coach Kathie Klages delivered a passionate defense of Nassar, and she later was charged with a felony for lying to investigators about first hearing of Nassar’s abuse 19 years before.
But from the horror of the Larry Nassar case comes the courage of college student-athletes who seem to be saying, “Never again.”
Kondos Field has announced her plans to retire after Saturday night’s event, but her influence is certain to resonate for decades. Though she has coached the UCLA women for 29 years and her teams have won seven NCAA titles, the woman they call “Miss Val” has no gymnastics training background – at all.
She was a ballet dancer and originally was hired by UCLA to be the team’s choreographer.
Miss Val’s autobiography is titled Life is Short – Don’t Wait to Dance.
She means it both literally and figuratively.
Her UCLA teams are expressive, nowhere more than in the floor exercise event, where the Bruin ladies’ routines are heavy with dance moves.
“We always think of floor as a floor party, so it’s hard not to get up and perform your best when you’re on the floor,” she said. “I believe 100 percent that the music is what dictates the movement. If we had music on balance beam, we’d probably have better routines.”
Think of a live NBA game with the sound cranked up to 11.
Floor exercise routines in college gymnastics are now bold and fearless. The dance factor is considered part of the routine’s artistic merit. Feel free to clap along.
It’s a little disconcerting for someone whose newspaper career included seeing icons like Comaneci, Kim, Olga Korbut and Mary Lou Retton perform.
Want to feel old? Retton’s daughter, McKenna Kelley, competes for LSU.
For LSU and semifinal competitor Georgia, the overwhelming support of the SEC has taken their sport to the next level. Eight of the league’s 14 schools have gymnastics teams. The regular season includes a round-robin schedule of dual meets, most of which are televised live on ESPN’s SEC Network.
Nicknamed Friday Night Heights, the network frequently televises gymnastics tripleheaders – 6 p.m., 7:30 and 9 p.m. – from the campus locations.
“Friday Night Heights,” Breaux said, nodding in approval. “We owe a whole lot to the SEC Network and the commitment they have made, but our administrators had to also make that commitment. They made a commit to women’s gymnastics and have seen it through.
“Now I think they’re really reaping the rewards and seeing fabulous student athletes, incredible young ladies, role models, who just keep on giving back to their communities. On top of that it’s a beautiful sport, and if marketed and branded well, people can sell out their arenas, like we have.”
This weekend, for the first time, the format of the national championships consists of two semifinal sessions of four teams apiece, with the top two teams from each semifinal advancing to Saturday’s finals.
With one team performing in each event, simultaneously, there are constantly cheers erupting and music blaring. Most importantly, the scoreboard is there for all to follow.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Breaux said after her team’s Friday session. “It’s like a football game. When the meet’s over, you know the score and you know who won.
“It came down to the last two performers for floor, and the scores for the other two teams were already posted and you could see them. It’s not like the scores were secret.
“When we had the six-team format nobody knew who was winning, until it was over and then it took 15-20 minutes of haggling to get it done. But this was over when it was over. And that’s the beauty of this format.”
The action moves briskly, mostly because the routines aren’t as skill-packed as they are with elite international gymnasts.
Remember, they only get 20 hours a week to practice, not 40. There’s no time to practice a multi-skilled routine.
Fewer skills also means less chances for mistakes and point deductions.
Thus, you do occasionally see scores of 10. And you do definitely see lots of 9.9s and 9.95s.
“You asked about the difference between us and elite,” Breaux said. “The difference is this is a 10. We’re a 10. And you know that when somebody’s got a 9.9 or a 9.95 they are so close to excellence.
“Our kids have the ability to achieve perfection, which is great. And they don’t have to go out there and beat themselves up because of somebody over in Romania and Russia who’s making up rules.”
Kondos Field agreed, though less colorfully.
“I just feel when we went away from the 10 internationally, it hasn’t killed the sport, but I’ve always said and believed that sport is entertainment,” she said.
“For our sport to grow, it has to be understandable and contain meaning. It can’t always be about how to manipulate the rules so that certain countries win, and that’s what’s been happening for decades.
“That’s one of reasons USA Gymnastics really looks to college, because we’re the ones who are packing the house, week after week.”
As 2008 Olympian Bridget Sloan, who went on to compete for Florida, put it, “There’s not a whole lot of laughing at the Olympics. In college, you put on a show.”
The best of the college gymnastics show will take place Saturday night in the same arena where 40 years ago a whole another gymnastics world once convened.
The show starts at 6 p.m. There will be music and, most definitely, there will be dancing amidst the double pikes and layouts.
It’s what these women do nowadays, now that they have such a brave and unfettered voice.
(Top photo by The Daily Reveille, LSU)