Sudden Fame Ranges Beyond Fun And Games
I am standing in a crowded room with Burt and Melanie Strug, wondering how they cope. Not as celebrities who feel right at home rubbing elbows with international stars named Carl Lewis and Larry Hagman, but as parents who have been so suddenly and completely sucked up like a trailer house into a roaring twister of circumstance and fame.
My daughter, Jenna, is a 15-year-old with dancing brown eyes, a ponytail and a sunny smile recently freed from braces, who flashes through the house like a bolt of lightning to answer the phone before the end of the first ring. It might be a girlfriend checking in for fresh gossip, confirming the time of a sleepover or - you can tell when she closes the French doors - a boy.
When the telephone rings for Burt and Melanie Strug’s 18-year-old daughter these days, it might be the president of the United States calling.
Six days ago inside the Georgia Dome, in the space of barely two minutes, Kerri Strug was transformed from just another hard-working member of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team into a national heroine and a triumphant symbol of the Olympic Games.
With one wounded trip down the runway and one brave tumble and painful landing over the vault horse, Strug’s face went from being as anonymous as a bowl of yesterday’s oatmeal to being the most logical choice for the front of a box of Wheaties.
There are two huge stories of the Atlanta Olympics so far: the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park and Kerri Strug. As a parent, that has to take your breath away.
One moment, you are merely the concerned mom and dad of a tiny teenager with a badly sprained ankle, trying to make your way through the crowd and past the security guards to be with your injured child, and the next moment you are the parents of the golden girl.
In an instant, your world changes.
Jay Leno’s people are calling. They want Kerri for the Tonight Show.
A message comes in from Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel. Letterman, Regis and Kathie Lee. There are cards and telegrams and enough flowers to fill a nursery. NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN. Sponsors and agents. Newspapers and wire services.
“It is overwhelming,” Melanie Strug said. “We go home at night to our hotel room, and the light on the phone is flashing with 50 more messages. We don’t know what to do.”
They are, quite literally, the little people behind the headlines of Olympics. Melanie Strug is 4 feet 11 and her husband barely an inch or two taller, and it is quickly evident that the bigness of the story their daughter has become is threatening to swallow them like a tidal wave.
“I’m there in the stands that day and I’m looking around at all of the people and the Olympic flags, I’m hearing the cheering and everything that’s going on and I’m thinking, ‘That’s just my little girl,”’ said Burt Strug, who used to have a quiet life as a cardiovascular surgeon in Tucson, Ariz. “She’s one of my three kids. I love them all.”
But now the whole world loves Kerri, for her grit and determination and for the way she looked so adorable in the huge Transylvanian arms of her coach, Bela Karolyi, as he carried her to the victory podium to receive her gold medal.
Life became a swirling carousel of lights and emotion for the Strugs that day, the flashes popping and the spotlights shining in their eyes.
“Later that night, as Kerri was doing a live TV interview on CNN, Bela came storming into the room and shouted, ‘Hang up the phone!’ Melanie Strug recalled. “She told him, ‘I can’t. I’m on live TV.’ And Bela shouted at her, ‘Hang up, Kerri! Hang up now! The president is on the other line.’ “
In the days since her starring performance, Strug has met Bruce Willis and Demi Moore at Planet Hollywood. She was introduced to Jamie Lee Curtis and posed for photos with the actress’ daughter. Hakeem Olajuwon and Reggie Miller, of the U.S. Dream Team, are still clamoring to meet her.
As parents, it has to create a mixture of pride and confusion. Kerri’s plan all along was to not accept endorsement money. She would attend UCLA in the fall on an athletic scholarship and compete in gymnastics at the college level.
What are the possibilities? A part in the next Die Hard movie with Willis? A cover shot on a magazine with Moore? Dinner at the White House? TV shows? Commercials? You watch them standing there, Burt and Melanie Strug, such nice, decent people, and you see them in the middle of the crowd, glancing at each other from time to time, and you can read the look that is exchanged between them. How in the world did this happen to us? Think about the serendipity, the sequence of events that had to set it all up.
If Dominique Moceanu, who preceded her over the vault, doesn’t fall twice and just registers an average score, Strug’s turn as the last gymnast in the U.S. order doesn’t mean anything. The gold medal already would have been clinched.
If Strug doesn’t land wrong on her first attempt, rolling over on her ankle, suffering a third-degree sprain and tearing several tendons, then the second vault isn’t filled with such high drama.
Who up there on Mount Olympus decided little Kerri should be touched by fate and given such an opportunity? What if it were your daughter or my daughter? What would it be like to answer my own phone and have to call out: “Jenna, it’s the president again!”
Over the past week, Burt and Melanie Strug have had to cope with the sound and the fury and the craziness of parenthood on a whole new level, and yet it all comes down to the same old thing.
Kids. Go figure.