The Greenville News from Greenville, South Carolina • Page 12

Thursday, June 20, 1991 SPORTS 4 iThc (I'rrf niullf News lis to b3 latest Karolyi profe yrnnast Stry with her progress. He describes her as a "fantastic leaper." But Strug's greatest asset, he said, may be her competitive drive. "She is one of those great young gymnasts that is just like a young tiger," Karolyi said. "She's not like some of the older ones. They have a tendency to be more cautious, protective of what they have.

Kerry is very aggressive." Off the floor, it is hard to picture Strug as a "young tiger." She is personable, yet a little shy and unassuming kind of a quiet confidence. Strug is a goal-setter. The Olympics aren't her only goal, "because what if something happens and you don't get there? There's got to be something else," she said. Aside from the World Championships in September and the Summer Olympics, she has her sights set on a scholarship to Stanford. But ask her to go a little further into her future, and it becomes clear that while one segment of her life may be mapped out and coordinated, she is still a young girl.

"You mean what do I want to do when I grow up?" she said. Maybe she doesn't know how far she has already come. Coming to Houston to train under the close supervision of Karolyi, who operates an Olympic factory of sorts, has changed a lot of things for Strug. Until late last December, Strug had been living at home in Tucson, training with coaches at the University of Arizona. She had huge success in the junior division, taking first place in the Junior Pan American Games and winning the American Classic twice.

But she wanted more. "I wanted to really go somewhere in gymnastics, so I figured that I might have to leave home," Strug said. "And if you're going to leave home, you might as well come to the best." So shortly after Christmas last year, she packed up and moved from Tucson to Houston, leaving her family behind. Most professional baseball players are at least 18 before they play their first game in the minor leagues. Another Karolyi prodigy, Mary Lou Ret-ton, won the gold medal in the overall competition at the 1984 Olympic Games at the ripe old age of 14.

Like Retton, Strug could probably teach a few of those ballplayers a lesson or two about having to grow up in a hurry and coping with life away from the nest. "It's hard at times. When you get down or have a bad day, you get to a phone and talk to your parents a lot," said Strug, who lives with a family that has a daughter who also trains with Karolyi. "But they come and see me once a month, and I have a friend that is coming down here this weekend, so I get to see people now and then." Strug obviously does not lead the life of the average teen-ager. If she has ever graced the doorway of a fast-food establishment, her coaches had better not know about it.

Along with many of her teammates, she attends a nearby private school for three classes a day during the regular school year. She rises at 6 a.m. And gymnastics is paramount. She has two practice sessions a day that average nearly four hours in length. She says that some of her friends don't understand what she is doing, yet Strug believes she's not missing anything at all.

"A gymnast's career is pretty short. Most of them will peak at 15 or 16," she said. "When I get through with this, I'll have the rest of my life to do all those other things. This means too much to me." Strug is poised to become one of the elite in the sport. Karolyi, notoriously tough to please, is happy HOUSTON (AP) Thirteen-year-old Kerry Strug only looks like she's 4 feet 5.

In fact, she has to be much taller than that. She couldn't do much of what she does unless she had an awful lot of grownup packed inside that tiny, yet powerful frame. Earlier this month, Strug became the latest Bela Karolyi wunderkind to leap, twist and flip her way into the national gymnastics spotlight when she became the youngest winner of an individual event at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Cincinnati. Strug scored a 9.825 on the vault to take the title and finished third in the overall competition.

She soon will begin preparation for September's World Championships to be held in Indianapolis. Qualifying for the U.S. team, she said, is something on which she is planning. From there, she expects to nail down a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team.

Not bad for a rookie, which is exactly what she is. Her performance in Cincinnati was her first in the senior division. "You practice so much and so hard that when you go out there, you expect things to go smoothly, so I didn't feel that much pressure," Strug said. "The vault, though, is kind of strange. Before I came here, that was my worst event." if Old ballgame proved haven for prejudice, college player says I-- it met.

4 ir "1,1 if THE ASSOCIATED PflESS Down, but not out Martina Navratilova pretends to fall Wednesday during land. Navratilova beat Schultz 6-1, 6-2 to make it to the warmups for her match against Brenda Schultz of the Nether- quarterfinals. Next up for Navratilova is Wimbledon which lands in the Pilkington Ladies tournament at Eastbourne, Eng- starts next week. Fred Lynn adjusts to life out of baseball aloud an article from Penthouse magazine that described a worn- 3 an's body parts in a particularly degrading fashion. Her coach and teammates shrugged off the inci-" dent by saying boys will be boys, but Croteau did not accept that explanation.

"If I was black and someone said, 'Hey, that wouldn't be acceptable and something wouldbe done about it," she said. "They wouldn't have read a degrading article about black people if there one on the bus." Croteau is thankful that St. Mary's gave her a chance to play when many other schools wouldn't. She is not so much knocking the school as the system itself. "I'm not a women's libber," she" said, thrusting her arm in the air and making a fist to emphasize the point.

"I just want people to be aware of what's happening in sports. Women are perceived as second-rate. It's like the old rooms or water fountains that were for whites only." The sexism is so much a way of life that Croteau said her team- mates insulted her without even knowing it. "Most of them are my she said. "That's a sign that they 2-didn't understand how offensive it was, because it's so acceptable.

And it manifests itself they'd go; to a women's lacrosse game and talk about the girls' breasts." Croteau first started playing -baseball when her mother signed her up for a co-ed league. She stuck with it, then ran into her first big problem when she tried to join the Osboume Park High School baseball team as a freshman. The school contended Croteau was too small and not good enough. "But I kept getting bigger and better, and finally, when I was they couldn't say that she said. Croteau sued the school in an incident that gave her a taste of thingstocome.

"that was the most horrible experience of my life," she said. "There are a lot of things in male sports that will weed you out any-' way, but I felt like I was being di- rectly fought just because I was a girl. I had been playing baseball with boys since I was five years old, and all of a sudden I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I was a girl." She couldn't prove discrimination, but the next year she proved the high school coach wrong when she played well at St. Mary's. Then things started to fall apart, and Croteau ultimately took a break from her pursuit of a philosphy degree.

"Baseball had become a headache," she said. But headaches can be cured, and Croteau said she hasn't completely dismissed the notion of resuming her career. "It's not necessarily over," she said. "I may decide in a year that I hate being away from baseball and that I want to play again. It's just that now, I'm burnt out." DALE CITY, Va.

(AP) Julie Croteau is sitting in the lunch room of the recreation center. Dressed in summer clothes that hang loosely on her 125-pound frame, Croteau looks more like a counselor, which she is, than a baseball player, which she was. Two little girls walk by the table and start fiddling with the controls of a video game. "This job gives me a chance to be a role model," Croteau tells a visitor. "Here, I've got a chance to have an effect on how children think about sports." Croteau has a solid opinion on the subject.

Three years ago, she became the first woman to play college baseball. The her debut as a first baseman for St. Mary's (Md.) College was widely covered and earned her a certificate from the National Organization of Women. Croteau was not merely a novelty. She played well enough to earn a spot on the second team of the all-conference squad and was named the Division III school's athlete of the month.

Best of all, her teammates accepted her and treated her with respect. She's back home now, about 100 miles from the school. All the souvenirs of Croteau's baseball past are packed in a box, the result of a move perpetuated by the divorce of her parents. Ironically, she too has moved on to something else. Croteau, 20, has taken a leave of absence from St.

Mary's, abandoning her education with three semesters to go because she was tired of fighting a system she claimed treated women as inferior to men. "All through baseball there were very positive experiences and very negative experiences," Croteau said. "It was like being a parent the good outweighed the bad. But that wasn't the case after awhile, and now it feels nice to be able to walk away from it." Croteau's freshman year couldn't have been better. "The school gave me a locker room, my teammates were great, there was no outright sexism," she said.

"It was like a dream come true." And then she woke up. "Things changed dramatically after the publicity left," Croteau said. "It wasn't the same again." Her teammates stopped being careful and slipped into old habits. They never directed the insults directly toward her, but they let her know how they felt about women playing the game by drumming up some of the same stuff she'd heard back in the little leagues. "They'd always say, 'You swing the bat like a or 'Throw the ball, They wouldn't say any of this to me, but I was the only girl there," Croteau said.

"They toned it down when I was around, but it's very scary to know that it's happening and that it's accepted. It's detrimental to women." The final blow came during a bus ride when her teammates read with the peak of Mt. San Jacinto as a backdrop. He is deeply tanned and relaxed. "Somebody asked me about this last year.

I said then, 'I go on the field and appreciate the moments. I see little things I didn't see before. I try to take it all in because it could be the last hurrah." "And it looks like it might have been. No matter what you say, though, you're not prepared for it when it comes. I was a little bitter and a little upset." As he fretted through early spring with no calls, then the start of the 1991 season, watching games on ESPN and checking daily box scores, the edginess of not playing built up.

In mid-April, he just dropped out of sight and went fishing on Lake Casitas, near Santa Barbara, Calif. For five days, he didn't read a newspaper or watch TV. For five days, he forgot about baseball. "Now, I am not quite as passionate about it," he says. "I look at some of my buddies still playing and I know that I can play with them, but I don't have the opportunity.

That's the way it goes." But Lynn doesn't quite concede that his baseball career is over. He believes that a team looking for a quick fix in a pennant race will turn to a proven veteran who can hit with power, who led the Padres in pinch-hitting last season and who was still fleet enough to play center field at 38. "I still want to play," he says. "I don't consider myself retired. I'm kind of inactive." He laughs.

"Being on top for so long and then having the bottom fall out, it's mentally tough. I can't let go totally, because if I do get a call, I (wouldn't) be able to get back into it mentally. "Physically, no problem. You hate to use the old cliche it's like riding a bicycle. But it is.

"For your own sanity, you have to admit that eventually it's going to end. There'll be a point where you put your glove away and do something else. You come to grips with that in your own mind." There is also a material adjustment. Last year, with a signing bonus and incentive clauses, he banked a comfortable $740,000. "You get used to those checks of $50,000 to $100,000 coming in twice a month," says Natalie, his wife.

"It's not just your income that's cut off. You get an endorsement fee from baseball that's substantial, more than $50,000. Your traveling is affected. Your whole lifestyle changes." of 1,111 RBI. Won four Gold Gloves for his graceful defense.

Was the American League's most valuable player as a rookie. Played in nine All-Star games and hit the only grand slam in All-Star history. Is out of a job. Fred Lynn thinks he can still play and contribute. He is in prime physical condition.

He still trains and hasn't noticeably lost speed or reflexes. His hair is solid black. At 182 pounds, spread trimly over a 6-foot-1 frame, he is two pounds heavier than when he broke in with the Boston Red Sox in 1975 with a season that produced numbers good enough for him to be named Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player. But no team in baseball invited him to spring training this year. He hasn't faced a pitched ball since playing out his contract with the San Diego Padres last September and becoming a free agent.

And so the transition that confronts every aging athlete nudges him. What is he going to do with the rest of his life? "You think you prepare yourself for this day when you start to get older and are still playing," Lynn says from the comfort of a patio chair, gazing down a green fairway, Los Angele9 Times RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. On a Sunday afternoon, just about the time the latest baseball scores are coming in, Fred Lynn is out on his back patio facing the Mission Hills golf course, grilling barbecue chicken and hamburgers. The day before, he had driven to Orange County to see his son, Jason, in a Pony League baseball game. For Monday, after his weight-lifting session at a local club, he has scheduled an 11 a.m.

tee time to play 18 holes of golf. Lynn is doing all the leisure activities he never had time for the past three decades. Sounds idyllic, right? The trouble is, this time of year, Lynn expects to spend the major part of every day or night in or around a ballpark. It was his living for 17 years and 30 days. That time span encompassed the big league career of a 39-year-old outfielder who: Was once regarded as Hall of Fame material.

Has a career batting average of .283, with four seasons over .300. Hit more than 20 home runs in nine seasons, with a high of 39 and a total of 306. Twice had 100 or more runs batted in during a season, with a total ft LAWNGARDEN MOTOR CYCLE MARINE $0098 AUTO BATTERY exchange on Selected 24, 26, 40 70 4mt jGl exchange M-24 $2498 $1 798 I exchange Selected Groups Y14L-A2 or 12N14-3A 3 Plaza Dr. Flasldiglits Farm Commercial Chargers Accessories Terminals Cables 9 next to Geo. Coleman Ford I Travelers Rest 834-9025 i.