U.S. Female Athletes Came of Age in Atlanta

It was the Kerri Strug vault, landed with her left ankle sprained, so far beyond pain that she told Coach Bela Karolyi, “I can’t feel my leg.” And he told her, “You can do it.” So she did. Under the bright spotlight of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Or maybe it was when Dot Richardson hooked a two-run home run down the right-field line, the ball kissing the inside of the foul pole, and George Steinbrenner leaping to his feet in the stands, just another smitten softball fan crammed into Golden Park, one of 8,750 lucky enough to see the game in person because NBC didn’t bother to televise it live. At the Atlanta Games, it was softball, not baseball that was standing room only.

It might have been on the night at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Ga., where normally the stands are filled with Georgia Bulldog football fans but on this night was packed with fans roaring in approval as Mia Hamm, her ponytail bouncing, hit a cutting Joy Fawcett who carried the ball with her feet to Tiffeny Milbrett who drilled home the gold-medal-winning goal. Game over. U.S. 2, China 1. Three months earlier the same women couldn’t draw 2,000 for an exhibition in Tampa, Fla. Now 76,000 wouldn’t leave the stadium. For American fans, men’s soccer at the 1996 Games barely registered.

But then for two weeks a modest gang of basketball players had taken turns firing behind-the-back passes, making jump shots look easy, shooting free throws as if they mattered and then behaving as if they were thrilled to be playing wherever they played, at Morehouse College or at the Georgia Dome.

While the U.S. Dream Team, the men that is, complained about the poor quality of room service in their five-star hotel and clogged the streets with Hummers taking their friends and families to private parties, the U.S. women won Olympic gold in as dominating a fashion as the men.

After they had beaten Brazil, 111-87, in the championship game, point guard Dawn Staley said wistfully, “The difference between us and the other Dream Team is, we don’t know where we’re all headed. We just appreciate the moment.”

U.S. Olympic Committee executive director Dick Schultz summed it up: “These Games have belonged to the women. By their performances, they’ve given girls around the world athletic role models.”

It was, even then, the “Summer of Women.”

While the U.S. four-man 100-meter relay team lost Olympic gold for the first time partly because of squabbling over whether Carl Lewis would run, the women swept all their relays. It was, as soccer player Kristine Lilly said, “because the fans saw women for the first time as athletes who loved competing for no other reason than to have fun and win and not for money or glory, and I think that kind of swept the country.”

It was a national love affair. Kerri. Dot. Mia. Dawn. We knew them by first names, we recognized their ponytails. We got them. They were like us. Not millionaires with entourages. They were the girls down the street.

Ten years later, we remember the girls. Mia is married to the Dodgers’ Nomar Garciaparra. Dot is a doctor. Dawn is a coach at Temple University. But few are pro athletes. The soccer league was a flaming failure. The gymnastics tour that was modeled after the ice-skating tour never took off. Pro softball leagues have gone nowhere. The WNBA continues mostly because the men let it.

Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said that “unless a fairly significant portion of your viewership is male, it’s hard to survive for women.”

“Marketers and television folks tap into that demographic,” Roby said. “I think women are still struggling to create a business model that will work. You have to do more than just play well. You have to entertain. And men’s pro sports always had advantages. Many of their stars were already icons coming out of college. And back when the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball were coming into prominence, you didn’t have wall-to-wall television and all sorts of expectations of immediate success. Their brands were cultivated over decades of time. The women’s soccer league got three years.”

Soccer player Julie Foudy remembers those heady days.

“I think we all thought success would come immediately,” she said. “That’s not how it worked.”

There were special individual moments for many female athletes in Atlanta: Lindsay Davenport, only 20, cried when she won Olympic gold, while swimmer Amy Van Dyken, who wasn’t favored to win any gold medals, won four and earned herself a spot on a Wheaties box. But it was the women’s teams that captured Americans’ hearts and respect.

Those teams -- gymnastics, softball, soccer, basketball -- won gracefully, joyously and, often, dramatically.

Gymnastics started it all.

The U.S. women had never won Olympic team gold, yet the group that came to Atlanta had a nickname: The Magnificent Seven, or Mag Seven for short.

Performing in front of crowds of more than 30,000 for the compulsories and free programs, and with the burden of being favored yet historic underdogs, the team of Strug, Shannon Miller, Dominique Dawes, Jaycie Phelps, Amanda Borden, Dominique Moceanu and Amy Chow spent two days embracing the pressure and, as Miller said, “sticking our landings.”

In second place behind Russia after the compulsories and just ahead of Romania, the Mag Seven took over first place early on the second night and seemed firmly in control until their final rotation.

It was then that 14-year-old Moceanu brought silence to the packed arena when she fell -- boom, boom -- on each of her two required vaults. And when Strug, the final U.S. performer, landed on her bottom on her first vault, it seemed the Americans might have crumbled. Even worse, when Strug had fallen on that first vault she felt a pop in her left ankle.

“It really hurt,” she recalled last week. “No one knew how much.”

Not knowing that her team had already clinched the gold by her completing that first vault, Strug chose to do a second. It was a Yurchenko 1 1/2 twisting vault and before she tore down the runway, Strug said, “Please, God, help me make this vault.” She did. She stuck the landing, just for a moment, then collapsed to her knees. When Karolyi carried her off the floor, Strug said, “I think I broke it.”

There was no break, but two torn ligaments. The U.S. won gold and when Karolyi carried Strug to the awards ceremony, the seminal photo of the Olympics had been taken. And it was only Day 4.

About 100 miles west of Atlanta, in Columbus, Ga., where they used a series of colored flags to alert the crowd to the level of heat danger, the softball players watched Strug on television and then did their own version of dancing on a balance beam. They lost to Australia, 2-1, in 10 innings, a game in which pitcher Lisa Fernandez had retired 29 in a row. But with a runner on second in the bottom of the 10th, after the U.S. had just taken a 1-0 lead, Fernandez grooved a pitch to Joanne Brown, who hit a walk-off home run.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Fernandez said last week.

The U.S. had won 63 of its last 64 games yet now was close to being eliminated. Then drama ensued.

Because of a screwy formula, the U.S. ended up beating China three games in a row to win the gold. It began with Sheila Cornell hitting a game-winning two-run home run in that first matchup against China for a 3-2 victory. A 1-0 win in their next meeting put the U.S. into the gold-medal game. In that game, Richardson was the hero with that home run that was fair by a breath. Michelle Granger struck out eight and Fernandez was brought in to get the final out in the 3-1 victory.

Such memories don’t wash away with time.

“My eyes were closed when I threw the last strike,” Fernandez said.

Richardson still remembers how her hands tingled when she struck the two-run homer. Two days later, she reported for duty at Centinela Hospital in Los Angeles. She also was, after all, Dr. Dot, an orthopedic surgery resident scheduled to do hand surgery.

By the time the softball team had its gold, the 1996 Games were better known as the Women’s Olympics.

Then came the women’s soccer team. It had played preliminary games in Orlando and Miami and filled up Florida stadiums. But when it arrived in Athens for the medal round, Foudy remembers, “I couldn’t believe it. We would walk from the dorms to the stadium and the place was packed.”

Shannon McMillan scored nine minutes into overtime to lead the U.S. over Norway, 2-1, in the semifinals. In front of 64,195 at Sanford Stadium, the U.S. had trailed 1-0 before Michelle Akers tied the game in the 76th minute on a penalty kick. Foudy made the pass on McMillan’s winning goal.

“The roar of the crowd, I’ll never forget that,” Foudy said.

In the finals, it was Hamm who was everywhere. She played with a sore hamstring and didn’t score, but the Chinese followed her everywhere anyway. Hamm took Lilly’s cross near the goal in the 19th minute of the gold-medal game and blasted a pass to McMillan who put the U.S. up, 1-0. Sun Wen tied the game in the 68th minute. Then it was Hamm orchestrating what looked like a basketball fastbreak. Hamm to Fawcett to Milbrett. The crowd of 76,481 didn’t want to leave.

It was the same when the women’s basketball team won its 60th game in a row, over Brazil. It had been Brazil who had upset the U.S. two years earlier in the finals of the world championships.

“That was an awful feeling that stuck with us,” Teresa Edwards remembered.

Though she played for five gold-medal winning teams, it was the 1996 group that Edwards said was the best.

“We had everything. Size, strength, shooting, defense,” she said. “We liked each other too. There was an innocence to that team. We just loved the game.”

Before the Olympics, the women had barnstormed the world, playing in 39 cities in nine months. In the gold-medal game, USC standout Lisa Leslie had a game-high 29 points. She was 12 for 14 from the field.

“It was magical,” Edwards said. “We all felt that way.”

Now it is these women who have the only viable professional league. Leslie, for example, leads the WNBA’s Sparks and Edwards played for the Minnesota Lynx.

The league is celebrating a decade of existence yet still fighting whispers of its imminent demise. It struggles with attendance, which has fallen from a peak average of 10,864 a game in 1998 to an all-time low of 8,174 last season.

While television ratings improved 30% for playoff games on ESPN2 last year, the league’s newest team, the Chicago Sky, is struggling to draw more than 3,000 a game.

Johnny Buss, president of the Sparks, fears the WNBA has not marketed itself in the proper way.

“When you create a new product, you give it an identification,” Buss said. “You give it a brand. And even though we were running off the coattails of the NBA, it was absolutely wrong to cause the WNBA to look so much like the NBA. It was absolutely wrong.”

Curtis Symonds, president of the Washington Mystics, disagrees.

“I think the league is positioned right,” he said. “When you look at professional sports, in today’s world we’re the only American league that’s made it 10 years. Soccer did not make it. Softball did not make it. We’re still here.”

And for women, that’s the best to hope for 10 years after the Women’s Games. To still be here.

Times staff writer Mike Terry contributed to this report.

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MICHELLE AKERS / SOCCER

Michelle Akers has had as many as 25 surgeries for various injuries and there are days when she still feels twinges of the chronic fatigue syndrome that sapped her strength, and sometimes her will, during the years she was a linchpin of the U.S. women’s soccer team.

Now she’s 40, the mother of a 15-month-old son, Cody, and wife of lawyer Steve Eichenblatt. They live on a 10-acre farm outside Orlando where Akers -- who went to college at nearby Central Florida -- owns four quarter horses.

She met her husband, she said, “when I needed reconstructive surgery on my knee and USA Soccer didn’t want to pay. Somebody recommended I go talk to Steve. It worked out. I got the surgery and my husband.”

She retired in 2000 after a 15-year national team career and that same year was voted by FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, as player of the century. Called “the heart and soul” of the team by star Mia Hamm, Akers said she doesn’t miss the game.

“I have my son, my husband, my horses,” she said. “I’m feeling better and better every day. Life’s good.”

Her best memory of 1996 wasn’t a single pass or goal.

“It was getting on the plane after we won the gold medal,” Akers said, “and realizing normal people like me were coming up. They knew me. Wow, I thought that was really cool.”

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DOT RICHARDSON / SOFTBALL

Dot Richardson was everybody’s favorite in 1996. Dr. Dot.

She was a spark-plug shortstop on the first U.S. Olympic softball team. She was training to be an orthopedic surgeon. She was a motor mouth. She was enthusiastic. And she could play ball.

Things have changed a little since then.

Richardson, 44, is medical director of the USA Triathlon National Training Center in Clermont, Fla., near Orlando. She is married to Bob Pinto, who owns a chain of coffee shops. She is trying to start a new professional women’s softball national league called the PFX Tour.

Richardson won another gold medal as a second baseman at the Athens Olympics and her plan was to open a practice as an orthopedic surgeon after her retirement from softball.

“But I got this tremendous offer at the only place to date I’m aware of that’s a hospital, a training center and a center for women’s health,” she said.

She remembers every inning of the 1996 Games, “as if it happened yesterday. The first pitch I saw was a ball,” Richardson said of the U.S. opening game against Puerto Rico. “The second, I got a hit. From there, everything just built. It was a magical time and I want to make sure softball has more of those times in the future.”

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TERESA EDWARDS / BASKETBALL

Teresa Edwards splits her time between the gym and the coffeehouse these days. She plays pickup basketball at the gym and she works on her book at the coffeehouse.

At 42, Edwards, winner of five Olympic gold medals, finds herself at a crossroads. “I’ve got to find my way without the game,” she says. “I want to do a lot of things.”

In 1996, two years after she had seriously considered retirement, Edwards was chosen to recite the Olympic Athlete’s Oath in her hometown of Atlanta on her 32nd birthday during the opening ceremonies. “That’s a great life moment,” she said.

After Atlanta, Edwards was part of the short-lived American Basketball League. She struggled to find a place in the WNBA after being tabbed “the world’s oldest rookie” when she joined the league as a 39-year-old in 2003. She played for two years with the Minnesota Lynx.

Edwards’ father and grandmother died recently and the woman who first played for the U.S. in 1981 and didn’t retire until she won a fifth gold as a co-captain of the 2000 Olympic team is trying to plan the rest of her life.

“I want a new niche,” said Edwards, who lives in Smyrna, Ga. “I’m working on a book. I want to do my story to motivate girls. I think some of the innocence of the game has left us. I want that back.”

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LISA FERNANDEZ / SOFTBALL

As Lisa Fernandez speaks, her 7-month-old son Antonio bellows in the background.

“He’s got lungs,” Fernandez said. “I love it.”

Fernandez, 35, drove in the first run for the first U.S. Olympic softball team at the 1996 Games. And she scored the second run. Though she is taking off this year to spend with her son, Fernandez hopes to be on her fourth Olympic team in Beijing in two years.

“And my little boy is going to learn what it’s like to support female athletes as well as male ones,” said Fernandez from her Long Beach home.

Her husband, Michael Lujan, is a teacher. Fernandez isn’t sure what it is she’ll do when softball is over. She has served as an assistant coach at her alma mater, UCLA, and has earned praise as a knowledgeable, confident broadcaster on ESPN college softball telecasts. And she is most excited about her own clothing and equipment collection being designed by Schutt, a sporting goods manufacturer.

“There will be bats, gloves, clothing, everything,” Fernandez said. “One-stop shopping for female softball players.”

Two years ago in Athens, Fernandez was 4-0 as a pitcher and batted .545. After her maternity rest, Fernandez plans to do as well in 2008.

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DOMINIQUE MOCEANU / GYMNASTICS

Dominique Moceanu, the youngest member of the 1996 Olympic gold-medal gymnastics team, is making another comeback. On Saturday, she competed at the U.S. Classic in Kansas City, Mo., and hopes to qualify for U.S. nationals this month.

Moceanu, 24, is majoring in business at John Carroll University in Cleveland and is engaged to her coach, Mike Canales. She came into the national spotlight in August 1995, when she was 13 and 4 feet 6 1/2 .

Moceanu -- daughter of former Romanian gymnasts Dmitri and Camelia -- had just become the youngest to win the national all-around title. But then, leading up to the Games, she suffered a stress fracture in her leg and couldn’t compete in the all-around and had three hard falls in the team competition.

Life didn’t get easier. In 1998, Moceanu legally “divorced” her parents to gain control of her money and won a restraining order against her father, saying she feared he would do her physical harm. She says she has since reconciled with her family. Then, in trying to qualify for the 2000 Athens Games, Moceanu injured her knee and ultimately retired. Now she is back.

In Kansas City, she took part in two events, placing 14th in the vault and tying for 15th in the floor exercise. But simply competing was a milestone.

“I have overcome a lot of adversity,” said Moceanu, who now stands 5-3. “And I’ve found out that nothing is served on a platter.”

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BRIANA SCURRY / SOCCER

Briana Scurry is still playing soccer for the U.S. national team. She is 34 and most of her teammates from 1996 have retired. Not Scurry.

“I love it,” she says. “I’m not done yet.”

Scurry was the goalkeeper on the Atlanta Olympic team, and while the focus then was on such offensive players as Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers, it was Scurry who had made the biggest boast. “If we win gold,” she said, “I’ll run naked down the street.”

They did -- and she did.

“It was at night on a small street, but I did it,” Scurry said last week. “And I still have the tape. No one gets to see it though.”

But when it was time to get ready for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she came to camp overweight and was left off the team. She returned in 2002 and went on to play at the 2003 World Cup. Scurry also played every minute at the 2004 Athens Olympics, when her team won gold. After taking 2005 off, Scurry is back.

“I think I can help a new generation of girls,” she said. “I hope I can be a reminder of all the great things we’ve done.”

Scurry, who hopes to be ready for the 2007 World Cup in China, is still the most accomplished goalkeeper in national team history, with 71 shutouts in 155 international games.

“It’s not about the records,” Scurry said. “It’s just about stopping the ball.”

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DAWN STALEY / BASKETBALL

Dawn Staley is a college coach even though she has yet to finish her WNBA playing career as a member of the Houston Comets.

Staley, a point guard from Philadelphia, was one of the younger members of the 1996 team. “Dawn was glue,” said teammate Teresa Edwards. In Atlanta, the first of her three Olympic appearances, Staley averaged 4.1 points and 3.5 assists.

Staley, 36, became head coach at Temple six years ago while continuing to play for the WNBA and the national team. This year she led the Temple women to their first national ranking. In February, Staley was named as an assistant coach for the 2006 U.S. women’s national team that will compete in the world championships.

A University of Virginia graduate, Staley is now writing books aimed at teenage girls looking for role models.

“Those are the girls who need guidance so much,” Staley said. “I want to touch them.”

It wasn’t until Temple officials approached her in 2000 that Staley thought of herself as a coach.

“I never wanted that,” she said. “Then the opportunity came at Temple. I was flattered they came after me, but I didn’t know what coaching entailed. I do now. I’m a coach forever.”

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KERRI STRUG / GYMNASTICS

It was a vault heard around the world. It was the carry seen around the world. Kerri Strug landed on a sprained left ankle to help secure the first gold medal in women’s team gymnastics for the United States and then was carried to the awards podium by Coach Bela Karolyi.

“Before that, I had kind of been known for not being able to pull the best performance out when it counted,” Strug said. “Suddenly, all the focus was on me and it changed my life.”

Strug said landing that vault brought her a sense of confidence she had been lacking

“I changed as an individual,” she said. “I became an adult.”

She is 28, still only 4 feet 10 and works in Washington as a special advisor for the Department of Justice in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Strug was mostly an afterthought on a star-studded team that included Shannon Miller and Dominique Dawes and the 14-year-old apple of Karolyi’s eyes, Dominique Moceanu. But Strug turned out to be the most famous.

“People see me on the metro and ask if I’m the girl who hurt my ankle,” Strug said. “And then they say they are surprised how small I am.”

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Profiles by Times Staff Writer Diane Pucin

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Wednesday: Why the “Summer of Women” didn’t become the “Decade of Women.”