BELA OF THE BALL : When Karolyi Talks, Everyone in Gymnastics Listens-Even Judges

The little girls are all lined up, anxious, bouncing on their feet, intent on making the most of the moment. This could be as close as they ever get.

“Bela! Bela! Bela!” they squeak in unison, tiny voices rising from tiny bodies as the world’s most famous gymnastics coach draws near.

But Bela Karolyi does not acknowledge them. He is down on the floor of the FleetCenter, where there is important work to be done this evening, and they are up in the stands, in the hope-and-dream section, calling out for a wave or, choicer still, a smile from Bela. It is not going to happen. The little girls are only feet away, yet they are worlds away. As Bela might assess the situation, the timing is no goot, no goot at all.

The compulsory phase of the U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics trials is about to begin, and Karolyi’s immediate mission is a complicated one. He has two gymnasts trying to qualify for the Olympic team--one, Kerri Strug, via traditional means, and another, Dominique Moceanu, by way of an injury-waiver petition. Moceanu, 14, already anointed as the third link in Karolyi’s Nadia-Mary Lou golden ring chain, has a stress fracture in her right shin and is trying to qualify on the strength of her score from the national championships. Strug needs to outpoint nine of the 14 gymnasts competing here to earn her second trip to the Olympics.

So, Karolyi needs the scores on the floor to be low, low enough that Moceanu’s nationals mark holds among the top seven, except for Strug. Strug’s score has to be high.

Confusing?

No, just women’s gymnastics.

Karolyi rubs his hands together, bracing for this fascinating game of high-low. He knows precisely what has to be done. So do the judges. But should they happen to forget, even for a moment, Bela has ways of refreshing their memories.

Strug begins the night with a 9.475 score on the uneven bars, which puts her fifth in her group of seven. Not great, not disastrous. Tentatively, Strug walks off the mat and approaches Karolyi with a half-flinching, half-crooked smile that says, “Was that passable, or should I start running laps right now?”

For a moment that feels like an hour, Karolyi towers over Strug. He wanted a better score, but he knows he has to keep Strug upbeat and confident. She has three more crucial events ahead, and, besides, the TV cameras are rolling.

“Vay to go!” Karolyi finally roars and he doles out his traditional sign of approval--the swarthy, sweaty Bela bearhug, which tends to make American television viewers melt in front of their screens and American gymnasts disappear temporarily from sight.

As usual, Karolyi pushes all the correct buttons. Strug nails her next event, the vault, with a 9.887 score and completes a strong balance beam exercise that sends Karolyi into fist-pumping gyrations. The judges, not quite as impressed, grade Strug at 9.575.

Then, two of the next four gymnasts on the beam, Amy Chow and Dominique Dawes, receive identical 9.637 scores for similarly solid, though unremarkable, routines.

This does not please Karolyi. The scores are starting to escalate--”Outrageous,” is Karolyi’s word for it--which does not bode well for Moceanu. Something has to be done, quickly, so Karolyi dispatches his wife and assistant coach, Martha, to the judges’ table.

Soon Martha and Audrey Schweyer, the women’s technical director for the meet, are standing in a FleetCenter tunnel, talking heatedly. Martha flails her arms, points emphatically and rolls her eyes. After that, Martha breaks into tears.

By the time the encounter ends, another group of gymnasts is ready to take its turn on the beam. News flash: Scores are suddenly lower--a 9.5 here, an 8.912 there, a 9.487 over there.

By the end of the night, overall scores are low enough that Moceanu is assured a spot on the Olympic roster and Strug is in strong position to join her--in third place heading into optionals.

And why were scores so low?

“A lot of mistakes on the floor tonight,” Karolyi says.

Not a one, however, committed by Bela Karolyi.

*

He long ago eclipsed the sport from which he retired in 1992, amid bold headlines, and then unretired in 1994, amid bolder headlines. His bearhugs are now emblematic of what he has done to the business of women’s gymnastics--engulfing it, overwhelming it, all but swallowing it whole.

In the last two years, three highly publicized books about women’s gymnastics have been published in the United States. One was Karolyi’s ghost-written autobiography, the illuminatingly titled “Feel No Fear.” The second was Joan Ryan’s “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters,” which devotes much of its volume to a scathing assessment of Karolyi’s “abusive coaching methods.”

The third? “Dominique Moceanu: An American Champion.”

Karolyi looms so large, first, because of his record: Nadia Comaneci’s unprecedented perfect 10s in 1976, Mary Lou Retton’s unprecedented American women’s gold medal in 1984, Kim Zmeskal’s world championship in 1991.

But his influence only begins at the judges’ table. Karolyi is the Rockne, the Lombardi and the Jimmy Johnson of women’s gymnastics--the innovator who altered the sport forever, the legendary builder of champions and the unrelenting self-promoter and media charmer. The face of women’s gymnastics, circa 1996, is not cherubic, rosy-cheeked and pony-tailed. It is 53 years old, and it is framed by salt-and-pepper sideburns and a graying push-broom mustache.

Karolyi assumed this position, largely, by squeezing his burly frame into a vacuum. Once women’s gymnastics became the domain of 14-year-old girls, a revolution spawned by the success of Comaneci, it became the consummate coach’s sport. Spend 10 minutes in the interview room with the U.S. women’s gymnastics team and you will hear. It’s all nervous tittering, shrugging and blushing and a lot of “This is a dream come true, I don’t know what else to say.”

In this kind of atmosphere, quote-hungry sportswriters and television interviewers naturally gravitate toward the coach. Karolyi figured this out before any of his peers--he leads the sport in accessibility and quality sound bites.

Karolyi readily answers the phone at his Houston ranch home. He invites reporters up to his hotel room after USA Gymnastics operatives have “officially” cut off one-on-one interviews. One Olympic beat writer says he and his colleagues have ranked the top five and bottom five interviews among Olympians. No. 1? “Bela, easy,” he reports. The bottom five? “Five women gymnasts.”

Need an assessment of the U.S. men gymnasts’ chances in Atlanta? Go ask Bela. He says all there is to say without saying a word. He simply shakes his head and scrunches up his face as if he has just swilled a bad glass of Romanian wine.

His impressions on the current state of women’s gymnastics?

“It is changing. It is no longer going to be this exclusive search for itty-bitty tiny kids. After these Olympics, people are going to accept the older gymnasts. They will see you can still be a successful gymnast without being a little midget.”

The difference between gymnastics coaches in Europe and the United States?

“In Europe, coaches are educated people, going to several years of training, and they have earned several degrees. Only based on those degrees and after thorough preparation can they become a coach. Here is totally different. Even a housewife, the one that has a talented kid, can turn the next day [into] a coach or a judge. It’s an unfortunate situation.”

Are Karolyi’s coaching methods as harsh as his critics claim? In “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” Ryan describes him as “the high priest of insensitivity,” a tyrannical taskmaster who derided his girls as fat and stupid, likened them to cockroaches and pregnant spiders and kept them on so strict a diet, they smuggled bagels and fruit into their hotel rooms.

“I never met Dracula,” Karolyi cheekily writes in his book, but he can spice up an interview with a pretty fair vocal impression. Lowering his voice to just the right Transylvanian timbre, Karolyi discusses the “general conception” of his work--”They say, ‘Ooooh, your work is very inclusive, you work in such a mysterious way.’ ”

Karolyi dramatically raises his right arm above his head and cracks an imaginary whip.

“They say I am some kind of mean bull or something, chasing the kids around with the vip, and scowling at them, standing in the middle of the gym,” Count Bela continues, chuckling at his own performance.

“Oh yes,” he says quietly, back in original character. “We never close the doors in front of anybody. The gym is open all along. People come in and out, and I don’t believe anybody would find my tactics to be like this. No such thing.”

He laughs again.

“Is ridiculous.”

One of Karolyi’s current soldiers, 23-year-old Svetlana Boginskaya of Belarus, does not deny comparisons between Karolyi’s Gymnastics in Houston and a boot camp for pre-teenage girls. But she does not condemn Karolyi for it, either. Strict discipline, sacrifice and verbal abuse are just part of compulsories for an Olympic-class gymnast, Boginskaya believes.

“In every sport, every coach is supposed to be tough sometimes,” she says. “And, yes, maybe it happened a couple of times when he was kind of mad at us and yelled. But it’s supposed to be this way, you know. . . . If he sees a girl cannot do anything, sometimes you just have to yell. It gives her energy. When I was little and my coach yelled at me, something happened inside of me and I would then do everything perfect. You need it sometimes when the coach is tough.”

Boginskaya remembers that as a young girl, “My coach would tell me, ‘Do this, Svetlana,’ and I wouldn’t do it. But when he spoke loud to me and said, ‘Go and do it or you’ll stay in the gym the whole night,’ of course you’ll go and do it.”

Karolyi enjoyed hearing these words from Boginskaya.

“Vell, vell, vell,” he says, grinning broadly. “All night long in the gym. That was a very well-used technique. Of course, you could do that then.

“Here, you say you’re going to keep a kid in the gym all night long and the next you would face is the federal judge. And, probably, all the lawyers too.”

Karolyi chuckles to himself again.

Those were something, the good old days.

*

Karolyi never met Dr. Frankenstein, either, but he felt like him in Barcelona in 1992, watching the long parade of gymnasts who were too small, too skinny, too young and too grim. Karolyi invented the pint-sized gold medalist, wowed the world with the incredible flights of tiny Nadia, but this, nearly two decades later, was “a scene I never could image.”

Karolyi had created a monster, and after the 1992 Olympics, he decided to flee the laboratory. He retired to his ranch in Houston, where he spent the next two years “going down to the ground basis, to the grass roots, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. Probably in my 15 years of coaching here in the States, these two years were two of the most beautiful ones. I had such a great time working with the little guys.”

Especially one named Dominique.

Karolyi claims he returned to coaching in 1994 to accommodate the dual comeback attempts of Zmeskal and Boginskaya. “Kimbo, bless her heart, got so excited about watching Katarina Witt in ’94 during the Winter Olympics, that she says to me, ‘I want to come back too, and try one more time,’ and she asks me to help her,” Karolyi says. “If I could refuse anybody in the world, it was not Kimbo. She was too close to my heart.”

She was also a longshot for 1996, given her advanced age--Zmeskal is all of 20 now--and the knee surgery she underwent after a blowout in 1994.

If Karolyi was to make his second coming worth the trouble--meaning one more round of Olympic wreaths and bows, nothing less--he needed a comer, a tiny tyke with a big upside. Ideally, another Nadia. Moceanu, with her Romanian heritage, her round, emotive, camera-friendly eyes and her 9.9 scores on the vault, fit the bill, almost too perfectly.

Moceanu and Strug will enable Karolyi to take one more turn on the Olympic floor in Atlanta, even if Martha carries the weightier title of U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics coach. Bela has been there, done that. Now, he can concentrate all his energies on getting Moceanu and Strug ready--and polish up another how-I-did-it speech after the medals presentation.

Bela Karolyi, consigned to the background?

It will never happen, so long as he remains unretired. Karolyi relishes in retelling the story of his first visit back to Romania in 1990, a decade after his defection, when the border police first greeted him “in the rudest, most primitive, uncivilized manner. ‘Open that door! Open that trunk! Passport! Passport!’ ”

“So I give him the passport and he says, ‘Oh! Bela! Hey, guys, it’s Bela!’ He says to me, ‘Here, Bela, have some schnapps. Bela, can I cook something for you? Bela is back! How is Bela?’

“Forty-five minutes I have to stay with him,” Karolyi says, laughing. “It was incredible.”

Two months ago, Karolyi returned to Romania to bury his 90-year-old father. Karolyi says he will always remember the face of his father in the funeral home.

“His face was very, very peaceful, which was so impressive to me,” Karolyi says. “Because this was how he was living his life. He was a very quiet man, very average, not exceptional. He lived a very basic life. His only concern was to keep the family going. He got satisfaction and peace of mind just providing for the everyday needs of the family.

“He never had a great hobby, he never a great achievement, but I think he was still a happy person. His face was reflecting this in his death. This was very impressive to me.”

Bela Karolyi II, however, required more from life. He lives for the great achievement, partaking in the great hobby of sending forth young girls to collect gold medals so that he may hug them and discuss them, at great length.

And if he must endure critical barbs and arrows along the way, charging his methods too ruthless and mean . . . .

“Well,” Karolyi suggests with a broad grin, “I would say, ‘Gosh, just be meaner than him and produce as many athletes like he done and then you gonna be a lucky fellow.’ Vell, vell, vell.”