At December's Runnin' Ute basketball games, from high up in the Huntsman Center, she realized what it's going to be like from now on. "A whole weird perspective," reports Missy Marlowe, the former gymnast.

"Down on the floor, I never really paid attention to how many people were there, but now, up in the stands - it's neat. I feel proud we can get that many people there," says Marlowe, who put many thousands of gymnastics fans in those Huntsman Center seats during her four years as a Ute.Those years saw Marlowe set NCAA records with 10s in every event (the only gymnast to ever do that). As a senior last season, she went out with a record-shattering NCAA Championship meet, leading the Utes to their eighth national title and winning the NCAA all-around, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise championships, the first NCAA gymnast to ever win three event titles in one night. Her five total NCAA championships (she won beam as a junior) are an NCAA record. Her 39.65 all-around score was a record for the NCAA Championships.

This month she was named to the Today's Top Six, the NCAA's highest honor - it picks six athletes, men or women, from all of its sports as its shining examples for the year. She won the Honda Broderick Award as the nation's top collegiate woman gymnast and is a finalist for the all-sports Honda Award, which is to be announced Wednesday.

Marlowe won the Deseret News Athlete of the Month award for February 1992 after setting what was then an NCAA all-around record with 39.6 and in the same meet scoring 10 on balance beam, her first 10 in an event other than her uneven-bars specialty. In March, she added 10s in vault and floor, completing the cycle, to win AOM for that month. Four NCAA golds plus the team title made her April's DesNews AOM as well.

Three AOMs in one year.

She is, without argument, the Deseret News Athlete of the Year for 1992.

Marlowe's NCAA brilliance followed an amateur career that culminated in 1988's Seoul Olympics, where she and the American team barely missed medaling.

Now it's all in the past tense.

The Utes are beginning their first post-Marlowe season, and Marlowe is seeing things from new angles as she gets on with her life.

She watches fans as they fill the Huntsman arena seats, notices how many there are, how different they are, how different it is to be up there, even during basketball games.

Marlowe's perspective has also changed in the past few months as to what she'd like to do for a living upon graduation this June from the U. She's pursuing a degree in exercise and sport science, planning to be a personal fitness trainer.

Now, however, she's leaning toward something she used to say she definitely didn't want to do: coaching.

"I always promised myself I'd never get into coaching," she says. But recently, a mother asked Marlowe to give her daughter private gymnastics instruction; that grew to doing personal coaching for some 20 girls, aged 6-12, spending about 20 hours a week at it.

She still isn't interested in general or recreation gym classes, but private lessons with kids who really want to be good gymnasts has been rewarding enough that Marlowe and husband Mike Anglesey have talked about some day starting their own gym. They're not sure how to come up with the financing yet.

She could be interested in coaching at a college level, too, though the U. is out for a while because coach Greg Marsden's wife, Megan, is the only full-time assistant the Utes are allowed this year by the NCAA. Anyway, that "would take some adjusting. I still feel Greg is my coach," Marlowe says.

She still goes to the U. gym often to watch and be with former teammates.

It is hard to leave.

"I miss it - a lot," she says.

"I miss being a part of something that is so successful," she says, adding fellow program grad Shelly Schaerrer feels the same way. "That was our identity," Marlowe says.

Her memories of her career aren't filled with her glorious exploits. They're of her 1992 teammates: Shaerrer, Kristen Kenoyer, Jenny Donaldson, Aimee Trepanier, Kelli Wolsey, Tracy Richard, Missy Wells, Meredith King, Suzanne Metz. "Just being with them," she says.

She's already forgotten the pain and frustrations and hard work. "I have to remind myself how hard practice was and how hard conditioning was," Marlowe says. "I just remember being part of a group that wanted something so bad.

"The hardest I've ever laughed was at warmups at nationals," she says, recalling the events that led to last season's team championship. "Everyone was so strung out and nervous and trying to contain it in the right way."

She says the reason she dominated that final NCAA meet was the same reason she qualified for the 1988 Olympic team when she came into the Trials in 12th place and had to move up to sixth. That reason was finality.

"I thought the Olympic Trials might be my last meet," she says. "I was pretty burnt out and didn't know if I would do gymnastics in college."

She went into the '92 NCAAs with "the exact attitude I had at the Olympic Trials - the last chance I will ever have to do what I can do. I wasn't about to hold back or be afraid of making a mistake," she says.

"I've always been the underdog," says Marlowe, who went to the NCAA meet ranked behind Oregon State's Chari Knight, Georgia's Hope Spivey, Alabama's Dee Dee Foster and tied with Kenoyer. Until April 24, 1992, Marlowe had never been a national all-around champion, in USGF or college, though she ranked No. 1 several times. "I was not about to hold back and let Hope or anyone else beat me," Marlowe says of her last meet.

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Marlowe will still be somewhat of a public figure. She'll do commentary of meets on television, beginning Friday with KSL-TV on the Georgia-at-BYU meet. She hopes to continue with that.

She did behind-the-scenes work for NBC's Triplecast in the Barcelona Olympics. That gave an ex-Olympic athlete a chance to experience the Olympic spectacle without the worry of competing and to attend different kinds of events.

In other words, to be a spectator.

Something she's just learning to be.

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