For some of us there is one defining moment that sets our lives in motion in a way that can never be altered. For Greg Marsden, there was such a time. It was the day his father flew into the eye of that storm never to be heard from again.
At that moment the play that would be Marsden's life began to unfold, one scene playing out crazily after another. The mother in and out of institutions the rest of her days. The stern grandfather, wielding discipline at the end of a belt. The grandmother eaten away by cancer. Before he graduated from high school, Marsden already had been served more pain and loss than most see in a lifetime.He chose to go it alone, staying away from home each day until he needed a bed. That was how he dealt with life. He occupied his hours with sports until it was time to sleep. He was not a star athlete, and the small-town teams he played on in rural Arkansas were rarely winners, but athletic teams surrounded him with something more - friends, camaraderie, common goals, father-figure coaches, family.
And then he grew up. By luck or fate, he was hired by the University of Utah to coach gymnastics - a sport he knew almost nothing about - and once again he was surrounded by family. A temporary job turned into a life's career. Given his history, is anyone surprised that where family is concerned, Marsden is independent and willful, that he rages against establishment, that he has fought for his team with the tenacity of a bulldog, that he is both loved and hated.
At Utah, he has built a dynasty from the ground floor up. He took his gymnasts to the top in six quick years, although it wasn't until he married one of them that he found real contentment. In Marsden's 19 years of coaching, the Lady Utes have won eight national championships and finished second four times. This weekend, the Utes will seek another title when they host the NCAA gymnastics championships in the Huntsman Center.
There it is: 43 years in a wrap, a life filled with tragedy, championships, controversy, energy and even a little romance.
Is this a made-for-TV movie, or what? In Marsden's life story, the script would have at least four major scenes.
I. THE PROGRAM
The Utes were simply going through the motions when they hired Marsden nearly two decades ago. Title IX had just passed and the Utes were required to offer women's varsity sports. They already had some gymnastics equipment, so that sport seemed a relatively inexpensive way to go. Marsden, who was pursuing a doctorate in sports psychology while teaching in the physical education department, was offered $1,500 to be a part-time coach.
He said no. It would be a distraction from his studies. A week later he changed his mind, thinking he could use the money. Two years later he quit his studies because they were a distraction.
The Utes had no idea what they were getting into when they hired Marsden. They thought they were getting a nice, quiet little program that would throw a bone to Title IX. They got much more. This was supposed to be a part-time job for Marsden, but he never did anything part time. Besides, there was nothing else for him. He lived in a dormitory like a student. He taught classes. He had no girl-friend, no outside interests. So he threw himself into coaching.
And here was the limit of Marsden's knowledge of gymnastics: As a diver at State College (now Central University), he took a couple of gymnastics classes to improve his diving. When he became a gymnastics coach, he made up for lost time. He read everything he could find on the sport. He watched videotapes. He attended clinics. He observed other schools' programs and coaches.
"I became obsessive," he said. "I wanted to learn everything." He looked at his lack of experience in the sport as an advantage. "I had no stigmas. I was willing to try new things."
And he did. Looking for every advantage he could find, Marsden borrowed from other sports and added a few innovations of his own. He retained a team nutritionist. He recruited a former judge to critique his gymnasts' routines in practice. He hired a part-time meet director to ensure professionally run home competitions. He hired a weightlifting/conditioning expert and sent the Utes to the weight room at a time when gymnasts didn't lift weights.
Marsden enlisted a sports psychologist to build the Utes' nerves and powers of concentration. He retained an exercise physiologist who, by utilizing computers and attaching wires and electrodes underneath the Utes' leotards, conducted exhaustive studies to improve their mechanics and training and to understand their injuries.
Including two assistants, two physicians and an academic advisor, Marsden's staff of consultants eventually swelled to a football-like 11 people.
Marsden himself became one of the first to address the problem of eating disorders among female gymnasts and other problems unique to female athletes. He also recruited nationally, another first in this fledging college sport.
Finally, when Marsden had a product, he was ready to market it. He pestered the media repeatedly for coverage until one day an exasperated reporter told him, "My job is to sell newspapers and write about what people want to read. When 5,000 people are watching your meets, you won't have to call me."
Marsden went back to work. Borrowing from the NBA, he began home meets with Showtime - fireworks, spotlights and music. Borrowing from college football and basketball teams, he oversaw the production of a full-fledged media guide, with pictures, statistics, heights and weights.
He held clinics to raise funds and attract recruits, and he recruited sponsors from the local business community. He launched eye-catching promotional campaigns that showcased his gymnasts' physiques (read: sex appeal) on posters and signs. One of his advertisements, an artsy (some said sexy or sexist) photo of Amy Trepanier in a leotard on a billboard that overlooked I-15, created a major controversy among P.C. busybodies and feminists. Let them rage. Marsden responded by appearing on the same sign himself, wearing a white tutu that advertised the arts festival while also lampooning the Trepanier sign.
The bottom line: In the last five years the Utes have averaged about 12,000 fans at home meets, including 13,164 for five meets last year, which broke their own NCAA attendance record for all women's collegiate sports. As a result, according to Athletic Director Chris Hill, the program is close to paying for itself annually - a claim few collegiate sports anywhere can make beyond the basketball court.
Says Marsden, "Every piece of information that comes out of our program, I want it to have a certain look - the promotions, the ticket campaign, what the athletes look like, the uniforms. I want every other program to use us as a standard."
And they have. Just as Marsden once studied other teams, now they are studying him. They call the Utes' strength coach asking for a copy of their strength program. They call the team's psychologist for help. They copy the Ute media guide. They ask to visit the Utes' gym. Rival coaches call Marsden and ask, "What are you doing? How did you get those crowds?"
The Utes say all this sharing with other teams has cut their competitive advantage - they have won only two national titles in the last six years after winning six consecutively - but the Utes still have something the other programs don't: Marsden.
II. THE MANIAC
For months at a time, Marsden works maniacally, 10 hours or more a day, until finally he crashes for two or three days of non-stop sleep, as if to recharge his batteries, and then he resumes hisfurious pace.
"He's maybe the most amazing person I've ever met," says one longtime member of the athletic department. "Any vocation he did, he would be the best at it. He's extremely driven and intelligent, and he works harder than anybody else, too."
Not everyone, of course, likes Marsden. Some have called him the Bobby Knight of gymnastics. His confrontations with gymnastics officials have become annual occurrences. "When I go home to Florida and talk to other gymnasts," says Ute gymnast Suzanne Metz, "they say things like, `Isn't he really mean?' They think he's this monster. That's the image he portrays on the floor. He's very businesslike and intimidating."
Says Marsden, "You don't go as far as we have without making enemies, pushing the status quo, pushing people who don't want to be pushed."
Marsden has done plenty of pushing. One year he fussed about the type of equipment that was used at the NCAA meet. Another year he protested the use of a judge at the NCAA meet who was a member of Georgia's gymnastics booster club. A few years ago, one coach reportedly said that the NCAA was sending a meet referee to the regional competition who "can stand up to Marsden."
"When others protest it's no big deal," Marsden once said. "When I do, it's a national scandal."
During last month's BYU-Utah dual competition, meet officials took quick offense because Marsden walked onto the floor to get an unobstructed view of the routine start values. After a heated exchange and a penalty against the Utes, Marsden pulled his team off the floor halfway through the competition. The incident probably had its beginnings in an old feud with local judges, whom he has criticized for the inconsistency of their scoring.
Last year Marsden was officially censured by the NCAA for leaving a coaches meeting (and knocking over a brief case and chair in the process) when he felt his concerns were not given the same consideration as that of other coaches because of past confrontations. That incident also was precipitated by another long feud, this one with Cheryl Levick, head of the NCAA gymnastics committee.
"If I feel my athletes are not being treated fairly, I'll say something," Marsden explains. "I'm a very competitive, combative personality. I have little or no respect for misused authority. When I get myself in trouble, right or wrong, it's for those reasons."
Says Hill, "Greg is a perfectionist. If things are not done right, the way he thinks they should be, he won't do it."
Name another man who would resign his position as head coach of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team simply because he didn't like the backroom politics. Marsden says he had been told that he would have full charge of the team, but then he discovered that the bureaucracy and the various private clubs and officials wielded their own power and had their own agenda that "was not in the best interests of the athletes."
At the 1987 World Championships, Marsden was asked by U.S. judges to schmooze with rival judges, bearing gifts and a good word for his team, and to participate in a plan to influence the scoring. He balked, but they appealed to his sense of team loyalty, saying his refusal would hurt his athletes. Marsden went along with the plan, then thought better of it when he returned home. He confessed the scheme to the media, but the other alleged participants denied his claim.
"I did the wrong thing, and I was willing to admit that," says Marsdsen. "Everyone else lied."
Embittered by his first taste of international athletics, Marsden resigned as coach, although U.S. officials tried to change his mind. He couldn't change the system, but he wouldn't be a part of it, either.
"He's a highly principled person," says Marsden's wife, Megan. "I'm not sure where it comes from."
III. THE TRAGEDY
Marsden never knew his father. He was a Navy pilot stationed in Guam whose job was to fly into the eye of typhoons to allow scientists to study the storm. One day he flew into the storm and disappeared. They never found the plane or the bodies. Greg was 3. After the tragedy, the family moved to tiny Clarksville, Ark. (pop. 4,000), where his mother was raised. Her problems were only beginning.
"(The accident) was devastating to my mother," says Greg. "Whether that was the full reason or it was physiology or both, she had a series of nervous breakdowns. It was very traumatic."
For the rest of her days, she was in and out of mental institutions (Marsden believes she was paranoid schizophrenic). For a time she would be fine, and then . . . Once she woke all three children in the middle of the night, herded them into a bedroom and locked the door, convinced that they had been hypnotized and that someone was trying to break into the house. At his mother's insistence, Greg, the oldest, stuck his head out the window and screamed for help. The next morning, the sheriff came and took her away in a squad car while her children looked on.
When their mother was home, the Marsden children lived with her; when she was hospitalized they lived with their grandparents. Greg resented and disliked his grandfather, a strict man who inflicted beatings as discipline. "He wasn't a horrible person," says Greg. "He took our family in. I think I blamed him for my mom. I saw him taking her away to institutions. It made me a smart mouth. I said mean things. A part of what I got I deserved."
Greg's solution was "to stay gone all the time." After school, he played games on the school grounds, and, when he was older, participated in every available team sport. The teams were the nearest thing to a family he had.
When he was 17, Marsden came home to find his mother in a coma. He carried her to the car and drove her to the hospital. She died the next day. For the next year he watched cancer consume his grandmother until, in the end, she was shrunken and frail and struggling for every breath she took. Years later, while on the floor of the 1984 Olympic Games, Marsden received a call from an uncle telling him that his grandfather had taken his own life.
Looking back on his troubled youth, Marsden says, "It made me very independent and determined . . . But to survive I had to develop that quality."
What Marsden needed was . . .
IV. A LITTLE ROMANCE
Marsden thought he had achieved everything when he and the Utes won their first national championship in 1981 in Salt Lake City. The last one to leave the Huntsman Center, he walked to his car, trophy in hand, drove home and walked into an empty house. He set the trophy on the kitchen table and sat down, and as he sat there, taking it all in, he marveled that the sense of elation was ebbing from his body. The happiest night of his life turned into one of the saddest, and suddenly he knew why. He was alone. His gymnasts were out celebrating with family and friends, but he had no one with whom to share the victory.
With further reflection, Marsden concluded that championships and work were relatively meaningless; that in the end, he would be forgotten by everyone within days after he retired - by everyone except loved ones, and he had none of those. The realization startled him. Of necessity, he had been mostly a loner throughout his life. It was all he knew.
In the coming months, something began to happen to Marsden that he swore he never would allow: he was falling in love with one of his athletes. During the season, he had argued often and loudly with freshman Megan McCunniff, a pixie blond-haired freshman from Iowa, but soon Marsden realized that he had other feelings. He was tortured by them. How could this happen? He tried to ignore the feelings, but couldn't. He consulted friends. What should I do? This was unethical and potentially scandalous, and there was an 11-year age difference to boot.
Finally he called her into his office and confessed his crush. McCunniff was dumbfounded. She had thought Marsden was going to cut her scholarship. Now her coach was saying he wanted to date her. He told her to take the summer to think about it. After exchanging phone calls and letters, she decided the feeling was mutual. To head off scandal, Marsden flew to Iowa to get her parents' permission - "I felt like a 12-year-old," he recalls. "My voice was cracking. I was so nervous" - and he discussed the matter with the team and Athletic Director Arnie Ferrin. "I didn't want to sneak around," says Marsden.
Two years later Marsden and McCunniff married.
"We were very fortunate," says Marsden. "There were no problems. I guess now if that happened, I'd have to give up my job."
The Marsden's first family of gymnastics is five now, including Montana Dakota and the Utes' official Gym Dog, Sadie, a lab mutt who hangs out at the gym every afternoon. McCunniff, a two-time NCAA all-around champion, is a paid assistant coach to her husband.
The man who would "be gone all the time" is now a homebody family man when he isn't coaching, and Megan, given his upbringing, marvels at how he has taken to fatherhood, but no more so than Greg.
"Marriage has given me something I never realized I missed - companionship and a family," says Marsden. "I never had thought it was a big deal until Megan came along. Given my background, I could've gone through life not knowing. That's the thing I appreciate most."
Win or lose this weekend, Marsden won't return to an empty house.