To Ex-Olympic Wrestler, the Day Is Not Complete Without a Workout

In his earlier days, Terry McCann was a compulsive athlete who could not stand losing.

He won an Olympic gold medal for the United States in the 1960 Rome Olympics in freestyle wrestling. And now at age 55, little has changed, except McCann acknowledges that he no longer is a fanatic about winning. Well, sort of.

“I’m out there every day doing something,” said the Dana Point man. That can mean playing handball, outrigger canoeing at night, surfing, swimming and bicycling 15 miles every day at lunch time.

And if it wasn’t for eight knee operations and one on a shoulder, McCann said he’d probably still be wrestling, which he considers the toughest sport in the world.

“The day is not complete for me if I don’t work out,” said the father of seven children and 10 grandchildren. “I feel I’m missing something in life if I’m not exercising,” a routine he said he has endured since he was 12.

McCann doesn’t take all the credit. “I may have been an All-American athlete, but my wife (Lucille) is an All-American wife and mother. I couldn’t have competed in the Olympics if she hadn’t helped me,” he said, adding, “We already had two children.”

The executive director of Toastmasters International, headquartered in Santa Ana, said his goal is to stay in shape. “I want to be fit and to do that I’ve got to keep up the regimen,” he said.

McCann also heads the United States Wrestling Federation, which governs the amateur sport in this country. But he added that he “would not want my grandchildren to become wrestlers,” raising a pant leg to show the surgical scar tracks on his knees.

Despite the many operations, McCann insisted that he is “stronger now than I was back then (during the Olympics), (I can) lift more weight now and work out harder and longer.”

McCann said he wrestled in the 120-pound division. At 5 feet, 4 inches in height, he explained, “wrestling was a way of setting myself apart from others.”

“When I was a kid, I was always the last to be picked in sports because of my size, and I didn’t like that,” he said. “You remember things like that from when you were young, and that hurt. I loved to play games and to compete.”

McCann played football in his high school days and it was his football coach who steered him to wrestling. “I really wanted to play quarterback at Notre Dame,” he said. “The football coach, who was also the wrestling coach, thought I should try out for wrestling because he knew I wasn’t going to make it on the field.”

To this day, McCann said, exercising is not an effort to him. “It’s not hard for me to do it and I don’t get tired. A doctor once told me I had a very slow heart rate, and maybe that does it.”

That may be the reason he can keep busy. “How many things can I do in a day?” he said. “That’s the measure of success. I can do five things a day and keep busy from dawn to dusk.”

It’s no wonder that McCann likes to give speeches to organizations and often trains volunteer leaders for the Toastmasters organization. Of course, he trains them in motivational speaking.

Seventh-grader Christina S. Gibbs, 13, of Newport Beach, has only been taking ballet for a couple of years, but will break new ground next month by taking ballet lessons at the Bolshoi Ballet school in Moscow.

Christina and her mother, Sydney Gibbs, will depart June 9 to spend 10 days at the school, where she will dance in classes with Soviet youngsters.

“This is the first time Americans have been able to take ballet at the school,” Sydney Gibbs said, noting that her daughter will be among a group of Americans to dance at the Bolshoi School. Christina is the only dancer from Orange County.

“We’re both very nervous about this,” she added. “Russian teaching is so intense. It’s very stressful because Christina wants to do well and get as much out of it as she can.”

Acknowledgements--McFadden Elementary School’s literary art magazine, “In Retrospect,” has received a first-place award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Assn. The student magazine has won the award for eight consecutive years.