 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Sunday, July 02, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
Most of all, Shannon Miller didn't want her coach to laugh. Given what she was going to tell Steve Nunno, the man who had helped her to win four Olympic medals, including gold with the U.S. team and on the balance beam in 1996, she knew that was a distinct possibility. Even logical, perhaps, considering that she was going to ask Nunno to train her for one more Olympic Games ... even though gymnastics is a sport dominated by pixie-like girls and she was 23 years old, was studying finance at Oklahoma University, hadn't competed for more than a year and a half and had just gotten married.
Former NA wrestler ponders his next move
And the Olympics were only 10 months away.
She was nervous when she walked into Nunno's office in an Oklahoma City gym a few days after Christmas and asked for his help. His reaction, however, was all she could have hoped for.
Said Miller, "He kept a straight face, I'll give him that."
So began a difficult journey that Miller hopes will end not only with a personal victory, a berth on the Olympic team and a trip to Sydney, but with a boost for the U.S. national women's gymnastics team, which has struggled since winning the team gold in 1996 and finished an embarrassing sixth in last year's world championships.
"I've loved gymnastics since I was 6 years old," she said. "I'm 23 now, and I love it just as much if not more. ... If I can be a part of this team, hopefully I can bring some experience. But most of all, I want to just bring a solid performance."
Such goals weren't good enough for Nunno, not right away.
He wanted to make sure that Miller knew what she was getting into. That day in December, he told her, "Don't just remember the day you stood on the gold medal stand. Remember the Saturday morning you didn't want to come in and work out, and the days you were sore or hurting or injured or whatever. Remember those times, and if you still want to do it, OK."
Admittedly, Miller hadn't thought much about those bad days. But she swore she wanted to come back, and Nunno developed a 12-week program to get her back into competition form.
"The first couple weeks I tried to run her out of the gym," Nunno said. "I tried to get her to the point where she was going to crack or not. I wanted her to understand that this was going to be the commitment from day one."
Returning to her sport was harder than Miller expected. It wasn't that she'd been inactive since her last professional competition in July 1998; she got fairly serious about figure skating for a while, and she even went skydiving once.
"I never officially retired," she said. "I don't really like that word, nor do I like the word comeback. My thoughts have always been with gymnastics."
Her body, however, wasn't.
At the end of December, she couldn't even do a kip -- a basic maneuver -- on the uneven bars. She couldn't run a mile. And she discovered quickly that she could no longer train hard six days in a row. She had to learn to pace herself, to back off a little on Tuesday so she could still function on Friday.
Miller's husband, Chris Phillips, an ophthalmologist she married in June 1999, had a bit of trouble adjusting to his wife's transformation into an elite athlete.
"He's never really seen me in work mode -- actually training six, seven hours a day six days a week," Miller said, laughing. "It was kind of a shock to him to see me like that."
The newlyweds came to an understanding. He wasn't to ask her how her day went; if she didn't volunteer any information about her day in the gym, that meant things went poorly.
"I was surprised how easy it is to lose skills," Miller said. "But you don't lose the mental aspect, you don't lose the awareness of the things you've done so long. Once I got my body back in shape, things came pretty easily."
Getting her body back, however, was far from easy. Said Nunno, "Every week I would say, 'She's going to be so sore, she's going to reconsider.' "
And as if the physical exhaustion wasn't bad enough, Miller discovered that combining training with a life outside the gym -- something she didn't have even in 1996, when she was 19 -- was nearly impossible.
Dinner wasn't on the table when she straggled home after practice ended at 8:30 p.m.; sometimes, when Phillips was working late, there weren't even any groceries. When there was dinner, she had to worry about getting the dishes done. Her leotards weren't clean. And she couldn't even spare time to do her income taxes.
"I have new respect for my parents now and all the things they did for me when I was training," Miller said.
But three weeks into the 12-week plan, Nunno said, she was his best gymnast. By week eight, she was where he had thought she'd be on week 12. On week 11, however, Miller finally cracked.
"She came in and hit the wall," he said. "She said, 'I have no life.' I said, 'Excuse me? You chose this life.' "
Still, Nunno agreed to a compromise; he cut the program in half for a week, enabling her to pay taxes. Then he helped her make an additional schedule to ease her training -- grocery shopping on Wednesdays, laundry on Fridays. Her parents chipped in to help with the chores.
And now, with the national championships -- the first part of the selection process -- just a month away, Miller is back on an even keel.
"Working out with 14- and 15-year-olds, I think they keep me young," she said. "I don't feel any older than I was in '96."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
