The Strongman
16
Auditioning
I GOT INTO TAMPA Thursday afternoon in time to check into the academy. They were very kind to say that even though they couldn’t pay my transportation to Florida, they would provide a room for me in the dormitory and perhaps I would meet some other interesting people. I joined the other students at dinner in the cafeteria.
They were festive. That’s about all I can say I took away from the dining room. I met people. Lots of them. Too many to remember any names. They were all performers and it looked like they were on all the time.
I should say that this was a bigger place than I expected; it was called the Tampa Gymnastics Acrobatics and Circus Academy. Some of those at dinner were still in costumes and makeup from their training day or maybe a performance. Others were simply making contacts and getting to know each other. I was induced to do a couple of flips, but I wasn’t prepared to do much in a cafeteria. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which wasn’t the best gear to do gymnastics in.
At one point a few were doing some kind of launch and catch that went wrong and I looked up to see a flyer flying toward me. I instinctively spun to catch her and suddenly had a very surprised girl in my arms.
“Thank you,” she said. “I was going to just tumble out of it, but I couldn’t expect you to know that, could I?” She had a light accent that I took to be British, but I wasn’t very experienced with that kind of accent so it could have been Australian or some other place that talks like that.
“I’m sorry I spoiled your landing,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be sorry. I rather like being caught. See you in class tomorrow.”
Then she scampered off and I realized we hadn’t even exchanged names. No matter. I didn’t think I’d be seeing her in any classes. I hadn’t yet figured out how training and classes all fit together yet. That was why I was here to interview and audition.
The escort I’d had earlier in the day, who got me checked in and saw me to my room, knocked at my door at about eight o’clock that evening. He handed me a packet that included instructions for Friday, a schedule, and even what to wear and be prepared to do. He offered to show where things would get started and I accepted. It was obvious that Friday would be a long hard day.
I was up at 6:00 and started my morning warmup. Then I went to have a light breakfast in the cafeteria. I returned to my room, showered, and dressed in my best gym wear. At 8:30, I was in the interview room and one of the hardest days of my life began.
“Paul, when did you begin your training in gymnastics?” Raymond Davis, the director of the academy, asked. They hadn’t actually introduced themselves, but I recognized him from the photos on the website.
“I’ve been training for eight years now. I began when I was almost twelve.”
“Kind of a late start, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but I devoted myself to it and made rapid progress. I am rated a senior elite.”
“Your competition record isn’t very extensive.”
“Not as a senior, sir. I had many good competitions before I achieved that rank.”
“But your last competition was over a year ago. Why is that?”
“I was recruited to assist former national mixed pairs champion Tara White in an exhibition program at Nationals in June. I spent nearly all my time working with her and preparing for that exhibition,” I said.
“Ah! Now I see. You’re him!”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Well, there was nothing in your resume that called out that event and I didn’t associate the name with that excellent performance. Why didn’t you put it on your resume?”
“I want to return to artistic gymnastics rather than continue in acro-gym now.”
“Okay. We’ll go to the gym and take a look at your form and condition. Understand that if it is not up to that standard, we might still recommend you train in acrobatics,” he said. “Now, tell us about why you left your gym and coach in Minneapolis.”
I explained the entire horrid sequence of events involving Madison, her coach, and my coach’s lack of support for me.
“I left because I could no longer trust my coaches or the gym. Even though Madison Layne retracted her accusations, she still came to my house and threw a brick through my window because I refused to work with her as a base any longer. I didn’t feel safe going back to that gym.”
“Well, acrobatics is not a particularly safe sport, but we try to mitigate that with spotters and good coaches. Nonetheless, you should feel safe from attack by your teammates. I’ll want to make sure we do not offer an audition to that performer. Let’s head for the gym.”
We got to the gym and there were already several stations occupied with gymnasts, acrobats, and coaches. The place was huge compared to the Hennepin Gym. There was one area that was obviously set up for performances and competitions with each of the six men’s stations and the four women’s stations positioned so they could be seen from stands. The center part of the gym had multiple units of each station so more than one athlete could work at a time.
I hadn’t worked on the high bar, rings, or vault for a while, though I was confident that I could do my routines. I just hadn’t had a place to practice. I’d managed to do floor routines at the gym Tara and I worked at on Saturdays. I had my pommel horse and parallel bars at home in Minneapolis, but no room to do a full routine. For all of them, I’d need to trust to muscle memory.
I started on parallel bars, which was a good warmup for me. The director and three other coaches watched and assessed my performances. I had one coach who stayed at my side as a spotter. After all, this was an audition, not an actual performance. After I’d completed my routine on the pommel horse, I felt ready for the still rings. My spotter gave me a boost up to the rings and I began my ninety-second routine.
I was a little shaky on my iron cross and didn’t quite make it parallel to the floor, but overall, I felt good about it.
I chose vault next. I didn’t do a very complex vault. It was more important to me to show that I could learn to master the apparatus than it was to have a degree of difficulty I couldn’t depend on. Then, after the high bar routine, it was time for my floor exercises.
I bounced a little on the floor to get the feel for working on a sprung floor again. I loved the feeling. This routine was my favorite and I took off with pleasure. I didn’t intend to do a lot of extremely difficult elements, but I was really feeling good as I reached the end. I did a one-and-a-half back flip and caught myself on my hands where I stayed stable and then took two leg positions while showing my strength. I flipped out of the hand stand into the splits and raised my hands.
There was polite applause from a few people who had stopped to watch and my auditioning committee. Then they beckoned me to the side and said we’d discuss things at lunch. I could hear a couple of the committee commenting behind me.
“That’s a banned element, isn’t it?” said one.
“I don’t know if it counts as such. He didn’t do a twist. The Thomas salto has the one and a half backward salto, but it also has a one-and-a-half out.”
“No. I’m sure the 2017 rule book bans all 3/2 salto elements with reception by the hands. He did it beautifully, but I still don’t think it’s allowed.”
I’d never even heard of the Thomas salto and determined that I’d look it up. I thought I’d invented the move. Certainly, none of my coaches in Minneapolis had ever mentioned it. I guess that shows how attentive they’d been.
There are two types of ‘banned’ elements. One is an element that is simply not in or has been removed from the code of points. In that instance, if you do the element without prior approval, you simply get no points for it. So, why bother? The other is to have a specific ruling that prohibits an element. If it falls in that category and you do it, you’re disqualified. It was obvious to me that the coaches here knew the rules better than my coaches in Minneapolis. Even if that move proved to not be permitted, I felt more confident in the program in Tampa.
My lunchtime critique was generally positive. I was asked to explain my element selection and how much of it had been my own decisions and how much were from my coaches and choreographers.
“It was hard not to notice a lack of difficulty in your vault. You’d have scored the base level of points for completing the exercise, but would not have gained anything there. Are you uncomfortable with the vault?” asked one of the committee members.
“No, sir. The truth is that I haven’t done a vault since mid-July, so I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew on my first time back.”
“You don’t say! Well, that’s understandable. I’ll want you to try one or two new things with me this afternoon.”
“Yes, sir.” I had no idea what I was getting into. My schedule simply said, ‘work with coaches.’
It proved to actually be a working session with four different coaches on four different apparatuses. I did not work on either the pommel horse or on the floor exercises. I guess those were the strongest of my performances.
I learned so much from the vault coach that I couldn’t possibly hold it all inside after one session. He worked with me on elements of increasing difficulty, pausing after each to critique it, make suggestions, and send me back to repeat it to see if I could follow his suggestions.
The rings coach had me do several slow presses into position and then several rapid transitions. You can’t swing on the rings, even though they are hung from straps that would certainly allow swinging. In fact, when your coach lifts you to the rings, you have to hang from them and he steadies you to be sure you are still before the routine begins. Part of the art is to be able to hold the rings still while your body works. But you can swing your body, so you can start from a vertical position, then drop and turn completely around into a vertical position again. I was definitely tired by the time I finished. I had to explain that I hadn’t been on rings in several weeks, either.
The parallel bars coach simply wanted to give me moves and see me go from one to the next as he called them out. It was a combination of finding out if I knew the moves and if I could execute them one after the other. Our workout lasted only about fifteen minutes and I was shuffled over to the high bar.
That coach wanted to see if I could change routines from one to another after receiving instruction. Then he’d have me do an element or two to see if I knew them before putting them together in a sequence. I think he was impressed when I started myself off with a waist-high pull-up—the same move I’d taught to Chantell on the basketball team—only I followed it with a press up to a handstand.
I got a little break and then was led over to a different part of the gym where I worked with a woman on a straight-line tumbling routine. The sprung mat for tumbling is twenty-five meters long and two meters wide, with a line painted down the center and bounding each side. There’s a ten-meter run-up that is not sprung, and a landing area at the other end that’s six meters long and three meters wide with a much thicker cushion for landing.
I’d never worked on a tumbling track because there just wasn’t room for one in our gym in Minneapolis. My tumbling was all done in floor exercises. The tumbling track was a total of 135 feet long and had a safety mat at the end that extended another ten feet, just in case the gymnast couldn’t stop. The coach had a couple of other tumblers do passes on the mat before she started working with me, just to show me what she was looking for. It looked like fun.
It was really exhausting. I loved my floor exercises, which are the artistic gymnastics equivalent of tumbling. This track was a lot longer than the diagonal of the floor exercise and people really worked up a lot of speed. The pass has to include at least three elements, which are all flips, twists, and somersaults. It’s funny to me, but the one-and-a-half with a hand landing wasn’t banned in tumbling because you just spring into another element. You could hardly call it a landing!
I never really got up to the full eight elements required in a competitive tumbling pass. They were basically what I did in cheerleading when I did somersaults across the floor. With a sprung floor beneath me, though, the elements really gained a lot of height. I thanked the coach at the end and said I really enjoyed that. She said she’d see me for more work on my floor exercises on Monday.
That was the first indication that I’d be invited to stay over the weekend and do more auditioning on Monday.
Finally, I was conducted to a sprung floor in the acrobatics area. Even though my heart was set on being a gymnastics competitor, I had to admit there was a certain satisfaction in the acrobatic lifts that I enjoyed. There isn’t really anything that shows off strength like those lifts and balancing routines.
And, obviously, I’d been working more on those things over the past year than on my artistic gymnastic routines.
“Hi! I’m Sydnie Cragg,” said a bright little girl, meeting me on the mat. Okay, so I’m still prejudiced, but her name was bigger than she was. She might be twenty years old, but she still looked twelve or thirteen. Once I really looked at her and put that together with her accent, I realized she was the same girl I caught in the cafeteria the previous evening.
“Paul Bradley,” I said, shaking her hand.
“I’m part of a women’s group,” Sydnie said. “The top, as you probably assumed. They asked me to come over and work with you a little, but don’t think of me as a future partner. Our group is getting really good.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m not really looking at getting into acrobatics, but it’s part of my overall audition. I promise you my best at anything we’re asked to do.”
“Paul and Sydnie,” said a woman approaching us. “I’m Coach Li, Paul. I already coach Sydnie and asked her to participate in the exercises this afternoon. The two women with me are her teammates, Lena and Eva, and will act as spotters. We’re going to run through a few exercises to see how you move and what your level is. Paul, I’m aware of your experience, but the things you were asked to do with your previous partner had subtle differences to what a competition would require.”
“I’m aware of that, coach. I did some work with another partner during that time as well. I’m ready.”
“Oh good. Let’s get started, then. First, see if you can synchronize a forward flip in layout position. Take a minute together to coordinate your timing.”
I turned to Sydnie.
“Let me see yours,” I said. “I’ll adjust to match you.”
It was a simple enough move that I’d done often enough with Madison, though Tara couldn’t support herself well enough to either launch or land that type of somersault. It only took us a couple of tries to have a pretty well coordinated flip.
“Now, do the same thing, but when you land, launch immediately into a double back flip with a twist. Together now. Ready.”
She didn’t give us time to plot the run, launch, or landing together. I hoped Sydnie needed to bend down to launch her back flip, and that she had good height on it.
We did it. Coach Li went right into balance exercises next. Sydnie mounted to my shoulders and to my hands. While I held her aloft with one hand, I got down on the floor and did a classic right triangle table with one hand down, one holding Sydnie up, and my body stretched out as the hypotenuse.
We did a number of balancing poses and combinations, then Coach Li moved us directly into throws. We did throws in which Sydnie did multiple somersaults and I caught her as she landed, then we did some throws up to a position above my head. Throwing another person upward with the right amount of force to let her complete her flip and still be high enough to land on my hands is a little tricky, but the spotters only moved in once to protect Sydnie from a potential fall.
I caught her.
We must have worked for over an hour as Coach Li gave us progressively more complex combinations to do. Sydnie was very good. I’d have to say she was way better than Madison could ever hope to be. That might be because she was six inches shorter and twenty or thirty pounds lighter than Madison.
“Good. Gather around here. We’re going to resume on Monday. I want the four of you to put in a few hours of practice over the weekend. I’m not planning to put together a mixed pair with Sydnie and Paul, so the other two of you can relax about that. I’m using Sydnie because she is about the best flyer we have right now and I wanted to give Paul a chance to shine. The intent of your practice this weekend is to put together a two-minute combined program. Work your spotters into the routine so they can stay on the floor with you at all times. Got it? Good. See you Monday morning.”
“What fun!” Sydnie said, grabbing hold of me and planting a kiss right on my lips. It was nice, but…
“Whoa. Easy. I have a girlfriend and I’m not in the market for another,” I said.
“That’s good,” Sydnie said. “I’m not in the market either. I’m just friendly!” Then she dropped her voice so only the two of us could hear and growled at me. “But not that friendly. Don’t try anything.”
I put both hands in the air and backed up a step. Then our two spotters grabbed my elbows and started to march me off to the cafeteria.
“Dinner time! I’m starved,” Sydnie said.
At dinner, I finally learned the full names of Sydnie’s teammates who had been spotting for us.
“I’m Lena Alexander,” said the middle. “I’m from Alabama, so I’m used to this heat. You northerners never seem to get used to it.”
“Yeah,” said Sydnie, “but you nearly froze to death at Nationals in Minnesota, and it was in the middle of summer there!”
“I’m Eva Evashchuk,” said the base. “I was born in Ukraine, but we immigrated to the United States when I was young. I was not happy to leave my friends and my parents decided gymnastics would help me adjust. But then I grew, and now I support these two.”
“That is quite a job,” I said. “I trust you all do well, if Sydnie is an example.”
“Oh, yes. We were only eighth in Portugal last month, but now we will train harder for next year,” Lena said.
“You’re on Team USA?” I said.
“Yes, of course,” Sydnie said. “We spent the entire time from Nationals until Worlds training in Texas. But this is our home gym and we came back here as soon as possible. We’ll return to Texas for pre-event training, but Coach Li travels with us.”
“You’re all so impressive. I’ve yet to qualify for the national competition. But, I’m only 19. Did you see the men’s Olympic gymnastics in July? Most of the competitors are in their mid-twenties.”
“You stand a better chance of advancing than I do,” Sydnie said. “I’m seventeen, which puts me near the old end for acrobatic gymnastic tops. If I’d grown like Eva did, I’d be a circus performer already.”
“Circus?”
“It’s a common progression. Opportunity doesn’t come knocking for older gymnasts. We go from being artistic gymnasts to acrobatic gymnasts to circus acts. It’s not that we can’t do the work anymore, but we don’t look as young and innocent,” Sydnie snorted.
“It’s not like it’s a hierarchy,” Eva explained. “It’s just that as you grow and mature, it’s harder and harder to compete against younger gymnasts. And if you need to earn a living, you either end up teaching gymnastics, teaching physical education, or performing circus acts.”
“I got my certification as a massage therapist, so I hope to earn my living in that. I know it’s not much, though.”
“Oh, please! I’ve had just one professional massage in my life and it was heavenly. I couldn’t flex a muscle for the rest of the day,” Lena said.
“Our motto is ‘walk in, wobble out,’ you know,” I laughed.
“When can we get massages?” Sydnie asked.
“Um… I think in Florida I have to get a license before I can offer massage,” I said. “I didn’t really check that out before I drove down here.”
“I bet that doesn’t mean you can’t give a massage if asked,” Sydnie said. “And I’m asking.”
“Let’s get through our weekend training and find out if I’m even staying here. For all I know, they might send me home Monday.”
“They’d have sent you home today if you weren’t staying. And they certainly wouldn’t have assigned members of Team USA to help you. Let’s finish dinner and then go plot out what we want you to show in our routine.”
It was going to be an interesting weekend.
It was far more than interesting!
I had worked with Tara, a national champion. I knew how good she was—or I thought I did. As far as moves are concerned, Madison was more advanced because of Tara’s disability. But here I was working with three national champions who were at the top of their game and in peak health. What they could do was far more than either Tara or Madison could do. I assumed Tara had been able to do all of that four years ago, but not today.
“Okay, we’ve shown off a bit,” Eva announced after our first hour or so of practice on Saturday. “But this is supposed to show off what Paul can do. Lena and I aren’t even performing. It’s just you two. So, what do you bring to the table, Paul?”
“Well, you guys are certainly worthy of all your championships. Just plain cool. Pretty much anything that you did with Sydnie on top, I think I can do. There are a couple of things I think we could do that I haven’t really tried before, but I know I have the strength for.”
“F’rinstance?” Sydnie asked.
“Well, in the combined routine, there’s usually an element of coordinated tumbling. I love tumbling. Can you do a double front layout with a twist? That’s usually a degree more complex than most pairs I’ve seen.”
“Yeah. I can do that. Why’d we never think of putting that in our routine?” Sydnie asked her partners. They just shook their heads. We all four practiced the element, spotting for each other. Then Sydnie and I tried coordinating it together. I think we worked on that one move for an hour or more. We had to take a break and let our muscles recover a bit before we went to the next element.
“You know, one of the things I got from that is that Eva and Lena wouldn’t have to just stand around waiting for us to fall,” I said. “Like, we could all four do that tumble together, and then Sydnie and I could move directly to our next element.”
“And what do you suggest?” Sydnie asked.
“Lena launched you into the air and you landed on Eva’s shoulders. Well, you don’t have partners to launch you. Can you launch yourself onto my shoulders?”
“How high would I have to get? Let’s see. Um… I can’t just jump up to them. I’d have to do a somersault to get up there. If I did it in a tuck position, I’d probably get there, but I’m not sure it would be a very pretty landing.”
“How about if I was on my knees?”
“Yeah! I could totally do that.”
“What else?” Lena asked.
“I was thinking that I always see one-hand lifts or poses with the base’s dominant arm. Wouldn’t it be cool to have Sydnie switch from one hand to the other?”
“You mean your hand, right?”
“Yes.”
“That would count as a whole new pose, wouldn’t it?” Eva asked. “I don’t know if I can hold you in my left. Are you sure you can do it, Paul?”
“I gotta tell you, Sydnie weighs, like, thirty pounds less than either of my previous two partners. She’s like lifting a feather.”
“Thanks, bud.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.
“It sure isn’t. If Sydnie weighed thirty more pounds, she’d need a different base than me,” Eva said.
“I was also thinking that when we did the tumbling, we all four went together, right? What if you kind of reflected some of our other moves? Like, if Sydnie is standing on her hands on my hands doing the splits, you two could simply be standing on your hands doing the splits without being held up.”
“Oh, that’s a hard move for me,” Eva said. “Remember, I weigh fifty pounds more than Sydnie.”
“But I know you do the splits. You could mimic an inverse of the position.”
“Could do that.”
“Break time’s over,” Lena said. “Potty up and let’s get back to work.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
