Phoebe Mills relaxes on the couch with a bagel and a bowl of canned pears on her lap. As she eats, her brother Whittaker roller-skates into the room and sits down to play the piano. In the kitchen of the apartment she shares with two of her children, Susan Mills stirs the stew on the stove and then scurries to find the car keys.
She has a busy night ahead of her. First she has to drop her daughter off at the gym and then it`s out to the airport to pick up her husband, Chris, who`s arriving from Chicago for a visit.
Behind this picture of domestic disarray lies a lifestyle that is actually quite orderly. So rigorous are its demands, in fact, they can be met only with a profusion of love and family support. Both exist here in abundance.
Phoebe Mills, who is from Northfield, has been training with gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi in Houston since the age of 10. Now, four years later, she is a sure shot to make the 1988 Olympic team. Like Karolyi disciples Mary Lou Retton and Julianne McNamara, and Nadia Comaneci before them, Phoebe has an opportunity to achieve the ultimate in her sport. It is an awesome prospect for a 4-foot-9-inch, 80-pound girl, but neither she nor her remarkable family view it as such. To them, it`s just a natural part of life.
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Phoebe`s days start before dawn, when she awakens her mother to drive her to Karolyi`s massive gymnasium. There, seven of Karolyi`s finest gymasts, girls who have competed at the highest levels in their sport, gather in the early morning light and begin their tricks. With every ounce of Retton-like zeal they can muster, they whip their lithe bodies over the horse again and again. They work quickly. Precisely. Quietly. Karolyi watches from a corner of the gym. The girls vault for nearly an hour.
Then they move to the beam, where Karolyi`s wife, Marta, takes over. Each girl has a beam to herself. In concert, they perform under Marta`s direction and then watch when she demonstrates a correction. The girls strive to perfect every nuance, to make every swing of the arm graceful and every step on the beam confident. They labor with concentration for almost another hour.
At 9 a.m., they scatter. Susan Mills picks up Phoebe and heads home, where she makes breakfast and Phoebe gets ready for school.
At 11, Susan drives her daughter to Westfield High, where Phoebe is a freshman with an ”A” average in Latin, world history and geometry. Phoebe also takes English but by correspondence from the University of Texas, since she is not able to fit another course into her busy day.
At 2:30, she waves goodbye to friends at school and hops in the car. Once home, she eats another meal and then takes a nap.
At 4:30, she`s up and ready to eat again.
At 5, she`s in the gym, where the workout lasts around four hours this time.
By 9, she`s home for another meal and homework.
At 11, it`s lights out.
”The days seem so short,” says Phoebe. ”Sometimes I wonder what would I`d do if I didn`t have gymnastics.” Then she smiles and says, ”I`d just sit home, watch TV and eat.”
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Susan Mills was working as a speech therapist when she met her husband on the slopes at Boyne Mountain, Mich. He had lost a leg in a tractor accident when he was 13 but had gone on to become a national amputee ski champion. Susan, who held nine varsity letters from high school and who had broken both legs in a car accident not long before the encounter, felt tremendous admiration, and an immediate attraction, for Chris. He asked for her telephone number while they waited in a lift line, and three months later they were married.
Soon after, they moved to the Chicago suburbs, where Chris went to work as an attorney for Chicago & North Western Railroad. Over the years, they had four children and adopted two more. Their kids are a most unusual crew, and it`s clear they are the focal point in their parents` world.
”All our time is spent with the kids,” Susan says. ”Everyone has a gift, and I have a gift of motivating children. I appreciate them as individuals and support them.” Adds Chris: ”We have high standards. We tell them, `If you`re going to do something, do it well.` ”
Nathaniel, the oldest child, is 17 and a world-class speedskater who may have a shot at the Winter Olympics next year in Calgary, Canada.
Hilary, the second in line at 15, is a soccer player and a speedskater and the first in the family to win a gold medal (in speedskating at the U.S. Sports Festival in Houston last summer). Phoebe took six medals in gymnastics at that same festival–she competed after Hilary–but also holds an age-group record in speedskating and is a more than competent diver.
Daughter Jesse, 12, is a figure skater now training with noted coach Barbara Roles in Los Angeles. Adopted sons Lucas, 8, and Whittaker, 5, are gifted musically, though each has dabbled in sports as well.
”They are good competitors because they have a good self-concept and they have a lot of love–love meaning security and affection,” Susan says.
”Because of that, they are all willing to test themselves.”
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Phoebe didn`t know just how much she would test herself when she first linked up with Bela Karolyi. After Bill Sands left the Mid-America Twisters in Northbrook, Phoebe was without a coach, and so she attended a summer camp run by Karolyi in Merrill, Wis.
”She was a little fighter, a little hard-working girl,” recalls Karolyi, who had defected from Romania a few years before. ”It was a pleasure working with her, no question about it. Yes, I told her, I can see a strong upcoming gymnast.”
Those words prompted Phoebe to ask her parents if she could finish out the summer at Karolyi`s gym in Houston. Go ahead, they said, never imagining that she would choose to stay on a permanent basis.
She moved in initially with the Spiller family, whose daughter Paige trained with Karolyi at the time. Later, she lived with another family, and then another. At one point, she lived in the same home with Retton, and to this day, the two are good friends.
But the moves eventually took their toll. The instability of her living situation, coupled with a bloody kamikaze-like crash into the vault at a meet in Louisiana early last year, sent her confidence plummeting. When Susan went to Houston for a visit last spring, she was stunned. ”She couldn`t even walk on the beam without wobbling,” Susan remembers. ”I just intended to stay a few days, but I called Chris and told him I couldn`t leave.”
So she stayed. Whittaker is now the third member of the Houston contingent, while Chris stays at home in Northfield with Nathaniel, Hilary and Lucas.
At about this time, another Karolyi prodigy had begun to emerge. Kristie Phillips won last year`s American Cup competition, then became the youngest athlete to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Kristie was hailed as the new Mary Lou, and Phoebe admits Kristie`s fame affected her.
”Phoebe really went through a hard time,” Karoyli recalls. ”Her workouts were not excelling and we could not encourage her. We could not tell her she was doing great because we could not fool her. Then her mom came down. There was no special change at first, but two or three months later, Phoebe really picked up. She was much more confident. She started to look at you a little more nasty. Yes, nasty. The look said: `I`m my own boss. I`m not a puppy.`
”There are great moments in gymnastics, when a girl feels, `The world is mine.` But they are relatively short. Kids get tired and sometimes get down. Minor injuries, long hours, physical fatigue, an upsetting situation at school. You ask the girls, `What`s wrong?` and they say, `Nothing.` The only person they`ll tell their little problems and their pains to is their mom.”
”She has comforted me a lot,” Phoebe says of her mother. ”If I ever had a problem, I could talk to her, and when I missed home, she`d be there. After Kristie won the American Cup, I felt all the attention had gone to her. But I realized that my time will come. I realized I had to get psyched up for all the future meets and not worry about anybody else.”
The realization paid dividends. In November, Phoebe burst onto the international gymnastics scene with a victory at the USA-China Classic in Hawaii. She not only took three of a possible four gold medals but outscored her teammate Phillips at a most prestigious competition.
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Karolyi calls Phoebe a four-event gymnast, which means she has no weakness on any piece of apparatus. ”Phoebe is not the type of gymnast who`ll get her scores through a bubbly personality,” he says. ”Her strength are her skills, to come out and perform so accurately. She reminds me of Maxi Gnauck from East Germany (who tied for a silver medal in all-around competition and won a gold on the uneven bars at the 1980 Moscow Olympics). Maxi never smiled too much, but she did everything so precisely, so spectacularly.”
Phoebe broke her wrist in the gym in January, but her desire to return was so great that Karolyi says: ”I had to slow her down. She would not give up for a minute. It was a very positive indicator to me. Phoebe is a forward- looking person. She never runs away from her difficulties.”
The wrist has almost healed now, but the injury came at a bad time. Next Saturday and Sunday, Phoebe will be competing in Fairfax, Va., in the American Cup, a meet that will probably give her more exposure than any other so far.
”The American Cup competition is so well-honored around the world,”
says Karolyi. ”It is a preview of who is going to the Olympics. This year the standards are going to be way higher than last year. Every country is going to send those who`ll be contenders for the Olympic medals. An injury won`t help Phoebe, but I don`t think it will be a major handicap.”
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Phoebe sits on the couch and enjoys a few tranquil moments before her nap, slowly eating Ritz crackers spread with peanut butter. Between Whittaker`s drawings on a wall in the dining room is a poster promoting the Seoul Olympics, and Phoebe acknowledges that the prospect of realizing that dream is exciting.
She draws strength, she says, from remembering the former Olympians Karolyi has trained and from thinking about how hard Retton worked. ”I want to put in that much effort or more,” she says. She also draws strength from Karolyi, who she says yells quite a bit but is ”really nice. You try your hardest to get whatever he says right and then you won`t have to worry. It makes you want to go for it harder.”
But in the final analysis, she draws strength from within, tapping into a source that has existed from the day she stepped into a gym at the age of 6.
”I pretty much motivate myself,” she says quietly. ”I can`t do it for my parents. I have to do it for myself. You go through your down periods, when you want to go home or quit, but you have to look at the good times. I`m especially motivated when I learn a new trick. I want to go to the gym the next day and practice to make it perfect.”
That inner source of motivation has carried her far, and to help her go the rest of the way, Susan will live in Houston at least until the Olympic trials. ”It`s hard to face in a way,” Chris says. ”Though this may sound funny, I think we can only do it because we are a really close family. It is tough on the kids. We worry a little about the fact they don`t have two parents to answer their questions.”
”But there`s always a silver lining in every dark cloud,” Susan says with a laugh. ”The older kids all cook now and do their own laundry.”
