So here’s a story I haven’t told. I was a gymnast.
Technically I still think of myself as a gymnast, it never really goes away. I can still do a round-off, back handspring and backflip. My knees and ankles aren’t what they used to be and I probably can’t do the most basic move on high-bar, like a kip, but I find it's really a part of a mindset, it’s part of how you look at the world and how you approach your own physical capabilities.
But anyway, yeah, for five years from 5th grade to 12th grade I trained and competed in gymnastics. I was an all-around performer, doing all six apparatus for men. I won several awards, even winning 1st place All Around for a Los Angeles City-wide Sophomore invitational competition in 1978. I didn’t go to the NCAA and compete on that or the Olympic level — which is a long, sad story — but for many years I was totally immersed in the gymnastic world.
And, yes, for a time — as a senior in high school — I experienced a couple of incidents which now in hindsight I can recognize as being the same type of loss of kinesthetic awareness while in motion during a twisting somersault that Simone Biles has described. I got the “Twisties.”
For me, it all started on the playground. I used to do tumbling in elementary school. It began simple enough, but eventually, I got better. I went from simple cartwheels to round-offs, to flip-flips (back handsprings) to back somersaults, to twisting somersaults while in 5th grade. I was a daredevil, I would try anything.
My mom enrolled me in some private training which was with a member of the 1968 Japanese Olympic team, Mitsuo Mouri, who had a “gym" in Glendale. I say “gym" because it was really a bowling alley that he had converted. Eventually, he converted an old auto repair shop and we did our workouts there, both for girls and boys.
I still remember my first competition, which was a LA Valley College. I was so green. Big afro and shorts. There was a buzz about another big-name gymnast being there - Mitch Gaylord - who was a couple of years older than me. I barely remember him.
As I got into the sport I began to pay attention to what was happening in the Olympics. These were the years when Olga Korbut debuted and competed for the Russians, who were dominant in the sport at the time. The Russians used to do exhibitions which I attended at the Forum.
Things between men’s and women’s gymnastics were very different back then. I remember one of her older teammates saying that gymnastics required putting your “years of life experience” into it. For women, it was more artistic and expressive, while for men the sport was much more about athletics and somersaulting. The guys were all about the flipping and the twisting, pushing themselves to do more and more complex moves in the air. Women were more grounded.
Olga changed that.
She made women’s gymnastics much more athletic than it had been. This continued with Romanian gymnast Nadia Comeneci.
Over the years the women gymnasts were essentially replaced by younger and younger girls. Girls willing to take bigger and bigger risks. Girls who hadn't yet gone through puberty where their bodies change, modifying their center of gravity and balance. Another thing that's unique about Simone is that she’s much older than the average women's gymnast, she’s 24, she should have “aged out" already but she basically still has the body shape of a teenager and could keep on competing for years to come. Having that extra time may also be why she’s developed skills that even male gymnasts don't do.
In order to be considered "elite" you had to do a "double” move on floor, bars and vault. A double twist. A double somersault. Sometimes both at the same time. Sometimes - a triple somersault. One of the male Russians did a triple somersault high bar dismount in exhibition. Things went from Nadia to Mary-Lou Retton and Kerri Strug as Nadia’s former coach Bela Karolyi defected from Romania and joined the U.S. team. He pushed his girls hard, as he had pushed Nadio to do more and more difficult tricks. This ultimately led to the end of Kerri Strug’s career during a vault to secure an All-Around Gold medal even though she had already torn two ligaments in her ankle on a previous vault.
It was a little weird being a male member of a sport that was essentially known for its female members. I suppose that's a karmic reversal considering all the sports that are male-dominated. It was also strange being black in a sport that was essentially dominated by white guys. This is another area where I identify with Simone.
I paid attention to the women, but really my heroes were male gymnasts. People like Bart Conner — who eventually married Nadia. Kurt Thomas. Tim Dagget. And, oddly enough, Mitch Gaylord.
If you can do math, you probably realize that there are more than five years between 5th and 12th grade. That's because my single mom pulled me out of training after two years because she really couldn’t handle working nights and also getting me to the gym during the day. It was all too much. We tried to find alternatives but most of the schools in South Central LA had no gymnastics program. We even checked out potentially training in Culver City with another 1968 Olympian Mako Sakamoto, who had Mitch Gaylord who had been to nationals as one of his students, but it was pricey and frankly they seemed, well, snotty.
So I ended up having three years, during Junior High, away from gymnastics. Because there weren’t any gymnastics programs near me or at the high school I would have gone to — which was Locke High — I volunteered to be bused to the San Fernando Valley and went to Cleveland High School in Reseda. Unfortunately, I was essentially three years behind, and I had to spend my first year relearning what I had previously known.
Eventually, as a senior, as began getting to the "double" level. I had a double-twisting back somersault on floor and a double-back somersault on rings worked into my routines. I did pretty well, but I could see another gymnast who had competed against me years earlier who I had known as Jamie Rex, now calling himself Jim Rix, who was also having struggles getting back in the groove at nearby Monroe High. He was being outshined on his own team by two students who clearly were getting private tutoring as we both previously had.
It all came to a head when during a competition I attempted my opening double-twist move on floor-ex and in the middle of the move I lost all positional context.
I got lost in mid-air.
Everything was a blur, like being in a big blender, then I landed - only finishing one and half twists — on my ass. It was not an auspicious beginning. I got through the rest of my routine but it was jarring. That had never happened in practice. It was weird.
I soldiered on.
But then, during another competition where I attempted my double-back somersault ring dismount — I found I over-rotated and landed flat on my back.
Now, over years I had thought these failures were because I was nervous in competition and both of these moves were relatively new for me. These things happen, y’know?
Well, in hindsight, I think being new moves was part of it, but also in both cases, I distinctly remember losing my sense of where I was in the air. For me, the competition ended, and that was basically the end of my career. I didn't have to carry on, I didn't have keep working on those moves and see if I was still having a problem. I was done.
Considering how things went my senior year I didn't seek any gymnastic scholarships for college. But years later I found out one of my former teammates with Mouri had gained a scholarship to UCLA. For some reason, he had decided to turn it down only to change his mind and try and get it back only to find out that it had gone to another student — Mitch Gaylord.
Gaylord went on to the 1984 Olympics coached by Mako Sakamoto - who was also the coach for UCLA. The 1984 Olympics took place in Los Angeles, for various reasons I didn't go to any gymnastic events.
Gymnastics is a unique sport. To some extent, it's a sport for the affluent. All the equipment is expensive, good coaching is expensive. Kids go away to gymnastics camp, entire families uproot themselves to get to a good gym with a good coach. I know I didn't have access to all that. I also know I didn't have a coach who would put my safety at risk.
Therefore I have perhaps a somewhat different view of the comments from Piers Morgan on Simone Biles.
In a Tweet on Wednesday, Morgan compared Biles' decision to the time he stormed off of Good Morning Britain after a co-host accused him of having an obsession with Meghan Markle.
"Are 'mental health issues' now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke," Morgan wrote on Twitter. "Just admit you did badly, made mistakes, and will strive to do better next time. Kids need strong role models not this nonsense."
"Twitter when I walked off GMB because I was a bit stressed out: 'YOU'RE A PATHETIC, GUTLESS, COWARDLY, WEAK, SHAMEFUL FAILURE! MAN UP!'" he later added. "Twitter when their favourite athletes quit because they're a bit stressed out: 'YOU'RE A BRAVE INSPIRING, ICONIC HERO!'"
This is not a joke. Even if Simone was not dealing with a physiological issue and it was only psychological, that is enough. As an athlete, you have to be able to evaluate when you're ready to compete and when you aren't. Frankly, It's pathetic for a middle-aged pudgy asshole to compare anything he's done to the guts it takes to launch yourself into the air and blindly hope that you don't lose a sense of where you are and land on your back badly, or your head or your neck.
He has no fucking clue.
For many years after school I would casually do gymnastics moves out in the wild. Just for fun. I used to do front somersaults off a set of fountains near an office where my wife worked. People seeing me would freak out, "What's that guy doing?" To me it was nothing much, I was just practicing a fairly simple little move. To someone who doesn't really know what flying off a high bar or rings is like, it was inconceivable.
Gymnastics made me fearless. Well, actually, it made me better understand my capabilities and my limits. I knew what I could do, I knew how far I could push things, I knew where the line was that I shouldn't cross.
Simone knows where her line is and I'm frankly glad that she made the right decision to protect her safety when the risk was too high. Regardless of what it meant for the rest of the team, regardless of what it means to Pier Fracking Morgan.
She did the right thing, trust me on that.