It was a question Shannon Miller faced at times during her career, from the first moments her parents took her to Jerry Clavier’s gym located five minutes from her family home in Edmond, Oklahoma, to just before every event at the Atlanta Summer Games in 1996.
Do you truly enjoy gymnastics?
The answer was always a resounding “yes.”
“You’ve done the work,” her coach, Steve Nunno, would tell her in 1996 as she and her Magnificent Seven teammates held the expectations of the United States and the world. “Now go have some fun.”
Miller was quiet in public and exhibited an intensely serious approach to her sport. The world learned more about her as a person in early 2011 and in the ensuing years after doctors found a baseball-sized cyst on her left ovary. She was not only jolted by the diagnosis, but the idea that she had almost canceled her routine checkup at age 33 that would lead to its discovery.
“I do think there is this feeling of being invincible, like you just got your whole life ahead of you and you’re so focused on all of these other things going on around you that, a lot of times, your health takes a back seat,” Miller says. “That’s why I really talk often about the importance of early detection, not just for 50 and over, but we’ve got to get those regular exams, even when you’re in your early 20s and you’re off to college and your parents aren’t making those checkups for you anymore, we have to take that and we have to keep that going because it really could end up helping save your life.”
Miller drew on her athletics career to find strength and has emerged cancer free. More than a decade later, that once-shy Olympic gold medalist is a vocal advocate for preventative care and regular medical screenings and exams.
Miller, 46, spoke to USA TODAY Sports during National Cancer Survivors Month about being a world-class athlete, cancer survivor and sports mom to son Rocco, 13, and daughter Sterling, 9. Her journey offers lessons and perspective for parents and athletes from those innocent days of childhood to young adulthood.
(Note: Questions and responses are edited for length and clarity.)
Q: Talk a little about your upbringing and how you got into gymnastics.
A: I started when I was 5, not because my parents knew anything about gymnastics or the Olympics. I had never seen the Olympics or gymnastics but I have a sister (Tessa) who’s two years older and I just wanted to be her, that’s all I cared about. And my parents, they just found us trying to tumble and do things on the furniture and on this trampoline that they bought at a garage sale. And, of course, back then, there were no nets. Everything was springs, and if you flew off, you landed in the yard. So they wanted us to get that energy out in a safer environment. So they called up a few gyms and we went to the first one that called back. And it was more of a recreational program, but I loved it from the first day I stepped in the gym. I got to do turns and tumbles and jumped into a pit and swing on bars and it was just a kid in a candy store. And I never wanted to stop.
And my sister eventually moved on to some other sports and I begged my parents to keep going. In fact, my coach at one point called them and said, “We’d really like her to come in a few more hours a week.” And I was only going one hour per week. And my mom said, “No, this is plenty for her. She’s so young.” And I begged and begged and my dad finally broke down and said, “I’ll take her. In a couple of weeks, she’ll be tired of it (and) we’ll be off the hook.” So that didn’t happen but my love for the sport just grew.
Q: You said in your book (“It’s Not About Perfect”), Jerry Clavier was a perfect first coach for you. Could you just expand on that a little bit?
A: He just allowed us to enjoy the sport and we learned a ton of skills. And I think (that’s) because I wasn’t necessarily focused on competing or having to go by a certain amount of rules. We were just learning. We just went in and learned skill after skill and that’s what I loved the most, and so by the time I was competing at 9, I really kind of had this list that I was already working on. They may not have been perfected but it was a good list and I had learned to enjoy learning.
Q: You seemed to have a pretty normal childhood. Would you say that’s the case?
A: I would say that understanding that everyone’s normal is different, but I went to public school, I spent time with my family, I lived at home, so all of those things were “normal.” Gymnastics for me was my after-school sport, granted it ended up at one point being 40 or more hours a week after school but it was my after-school sport and when I came home, we really didn’t talk a lot about it; every once in a while it would come up. My mom had wanted to understand more about what I was doing and so she, in addition to her day job, started learning how to judge and coach – and she only coached for a little bit, not me; she judged for a very long time, even after I retired. Again, not me, but she judged up to college and really just wanted to learn more about the sport so that she could talk with me if I needed to.
Q: It seems like your parents always made sure you were having fun.
A: I know now as a parent how challenging this line can be to walk but they did a really good job of helping me to understand the importance of work ethic and doing what you love but understanding it’s not always going to be easy and there’s a difference between wanting to quit and wanting to move on, and I kind of faced that in 1993 (after her first Olympics, the 1992 Games in Barcelona) and they always did a really good of talking me through things and letting me talk and share when I had bad day at gym, because it wasn’t all super easy. There were days where you come home and you couldn’t get the skill right and you get upset and, yet, maybe quitting is not the answer. And so there were times when they really did have to step in and help me just focus on what the important things were. Maybe you didn’t have the best day in the gym, maybe you didn’t have the best competition, but if you enjoy it, it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth working.
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Q: I have always wondered what it is like as a gymnast. I know you did the balance beam, which is a very long routine. What goes through your mind when you’re doing that? Are you thinking about your next move or are you just kind of in a zone?
A: Each event is a little bit different but something like balance beam, which involves so much focus – me, my coaches, really honed in on this. They never gave me more than three corrections to think about at any given time and my balance beam coach, Peggy (Liddick), she always said, “You can’t handle more than three. The brain doesn’t handle that, especially in the short moments, so don’t have more than three corrections in your head at any given point.” When you’re up on a balance beam, you’re thinking just about the immediate next skill and never about the dismount. You need to be thinking about what you’re doing when you’re doing it and, it sounds easy, but it can be quite the challenge when you’re actually in competition.
Q: You mentioned that you craved constructive criticism. Is that something that you carried with you from an early age?
A: I did. I think I still have that today. I can’t get better if I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. And that’s kind of my attitude in life, as well. So I’m very open to, “Hey, coach me. Tell me what I’m doing wrong. Give me some help so I can do better.”
Q: Are your kids into sports? What do they play?
A: They are. A bit of everything. Our philosophy has been, “Be physically active,” because we know how important that is. So, choose a sport, any sport. Choose an activity – it doesn’t even have to be a competitive sport, but choose something to do where you can be physically active. So they’ve done a little bit of everything and they’re kind of honing in with what they enjoy the most but I really feel like, at their ages, it’s good to just try different sports and see what speaks to you.
Q: There was so much hype around all of you and your Olympics teammates in 1996. Did you talk about that? What did you talk about when you were in your down time there?
A: I was very shy growing up. I didn’t really start opening up – speaking, doing the things that I do now – until I was well into my 20s. So at that time, I kept to myself pretty well. I knew the other girls from other competitions but it wasn’t like it is today. We didn’t have the national training camps and the different things, so we really just saw each other mostly at competitions. And so we still laugh about this. Because I was one that was always sleeping. I would go to work out, get home, eat and take a nap. So, I didn’t do a lot of extra talking and I would say my coaches – and also my parents – they kept us pretty well sheltered from media. We didn’t have phones. We didn’t have internet. So, unless you read the paper or were watching something specific, you really didn’t know that there was so much hype going on and I think that probably helped us.
Q: And your shyness was sort of skill. You were able to block out distractions that way.
A: (Laughs.) I think it was. I think growing up very shy, it was easier for me to block out things going on around me and that’s very helpful when you’re on the balance beam and there’s a million different things going on. I just could very naturally do that. And it really became a skill.
I would say that I figured out a way to kind of combat the negative thoughts. It’s not that they didn’t come in. But I would really try very hard when those negative thoughts were coming in, I would immediately thinnk of two things that were positive and I would force myself to try to push that negative thought to the curb … and it’s not always easy and didn’t always happen 100% of the time but I tried really hard to stay focused on the positive.
Q: So then, taking that philosophy into your cancer diagnosis, how did that help you?
A: By January of 2011, I was getting out of surgery to find out that it was cancer. And I think for me a really challenging time was kind of between that first doctor’s appointment and finding out the actual diagnosis. You have no idea what’s going, you have so many questions and so few answers and it’s really hard to stay positive because all of these negative things are swirling around in your head and it’s all a, “What if.” And for me, trying to combat those was nearly impossible, and so I think in some weird way, finding out the diagnosis was actually a relief because we just knew what we were dealing with. Granted, they caught it early and I would need to go through an aggressive chemotherapy regimen but I think at that point, I reverted back to that competitive mentality a little bit more, that positive mentality that I had learned in sports. I had a plan with my medical team; it was, basically, just get through chemo, get through without stopping and so that’s when my mentality shifted back to a lot of those things that I had learned through sports.
Q: Going through all that you’ve been through, do you have advice you can offer parents whose kids are growing up as athletes and maybe potential strong athletes?
A: I wish I had a handbook (for parents). I look back at my career and I am so thankful for all of the small things that my parents did. I think the best thing that they did was make sure I knew that I was loved for being me, not for gymnastics, not for awards but they were going to love me regardless of any of that. And I think when you start with that foundation, all of the other things tend to fall in line. But I’ll also say that it is not an easy task and, being a parent myself, there are so many difficult decisions every single day. You have to give yourself a little grace along the way as well.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now loving life as sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a future column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com