In the balance

The run of state titles looked to be coming to an end for
the powerful gymnastics team ... until the teary-eyed
junior stepped to the beam with a chance to save the day

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

Athletics is all about the final score, who wins and who doesn't. But courage is what makes it memorable.

It takes a certain kind of courage to sink the critical free throws in the final seconds, to play with pain, to stand up to a stronger, more-skilled opponent, to get up after being knocked down, to refuse to give up in the face of overwhelming odds.

Over three decades of witnessing and writing about that kind of courage, one instance has always stood out in my mind. It happened a long time ago and hundreds of miles from here, but I'll always remember the moment and the
athlete -- a gymnast who was 16 years old, stood 5-foot-3 and weighed barely over 100 pounds.

I doubt any retelling could possibly re-create how dramatic it seemed at the time. Maybe you had to be there. But I was there, and I was absolutely blown away. A quarter-century later, I still consider it a gift simply to have witnessed it.

The athlete

In some ways, it was surprising Brenda Bajema was competing in the 1983 state gymnastics meet -- or in the sport at all.

She was afraid of heights, for one thing.

"I think I picked a really weird sport to get into," recalls Bajema (pronounced Bye-muh). "You'd have to get into the zone, play little mind tricks on yourself. You know: This beam is NOT that high off the ground."

Then there was her back.

By the previous winter of 1982, Brenda and her twin sister, Laurie, were sophomore standouts on the Sehome gymnastics team. But a spinal condition -- spondylolysis, common among gymnasts, football linemen and other athletes whose spine takes a pounding -- was threatening to end her career. The injury typically begins with a stress fracture and can lead to deterioration of part of the vertebrae in the lumbar region -- and a lot of pain.

In the 1982 state meet, what Brenda describes as "a pretty horrendous vault" left her in such agony she could barely get out of bed the next morning.

A Seattle sports medicine specialist assessed Brenda and asked, "How important is this sport to you?"

"It's my life," Brenda answered.

"Well, I don't know if you can do it any more."

Brenda wasn't about to quit, though, and the doctor gave her a sliver of hope.

"She said, 'Kind of let pain be your guide, and if you keep your abs really strong, you might be able to work through it,'" Brenda recalls. "It all depends on how bad it is."

The program

Brenda took three months off from what had been year-round training, and by that fall of 1983 working harder than ever -- in a Sehome program with a standard of excellence like no other.

By that 1983 season, the high school in Bellingham had already won 10 straight state championships, all under the watchful eye of Nola Ayres, known for her tough-love brand of coaching. Ayres was much like famed former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight, minus the chair-throwing -- at once a brilliant coach who could get the best out of any athlete and an intense taskmaster whose withering glare could sear that athlete like the object of sunlight under a magnifying glass.

As the twins had moved up through the club program on their way to high school, they were well aware of the looming prospect of competing under Ayres. "I was scared of her," Brenda says. "Totally scared of her."

But under Ayres' tutelage, the twins blossomed. As blithe freshmen on a team of juniors and seniors, they tied each other for the state uneven bars title as the Mariners won the meet. The next year, with Brenda competing through
her back pain, Sehome won the title again.

"Nobody wanted to be the team that lost, the one that broke that streak," says Laurie. "There was a huge amount of pressure on our team, having the legacy that we did, and I think there was a lot of people wishing we'd get pushed out of first place."

In a way, the team's sustained excellence worked against it. A state judge told me at the time -- way off the record
-- Sehome gymnasts often had to perform a 9.6 routine to earn a 9.1 score (out of a 10.0 maximum).

Last month, Anita Sharratt -- another longtime Washington state-meet judge, since retired -- agreed with that assessment, and did so on the record.

"(The Mariners') routines were so polished and so good that if they made even tiny little errors, they stuck out like a sore thumb," Sharratt said.

"So (judges) deducted those errors from Sehome, whereas from another team they would have ignored them.

"The little (errors) most people would totally ignore, they didn't ignore when it was Sehome."


The battle

Certainly, they didn't ignore it when Sehome opened the meet on floor exercise. Nobody seemed to "stick" her routine except Brenda's sister, Laurie, the only gymnast in the state to do a "double full" -- a monumentally difficult twisting maneuver involving two complete revolutions. When Laurie's score came up, though, it was 8.7.

Ayres -- who has retired from coaching and now serves as the state judging director -- nearly blew up.

"Her routine was flawless," she told me minutes later, nearly spitting her words. "I am livid. We are obviously not the meet favorites here."

Still, the Mariners held a slim lead entering the third round, in which they would be on the uneven bars, Brenda's signature event. A week earlier, she had won at the district meet with a 9.35 score.

"Her bars routine was filled with hard moves," Laurie says. "She's always been gutsy. She was always the one to try really scary tricks, and I would not have been the gymnast I was if not for her. She really pushed me. She would always try the hard moves."

On this day, though, every move was hard.

"I felt like lead," Brenda recalls. "I couldn't focus. It might have been nerves. I remember it was really hot in that gym."

On her first big release move from low bar to high bar, she missed the bar and fell to the mat.

"That was shocking," Laurie says.

"That," Ayres says, "was like ... oh my gosh."

Brenda hopped up to continue her routine, clearly shaken. The fall would cost her a half-point, a huge deduction. She needed to be perfect the rest of the way to salvage the routine.

But the worst was yet to come. On her second high-difficulty move, a blind, flipping release backward and upward to the high bar, Brenda froze.

She didn't let go of the bar.

"That's what you do when you chicken out, kind of -- like when you're first learning the skill," Brenda says. "It was odd. I just totally lost it. Probably one of the most mortifying things that had happened to me in my life up to that point. What just happened there? What did I just do?

"I just held on."


The break

At the state meet, while four of the eight teams compete in one round, one on each apparatus, the other four retire to a second "practice" gym, away from spectators and distractions.

After the Mariners finished on the uneven bars, they were in the second gym for a half-hour -- almost all of which Brenda Bajema spent in tears. Her 6.5 bars score was probably the lowest score she'd had in high school, and only two things kept running through her mind.

"The first thing," she recalls, "was I hope I didn't blow the team title. I thought that could be a distinct possibility, letting down my teammates ... because everybody had worked so hard."

Now the Mariners were behind going into the last and, for Brenda, hardest event -- balance beam.

"It was a horrible draw of events," Laurie says. "They put our best event first, and the tricky event last," Laurie says. "Beam is most people's nemesis of an event. It's such a psychologically difficult event.

"Nobody wants to do beam last. It's just a nightmare."

And so Brenda Bajema cried, trying not to and failing miserably. For a half-hour straight.

But even in tears, Brenda was thinking about what she had to do.

She and her sister are all grown up now, married women in the working world. But 26 years later Laurie still remembers her sister telling her about the other thing that kept running through her mind in that practice gym.

It was two lines, the closing lyrics of a song by an English rock band called the Psychedelic Furs:

You can never win or lose

if you don't run the race.


The beam

Brenda had three difficult aerials in her beam routine, the first one a side cartwheel with no hands. Then came a side salto -- a forward flip with a quarter-turn -- a maneuver even more difficult than her final tumbling series, a back handspring into a back tuck, finishing with a no-hands, 360-degree back flip.

Each aerial had to end the same way -- with Brenda landing, feet-first, on a 4-inch-wide beam.

Without so much as a wobble.

After spending a half-hour as an emotional basket case.

"That's the thing that is so amazing about individual sports, how they develop mental toughness," Ayres says. "It's you against that piece of equipment.

"Brenda was doing things on the balance beam that were a huge risk. We could have gone safe and just gotten a score."

Ayres had ordered gymnasts to remove difficult moves from their routines many times before -- sometimes right before the athlete was about to take the floor -- but she didn't pull either of Brenda's aerials. Says Ayres, "She would never have let me."

Ayres did, however, change Brenda's place in the order from last -- the clean-up hitter, basically -- to second. "Which was brilliant," Laurie says, "because she had less time to stew about it."

Still, Brenda's eyes were still puffy and red as the Mariners came out for their final round, and I think everybody in the building -- at least those not wearing a Sehome singlet -- fully expected her to struggle mightly on the beam, if not completely fall apart.

I expected a total meltdown. Sehome's monumental title streak was coming to an end.

Anyone who has been around sports knows how difficult it is to come back from something like that. A breakdown on your best skill -- an utter collapse of confidence -- is as bad as it gets. Even if you grit your teeth and carry on, you're not the same. You're shaky. You question yourself. You're not on solid footing.

And Brenda Bajema was going to have to find that solid footing at the place she dreaded most: atop that oh-so-slender beam.

The moment

The first Mariner up on the beam, sophomore Heidi Molden, opened with an 8.8 that brought her teammates to their feet with relief. I remember watching Brenda's muted reaction; she was already mentally honing in her own routine.

When she mounted the beam, there was a steely resolve behind those red, puffy eyes I hadn't quite expected.

You could have heard the beating of a heart; the air in the gymnasium felt too thick with tension even to breathe.

Brenda stuck the first aerial, that impossible-looking, no-hands side cartwheel. Absolutely nailed it.

I'm fairly certain my jaw dropped.

But she wasn't through that emotional ringer yet. She stuck the side salto with no problem, but then the fear of failure crept in.

"I felt pretty shaky after that," Brenda admits now, these many years later. "I got shaky starting that (back handspring-into-back tuck) series. I could feel my knees getting wobbly. People couldn't see it, but I was starting to
lose it a little bit: I really want to get off this beam. Dismount, hurry, dismount!"

If there was a wobble on that back-tuck series, I never saw it. What I remember was being awestruck as she completed her routine -- almost perfectly -- to thunderous applause and a 9.0 score.

"To see her do that, to see her go from devastation on her very best event and come back on the hardest event -- and nail it," Laurie says, "I was just so proud of her."

Three teammates, Laurie included, still had to take on the beam. But -- no doubt buoyed by Brenda's gutsy performance -- one by one they came through, though none with scores as high as Brenda's. And 10 minutes later, they
stood together, holding the state championship trophy aloft, the streak still alive.

They won again the next year, the Bajemas' senior season, and again in 1985 before Sehome was finally upended in 1986 -- a year during which Ayres had taken a hiatus from coaching. She returned in 1987, and the Mariners ran off
seven more straight championship seasons.

But could any of them have been as dramatic as 1983, when Brenda Bajema came back from the depths and reached the sky?

Maybe they all were, each in its own way.

That, after all, is sports in a nutshell: courageous efforts, memorable moments and a story in every uniform.

This was one.