LAST CRACK : Daggett Still Trying Comeback in Gymnastics, Knowing It Could Go to Pieces

Tim Daggett’s curious comeback continues.

Thursday, in an informal session that served as a prelude to Saturday’s gymnastics meet between the United States and Soviet national teams, he performed a compulsory routine on the pommel horse, did a light-footed dismount and received his first score in nearly six months. A 9.75.

A smattering of fellow gymnasts, just about the only people in the building, stopped their sets and applauded.

This, you must know, was sweet music to Daggett, considering that his last dismount in competition was attended by the sharp sound of bone cracking.

It’s kind of funny: People still talk of where they were when they heard Daggett’s leg bone collapse into itself, as if only the distance the awful sound carried can truly convey the horror of his injury. All Daggett stories seem to begin with this dramatic element.

“I was 50 feet away,” recalls fellow Olympian Bart Conner, shaking his head.

Really, it’s best left unsaid.

“Nasty,” he agrees, and lets it go at that.

Some people, of course, were even farther from the accident when they turned their heads at the noise. Nasty is not quite the word, is it?

That was in the World Championships, back in October. Interesting that the sound still hangs in the air, wherever Daggett travels.

Daggett hears it, too, of course. Until February, when he finally looked at a tape of his landing from the vault, he dreamed of it every night, having horrible nightmares that nearly sent him over the edge.

Even now, although he dismounts as if he had eggs in his socks, he still listens for the sound of bones breaking. Thursday’s applause, in its stead, was refreshing.

Daggett’s comeback, though courageous, is by no means complete.

He is 25 and nobody really knows why he persisted, after the improbable glory of the 1984 Olympics, anyway. With the five operations his left leg has required, he now has had surgery 10 times. And the leg, for all the reconstruction of artery and nerve and bone, could still fly apart, shatter into a calcium mosaic on any single impact, good landing or bad.

And for what? His coach, Yefim Furman of UCLA, says that Daggett has only a 50-50 chance to make the Olympic team.

Even that assessment may be overly optimistic. The team selection process, based entirely on performance, will begin in June. Daggett has yet to try a dismount off rings or high bar on anything less forgiving than the foam pit at UCLA. As for the vault, he has done some tentative bouncing on the springboard.

In the meantime, he works out seven hours a day in three sessions of gymnastics, one of therapy. He lives off his savings, sharing a modest West L.A. apartment.

Is this foolish?

His teammates from the 1984 team--all but Scott Johnson--have gone on to other things, Mitch Gaylord the movies, Bart Conner commercials, Peter Vidmar and Jim Hartung high-paying speaking gigs. It does seems foolish.

“I try to call Peter up,” Daggett says. “But he’s in Vail.” Pause. “Great.”

Daggett is in the gym, listening for the sound of bones breaking, a sound that will mock his efforts, turn his courage into black comedy. The difference between his being a hero and a fool is just that, the sound of bone breaking.

Yet he doesn’t see it that way. If it ends tomorrow, and he knows it may, he says he has already had a successful comeback. Even if all his sacrifice, which can be measured in hours spent or income deferred, becomes nothing more than a side story to the 1988 Olympic team, Daggett can rest happy.

However it ends, maybe even in Seoul--who knows?--it will be better than if he had never tried to pick up the pieces and come back.

“When you do something for 17 years, with all your heart and soul, you can’t let it end that way,” he tries to explain. “If I didn’t come back, I’d have to remember my last dismount in gymnastics as a tragedy. I just can’t go through life feeling that way. As of now, my last dismount was a 9.75.”

He would rather go out with applause in his head than the sound of bone breaking. For him, anyway, the comeback is complete.

Tim Daggett may be a little different from the rest of us. He’s different even from his 1984 teammates, who were already different from the rest of us. Most of them, though Daggett’s age, didn’t think a minute before vaulting right out of gymnastics.

The lightly regarded U.S. team surprised the world with its gold-medal performance. Daggett, who capped the team scoring with a 10 on the high bar, even won a bronze medal on pommel horse. Those guys could compete in Olympics until they were eligible for Social Security and it would never get better than that.

They walked, most of them.

And the rewards--you may not have been aware of this--exceeded the glory. An exhibition tour immediately afterward was rich indeed.

Some, by manner of their charisma, struck it bigger than others. Bart Conner earned Ferrari money for doing a pain-killer commercial. Gaylord was quickly cast in “American Anthem.”

But the others found they could rake it in, too, in less public endeavors.

Daggett, who doesn’t seem that outgoing, discovered that he could give a nice motivational speech. The corporations were booking him regularly and, though Daggett refuses to say what he was getting, he says his speaking fees “were competitive.”

They were set for life.

Then Daggett, in a competitive pique his teammates can only shrug their shoulders at, canceled 11 speaking engagements, at thousands apiece, to train for the World Championships.

The payoff?

Well, he might make the Olympic team and the team might win a medal. That’s a best-case scenario. He wasn’t going to get anything he didn’t already have.

“This may sound corny,” he says, beginning to explain. “But it’s like an artist, and his painting looks done to the rest of the world. But he doesn’t let it go because he wants to work on the things others never really see. My gymnastics wasn’t as good as it could be. I just didn’t feel I was the best I could be. You want it to be just right.”

So he returned. He quickly became the ranking gymnast, winning the national championship in 1986. But he suffered a serious neck injury the next year. Recovering from that, he went to the Pan Am Games. He struggled through that with mononucleosis. This wasn’t going to be easy after all.

Then the leg injury in the Rotterdam World Championships. His recovery is well known, how he was kept in near delirium for three months, medicated with morphine, how his left foot curled up and shrank two sizes because they couldn’t get the nerves to stop firing.

Just coming back from five operations is tough enough. But Daggett’s comeback is mental, too.

Says Conner: “Tim never knows when it will happen again.” Right, says Daggett. “The smallest error at this point and I’m out of the ballgame.”

Daggett must also eradicate the bad associations he has with certain events, with gymnastics at all. Thursday was a big breakthrough. Walking up to the pommel horse, he was unsure how he would react.

“I was a little afraid I wouldn’t like the feeling,” he says. “I could have raised my hand to the judge and said, ‘I don’t want to this anymore.’ ”

In fact, he wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t do just that.

He still has to get in a full-fledged dismount, to experience an impact after a triple-flip off the rings. Or, most especially, a pike Cuervo vault. There are mental breakthroughs yet to be made.

It all sounds very unlikely, doesn’t it?

“I’m afraid so,” Conner says. “But I almost don’t think that making the team is the point of all this. Isn’t that something?”

Yes, it’s something. You almost want to turn away at the futility of it all, kind of like you would have wanted to have covered your ears in Rotterdam.

Then again, Daggett has come quite a way, farther than you would have thought if you’d heard his leg shatter just six months ago.

Why not Seoul?

His fierce insistence is compelling. There is something about a guy with such purity of motivation. You don’t bet against someone who only wants “to get it just right.”