Beaming Reunion : Former Titan All-American Gymnast Returns for Taste of Success

Tami Elliott Harrison has been eagerly awaiting her trip back to her alma mater, Cal State Fullerton, this week.

Maybe she’ll sample the pizza dish that bears her name at the Off-Campus Pub, a restaurant on Nutwood Avenue that names some of its menu items after such former Titan athletes as Phil Nevin, Tim Wallach and Leon Wood.

Maybe she’ll even stop by the Sizzler down the street to see if her picture is still hanging on the wall in one of the back dining rooms.

But the reason she’s returning is the “20 Years of Excellence” reception and dinner Wednesday on the Fullerton campus that will celebrate the school’s success in women’s gymnastics, a program that Lynn Rogers started, nurtured to national prominence and still coaches.

Harrison will be one of several former gymnasts returning for the event, and she remains one of the program’s most sparkling memories. She was honored as an All-American 10 times in the various NCAA events in those days when she was Tami Elliott, student-athlete.

Later she became Miss Virginia, representing her home state in the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. She would have preferred representing the U.S. in the Olympics, but an injury ended that dream in her senior season at Fullerton.

Today, at 29, she is married to a former college football player, and is back home, living in Virginia Beach, Va. They have a 19-month-old son, Rex III, who she jokingly says is “almost constantly out of control.”

Today, too, she is director of a gymnastics academy in nearby Newport News and is delighted to be coaching the sport.

“It will be fun going back to Fullerton,” she said. “I’ve only been back to California a couple of times since I graduated. And it will be fun to show my husband that all those things I’ve been telling him about when I competed there are true. Lynn Rogers says I still have the record in number of All-American recognitions.

“What was neat was when I told my husband that they had some kind of pizza dish named after me at the restaurant. I’m still not sure he believes me, so I’ll want to show him that. It tickled me to hear that I was right there on the menu with Leon Wood and guys like that.”

Her husband, who owns a restaurant and night club in Virginia Beach, played at Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina, and had a brief tryout with the San Diego Chargers, but a knee injury quickly ended that.

“Typical football injury,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I guess I shouldn’t be saying that about football, though, because my injury was pretty scary.”

In March of 1987, she was in top form for another NCAA bid, and only six months away from the Olympic trials. She had finished 13th in the trials for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, but only 10 made the team.

She was far more proven and poised as a performer four years later at 22. She had been the highest American finisher in the 1985 World University Games, and her career seemed to be peaking.

Then it happened. It was a routine move on the vault, the kind she had made almost without thinking countless times. This time, however, her hand slipped when she hit the vaulting horse, and she crashed down on the top of her head. Her spinal cord compressed, and two cervical vertabrae were cracked and another crushed.

“I have to thank the Lord that I’m still walking around,” she said. “I could have really been bad. The doctor told me I was just a millimeter away from really being badly hurt. My spinal cord was nicked but didn’t break. I could have been dead, or paralyzed from the neck down.”

As disappointed as she was that her competitive career was over, she is comfortable with the turns her life has taken.

“The injury made me feel more thankful for the things I have,” she said. “I can remember standing at the end of the runway joking with my friends on the sidelines, and then 30 seconds later, I was hurt. . . . It really makes you think.”

Rogers recalls being with her when the doctor told her that her gymnastics career was over.

“I just remember her saying, ‘Doc, I’ve had 18 good years of gymnastics, so I’ve got nothing to be sad about,’ ” Rogers said. “Even then, she wasn’t going to mope around. I was so impressed by that. Her injury shook us all up. It was the worst we’ve ever had.”

She helped Rogers as a student assistant coach for a year while finishing her degree. She gave some brief thought to staying in Southern California and exploring work in commercials, perhaps even movies. She had been offered the opportunity to portray Nadia Comaneci in the movie, “Nadia,” when she was still in college, but she was committed to trying for the Olympics at the time and turned it down.

She decided instead to return to Virginia after she graduated. “I went back mainly to be close to my family again,” said Harrison, one of six children of a retired Army master sergeant and his wife. “My parents hadn’t been really happy about me going all the way to California to school from the beginning, so they wanted me to come back home.”

She quickly fell into a job helping out at a Newport News gymnastics academy, and has been there ever since. “I really became attached to the kids I was working with, and I realized again how much I loved gymnastics,” she said. “I could have done other things, but gymnastics was in my blood.”

There also was that whirlwind span of time when she was named Miss Virginia and competed in the national pageant.

“The woman who ran the local pageant in Newport News encouraged me to sign up for that,” Harrison said. “She had known me when I was little, and I remember her saying that I wasn’t the same little girl she knew. . . . I really didn’t think of myself as a Miss America kind of person, you know. I’d always thought of myself more as an athlete, a jock.”

But she decided she would give it a try. And she didn’t have to think twice about what she would do for the talent competition.

“I did some gymnastics routines set to music,” she said. “They weren’t that difficult, and they were easy for me after being a world class gymnast, but they still really impressed the judges, I guess. There’s a big difference between that and competitive gymnastics, and I was careful to be sure that I didn’t do anything that would put me in any sort of danger.”

She won the talent competition in Atlantic City, and remembers being ranked 12th in all categories. Her success in the pageant helped her develop a part-time modeling career in the Virginia Beach area. “A lot of my friends asked me why I don’t go to New York and try for the soap operas, or some of the modeling agencies there, but I’ve been happy where I am.”

Harrison also looks back on her gymnastics career at Fullerton with good thoughts.

A member of the U.S. national team coming out of high school in Newport News, she was regarded as the No. 1 recruit in the nation that year, Rogers recalls. “I could have gone anywhere I wanted,” she said. “Alabama, Penn State and Florida State all wanted me, but I decided on Fullerton because of the great family atmosphere the program had, and Coach Rogers.”

She especially remembers Rogers’ ability to motivate his athletes.

“I remember once when I was really working hard to make the national team, but I told him I was getting fed up with it,” she recalled. “He would sit me down under an American flag and tell me to look up at it. ‘That,’ he said. ‘is why you’re doing this.’ ”

She remembers the serious side of Rogers, as well as the humorous. Once, she said, when the team was tired after a series of tough practices. Rogers pulled off his sweat shirt, revealing a T-shirt with the words, “Take No Prisoners.” She laughed and said: “That broke us all up.”

Another time Rogers gave her a tape and told her to listen to it on her Walkman just before she competed. It was John Fogerty’s song “Centerfield” with the recurring line “Put me in, Coach.”

“After that, I remember I just kept telling him, ‘Put me in, Coach, I’m ready,’ ” she said.

Those were fun times for her.

“I was serious about competing, but I liked having a good time, too,” she said. “I remember once when I felt I wasn’t doing any better, I said something to him about maybe I should be more serious. He said, ‘That’s not you. When you’re just a carefree kid you’re at your best.’ ”

She helped keep things loose in practice. “I was always the one who was standing behind him making faces when he was chewing somebody else out.”

She enjoys telling about the time Rogers thought his entire team had deserted him.

“We decided we’d play a joke on him,” Harrison said, “so we decided we’d all hide under the stair landing, and wait to see what he’d do. It was time for practice and he couldn’t figure out what happened, with none of us there. Then we all came out laughing.”

Many of those gymnasts of the last 20 years have been away for a while, under life’s landings. But Wednesday night, if Tami Elliott Harrison is correct, they’ll again come out laughing, celebrating the good times.