I have a confession to make. I am hooked on the sport of women’s gymnastics.
It’s not just because my wife is the assistant coach at Penn State. For me, it is the female equivalent to the sport I grew up in, wrestling. It comes down to the bottom line: Have you prepared correctly to perform under pressure without the aid of your peers?
When I was a student here, our 118 lb-er was friends with Ann Carr, whom we have an award named after that is presented to the best PSU gymnast of the meet, and he would always try to get me to go to meets. Back then (the late ’70s), it was always so packed I couldn’t get a seat, so I wouldn’t go. But after meeting my wife-to-be, who was just finishing up as a senior here in the late ’80s, I started going to all of the meets and couldn’t stand missing one.
But just like how it’s collegiate wrestling I love, it’s collegiate gymnastics I love as well. There is the added dimension of team vs. team and the idea that the rise of each individual, in that pressure situation, will lead to the rise of the team itself.
My daughter is in the sport, and some of the alumni who were either teammates of of coached by Jess have daughters the same age as my daughter. I must confess, I would love to see all of them on the PSU team together in several years. How cool would that be?
I have become a gymnastics dad, too, but that is on the back burner for now. Let’s get into how someone like me who basically only knows enough to be dangerous, can watch the sport and enjoy it.
It’s simple. Match it up against football, which everyone around here knows.
Oddly enough, that isn’t such a stretch. For instance, my brother, a football coach, and my wife, the gymnastics coach, have both told me at one time that I had little clue as to what was going on in a certain situation with regard to their sport. After holding my breath for five minutes in protest, I realized they might have a point.
In my job, as a meteorologist, there are times when the average person will say something to me about a weather situation, and I will think the same thing my wife and brother think about me in their sports.
Look at the play-calling, for instance, in football. A simple off tackle play when I was a kid was a 34 five, now it’s maddogredbuck86slashchuckakahnbull…on go.
Look at gymnastics. A typical move is doubleflipfloplayoutdoitrightoryou’llcutyournoseoff. But I say just because you may not understand the whole thing doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. In fact, it probably adds to the irrationality that is needed to be a true raving lunatic fan. This is a case where less knowledge makes you even more mad dog in support for your team.
But I have devised a way to really parallel it to football. We have four quarters in football, and we have four events in the women’s sport. Each tenth in the women’s sport is like a point in football. (If we are leading by 3/10ths, we are up a field goal).
Each event has a crucial aspect that is like football. The vault is the running game, for instance. One needs a solid running game in football to establish the situation for the game that can lead to victory. Same here.
Not only that, but the ladies have to run to the apparatus. It can’t be any simpler.
Once you know the start value, as long as the lady doesnt butt the vault, which is simply falling on her butt instead of landing without moving (the equivalent of the back getting dropped for a four-yard loss) she will probably score within 2/10ths of the start value.
Falling during any event is like any major debacle in football It burns you. It’s worth a half point, and since you only count five of the six routines, one fall is not so bad, except it puts pressure on your teammates. That is what the ‘wrestling’ and educational beauty of the sport is.
Now to the uneven bars. This is the passing game, the air attack, since the gymnasts spend a heck of a lot of time in the air.
A great ‘bar’ team in most colleges is a frat that can keep a pub in business. Not here. Since you are flying at levels not even LeBron James can leap to, you better be able to execute or you can be executed. But again, a fall here is like an interception. One fall is no biggie, but two falls mean a pick six (well, pick five) ’cause one of them counts.
Again, if you know that start value (the ‘clock’ at the judges table), you can probably figure within a couple of tenths what someone will score.
That brings us to beam. Defense.
They say defense wins games, like pitching in baseball. Well the miracle, and it is a miracle, of a human being actually doing things that most human beings could not do with the help of a crane, on a four-inch-wide surface that is a few feet off the ground, is something that is no less than a goal line stand with time running out. In fact, I have seem women gymnastics T-shirts that say, ‘if it were easy, we would call it football.’ No football player I know would even want to try to walk on that beam. I cant even sit on the darn thing.
I was once at a post-game meeting of my brother’s team, and the coaches were screaming like nuts at each other, because a blown call while they had the ball with a minute left resulted in the other team recovering the ball in the end zone. You might have thought they lost the game, but the fact is they had won 37-6, but they lost their shut out, and the defensive coaches were out of control mad. An hour later, they were all buddies again, but I was struck by their mentality about the whole thing.
It hits me that my wife, who happens to coach beam, has about the same kind of mentality as far what that beam team means. It is the defense. They do have to believe they will control the outcome, and a fall that counts here is just like getting burned on a long pass. There is nothing worse than going to a meet where four teams are going at once and seeing your team fall on beam, while someone is nailing bars (a bomb for a touchdown) or nailing a vault (an off tackle play that goes for a touchdown) or nailing a floor routine (kicking a 52-yard field goal as time runs out).
I will watch my wife, and while a routine is going on, and while I am a blathering idiot with each pass, she is just sitting there as if nothing if happening, good or bad. I have seen football coaches who sit there and maddeningly chart the game as if nothing is going on, no matter what is happening. I can’t figure out how she or they can do it. Me, I would be ranting and raving at the judges and flipping out.
This brings us to floor (the kicking game). Why not? They run, jump, kick, contort and basically are there to enhance the lead, add that insurance field goal or, if need be, pull the game out. Again, if you fall, it ups the pressure. If you watch closely here, you can imagine in some of the passes the beauty of a wide out leaping high over his opponent for an unreal catch. If that doesn’t keep you focused, then take it for the beauty it is.
The floor is like the kicking game, though we don’t see the other teams calling time out to ice the kickers. However, if the judges stop to confer before a routine, it can be nerve-racking to the gymnast who is waiting to go with the meet on the line.
There is nothing more exciting in sports then to see a meet come down to someone having to nail her last floor routine. Now I know very little about this and it’s funny, my wife will say, ‘so and so on such and such a team got over-scored, and cant dance to save her life.’ Since I can’t dance to save my life either, I really have no idea what is going on.
Just like football, there can a home field advantage. One of the teams we have gone against in the years that this has grown into an addiction for me, has never placed higher than us in the nationals, but we have never beaten them in their home arena. Now how can that be?
As a loyal Penn State fan, I used to suspect that anytime we played ‘Bama outside of Beaver stadium, the Bear had the Alabama State Police reffing the game. The bounced pass for a touchdown in the 1978 Sugar bowl and the fact we have to get into the end zone four times before one of them is counted are classic examples of this.
Women’s gymnastics is a sport that, if one knows just a little bit about it, is as great as they come. Next to the Miami-Penn State game in 1987 for the national title, and every wrestling match I have ever been in or at, my most exciting experience in sports was watching the Penn State women’s team come from a touchdown (.7) behind on its last event to win the regionals one year. They did it on their weakest event and not in a way where the other team choked. They simply sucked it up, and beat their best on the event that year that they came to last by a half-point, and out-pointed the team that was leading them by .75 on that team’s last event.
It was nerve-racking, matching score against score, but it came down that to tie. We had to beat them by an average of .15 on each score that counted, and we did, plus a little more.
If you know enough, it can make it exciting and dangerous. Dangerous, because at my age, I may be able to take watching wrestling and football, but watching a routine with a meet on the line… Wow, I could have a heart attack.
Now how much do I love this? Well, I could not go to the wrestling nationals, but I fully intend on being in Florida for the gymnastics nationals. It will take us placing in the top two in the regionals here at PSU on April 10, so you should come out and root our team on.
Just stay away from the balding, aging, rabid dog in the stands screaming that ‘if the judges had another eye they would be cyclopes,’ because that would be me. As I said, I know enough to be dangerous.
