Kid Athletes

by David Stabler

  “I thought you might be ninth or tenth,” he said, “but never fourth!”

  Gabby had finally reached her breaking point. How could she have faith in her abilities if her own coach thought so little of her? She knew that it was time to stand up for herself, put an end to the bullying, and find a coach who believed in her.

  Luckily for Gabby, she found just such a mentor. Liang Chow had coached U.S. gymnast Shawn Johnson to a gold medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. He ran his own gymnastics academy in West Des Moines, Iowa.

  In the summer of 2010, Coach Chow traveled to Gabby’s hometown of Virginia Beach to teach a clinic and look for new talent. On his first day in town, Gabby worked up the nerve to introduce herself and show off some of her skills.

  Coach Chow was impressed. He was also friendly and patient, taking the time to show Gabby new moves and expressing confidence in her abilities.

  Gabby left the clinic determined to break from her current gym. Now all she had to do was convince her mother to let her go.

  “If I’m going to make it to the Olympics, I need better coaching,” Gabby told her mom. Natalie Hawkins understood—especially after Gabby revealed details about the bullying she had endured. But the next thing Gabby said threw her for a loop:

  Absolutely not, Gabby’s mom replied. “There’s no way I’m sending my baby across the country.”

  But Gabby knew she had to take a stand for what she believed in—she had only two short years before the next Olympic Games! Faced with her mother’s refusal, all she could feel was frustration and anger. “If I don’t change coaches, I’m quitting gymnastics!” she declared, and then she stormed out of the room.

  When her anger cooled, Gabby realized that threatening to quit unless she got her way was not a smart idea. Teamwork was the way to go. Once again, she enlisted her sisters Arielle and Joyelle to help convince their mother to change her mind. Finally, after much begging and pleading, they wore her down. Natalie realized that when her youngest daughter set her heart on something, she wouldn’t let go. She agreed to let Gabby leave home to pursue her Olympic dream.

  In October of 2010, Gabby packed her bags and made the thousand-mile trip from Virginia Beach to West Des Moines. She moved in with a host family and began training with Coach Chow six hours a day, six days a week. Gabby missed her family. There were days during the long, frigid winter when she thought about giving up and returning home to sunny Virginia Beach.

  But with the help of her new coach, Gabby consistently improved on each apparatus. She led the U.S. team to a gold medal at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo and then collected gold, silver, and bronze medals at the U.S. National Championships in 2012.

  Later that year, the sixteen-year-old phenomenon—now known affectionately as the “Flying Squirrel”—led the American gymnasts to victory in the team competition at the Olympics. After all the bullying she’d experienced, and all the hard work she’d put in practicing, Gabby had finally found a team with whom she could shine. She was now one of the fabulous “Fierce Five.”

  When Babe Didrikson was four years old, a fierce hurricane blew through her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. Fearsome winds and torrential rain pounded the small Gulf Coast city, uprooting trees and ripping houses from their foundations. While most people hid in their basements, one little girl danced around, laughing in the face of the storm.

  After the wild weather had passed, and with water flooding the streets, the girl tried to leap out the second-story window of her home to splash around. But her parents held her back.

  Mildred “Babe” Didrikson wasn’t afraid of any hurricane. In fact, many of the townspeople of Port Arthur thought she was much like a hurricane herself: fast moving, unpredictable, and impossible to contain.

  Babe’s father, Ole, knew right away that his youngest daughter was going to be a lot to handle. “No crib I can build is going to hold her,” he said when Babe was born.

  A furniture maker who had sailed to the United States from his native Norway, Ole settled in Texas with his wife, Hannah, during the state’s first big oil boom. But Ole was not an oilman, and he made little money in his newly adopted country. When the storm hit, his family lost most of their belongings, prompting Ole to move inland to a town called Beaumont. It was there that Babe (who later changed the spelling of her last name, adding the surname Zaharias when she got married) would truly leave her mark.

  In Beaumont, Babe found a whole new group of townspeople to astound with her fearless, daredevil antics. One day, one of her new neighbors dared her to jump off the roof of her house. She did—and went back the next day and did it again.

  In the summertime, Babe was one of the only kids brave enough to swim in the dangerous Neches River near her house. She dodged treacherous rip currents, venomous water moccasins, and snapping alligators. She proved to everyone that she was not afraid.

  At school, Babe developed a reputation for pulling pranks and taking risks. One time, she climbed the flagpole and balanced herself on top until the principal ordered her down. Parents warned their children not to follow the example of “that Didriksen girl.” But the kids found themselves drawn to Babe just the same.

  Maybe it was that Babe acted—and looked—like no girl any of them had ever seen. She hated dolls, wore denim pants, and kept her hair cut short so that it wouldn’t get in her eyes while she shot marbles with the neighborhood boys.

  As Babe grew older, she started putting more of her energy into sports. She played baseball, football, and basketball; she also liked to jump “hurdles” over her neighbors’ hedges. When her father built a jungle gym in their backyard for her brothers, Babe quickly took it over. There was a chin-up bar, a barbell made from an old broomstick with a flatiron at each end, and a trapeze for acrobatic stunts. It was the perfect playset for the daredevil in the family.

  For Babe, nearly every activity became another opportunity for play. Once, when her mom asked her to scrub the kitchen floor, Babe strapped a pair of brushes onto her feet and skated around on the soap suds like an ice skater. The way she saw it, chores were just a way to kill time until the next game started.

  Even though Babe wasn’t taking reckless chances, she still found ways to get into trouble despite herself. One day, her mother sent her to the grocery store to buy ground beef for their suppertime meal. On her way home, Babe spotted some boys playing baseball in the schoolyard.

  “This will only take a couple of minutes,” thought Babe as she set the package of meat on the grass and ran onto the field to join the game. But the couple of minutes stretched into an hour. By the time Babe returned to retrieve her groceries, a stray dog had eaten all the meat. When her mother found out, Babe was punished for ruining the family’s dinner.

  By junior high, Babe had developed a reputation as the best athlete in Beaumont. But not everyone shared that opinion. Some boys would not accept that a girl could be better than them at any sport. When Babe was twelve, an older boy named Red Reynolds challenged her on the playground. Red was the star halfback on the football team, and he had heard all about Babe’s exploits on the playing field. He was determined to prove that this champion girl athlete wasn’t as tough as she seemed.

  “Hit me as hard as you can,” Red told Babe as he stuck out his chin.

  Babe didn’t want to hurt Red, but she didn’t want to back down either. So she rared back and knocked him down with one punch.

  Babe could have been expelled from school for hitting another student, but the principal decided to give her another chance. The principal also made another decision that shocked everybody in town: she issued a decree making Babe the only girl in school allowed to play sports against the boys.

  The way was now clear for Babe to achieve her goal: “to be the best athlete who ever lived.” She went on to become the star forward on her high school basketball team and made the teams for golf, baseball, tennis, volleyball, and swimming. Then, just when she thought she had mastered every sport, Babe was f
aced with a new challenge.

  Babe was fourteen when a neighbor invited her to join the circus. Minnie Fisher, called Aunt Minnie by the kids in town, was a circus performer. Her specialty was the “iron jaw” act—dangling in the air from a trapeze clenched between her teeth and spinning around like a top.

  Aunt Minnie had seen Babe practice on her backyard trapeze and thought she had a future on the high wire.

  At that time, the circus was one of the only places where a female athlete was allowed to show off her talents alongside men. Babe was tempted by Aunt Minnie’s offer and convinced her parents to let her spend the summer under the big top.

  Together with her sister Lillie, Babe piled into Aunt Minnie’s car for the long drive to California. It was the first time she’d ever been out of East Texas and the first time she’d seen the sights, sounds, and smells of circus life.

  Over the summer, Babe learned how to walk across a tightrope, perform flips in midair, and hang by her toes from a trapeze—all to the delight of the crowds. It was an exciting adventure.

  Babe was enjoying the new experience of circus life—that is, until the day she was asked to ride on the back of a gray elephant. One look at the giant creature and Babe stopped dead in her tracks.

  Walking the tight rope or swinging on a trapeze was one thing, but this animal was huge—and scary. Still, Babe wasn’t a quitter, so she stuck with it. After she conquered her fear, Babe decided that, from then on, she would stick to sports and leave the circus acts to the professionals.

  As a grown-up, Babe would conquer all the major women’s sports of her era, and a few of the minor ones, too. At the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, she won two gold medals in track and field. A few years later, she took up golf, hitting as many as 1,000 golf balls a day. She ended up winning ten major championships, including three U.S. Women’s Open titles.

  Nothing pleased Babe more than beating boys at their own games. She once pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in an exhibition baseball game. She formed her own touring basketball team and later traveled the country playing pool. She even tried to qualify for the men’s U.S. Open golf tournament, but she was turned down because she was a woman.

  In 1938, when Babe married professional wrestler George Zaharias, the newspapers could barely fit all her accomplishments in the wedding announcement. She was described as a “famed woman athlete, 1932 Olympic Games track and field star, expert basketball player, golfer, javelin thrower, hurdler, high jumper, swimmer, baseball pitcher, football halfback, billiardist, tumbler, boxer, wrestler, fencer, weight lifter, [and] adagio dancer.”

  When she died in 1956, Babe Didrikson Zaharias was widely considered the greatest female athlete of the twentieth century. Many great sportswomen have followed in her footsteps, but so far none have excelled at as many different sports—or done so with as much panache—as the tenacious tomboy from Port Arthur, Texas.

  Bruce Lee was a man of many names. He was born in San Francisco in the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese calendar, and so some people liked to call him “The Little Dragon.”

  Though he was born in California, he grew up in his family home in Hong Kong. His mother, Grace Lee, named him Jun-Fan, which meant “Return Again,” because she believed that one day he would go back to his birthplace. A doctor at the hospital in San Francisco gave him the name Bruce, which is how we know him today.

  When he was a kid, Bruce’s parents gave him yet another name: Mo Si Tung, or “Never Sits Still.” The nickname was perfect because he was constantly in motion. But although Bruce never stopped moving, he didn’t really know where he was going. Not until he learned the ancient Chinese martial art of kung fu.

  Soon after his birth, Bruce’s family returned to Hong Kong. In the crowded and bustling city, they shared a cramped apartment with as many as twenty relatives, several potted plants, and a menagerie of pets—dogs, birds, fish, even a chicken who lived in a cage on the veranda. At times water was scarce, so the bathtub was kept filled from sunup to sundown. Bruce and his family washed themselves behind a curtain.

  These surroundings weren’t always the most comfortable, especially for an active little boy, so Bruce took to the streets to find room to play.

  Sometimes he liked to pretend he was Robin Hood. He and his best friend, Unicorn, would fashion swords out of bamboo stalks, and then they fenced each other for hours. Unicorn was bigger and stronger, but Bruce fought hard and refused to admit defeat.

  When he wasn’t dueling with the Sheriff of Nottingham, Bruce liked to roam around Hong Kong looking for trouble. More often than not, trouble found him. Usually it was because of what he was wearing.

  According to an ancient Chinese superstition, there are demons who try to steal male children. To confuse the demons and prevent them from taking their son, Bruce’s parents dressed him in girl’s clothes for much of his childhood. One night, when Bruce was riding a ferry wearing a girl’s outfit, two boys approached and started to make fun of him.

  At first, Bruce kept his cool, but as soon as the boat docked, he charged the two boys, kicking one in the shin and sending the other fleeing in terror. Soon kids all over Hong Kong got the message not to mess with Bruce Lee, no matter what he was wearing.

  Bruce’s other pastime was playing practical jokes. He started out with simple, classic gags, like putting itching powder on clothes. Eventually he moved on to more elaborate pranks. One time he secretly rearranged all the furniture in the family apartment to confuse their cleaning lady. Another time he told his brother to pretend he was on a submarine. When he looked up his jacket sleeve as if it were a periscope, Bruce poured a jug of water down the sleeve, dousing his brother from above.

  Preoccupied with pranks and fights, Bruce had no interest in school and often skipped class. Time and again, his teacher would call his parents to find out where their son was.

  Exasperated, Bruce’s mother made a deal with her son: he could continue to miss classes as long as he told her exactly where he would be at all times. That way, at least she could keep an eye on him.

  Still, Bruce’s mother worried about his antics. One day she asked him how he expected to make his way in the world.

  “I’ll become a famous movie star!” was Bruce’s reply.

  “How do you expect to become a famous movie star?” his mother shot back. “You can’t even act like a normal boy!”

  But Grace Lee saw glimpses of her son’s good qualities among the bad. One time, she noticed Bruce gazing out the window. All of a sudden, he leapt up and ran down to the street. When Grace looked outside, she saw Bruce helping a blind man cross the road.

  When he was twelve years old, Bruce enrolled in a new school, La Salle College. While there, he attracted the attention of a kindly teacher named Brother Henry Pang. Brother Henry saw right away that Bruce would be a difficult student. But he also saw that the boy had a good heart, an active mind, and the potential to do great things. He tried to help Bruce channel his restless energy into more constructive pursuits, like running errands, erasing blackboards, and opening classroom windows.

  For a time, Bruce gladly did all the chores Brother Henry assigned. But he was still Mo Si Tung and found it impossible to sit and pay attention in class. He again started getting into trouble, joining a schoolyard gang and becoming its leader.

  Bruce and his gang were always getting into fights with other kids. Sometimes the police were called. Every day when he came home from school, Bruce would hide under the covers and pretend to be asleep to avoid facing his father’s punishment.

  Eventually, Bruce was expelled from La Salle College and sent to a different school. He knew then that he needed a better, more positive outlet for his excess energy—and fast.

  He found that escape thanks to one of his friends. William Cheung practiced a type of kung fu known as wing chun. Bruce was often on the receiving end of wing chun–style kicks from the kids he occasionally battled, so he decided to master the art of defending himself. He asked his
friend where he was training. William introduced him to Yip Man, the local kung fu master. Yip Man agreed to take thirteen-year-old Bruce Lee as his student.

  From that day on, Bruce was, in the words of Yip Man’s son, “fighting crazy.” He took all the energy he used to spend playing pranks and fighting and applied it to studying the finer points of kung fu. Every day after school, Bruce dashed off to Yip Man’s classroom for his next lesson. He practiced kicks on the trees he passed along the way. When he went home, he would try out his new moves on the chair next to him at the dinner table.

  Bruce became so good, so fast, that some of the older kids in Yip Man’s class began complaining that he was beating them too easily.

  What was Bruce Lee’s secret to mastering martial arts so quickly? It might have been his dance moves. Bruce signed up for dancing lessons around the same time he started learning kung fu. His favorite dance was the cha-cha.

  Bruce spent many hours practicing complex routines. He wrote down more than a hundred different dance steps and kept them on a card in his wallet. The superior balance and footwork he learned while in dancing school became part of his kung fu fighting style.