And he kept right on dancing. When he was seventeen, Bruce won the Hong Kong cha-cha championship.
It seemed that Bruce Lee had finally found his calling. But that alone couldn’t keep him out of trouble.
Now that he had a reputation as the best kung fu fighter in Hong Kong, Bruce found himself constantly challenged to street fights and rooftop boxing matches. Though he won most of these bouts, they were violent and sometimes bloody. And often they ended with the police being called.
After one such altercation, a police detective arrived and knocked on the door of his family’s apartment. Bruce’s father answered.
“Your son’s behavior has gotten out of control,” the officer said. “If he gets into just one more fight, I might have to put him in jail.”
That was all Bruce’s parents needed to hear. They hoped their son would go to college one day, but now they realized that he had a better chance of ending up behind bars. Bruce’s mother urged him to leave Hong Kong and go to San Francisco to live with his older sister. He could stay out of trouble there and pursue his dream of becoming a movie star.
After thinking it over, Bruce agreed that his mother was right. The streets of Hong Kong were no place for a young man with his potential. In April of 1959, he packed his bags and left his home. In his pocket he had only $115, a gift from his parents. Bruce spent the next three weeks crossing the Pacific Ocean on his way to California.
Just as his mother had predicted, little Jun Fan had “returned again” to the city of his birth to seek his fortune. Bruce eventually founded his own martial arts school. Students—including famous actors and outstanding athletes—paid top dollar to learn his distinctive fighting style, which he called “Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu.”
In time, Bruce’s name became so well known that Hollywood producers started calling. He appeared in movies and TV shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In one movie, Bruce fought against the celebrated American martial artist Chuck Norris. In another, he squared off against the seven-foot-two-inch basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Perhaps his most famous film was his last one, a play on his childhood nickname called Enter the Dragon.
All the while, he continued to enter and win martial arts competitions throughout the United States and around the world. When he died in 1973, Bruce Lee was the world’s first bona fide kung fu superstar.
Cassius Clay may not have been born a heavyweight, but even as a kid, he knew how to throw a punch.
At birth, Cassius weighed six pounds, seven ounces—just about average for a baby born in 1942. But like all great boxers, he quickly figured out it’s not the size of the man in the fight, but the size of the fight in the man. Or in his case, the infant.
One day when Cassius was six months old, he was lying in bed next to his father, Cassius Sr. He stretched his little arms to yawn and accidentally slugged his dad in the face, almost knocking out his front tooth.
Cassius’s dad later called the blow his son’s “first knockout punch.”
Right then and there, his parents should have known that Cassius was born to box. But just to be sure, he kept giving them hints. He took to walking on his tiptoes, like a fighter dancing nimbly around the ring. And he never stopped talking, as if constantly egging on an opponent. Cassius’s mother, Odessa, even started calling him “G. G.” for all his “gibber-gabber.”
Then there was the peculiar brand of dodgeball that Cassius liked to play. He would challenge his younger brother Rudy to throw rocks at him. With the lightning-fast reflexes he would later show in the boxing ring, Cassius quickly dodged every flying stone.
No matter how many rocks Rudy threw, he was never able to hit his big brother.
Sometimes Cassius’s pugnacious disposition got the better of him. For example, he had a bad habit of getting up in the middle of the night and throwing everything in his dresser onto the floor. No one knew why he did it, but his parents counseled him to keep his temper under control.
Cassius and Rudy often got into trouble in their neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. One time they destroyed a birdbath in the yard of one of their neighbors, Mrs. Wheatley. People started calling the Clay brothers “the Wrecking Crew” for the damage they caused. Some even started bolting the doors to their houses whenever Cassius and Rudy came around.
That wasn’t the kind of reputation Cassius wanted. He realized he would have to find a better outlet for his energy. Fortunately, he was soon presented with the perfect opportunity.
When Cassius was twelve years old, his parents gave him a new bicycle, a red-and-white Schwinn that cost $60. It was just about his most prized possession.
One day he was out riding his new bike with his friend Johnny Willis when a rainstorm overtook them. To stay dry, the boys parked their bikes outside Louisville’s Columbia Auditorium and headed inside, where a large bazaar was under way. Cassius and Johnny spent the day browsing the booths and eating ice cream and popcorn.
At the end of the day, when they returned to retrieve their bicycles, the new red Schwinn was gone!
Tears filled Cassius’s eyes as he felt his anger rising. What should he do? He had no idea who took his bike, but he did have an idea of what he’d like to do to that person when he found out.
As luck would have it, Cassius found out that a police officer was in the basement of the Columbia Auditorium.
Boiling with rage, Cassius stormed into the basement. But when he opened the door, what he saw was no police station. To his surprise, he discovered a gym filled with men and boys punching bags, jumping rope, and sparring in the center of a velvet-lined boxing ring. If he wanted a fight, it looked like he’d come to the right place.
“Where’s the policeman they told me about?” Cassius asked.
Someone pointed to a kindly looking white-haired man who appeared to be in charge of the gym.
“I’m Joe Martin,” said the man.
“You’re gonna whup him, huh?” Martin replied. “Don’t you think you ought to learn how to fight first?”
That thought had never occurred to Cassius. All his life he’d been throwing punches, ducking flying rocks, and promising to pummel anyone who crossed him. He’d never realized that there was a right way and a wrong way to fight.
So when Joe Martin offered him boxing lessons at his gym, Cassius jumped at the chance. The search for the bike thief was put on hold and his training in the ring was begun.
Cassius became a dedicated trainee. He spent almost every waking moment learning to box at the gym. Joe started by teaching him the fundamentals: how to stand, how to punch, how to move his feet. When Cassius took his turn punching the heavy bag, Martin showed him how to throw rapid-fire jabs instead of big haymakers that would tire him out.
“Cassius, imagine there’s a fly on that bag,” Martin said.
Almost immediately, Joe saw that his new student possessed one of the most important attributes a boxer can have: speed. Cassius knew how to anticipate an opponent’s punch and then dodge out of the way at the last possible second. He never seemed to blink, not even for an instant, always keeping his eyes locked on the hands of his opponent. Cassius was so fast with his eyes, Martin said, that you could hand the other boxer a screen door and he wouldn’t hit Cassius with it fifteen times in fifteen rounds.
To complement his quickness, Cassius used fitness and nutrition to build up his body. Some days, he got up at four in the morning and ran several miles before heading over to the gym. For breakfast, he drank a quart of milk and two raw eggs. At school, he needed two trays to carry his huge lunches.
Cassius refused to drink soda pop, because he didn’t want to put on weight. Instead, he carried around a bottle of water with a clove of garlic in it. By the time he was done training, he was fit and trim and weighed 89 pounds.
After six weeks of lessons, Cassius was finally ready to step into the ring for the first time. His opponent was named Ronnie O’Keefe. As they squared off under the watchful eye of a referee, the two young boxers looked tiny
in their oversized fourteen-ounce boxing gloves.
For three one-minute rounds, Cassius and Ronnie boxed their hearts out. Then they tapped gloves and went back to their neutral corners. Cassius managed to land a few more punches and was awarded a narrow victory. “I will be the greatest of all time!” he proclaimed as the referee raised his arm in triumph. It was the first of many times he would make that claim.
No one knows whether Cassius ever got his bicycle back, but the detour he took the day it was stolen put him on the path to greatness.
Over the next six years, Cassius Clay won 100 of the 108 bouts he fought. By the time he turned fourteen, he was recognized as one of the most promising amateur boxers in America. Just four years later, he was selected to join the U.S. boxing team at the Olympic Games in Rome. He won the gold medal, mesmerizing fans with his lightning footwork and bold, brash personality. He then went on to become one of the greatest heavyweight champions the world has ever known.
His old life as Cassius Clay would soon change, as would his name, when he joined the Nation of Islam. It was then that the legend of Muhammad Ali—forged in a basement of the Columbia Auditorium—truly began.
He started out big—and he just kept getting bigger.
When Jesse Kuhaulua was born, he weighed ten pounds fourteen ounces. He was by far the biggest kid in his hometown of Happy Valley on the Hawaiian island of Maui. At Wailuku Elementary School, his classmates came up with a nickname for him: Big Daddy. They weren’t teasing him, though. Everybody liked Jesse. Even the school bullies stayed out of his way, probably because they were afraid to start a fight with him. Nobody wanted to mess with Big Daddy.
Despite its name, Happy Valley was a poor, tough neighborhood. Jesse’s family never had much money. Jesse’s shoes always had holes. When he wanted to watch TV, he went to the local drugstore to peek at its televion set through the window. But even though he didn’t have as much as some kids, Jesse was still happy and active. He liked sports and seemed to have boundless energy for every kind of physical activity.
At the end of a warm day in Happy Valley, Jesse would look up at the stars and dream of traveling to faraway places. Whenever a plane flew by overhead, he imagined he was on board and that it was taking him to Japan—a place he had read about in books. Jesse vowed that he would one day go there to live.
One morning when he was in the second grade, Jesse had a terrible accident that changed his life forever. He was late for school and came sprinting out of his house without looking. As he bounded across the main road, a truck full of pineapples crashed into him—bam!—launching him twenty yards into the air. Jesse broke both legs and spent the next six months in a hospital.
After he got out of the hospital, Jesse had to learn to walk all over again. He was in a wheelchair for another four months before he finally took his first steps on his own. When he returned to school, Jesse found it hard to keep up with the other kids because his legs tired easily. He tried out for the softball and track teams, but he was turned down because he was too slow. Jesse thought his days of playing sports were over.
The accident may have slowed Jesse, but it didn’t stop his growth spurts. Every day, his mom would give him a quarter to buy lunch at school. And every day, Jesse would pocket the quarter and go without lunch to save some money.
But still he never lost weight. By the time he was twelve, Jesse was six feet one inch tall and weighed 260 pounds. “If I can’t be the fastest kid in school,” Jesse figured, “I can still be the biggest—and the strongest.”
To help his family make ends meet—and to build strength in his legs—Jesse offered to do odd jobs around Happy Valley. He mowed lawns, cleaned yards, and tended the grounds of the local church. Perhaps his toughest job was working for a man who repaired washing machines. Jesse had to carry the machines out of people’s homes and load them onto a truck. After a few months of heavy lifting, “Big Daddy” was bigger and stronger than ever.
By the time he got to high school, Jesse had grown another inch and gained another twenty pounds of muscle. He felt so strong that he decided to try out for the football team. This time he made it. He earned a spot in the starting backfield and was soon scoring touchdowns. But when Jesse looked around, he realized he wasn’t succeeding because of his athletic ability. The other players were afraid of getting run over by him. As soon as Big Daddy started thundering in their direction, they darted out of the way.
Jesse wished he could find a sport where he could put his skill and his size to his advantage.
Jesse’s football coach, Larry Shishido, knew just the solution. He told Jesse about the ancient Japanese tradition of sumo wrestling, in which two competitors use a variety of throws, twists, and body drops to try to force each other out of a circular ring. In this sport, size matters. But the biggest man does not always win. Best of all, Coach Shishido said, sumo would help strengthen Jesse’s legs, making him stronger where the accident had left him weakest.
Jesse took to the sumo ring like a duck to water. He joined the Maui Sumo Club and began practicing twice a week.
Soon he was competing in tournaments and bringing home prizes: a transistor radio one time, a bottle of soy sauce another time.
In fact, Jesse won so many matches that he gained a reputation as one of the best rikishi—or sumo wrestlers—in Hawaii. When he was seventeen, a group of coaches from Japan came to the islands to watch him wrestle.
“What a monster,” said one of the coaches when he first laid eyes on Jesse. “If this boy ever comes to Japan, he will be a champion for sure.”
That was all Jesse needed to hear. He had always wanted to travel to Japan, ever since he was a young boy watching airplanes in the night sky. Now it looked like he would get his chance. There was just one small problem: Jesse had promised his mother that he would finish high school first. When the Japanese coaches invited him to Japan to join their sumo stable, Jesse told them they would have to wait another year until he finished his studies.
That was fine, said the Japanese coaches. Instead of being disappointed that Jesse had turned down their invitation, they took it as a sign that he was majime, a Japanese word meaning “serious” or “dedicated.”
In the meantime, Jesse continued to stay in shape by loading crates onto trucks for the Maui Pineapple Company. Though a pineapple truck had nearly robbed him of his dreams, now it was the agent that kept him strong enough to make those dreams a reality.
At last, when his studies were completed, Jesse won permission from his mother to go to Japan and join a professional sumo stable. It was the beginning of a glorious career. Jesse wrestled in Japan for more than twenty years and was the first American-born sumo wrestler to win a grand sumo tournament.
Now known as Takamiyama Daigoro, the big boy from Happy Valley retired in 1984. He is considered one of the living legends of the sport of sumo.
The first time Julie Krone sat on a horse, she knew it was where she was meant to be.
It happened one day when her mother was talking over the sale of one of the family’s horses with a neighbor. To show what a gentle animal it was, Judi Krone let her two-year-old daughter climb up on its back. While the adults were talking, the horse began to wander off. Julie instinctively took the reins and began to tug on them, leading the horse back to the stable.
From that day forward, Julie never met a horse she couldn’t ride. Until she met Filly.
Filly was the foal of Julie’s first pony, Dixie. She was half Arab, half Shetland and just about the stubbornest animal that anyone in Eau Claire, Michigan, had ever seen. She fought against everything. If Julie tied her to a fence, Filly would gnaw through the rope and break free. When Julie tried to put a bridle on her, Filly would plop down on the grass with her legs in the air.
Whenever Julie did manage to mount Filly, the horse bristled and bucked.
More than once, Julie was thrown off and left stranded miles from her house, with no choice but to walk back by herself. She quickly learned that wh
en you’re riding a horse, you must be ready for anything.
Julie’s mother, worried that no one could control her daughter’s horse, wanted to sell Filly. But Julie refused to give up—she worked doubly hard to win the trust of the ornery horse. To calm the animal, Julie placed a T-shirt over Filly’s eyes and gently guided her, a training method that usually worked.
But sometimes Julie’s techniques backfired. One day when Filly was blindfolded, she charged over a deep hole, narrowly plunging both horse and rider into the gap. Another time, she galloped straight into a barn door. Julie ducked at the last second to avoid banging her head.
Over time, however, Filly learned to trust Julie, and together they faced many obstacles. They learned how to cross crumbling bridges and to ease their way through rushing creeks. Filly learned not to panic when unexpected objects appeared or if obstacles popped up in their path. And Julie provided all the encouragement the horse needed during her training.
Julie’s bond with Filly continued to grow and strengthen. She taught the horse to do tricks, like bowing, sitting, and counting with her hooves. She even trained her to answer questions by nodding her head for yes or shaking it to mean no.
Eventually Julie began to enter competitions with Filly. Her bedroom walls were soon festooned with ribbons won at riding and jumping events. People began to say that Julie had a special gift for communicating with horses.
As she grew older, Julie set her sights on a career racing thoroughbred horses. The ribbons on her wall were replaced by photographs of jockeys and racetracks.
When she was eighteen, Julie left home for Kentucky to pursue her dream of becoming a professional jockey. Over the next thirteen years, she won more than three thousand races across America. In 1993, she won the Belmont Stakes astride a horse named Colonial Affair, making her the first female jockey ever to win one of the classic Triple Crown races.
Kid Athletes Page 6
