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By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Foundation

Mary Lou Retton knows all about "getting out of your comfort zone."

At 14 years old, she left the safe haven of her home in Fairmont, W. Va., to move to Houston, Texas, and train with legendary gymnastics coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi.

"This was the chance of a lifetime," said Retton, speaking Thursday night at a fundraiser dinner for the Baylor Acrobatics & Tumbling team that includes her daughter, Shayla Kelley. "We talked about it until we were blue in the face. And finally, my parents said, `OK, Mary Lou, tell us what's in your heart.' And I told them, `I don't want to spend the rest of my life thinking I could have gone to the Olympics. I can't not try, I have to try, I want to go.' And that was it."

The Karolyis never promised the Retton family that Mary Lou would even make the USA Olympic team, much less win a gold medal. But, Bela said, "I think she has the raw materials, the raw potential, to have a chance."

Her first chance came just a few months after moving to Houston, when Retton went to the 1983 American Cup at Madison Square Gardens in New York City as an alternate. When top USA gymnast Diane Durham suffered a hip injury, Bela told Retton, "This is your chance. Don't let me down."

"After I picked myself off the floor in complete shock and nerves and butterflies . . . I was like, `Maybe he's right, maybe this is my chance,''' she said. "I ended up beating the Russian champion to win that American Cup title. I was able to seize the moment.

"We all have those moments in our lives where we see that door of opportunity just starting at us right there in the face. Dig deep, find the courage to go through it, open the door."

The next month, Retton's face was splashed across the cover of International Gymnast magazine. "The judges knew my name, and so did my competitors. `Hey, that's Mary Lou, she's the one that won the American Cup.'''

But, with the Olympics looming, Retton knew she had to go win another major event "that was outside of my nice and safe little comfort zone."

"We all spend most of our lives living in that comfort zone -- avoiding risks, avoiding the unknown and avoiding the potential to fail," she said. "Why do we go there? Because it's safe. Sometimes, you have to go outside of that comfort zone to get that edge. You have to, you must, especially in the competitive world we live in today."

Traveling to Tokyo, Japan for the prestigious Chunichi Cup, Retton faced a litany of tests and obstacles, including "foreign judges in a highly subjective sport" and a country where she didn't know the language at all.

"And I overcame every single one of those things to win that title," she said. "People that can adjust to being outside of their comfort zone and still perform, those are the people that can become champions -- in athletics and in life."

As part of her Olympic training, Retton traveled with the Karolyis to summer camps all over the country. She was doing her final tumbling pass for her floor exercise routine one night, when she "felt and heard my knee pop."

After icing it that night, "the situation was much worse" in the morning, "so they rush me to the local emergency room and do all these tests."

"This doctor walks in and says we've got to do surgery right away. I thought there had to be Candid Camera cameras in the room. Or, for you younger people, I thought I was getting punked," she said. "Surgery, are you kidding? . . . I'm dating myself, but arthroscopic surgery had just came out. And even though it was an easy operation, I had less than six weeks to have surgery, rehab the knee and then try to get back in some kind of shape. I remember one of the doctors on that team saying, `I think they should just go back home to West Virginia and forget about the Olympics.'''

Stubbornly, Retton said, "I don't care what they say."

"I can't live my life wondering, `What if?' I told them, `I'm going to have the surgery.' I'm going to try. I don't care what they say, I'm going to try. I can't give up, I'm not a quitter."

The next day, she was back in the gym "putting myself through one of the most difficult times in my life."

"You talk about frustration," she said. "The day before, I was in the best shape of my life -- Olympics shape, once-in-a-lifetime shape."

Miraculously, by the time she arrived in Los Angeles for the '84 Olympics, Retton said she was "completely ready."

"Don't let other people put limits on you," she said. "It doesn't matter how crazy and ridiculous it may seem to everybody else. If you believe it's possible, you can achieve anything. You can."

In a neck-and-neck battle for the all-around gold medal with Romanian gymnast Ecaterina Szabo, Retton trailed by 0.15 with two events to go. After scoring a perfect 10.0 on her floor exercise, she still needed another 10.0 on the vault to win it and a 9.95 to share it with Szabo.

Even with a surgically repaired right knee, Retton stuck the landing on her vault and became the first American to win the all-around gold medal at the Olympics. She also won silver medals in the team competition and vault and bronze medals in the floor exercise and uneven bars, earning her "Sportswoman of the Year" honors from Sports Illustrated and a coveted spot on the Wheaties cereal box.

"It wasn't supposed to happen," she said. "You can always avoid taking risks, meeting challenges. There are going to be things that are dangerous to our safe comfort zone. Taking those risks and meeting those challenges head on, we learn so much from our failures. Sometimes, it's the only way to make your dreams come true"

Retton admits that when Shayla first got involved with Acrobatics & Tumbling, her immediate reaction was, "Ah, I'm not sure about this."

"And then watching my daughter grow -- Baylor, you guys have got it going on," she said. "Think about the legacy you are creating and leaving. Coach Fee (Mulkey), you're amazing. My daughter, you inspire her. She's scared of you. You're so inspiring, you're inspiring to me. Look at what you've done."

Kelley, a senior top from Houston, Texas, has been a key part of back-to-back national championship teams and added an individual national championship in the pyramid event last year.

Baylor opens the 2017 season Feb. 12, hosting Quinnipiac at the Ferrell Center.

"Get the word out," Retton said, "because these girls, these athletes, are busting their butts in that gym, on that floor, every day. I expect everybody to be in the Ferrell Center. Come watch these girls. I'll be there, yelling and screaming."