Lords of the Rings

The Only Ugly Part of a gymnast's body is his hands which are like a ballet dancers feet--a perpetual challenge to the miracle of tissue regeneration. Once while I was walking around a gymnastics gym, I stopped a roll of tape that was trucking across thefloor and returned it to its owner. He extended what was supposed to be a hand but looked more like a catcher's mitt with fingernails. There were more layers of Calluses than layers of civilizations in the Holy Land. They all have hands like that the toll of endless hous on side horse, ring's horizontal bar, parallel bars. I once watched a row of prommel-horse performers pass along a jar of hand cream like drop sharing of joint. Then I remembered a gymnast in high school telling me all his teammates went to bed with hand cream and gloves on.

When I started checking into what people said were big changes in gymnastics, I assumed I was about average of an American in terms of my awareness of the sport. I'd heard of two Iron Curtainettes, Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci; an American named Cathy Rigby, who, when last seen, was hawking tampons; and a guy named Kurt Thomas, the only male American gymnast to make international waves. I'd thought the sport as dominated by Commies and Japanese, something Americans just weren't good at. I'd seen a few minutes of gymnastics on Home Box Office while waiting for some R-rated movie to come on. And there's a photo of a V-shaped guy flying around a pommel horse in both my high school and college yearbooks. That's about it.

But as if out of the blue, America has gone from nothing to a top-ranked world power (third) in gymnastics, a feat comparable to Uganda's becoming an international baseball threat or Switzerland a swimming menace. American gymnastics could actually become Big Sport. Maybe we could even beat the Commies.

But I have to say that my first live gym meet was a big yawn--at least it started out that way. I began my gymnastics education at the Windy City Invitational, the traditional, season opener in N.C.A.A. gymnastics. For two days, I sat in a basketball gym on a roll-out bleacher at the University of Illinois' Chicago campus as 12 Midwestern collegiate teams, working in two shifts, performed simultaneously in the six events: floor exercise, horizontal bar, parallel bars, still rings, vault and pommel horse [see box on page 300].

Sounds great. However, by the time everybody (continued on page 164)Lords of the Rings(continued from page 149) had had a go at everything. I had seen 432 individual routines, eight dozen muscular Jimmy Olsens rocketing, whirling, tumbling and flying through the air. After about 45 minutes, I was comatose, numbed out of my tree.

Part of the problem was my own ignorance of even the gross points, but part of it was the aura of the meet. Every 20 minutes or so, there would be a marching on and off of the two shifts, each team behind a placard-carrying coed as the P.A. system blared a scratchy recording of that Olympic theme music heard on TV every four years.

The crowd, what there was of it, was strictly from bingo night. It seemed as though everybody in the stands was related to somebody on the floor; moms, dads, sibs, grandmoms, squinting into the action, clutching Instamatics, pointing and squawking," There he is!"

There were two 1980 Olympic team members down there, Ron Galimore of Iowa State and Jim Hartung of Nebraska, and any time either of them was about to perform, the announcer would try to drum up some competition; but the crowd seemed too busy trying to track sons, nephews and brothers. The vibes were more high school than Olympian and, at some point, I started hallucinating that I was watching my 11th-grade physed class and the only reason I was in the stands instead of on the mats was that I had a forged note from my parents.

But then, during the horizontal-bar event--while I was momentarily spaced out musing on hand cream and gloves-- there was a sudden resounding thud and a gymnast lay flat on his back on a mat under the bar. He had done a somersault over the bar, missed his regrasp and come crashing down on his head, a drop of approximately 12 feet. He tried to get up but couldn't, so he lay there for 15 minutes while his coach and a trainer fit him with a neck brace. The hell with the hand cream. This is a god-damn deadly sport. Every time one of these guys leaves the earth of his own free will, the potential for paralysis, broken backs, bones and necks is enromous.

To American sports fans, danger is a left hook, a blitzing defense, a toothless, armed 200-pounder rocketing across the ice at 90 miles an hour: Contact. In gymnastics, the guts are invisible unless they're spilled all over the mat. It's one man versus six combinations of steel and wood and padding, and the uninitiated can't readily see the years of pain and strain that go into each 30-second performance. It's a little bit like competitive ballet.

There are two kinds of excitement in watching a gymnast: One is the spectacular moves, the daredevil element, the high-flying, head-over-heels releases; but there is something else that catches your breath and it's much more profound and subtle--the degree to which that gymnast will deviate from perfection. That's what gymnastics is really all about: zip-lock precision, two points off for blinking.

The reason you won't see so much as a sideburn or shaggy hair on a gymnast is that the short hair, the over-all sleekness, is part of his score. A trim, clipped, toes-pointed flab-free image that reflects inner discipline and control is vital. If there were a prototypal gymnast today, he would be roughly 5'6", 125 poundus, have oversized delts, lats, triceps, biceps, back muscles, a somewhat concave chest and tapered everything else. He would be close-cropped and clean-shaven and the collective fat on him and 50 of his teammates wouldn't be enough to fry an egg without having it stick to the pan.

•

Twenty years ago, American gymnastics had about as much in common with today's sport as World War One doughboys had with Jedi warriors. People didn't know what to make of gymnastics back then. It was more of a show than a sport and it attracted another type of athlete. Hot dogs. Maniacs. It was basically a daredevil show, and guys were learning stuff in the gym so they could blow everybody's mind. A lot of them were crazy way before gymnastics. They usually started as late as high school, when they finally got it through their heads that they were too small for football and got tired of getting the crap knocked out of them. There was a lot of heavy partying, heavy boozing. They were amazing athletes--they had to be to lead the lives they did.

I can understand why a veteran gymnast of the Sixties claimed he'd become addicted to living over the edge, why a good part of his generation of gymnasts would still want to walk on the outside of their skins 24 hours a day. Those were guys who always walked up the down staircase, who wound up streaking the N.C.A.A. finals, staging motorcycle races inside the house, becoming stunt men, crop dusters, daredevil pilots. One guy eventually developed a trampolin act in a Vegas casino. Another did a porno film in which the climax was leaping nude in coitus 12 feet into a stone quarry. Another jumped off the Astrodome onto an air bag. One played beefcake in a Mae West film. I heard stories of Mexican whorehouses, Mexican jails, trashed motel rooms, gang bangs in trashed motel rooms, terrified motel owners blocking the path of team buses as they pulled into the parking lots, marathon drinking bouts.

But among the new crop of gymnasts, there's not even a hint of that kind of excess. They started changing in 1964, when a group of supporters, vying for control of the sport with the Amateur Athletics Union, set up the United States Gymnastics Federation.

In 1969, Masayuki "Mas" Watanabe, who at that time was considered the greatest gymnastics technician in the world, came to the United States from Japan and began conducting clinics for gymnastics coaches. For the very first time, American gymnastics was exposed to a scientific system based on sound mechanical principles. Before Watanabe, every skill was learned by aping footage of the Russians and the Japanese. It was "throw and go," the Dark Ages. Coaches at the first clinic just sat in the bleachers for seven days, coming out with note-books thick as the Yellow Pages with new concepts--a whole new philosophy of what gymnastics was. They all ran back to their schools and started spreading the new gospel.

In 1974, the U.S.G.F. and Watanabe started a nationwide age-group program, a Junior Olympics and a national training camp for potential Junior Olympic material and for select college gymnasts. Watanabe personally conducted the first camp, which Kurt Thomas and Bart Conner (who have both retired from amateur competition) attended in high school. The reasoning behind the age-group program was simple: The greater the number of kids involved with gymnastics at an early age, the broader the base to work with and the greater the number of potential American starts in international competitions. It would be a simple matter of letting the cream rise to the top.

"The jet to the sport is people," says Paul Ziert, coach of perennial N.C.A.A. contender Oklahoma. "Personalities. We have to develop more personalities, get on a good salesmanship program, get more visibility. Gymnasts have to do personal tours, get TV coverage. With more visibility, we'll get more athletes going out for gymnastics. We're already getting a broader base of 12-year-olds and in another five or six years, we'll (continued on page 290)Lords of the Rings(continued from page 164) have a solid base of six-years-olds. But it all comes out of visibility. The appeal of gymnastics is that it is clean-cut sport. If you were asked to describe you would think of someone who is all-American, a straight- A student, someone who speaks well; it's the prefect image if a politician his campaign.

"Part of the problem is that we don't have enough young people willing to fit that mold--the responsibility of visibility means towing the line."

•

After the City Invitational, I go out to watch the best of the breed, the N.C.A.A. gymnastics champions at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

It seems that the only way to get hurt in the gymnastics gymnasium at Nebraska is to shoot yourself out of a cannon and smack your head on the 35-foot-high ceiling. This room, 45 feet wide and 110 feet long, by general consensus is considered the best-equipped, the safest gymnastics gym in the country. The joint has more padding than a padded cell: it's a sea wall-to-wall multilayered spring mats. It has Pyramid-block-sized chucks of foam and there's a seven-foot-deep, $23,000 pit filled with netting shredded foam, into which gymnasts disappear after valuation off the long horse resurface from the nuck up, laughing, and ocasionally tossing chunks of foam at the next resurfacing head. The pit is like a millionaire kid's ultimate Christmas present. You could fall to your death in there and not get Nebraska gym is important: A gymnast has to be able to work, as much as possible, without fear.

Danger. Phil Cahoy on the horizontal bar goes into a giant swing, a flyaway, a back flip with a half twist, misses the bar for recach and drops 12 feet to the mat. He's wearing a safety harness around his waist attached to a rope that is pulleyed to the high ceiling, the loose end held by Nebraska assistant coach Jim Howard, who, when Cahoy starts his plummet, yanks down to break the fall. The resulting physics exchange jerks Howard a foot in the air, so that he looks like Quasimodo ringing the bells.

Over on the floor-exercise mat is steve Elliott, a tumbler so phenomenal, so in a class by himself that he has been asked to appear in the Guinness Book of World Records and on To Tell the Truth for his feats on floor exercise and vaulting. Elliott charges across the mat and does a double--a double somersault with two full twists, which means spinning twice simultaneously on his vertical and horizontal axes and landing on his feet, Elliott started at Nebraska on a swimming and driving scholarship. He is a gymnastics-team walk-on, a gift horse. Howard calls him a motor genius. "Elliott walked into the gym, watched some guys on the vault and said, 'I wanna learn how to do that.' Now he does stuff on vault that no one else in the world can do."

The mood in the gym is loose--looser than I expected. But as I spend more time with these guys, I learn that loose doesn't mean the same as not serious.

A few guys are wrestling on the foam blocks, some barking encouragement and advice to teammates on the apparatus, some laughing at guys screwing up routines. Francis Allen, the head coach, is sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, watching the action. Someone drops from a great height. "Wo! How's your kidneys, Bubba?" Allen's life is gymnastics. He was the 1980 U.S. Olympic gymnastics coach. Three members of that teem came from his own gym. His Cornhuskers are for the third consecutive year the reigning N.C.A.A. champs. In five days, I wouldn't see him wear an outfit that didn't have Nebraska printed on it somewhere. Like most gymnasts, he's short and trim. He has a pointed chin, a huge head of groomed hair ending in enormous rakish sideburns that almost meet at his nose and cackling eyes. He's an R-rated scoutmaster, everybody's favorite risqué uncle. He's part of the Sixties gymnastics generation, a cutup, a flake.

His office has four wall hangings: a sign that reads Piss On Iran, a drawing titled Polish Shower that shows a nude doofus pissing into a fan that blows it back on himself, a huge pair of B.V.D.s with Nebraska Gymnastics emblazoned on the front panel and, last, a laminated plaque that decrees Francis Allen the N.C.A.A. Coach of the Year.

As I sit and watch the practice, the goofing around, the spectacular routines, I'm told that today's practice is slughish. Allen, Cahoy and Hartung are all ragged out from jet lag. Allen and Hartung had an invitational meet in Japan and Cahoy had one in China, so they all hooked up in Tokyo over the weekend and flew back to Lincoln. That's the price you pay for being big Pizza in gymnastics these days. If you're good, real good, you get to see more of the world before your 21st birthday than an entire Air Force squadron. In the old days, gymnastics was a short-lived thing--high school, college, maybe a year or two of competition if you were good. But there was really nothing to look forward to except a trip to Denver or Tucson. Hartung went to Russia as a high school senior and has gone back a few times since; he's also gone to Japan, Germany, Hungary, Mexico. Most of the top guys have been on national TV--Home Box Office, ABC's Wide World of sprots. Thomas knocked 'em dead when he appeared with Dick Cavett (who himself was a former high school gymnastics champ from Lincoln, Nebraska).

White-bread disco music is pumped through the stereo system. Allen is flat on his belly, his chin in his hands, watching a video tape of one of his gymnasts. A couple of the guys are down on their bellies watching with him, laughing and cheering.

John Scheer, Ph.D.--and U.S.G.F. judge--come into the gym. Scheer teaches a class at Nebraska called Healthy Lifestyles. He, Allen and Howard have been pals since they were on the Cornhusker team in the Sixties.

"It's loose in here, isn't it?" says Scheer. "They work their asses off, but Francis keeps them loose. It's important with the skills so high and the routines so dangerous. A team picks up its vibes from its coach. Some teams tense up as their coaches tense up, and they clutch. In this gym, it's as loose the day of the N.C.A.A. finals as it is the first day of the season."

Despite the fact that most gymnasts are built like small Greek statues, the over-all Gestalt is more androgynous than studly; and although I guess that's kind of hip in a Euro New Wave way, most for these guys are about as New Wave as corn on the cob.

In the primitive Sixties, when the skills, the dangers ad the visibility were a fraction of what they are today, there was already that need to below it out, to walk on the edge of things. It would seem that if anybody had reason to get nuts to preserve his sanity, it would be this new breed. But nothing seems to penetrate their bland facade. I can't buy it--there's gotta be more than meets the eye.

But when I ask some of them how they raise hell'm if they raise hell, most say they don't have time to. Between workouts and school, there isn't any time left. One guy, when asked if his teammates raise hell, says, "Oh, yeah, we Frenched a guy's sheets last week."

Another says, "I got a girlfriend and all."

I guess the best answer to my wheedling and digging for some secret hysteria, some off-hours madness, reminiscent of Sixties rechlessness is one gymnast's blank-faced response: "I risk my life, I'm in some kind of flight for three hours a day, six days a week; what kind of release would you life? All I want to do after that is crawl in bed with a nice safe math book."

Their rooms are typical college-kid rooms with tape cassettes, Nebraska beer mugs and literary classic on the book-shelves with yellow Used stickers on the spines. There are only two jarring sights (other than the trophies and gym photos): Steve Elliott covered his walls with wood paneling except for a cutout square, dead center, where, stenciled against the harsh cinder block, is a dark-blue silhouette of a gymnast on still rings frozen in the eerily crucifixlike position of a perfect Iron Cross. In Hartung's room is a full gunrack. I say, "Holy shit, look at those guns!"

He looks at me patiently and says, "Those are rifles. The guns are in the closet." He likes to hunt.

They're just all-American guys headed for the trenches of international competition. But how do these Midwestern, fifth-in-the-world, corn-fed minors respond to traveling all over the world, being in the international spolight before they're old enough to buy beer? They all like it, of course, but they don't like it. No one has anything good to say about "the world."

"My kids don't like Russians, Romanians--even the French," says Allen. "The French are assholes. They hate Americans. I can't wait to get back home, either. My kids don't like the Commies, because they cheat like hell. It's built in to their system. They don't even think of it as cheating; it's a war situation, it's a war of political ideologies, and they have to win the battle. They put Yuri Titov [the head judge and president of the International Gymnastic's Federation] in there to run the judging and that's his job, to make sure the Communists win. He takes care of them, they take care of him.

"Those athletes are all subsidized. You get a 12-year-old Romanian kid who's got promise in gymnastics. You can offer her father a better job, a bigger apartment, an auto. Take her away, put her in a special government-subsidized training school. In Russia, they'll test kids and push them into sports according to things like hamstring flexibility. They might have three or four potential sports for kids with hamstring flexibility. And they can offer those incentives to the families and, as a result, the Russians have depth. If their number-seven man drops out, their number-15 man is probably just as good. We have maybe four guys at the top, but we don't have any bottom to our pyramid. We need money and publicity. We need more names known. Kurt Thomas would have been huge if we had gone to the Olympics. We lost all that publicity."

"How did you feel about the boycott?" I ask Allen.

"Well, I was the coach, so maybe I'll get a chance to go again, but these kids won't. I dunno. We were told that we were gonna help the free world. The U.S. was gonna make a stand. They had all the Olympic teams up to the White House, and we didn't know the President was going to be there. All of a sudden, Jimmy Carter shows up with 30 fucking guards. He pops out and gives this big spiel about freedom, freedom of choice, and all of a sudden, he turns to the Olympic people and he raises his arms, like that, and they didn't do a fucking thing. I was gonna clap, but nobody clapped. None of the kids applauded at all, and Carter goes [he makes a face as if he's torn his pants]. He just turns back around, says a couple of things and splits.

"It was devastating. It was fantastic. And I wanted to clap, because I'm kind of a redneck. You travel the places I've been and you're an automatic redneck. So I was gonna clap just out of respect to the President of the country that I'm proud of. And, if I had, clap clap clap, that's all you would have heard."

•

Cut to somewhere east of Lincoln. Put on an ominous Hollywood, Land of the Rising Sun sound track. As I stand there, talking with Francis Allen, redneck, patriot, Olympic coach, the Japanese collegiate all-stars march steadily across the Midwest, kicking ass at every stop of their American tour. And in just a few days--on December seventh, Pearl Harbor Sunday--they will be hosted by the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.

The day before the meet with Japan, the local TV cameras come into the Nebraska gym and start setting up their lights as the Cornhuskers go through their last day of practice. Elliott, wearing a pulled-out turtleneck, squints into harsh lights as he adjusts his shorts. Allen looks at him. "What a hambone," he says, laughing. "I'll never forget the 1980 N.C.A.A. finals, Elliott's first appearance. Only about a third of the people there had ever seen him do his stuff and he said to me, 'Well, Coach, what should I do?' I said, 'I'll tell you what to do. Just make one pass, ballsout, and do the hardest thing you can do.'

"So he flexes his wrists a few times, stands in the corner, jumps up, does a round-off back handspring two-and-a-half twisting step-up round-off flip-flop triple twisting somersault! Everybody's chin just hit the floor, just like that, and he won the gold medal right there. He was awesome, just awesome. See, normally, I wouldn't say that to just any gymnast, to go show 'em what you got. Some guys can't do it. But Elliott and Hartung and some other guys, they've got it. It's a pleasure to be ground them, kids who can do something like that.

"I like a kid with balls--daringness. A lot of coaches pick kids who they think are going to gain it. I don't think you can gain it. Either you come in with it or you don't have it. Either you have balls by the time you're, say, 12 or you don't. Rarely after."

Allen whistles the team over for an impromptu meeting. Everybody sprawls on the floor around him and Howard, and a few mild Jap jokes ripple through the crowd. As usual, Allen is loose as a goose:

"Gentlemen," he says, "I heard these guys got off the plane from Japan at one-thirty in the afternoon and they scored a 282 a [a 281 score won Nebraska the N.C.A.A. championship the preceding year] against Michigan that same night with no warm-ups and no rest. So them are some bad suckers, but they can trip over their dicks like anybody else, and it would be nice to win."

After the meeting, which consists of more jokes, the kids go back to practice and Allen turns on the disco over the stereo system and does a few dance steps by himself. The team members take charge of one another, barking corrections and approval. A nonstarter is working out on rings and does a good routine. Allen applauds, speaks to him easily but specifically, tells him to try it again. The kid does the routine twice as well. Allen applauds loudly and ambles on, keeping everybody loose with jokes and patter.

"I can't believe this meet is goona be on Pearl Harbor Day."

That's nothing," Howard shrugs. "There's gonna be a reception for them at the American Legion hall afterward. You watch, some of them might get falling-down drunk. They usually do-- they're heavy drinkers."

My mind exploded with the tableau of drunken Japs and drunken Legionnaires staggering around an American Legion post in heartland Nebraska on Pearl Harbor Day.

"How can they do that?" I ask.

"I don't think they do it before a meet," Howard says. "The Russians are worse. They travel with suitcases filled with vodka bottles. Their star Nikolai Andrianov? He's over the hill now, but we used to swap souvenir T-shirts at meets. Andrianov wanted three bottles of vodka for one T-shirt. He settled for two vodka, one wine. He was amazing. He does exhibitions totally bombed."

"How come your guys don't drink? If the Japs and the Russians drink and they're the best in the world, maybe your guys should drink."

"Nah. The drinking is a product of the environment. The Russians have chronic alcoholism. I don't know about Japan today, but back in the Sixties, Japanese gymnasts were so controlled, so segregated, their system was so rigid--these guys couldn't even date girls until they were 18. So whenever they could let loose, they did. We have two rules: No booze, no dope; and if you do, don't get caught. Me and Francis can drink all we want, but they better not. They got four years to get all they can out of our gym. We'll give them everything for those years, but they better give us everything. They got the rest of their lives to be drunk."

"And become gym coaches?"

"And become gym coaches."

•

Pearl Harbor Day. There is a giddy weirdness to standing at attention for the Japanese national anthem in the Bob Devaney Sports Complex on this ice-storm Sunday. There's a crowd of 6000 standing as the two teams face each other trim and airtight throughout the strange music. A few people refuse to stand, but everything's cool. They play The Star-Spangled Banner. People sing along with gusto. The Cornhuskers and the Japanese exchange token gifts man for man. As the two teams warm up, the P.A. blares disco interrupted by announcements of illegally parked cars.

Early in the meet, it becomes clear that the Japanese are incredible gymnasts. So are Allen's guys. The scores are consistently in the nines all around. The way the meet is set up, Nebraska does pommel horse while the Japanese do floor exercise. They stagger routines, then switch events. There are two judges per cent seated diagonally across from each other on either side of the apparatus, one Japanese, one American. Rarely are their scores more than a few tenths of a point apart; in the case of a big discrepancy, they get together for a heads-down and compromise.

There's an excitement in the air that was nowhere in evidence at the Windy City Invitational. People here aren't rooting for Nebraska, they're rooting for the American way, GI Joe, swing music. It's not anti-Japanese; it's just pro-American. Honduras, Canada, Iceland would be the bad guys. It's all one big Them. Sports is the most innocent emotional form of nationalism. When the Cornhuskers do their routines, the crowd yells out, "Go, Scotty! Big Jim! Go, Steve!" And the names have the soulstirring, heart-warming familiarity of the weary, ironic dogface at the check point in a World War Two moive responding, "DiMaggio, Olive Oyl, Brooklyn" to the questioning sentry's effort to determine if he's a real American.

I think maybe gymnastics is more of a team sport than I imagined. The group support among the Nebraska team is not hard to see. The Japanese are no slouches in the cheering department, either. They shout out the Japanese equivalent of Rip it up! to each of their guys on the final "dismount" pass of his floor ex, with its most spectacular twists and flips. After each man has finished his routine, they all run up to do a mass soul-mann palm pound.

After every two completed events, there's an awards ceremony, with more pomp and circumstance than at a coronation. Flags, trophies, handshakes, marching. The trophies might be little soldered wire mobiles representing the event, or a commemorative plate or imitation-pewter mug. If they gave real silver or gold, they'd go bust a half hour into the competition.

Once again, the excitement is that incredible combination of daredeviltry and not fucking up. The smallest trip or slip draws a wince from the crowd. Elliott does one of his patented balls-out, gravity-fucking floor-ex passes and brings down the house. Hartung draws howls on the pommel horse. The Japanese are spectacular, too, but no one cheers for them as loudly. The scoring is based on the top five of six routines in each event. The final score is then the compilation of 30 individual routines judged to the hundredth of a point.

Halfway through the meet, Japan leads by two points.

Allen is as calm and collected as if this were another workout. He strolls around the gym with his hands behind his back. Once, he leans over behind a photographer snapping away and fakes an abrupt sneeze. Turning to me, he makes noises like a berserk out-of-control camera and mumbles, "Screw 'em up. Gotta do something. They're beatin' us."

At the end of five events, with the compilation of 25 scores, Nebraska is ahead by nine tenths of one point. Cahoy has just brought down the house on the horizontal bar with his over-the-bar release somersault and recatch. He gets a 9.9. Hartung snares a 9.8. The Japs have a rough time on the parallel bars, scoring in the low nines. And now, with the last exchange, the mathematical tension is thick.

Pocket calculators are held in sweaty hands, eyeballs fill with decimal points. Japanese on the high bar, Nebraska on the P bars. The Japs match the Nebraska horizontal-bar scores. Nebraska is screwing up just like Japan on the P bars. It's close. I feel as though I'm holding that .9 lead in my hand. After every exchange, heads whip to the judges' placards. Nebraska can score low on the P bars, but not that low.

A Japanese gymnast falls off the horizontal bar. The crowd gasps with a combination of fear and relief. He takes his 30-second grace period (the deduction for falling off is not insurmountable) and finishes his routine. False alarm--he scores in the high nines. Meanwhile, the Cornhuskers are flipping around on the P bars as though they're on downers, as though someone, greased the wood. The scores are low--that .9 lead is being whittled away. Every Japanese flub, every slip draws cheers. Japan is up in the 9.7-9.8 range on horizontal bar. We're not making it. And when Olympic P-bar virtuoso Cahoy--working with a hand injury--barley scores a nine, it's decimal doom for Nebraska. The final score: Japan 283.85, Nenraska 282.85. It's the closet any American team had come to beating the Japanese on this tour.

At the American Legion hall, the largest of its kind in this country, the Japanese in black suits and short hair march single file to the bar. The place is already crowded with Nebraska rooters, sports personnel and the team. The mood is amiable but awkward. Almost none of the Japanese speak English.

Bob Devaney, the former Nebraska football coach and now athletic director at the university, the man whose name is carved is stone over the block-square sports complex, rises from his table, clasps his enormous gnarled hands in front of his chest and hesitantly gives a half bow in greeting. The Japs order beer and some weird mint-green frothy concoction that comes in a brandy snifter. They chain-smoke. Their suits are disco, but they wear white socks. The Nebraska kids don't smoke and they drink Cokes. They talk loud and slow, as you're supposed to when addressing senile grandparents and people who don't speak English. More effectively, they talk shop by pantomiming somersaults and dismounts with their hands.

The Japanese don't get falling-down drunk, as promised, though their coach is somewhat jovial and boisterous beyond the call of duty.

In the dining room, middle-aged waitresses pass out good old American inchthick prime ribs and plastic bowls of lettuce heavy on the Thousand Island. Just before I leave, Jim Mikus from Reading, Pennsylvania, a former number-one high school gymnast and now a Nebraska soph, nods at a non-English-speaking gymnast on this waning Pearl Harbor Day. He raises his finger and issues the challenge, "Olympics...'Eighty-four!"

"In gymnastics, the guts are invisible unless they're spilled all over the mat."

"As I spend more time with these guys, I learn that loose doesn't mean the same as not serious."