I started gymnastics when I moved from Euclid, Ohio in 1972 after I graduated from High School. There was no men's gymnastics at my High School but I knew its what I wanted to do. Ultimately, I wanted to be a coach. When the older of my two sisters reached High School she joined the gymnastics team and I helped her refine some skills. I also helped the cheerleaders with some of their skills. During my last year at high school as a senior, I researched gymnastics at the Library and before my parents packed up in the Summer of 72 to drive to Florida, I already knew the best coach and the best place to enter the sport in Miami, Florida was at Miami Dade Junior College with Coach Bruce Davis, Muriel Evelyn (Davis) Grossfeld's brother.
During my first year in High School I had made friends with a few guys that noticed me walking on my hands all the time and doing handstands on a set of rings that were hanging in one of the four gymnasiums in the school. They started mimicking me and working out with me. The next year I researched gymnastics programs by going to the library and I also looked up information in a phone book called The Yellow Pages at home. I found that there was a trampoline program on weekends at a YMCA. I told my friends about it and three of them were interested in coming with me. One of them was Ronn Smith. The program was being run by Bill Copp and occasionally Ron Munn assisted. It wasn't gymnastics but I figured we could learn some twisting flips there. I remember Ronn's dad checked my car to make sure it was safe before he allowed Ronn to ride with me. Every Saturday I would wake up early and warm-up the car. Then I would head out in the cold with snow on the ground and one by one, I went to pick up each friend at their homes. By 9 AM we were religiously in the gym ready to bounce.
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Within days of arriving to Miami I drove to the college and walked into Bruce Davis's office and introduced myself. I had just turned 19 years of age. I explained that I planned to enroll at the college and that I wished to join the gymnastics team. I had no experience. However, by 5th grade I knew I wanted to be a gymnast and a coach. I took acrobatics with my two sisters at Stanford-Foster Dance Studio in Euclid, Ohio in the late 60's. It was there that I learned to do cartwheels, walkovers, front handsprings, back handsprings, and flips. I also was taught to do adagio with the older of my two sisters. With her I learned to spot as a consequence of the double stunts we were practicing. As I improved my abilities to lift and flip my sister, the owners of the school asked me to be an assistant instructor. I assisted the owners to double up on spotting the other kids with a towel for back and front handsprings and even flips. I also helped teach walkovers, cartwheels, and other acrobatics.
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Over time, the owners of the dance school asked me to join my sisters in ballet classes. They also asked me to MC their shows and recitals. I was 15 years old when they asked me to do that. They needed males to join the classes and partner up with the girls. I tried it out for a while and learned the names of all the dance skills. I didn't like ballet dancing very much and eventually lost interest in doing ballet myself. But I gained valuable knowledge and appreciation of ballet that, at the time, I didn't know I would use years later when I started coaching women's gymnastics the very first year I joined the college team. Bruce asked me to try out teaching at his private gymnastics school in North Miami. It was called Muriel Grossfeld's School of Gymnastics. In the mean time my acrobatics and strength helped me learn gymnastics fast but at a beginner level. I was progressing much faster and much further at Bruce's private gymnastics school as a teacher than I was as a gymnast at the college.
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At the same time that I was learning to teach gymnastics at the private school, I had also begun to help my teammates at the college with their skills at the same time that I was on the team. I was in the company of talented fledgling unknown gymnasts that were either on the team or practiced with us. Such as Kurt Thomas and Ron Galimore, Danny Price, and many others. By the second year of college I had become an assistant woman's team coach at the private school. Bruce moved the school to an airplane hanger at Opa Locka Airport and renamed the school, Gymiami. By then I was coaching elite gymnasts.
At the college I had made progress as a gymnast but after only two years and a late start it was not enough to make much of my ability to do gymnastics. My teaching skills, however, accelerated much faster and further than my expertise as a gymnast. During my second year at the college I wrote an article on spotting gymnastics and sent it to Gymnast Magazine and it was published. Bruce took a sabbatical leave of absence my second year at the college and Kurt's coach from High School, Don Gutzler, came to the college to substitute as head gymnastics coach. Don was a partner with Bruce at the private gymnastics school as a boys coach. When Bruce took a leave of absence it was Don that kept the ship afloat for two years.
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I decided to continue my education at the college and expanded my studies. I stayed there until 1975. The third year that I attended Miami-Dade Junior College Bruce remained on leave. Bruce went to work for Gymnast Magazine as the editor. Don Gutzler left the college during that season and the Athletic Department Director asked me to take on the head coach position in Don's place to coach the men's team and take them to Nationals. I was only two or three years older than the guys I was coaching. Yet, I had earned the trust and respect from my peers and from the college administration as a professional. At the same time, I had also begun to travel to competitions with the girl's team around the country. Gymiami had become the dominant gym in southeastern Florida and we were in the top three in region 8. The AAU was no longer the governing body of gymnastics. The USGF took over.
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Some of our elite gymnasts were competing in both the Class One program and the elite program. In those days there were compulsories for both programs. I coached all four events. Bruce however, kept me at bars more than the other events. I am proud to say that in 1975 Debbie Reiser won first place at the Class One Nationals in compulsories and later that month, she won first place also at the Elite Nationals. That year she was the best bar worker in the country in compulsories and beat every Olympian to be. She was truly flawless and did everything to the limit. In Optionals she was also very good but did not take first place. When we got back to the gym at home, many people were excited and told me they saw me on the Wide World of Sports coaching our gymnasts.
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I continued to coach gymnastics at Gymiami until 1980 when I entered an apprenticeship in Air Conditioning, Refrigeration, and Ventilation. My plan was to have something that would earn enough money to open a gymnastics school. In those days it was almost impossible to live off of coaching gymnastics unless you owned a gym. Unfortunately, life got in the way and I never managed to return to gymnastics permanently. I coached an acrobatic dance team at Peaches School of Dance for many years when I signed up my daughter there. I got married in 1981. We used to drive to Tim Rand's Twisters in Pompano, Florida once per week from North Miami Beach and he allowed my kids to work out with me there. Eventually, he asked me to teach classes and for a year I taught recreational gymnastics. I enrolled my daughter in tot classes. The apprenticeship was on-hold at the time due to a recession. Tim and Tim's partner, Paul MacAloon, asked me to join their team coaching staff. By the time I had been there for a year teaching recreational classes, the recession had eased and I decided that I was going back to my plan to learn a trade and make enough money to open my own gym. I turned Tim down. I left Tim's program just before he announced that he was getting married to the State Gymnastics Director, Toni Lefleur. They were still dating when I went back to air conditioning.
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12 years later I suffered a divorce. About two years before the divorce I reconnected with a girl who had been a gymnast at North Miami Beach High School. She told me she was working at a new Gym called Park Avenue Gymnastics run by Stuart Greenberg and a lady partner. She told me that the partner was leaving and they needed a head coach. It had been over ten years that I left Twisters in Pompano with Tim Rand. I was between jobs and had split up with my wife even though the divorce had not gone through yet. Stuart hired me not before the partner warned me that Stuart was a problem and that I would not last there. She was leaving because of his pernicious behavior. She said she had invested thirty thousand dollars in the gym and was losing all of it.
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I lasted three months. We did not see eye to eye. I was elite minded and he was not interested in winning championships. There is much more to this story but I wish to preserve the dignity of this discourse. I went back to air conditioning. To this day I have not returned to my sport and was never able to open a gym. I have always regarded myself as a gymnastics coach and everything else is a sideline. I miss gymnastics terribly and feel that God gave me a gift of talent to do it. Life happened while I was doing other things.
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I got to know many famous people in gymnastics during my short lived era. Many of them got to know me although I doubt that Abie or Donna Strauss or Tammy Biggs, or Jackie Fie, or Rita Brown, or Tad White, or Cindy McLane, or Matt Reynolds, or Rene Nicoli, or Don Peters, or so many others remember me if they are still alive. I still have cassette tapes I recorded of lectures I heard from some of these great people. I met George Nissen, I wrote to Glenn Sundby to tell him I was interested in teaching acrobatic sports. He sent me a stack of Acro Magazines for free. I was there in the late seventies when the Safety Certification program got started and was one of the first ones to get safety certified. DJ Milem was one of the certifiers back in those days. I traveled from California to the Mid West, east, north, and south across America to competitions with our women's gymnastic team. I was trusted to travel alone with them at times and handled all the logistics and the competition by myself. I was only five or six years older than the girls. I coached the boy's team in my last year at Gymiami and one boy named, Tom Riether, who went on to be an Olympian Pole Vaulter. One boy from that team is Dick Gutting's son, Dave Gutting.
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