Retton Gives Back to Sport

In the 100-year history of the modern Olympics, it’s surprising how many--or rather how few--athletes left a lasting mark.

Oh, each has his or her claim to fame. But, in general, the list is short. Jim Thorpe in 1912, when the King of Sweden, no less, pronounced him the greatest athlete in the world.

Jesse Owens in 1936, when he gave the lie to Hitler’s “Master Race” by showing that it wasn’t even master of the long jump pit.

Bob Beamon broke the existing Olympic record by nearly three feet in Mexico City in 1968 and the existing world record by nearly two feet. To appreciate this, you have to understand the Olympics are not usually a competition in which even its records are broken. It’s more a time that you make sure you get a medal, not a record.

Other athletes stood above the crowd in their time, to be sure. But, probably, no one had an Olympics that belonged more uniquely to them than Mary Lou Retton in 1984.

It was a strange Olympics. The Russians weren’t here. The Games’ future hung in the balance. It was a do-or-die Olympics. The gloomies were waiting with the wreaths--and they weren’t laurel.

It was an Olympics that belonged in its way to Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals. But he contented himself in the long jump with a 28-foot victory and no more, passing up a chance at Beamon’s 16-year-old mark to save himself for other competitions.

So, for a lot of reasons, the ’84 Olympics belonged to an athlete so tiny she could have come to the Games in someone’s pocket. A few less inches and she would be invisible.

But you would have to say inch for inch, Mary Lou Retton was probably the greatest athlete in her Olympics. Other Olympic greats had long legs, long arms, great strides or powerful torsos. They looked like Greek statues. Mary Lou Retton looked like something out of a baby carriage. Or a doll house.

Mary Lou captivated a country. She had a smile that could light a dark cellar and she was seldom without it. She had the blackest eyes and the whitest teeth anyone had ever seen. The eyes looked like bottomless pools and they danced with merriment and energy.

She didn’t even overwhelm her competition. She was the best all-around gymnast--she won the all-around with two 10s in key parts--but she won the silver in the vault and the bronze in the uneven parallel bars and two team competitions.

Still, the public adored her. She was everyone’s kid sister. She was bubbly, as cheerful as a puppy with a rubber ball. She looked like she was having fun.

And she was a great athlete. She was only 4 feet 9, weighed somewhere between 90 and 100 pounds and got her shoes in the infants’ department, but never has so much energy been packed in so small a package. When someone came to Pauley Pavilion once and asked which one was Mary Lou, he was told, “She’ll be the one with sparks coming off her.”

She was raised in the hills of West Virginia, not ordinarily considered a hotbed of gymnastics. She was a hyperactive child, and when the family steered her into dance lessons to work off that excess energy, she left a trail of broken lamps, chair backs and crockery in her high-kicking exuberance.

Dad went down in the mines for a living, but he had been an athlete himself, good enough to play the other guard to Jerry West on the West Virginia varsity.

At 4-9, basketball was not an option but gymnastics was. Retton found that out when, at the age of 9, she watched Nadia Comaneci on television at the Montreal Olympics, where she became the first woman to score perfect 10s in Olympic history. Retton knew she had found her athletic niche.

She stole the ’84 Olympics. She became the first American woman to win a gold medal in gymnastics but, more important, she came off in the public mind as a combination of Shirley Temple and Mary Pickford. America’s New Sweetheart. She won five medals in all, more than any athlete in the Games.

She never lost her appeal. Only a year ago, nine years after her triumph, she was voted best-loved American athlete in a wire-service survey.

Fame is fleeting in all sports. But ballplayers can last into their 40s. Golfers can play as long as they can walk. Olympic gymnasts are over the hill at 16. The body needs an elasticity that comes only with childhood. Gymnasts go directly from the highchair to the uneven parallel bars.

But Mary Lou Retton has not retired with her clippings and medals in a glass case. At 26, she still looks as if she could get a 10 in the floor exercises. Diminutive, athletic, animated, she will look 16 when she is 40. Her schedule makes Hillary Rodham Clinton’s look humdrum. She has been host at Comedy Night at the Improv, a frequent performer in Hollywood (“Baywatch,” “Naked Gun,” “Dream On”), a coast-to-coast motivational speaker. And she still performs gymnastics. She is either on an airplane or a balance beam.

She is impatient with the notion that for girl gymnasts, pressure comes too soon, too intense. “You can handle pressure better at 14 than 40,” she insists. “You get used to it--you start at 7 getting used to it.”

If the Olympics won’t forget Mary Lou Retton, she won’t forget the Olympics. This month, Retton has instituted the “Mary Lou Retton” awards that she is setting up with her own money ($5,000). It is geared to help young hopefuls, the male and female athlete at the Olympic Festival who show the most promise.

“Growing up in Fairmont, West Virginia, I know more than most the financial hardship of trying to get ready for the Olympics,” she said. “I appreciate what my family went through. The Olympics were good to me, I want to be good to them.”

She already has been good for them. She doesn’t mind being a role model. That may be a bigger achievement than any 10 she made in the vault or floor exercises.