Ode to the Gymnasts

In 1996, when I was ten years old, I became obsessed with the U.S. Women's Olympic gymnastics team (a.k.a. "The Magnificent Seven"). When I say obsessed, I do mean obsessed. I watched every event, I memorized statistics and biographical facts, I bought at least two biographies (Dominique Moceanu's and Kerri Strug's), I bought the Wheaties box with the team on it and displayed it prominently above my desk for at least a year, and watched every TV special ever run about them.  Most absurdly, I was so enchanted that I actually wanted to be a gymnast. My swingset rings, the monkey bars, springy grass, hanging tree limbs, and sidewalk curbs become gymnastic apparatus. This was hilarious because I was not even remotely gymnastic. I was overweight, sedentary, and possessed the flexibility of a concrete pillar. Somehow I didn't see any of this as a problem, and at the height of my delusion I actually had my mother enroll me in a beginning tumbling class at the local community center. During the first class I spent twenty minutes with the teacher trying to master some basic position (a stationary position - I wasn't even doing any actual tumbling) - while hordes of first graders did hordes of cartwheels and roundoffs around me. My dream died that day. I never went back, and slowly my interest faded. At least until Sydney in 2000.

But my fascination with gymnasts never disappeared entirely. When the Olympics roll around, I always watch them. And oddly enough, gymnasts (and, to a lesser extent divers and figure skaters) are the only athletes with whom I feel some measure of understanding. Bear with me here.

I'm absolutely no athlete, and all my forays into athletics have ended badly. But there's some common ground between the gymnasts and the musicians out there. Especially the hornplayers, for whom each performance is a new adventure. You can do something right a thousand times and then completely fall on your face the 1001st time. You just have to hope that time is not The Big One, The One That Counts, The One People Remember. So much depends on the muscle memory, the repetition, the forcing of your body to do something it does not naturally do (there is NOTHING natural about playing most instruments), the warming up, the interminable wait, and then: a matter of seconds, you have to make something look (sound) easy. There is so much precision involved. It is hard to get across to anyone who has not done it. Gymnasts, I think, would get it.

With so many other sports, the pressure is of a different type. There's always another down, another inning, another serve. There's always the opponent, the time to beat, the limit to push, the world record to break. I appreciate that in gymnastics there is only that one try, and that the starting expectation is always perfection. They don't really battle opponents; they battle perfection. Musicians, I think, get that.