Gymnast’s Triumph Deeper Than Gold
Teddy Roosevelt would have loved Kerri Strug.
When Roosevelt was a boy they called him “Teedie.” He was a frail, sickly asthmatic. By force of will he defied his illness, built a barrel-chested physique and rough-rider spirit, flinging himself into brutal sports, grueling horseback trips, war, battles with powerful corporations and all the other challenges that made him one of America’s best-loved presidents.
Teeth snapping and spectacles flashing, he summed up his life philosophy this way: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
They don’t make politicians, or speeches, like that any more.
The nation that burst into this century with Rooseveltian vigor, young and competitive, is in danger of leaving it with a whimper.
We surround ourselves with regulators to stamp out risk. We run to court and sue when risk spawns misfortune. In public schools, some who educate our young deem grades a menace to our children’s self-esteem. In politics our leaders look to polls more than principles. And in the media, second-guessers raised prissy protests when gymnast Kerri Strug took a risk and leaped, with an injured foot, to an Olympic gold medal.
She hurt herself, the critics cry. Gymnastics is a cruel sport, they say, and its rugged regimens drive some girls to injury, anorexia, postponed puberty, stunted growth. All true.
Yet when young men develop an unusually large body in pursuit of excellence in football, who criticizes them? Cal Ripkin Jr. was called a role model when he broke the record for consecutive appearances in pro baseball games, playing doggedly in spite of injuries and pain.
Kerri Strug is a role model, too. She is a role model for a nation that seems at times confused about the path to achievement. The path is paved with risk, sacrifice and pain.
In business, innovators risk bankruptcy. In classical music, child prodigies risk tendonitis and flameouts by age 25. In science, those who question boundaries of knowledge might attain a Nobel prize - or mockery and obscurity. In politics, those who face controversial problems risk butchery at election time.
Though some Americans wrung their hands, many others sensed in that brave one-legged landing of Strug’s tiny frame an echo of our heritage, a quality that inspires instinctive respect. And there lies hope. She is a miniature package of the same spunk that still glows in the tragically injured boxer who lit the Olympic torch. In the next century America needs risk takers. As Roosevelt warned in 1900, “if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives … then bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by.”
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board