Setbacks Only Spur McCain On
By DAVID BARRON
Copyright 2000 Houston Chronicle
BOSTON -- Stephen McCain had plenty of chances to quit gymnastics.
McCain could have quit in 1991, when his club program at Houston Baptist University went under. He could have quit in 1994, when UCLA dropped varsity gymnastics. He certainly could have given up in 1996, when he failed to make the U.S. Olympic team, or in 1997, when he suffered a foot injury at the national championships.
But Steve McCain didn't quit. And because he didn't quit, he is separated by three days and 12 routines from a berth on the 2000 Olympic team.
Entering tonight's opening round of the USA Gymnastics Olympic trials at the Fleet Center, McCain ranks fourth among 17 finalists. If he holds his position through Saturday, he claims the fourth and final automatic berth on the U.S. team. If he slips a spot, he runs the risk of being passed over by national team coach Peter Kormann for one of the final slots on the six-man squad.
Nothing can surpass the grinding pressure of the Olympic trials. It is a stage on which McCain, 26, has competed before, and it is a stage on which he has failed.
He's ready to succeed. But this time, he's prepared to fail, too -- so prepared, in fact, that there's a good chance that he won't.
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Stephen, the second of Pat McCain's two children, was her "miracle baby." He almost died at age 2 from a viral infection. But after he got out of the hospital, he hit the ground running. And jumping. He never stopped.
"I wasn't afraid of anything," he said. "I would watch karate movies and see guys do these amazing things, and I thought I could do that."
Soccer was his first sport, until the day in the fall of 1983 when he slammed the car door on his left hand, severing the first joint from one finger. The joint was reattached, and Stephen was forbidden to engage in physical activity while the hand healed.
And he obeyed ... for awhile. He taught himself to perform handsprings and back flips, a skill that coincided with the 1984 Olympics from Los Angeles and the gold-medal performance of the U.S. men's team.
"He would go up and down the stairs, walking on his hands," said his sister, Teresa, 31. "One thing we didn't know about until years later was that he would get on the roof of our house and jump off it into the pool. He needed to be in a sport like gymnastics. He was a daredevil."
Pat McCain enrolled her son in gymnastics classes under Bill Austin, who coached a junior boys gymnastics program for HBU coach Hutch Dvorak and ran a gymnastics school in Sugar Land. Austin hired a young coach named Tim Erwin to run the boys program at the school and later at HBU.
Erwin and McCain worked together for six years, and it was under Erwin's direction that McCain made his first mark on the national scene, competing in the 1989 junior international championships.
"He was just an amazing little talent," Erwin said. "I used to say that I made a list of 10 things that could make a great gymnast. I could put checks by all 10 for Steve -- the talent, the air sense, the spatial awareness, everything. He had no fear. He was doing just amazing things when he was 15 years old. Just an amazing kid."
Dvorak, however, ran afoul of the NCAA, which placed the HBU varsity program on probation in 1990. HBU dropped varsity gymnastics after the 1990-91 school year, and when the junior program followed suit, Erwin left to open a new program at the Jewish Community Center. McCain, who had graduated a year early from Dulles High School, spent the year training under Kevin Mazeika, the current coach of Olympic hopefuls Sean Townsend and Mike Dutka, before leaving Houston to attend UCLA.
"I was on such a mission when I was a little kid," McCain said. "I never went to the prom, graduated from high school early so I could train. I'm amazed how focused I was at such a young age. I had goals when I was 10 years old."
One of those goals was to attend UCLA, the alma mater of three members of the U.S. team that won the gold medal in 1984. He got to live the dream until 1994, when UCLA dropped varsity gymnastics because of Title IX-related budget cutbacks.
Pat McCain remains convinced the emotional tailspin associated with the UCLA shutdown cost her son a place on the 1996 Olympic team.
"Steve had always been a happy kid, but things kept happening," she said. "When the club program closed, at least he was home and we could help him. When you're at a major university and training for the Olympics and they close your program, it weighed too much on his mind."
"I was ranked third in the country in '94 when they dropped our program," he said. "Then I had a hand injury in 1995, and the effects started coming into play in '96. We were being shunned and getting the cold shoulder, and it just does something to your confidence."
Things bottomed out at the 1996 Olympic trials in Boston. Ranked ninth in the nation going into the trials, McCain missed a release move on the high bar and fell. He finished 12th and failed to make the team for Atlanta.
"I was in great shape last time around," he said. "Physically, I should have made the team. Mentally, I wasn't ready to take on the challenge. The pressure was just too much for me."
"Everyone thought he would make the team," said Pat McCain. "When the team got to the Olympics, all the international judges asked, `Where is Steve McCain?' "
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Steve McCain, at the time, was in South Africa.
"My best friend is from there, and he knew how hard it would be for me to watch the Olympics on television," he said. "So he asked me to go to Africa. I spent six weeks there. The Olympics were in Atlanta, in our home country, and I didn't even want to see them. I didn't want to deal with them. I wanted to get lost."
And so he did. But he found something, too.
"It was one of the best times of my life," he said. "At a time when I should have been down and depressed, I was having the time of my life, meeting people and seeing one of the most beautiful parts of the world. I came back charged up on life."
But he still wasn't ready to leave UCLA or return to hard-core training in a pressurized atmosphere. So he eased back in with the help of Doug Macey, a former UCLA teammate who had given up the sport because of an injury.
Macey had never coached, but with his help, McCain won the all-around championship at the 1997 Winter Cup Challenge in Battle Creek, Mich., the first major post-Olympics competition. He suffered the foot injury at the 1997 nationals, finishing 12th, but came back to finish fifth at the 1998 nationals.
McCain made the world team again in 1999, competing in China with the U.S. squad, then won the Winter Cup in Las Vegas and finished fifth in the all-around at the Senior Pacific Alliance Games in New Zealand.
"For Steve to do what he has done is phenomenal," Kormann said. "He made the world team in 1995, missed the Olympics in '96, didn't make the world team in '97 and then made it in '99. That happens almost never. You start to question yourself and wonder why you're staying in a sport that is so hard and so demanding.
"Most guys quit. All guys quit."
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Steve McCain didn't quit. He stepped up the pace.
In 1999, McCain and Jay Thornton, another resident athlete at the Olympic Training Center, launched the American Gymnasts Journal Web site at www.american-gymnast.com The site includes news updates, training tips and a chat room in which McCain and Thornton answer questions from aspiring gymnasts.
The Web site is a first, tentative step toward life after competitive gymnastics. Regardless of whether he makes the Olympic team, McCain hopes to continue competing through the 2001 world championships, then return to UCLA to complete work on an economics degree.
"Gymnastics is not my life anymore," he said. "I used to let things get to me. If I had a mistake, oh, my God, I'm not going to make it, and I would crumble. Now, I know that you're going to have mistakes, and I accept that. No one is going to go through the Olympic trials and have a perfect meet every single day."
McCain came close at the USA Gymnastics national championships, the first phase of the Olympic qualifying process, in St. Louis last month. He ranked second behind four-time champ Blaine Wilson after the first day of the all-around competition.
But on day two, the bolt that secures one of the parallel bars became dislodged during his performance, forcing him to abort his routine. He received a score of 9.0, his lowest score of the night, on his second try, then fell off the pommel horse and dropped into fourth place.
McCain's mother and sister will join him in Boston, as they have joined him for meets all over the world over the last decade. When his career ends, a part of their lives will end, too.
"He was a little guy who was skin and bones," Pat McCain said. "But gymnastics welcomes the little guys. He was a little bitty boy. Look at him now. It's been a wonderful journey for us, and it's been an experience that Stephen can cherish all his life."
From injuries to failures to simple twists of fate, "there are so many reasons for me not be sitting here today," McCain said. "But my mom and my sister have never given up on my gymnastics. Never. They never once made me feel like I was a failure.
"They know how much it means to me, and they want it for me, but now I'm equipped to understand that nothing is for sure. I learned so much from failure. It's great if I make the team. If not, it's about the learning and the struggling, and that is what I will take with me for the rest of my life. You can't buy that."
