Tiny Teens Are Bopping in Houston : Gymnastics’ New Wave Rolls Into the U.S. Olympic Festival

HOUSTON —  Who’s the next star in American women’s gymnastics? Hint: You can’t see the end of the line.

Kristie Phillips is one; Phoebe Mills is another. Phillips is 14; Mills is 13. Mary Lou Retton, 18, is somewhere out there, selling batteries. Michelle Dusserre, a 1984 Olympian, is 17 and aging. Kelly Garrison, who won this U.S. Olympic Festival last year, is 19 years old, and the kids here are taking up a collection for her retirement in Florida.

Phillips won the all-around competition Friday night in front of 13,265 fans at the Summit. Mills, her best friend and best rival, placed second. Robin Richter, 14, was third.

And from the geriatric set: Garrison was fourth. Dusserre was 19th.

Phillips and Mills are part of the new wave in this sport. If you listen closely, you can hear it coming. It’s carried on the resonant tenor bellow of that loveable lunk, Bela Karolyi. Karolyi brought the world Nadia Comaneci of Romania. On this side of the Iron Curtain, he’s coached gold medalist Retton, whom he called Little Body.

That nickname is sort of a joke at the moment. Now Karolyi coaches Phillips, who is 4 feet 10 inches and 80 pounds, and Mills, who is 4-6 and 70 pounds. These, it can be safely asserted, are little bodies.

“Mary Lou had her own style,” Karolyi said. “Kristie has her own look and style. She’s smaller. If you look back in the history of gymnastics, every one of the (Olympic) Games has brought a new style.”

Phillips and Mills blew everyone else away Friday night. Phillips was spectacular, somehow managing to execute moves with grace and poise. And with a power that astonishes.

“In 1986, we have a new generation of gymnasts,” Karolyi said. “The athletes from 1984 are pretty much out of competition now, which is good and bad. Bad, because it is sad to see them go. Great, because it opens the door to the sport for these athletes.”

Phillips is a strawberry blond who could pass for Boris Becker’s kid sister.

She does a move on the balance beam, called a reverse plange, where she becomes a human ‘V’. When she did this Friday night, you could hear the chiropractors in the house calling their answering services.

It is Phillips’ reptilian flexibility that sets other gymnasts to marvel. The Gumby of gymnastics has been doing the reverse plange since age 7.

She has been performing since her mother starched her diapers and presented her in a beauty pageant at age 18 months. “When I was little, I did beauty pageants,” Phillips said.

Phillips soon grew keen for gymnastics. She moved to Atlanta to attend a gymnastics academy. Then she moved back home to Baton Rouge. La. Then she heard about Karolyi. She came to Houston, where Karolyi was busy training the new wave.

Phillips was only 10 and, after three months in Houston: “I didn’t think I was old enough to train under Bela.”

Apparently ready at age 12, Phillips returned two years ago.

To those who don’t train under him, Bela appears to be perfectly lovable. Friday night, no doubt for the benefit of the judges, Karolyi whooped and hollered after each of his gymnasts’ routines. He gathered them up in his former hammer thrower’s arms and hugged until the blood left their feet.

But Bela behind closed gymnastics academy doors, is another plate of potatoes. “If you do something wrong with Bela, and he’s told you many times before, he’ll yell at you,” Phillips said.

Life, for the Kristie Phillips of the new wave, is gymnastics from 7-9 a.m., then school, then gymnastics again from 5:15 to 9 p.m.

“I go to public school just like a normal person,” Phillips said, standing on a stool to reach a microphone. “I get A’s and B’s. Even when I’m traveling, I take my schoolwork with me. I do my very best.

“I feel that I have lost some of my social life, but I’ve lived with that all of my life. Now that I’m older, I realize what I missed when I was 7 and 8. I’ve lived away from home since I was 9.

“People at school treat me just like a normal person.”

For now, she’s a ninth grader and Olympic Festival champion and she and her best friend are having fun giggling their way through a press conference.

And, for, now, it’s fun coming to the gym and it’s fun traveling and meeting people. It’s fun riding the crest of the new wave.

Somewhere, Mary Lou Retton is closing a deal for an aerobics video and looking behind her. She can’t see the end of the line.