Ron O'Brien, Jennifer Chandler Stevenson, and Micki King

[00:01] MICKI KING: Yes. My name is Mickey King I am 75 years old, going on 41. Today is Friday, February, November 1, 2019. I am in Colorado Springs at the reunion for Olympians. My interview partners are Jennifer Chandler Stevenson and Ron O'Brien. Coach, longtime coach.

[00:28] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: My name is Jennifer Chandler Stevenson I just turned 60. Yikes. Today is Friday, November 1, 2019. We're at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs for the US Olympic and Paralympic reunion and also to celebrate Ronnie's induction into the Olympic and Paralympic hall of Fame. Our interview partners today are Mickey King And we were not teammates, but, but we were. Mickey won a gold medal in 3 meter springboard in 1972, and I won a gold in 1976 and 3 meter springboard. And Mickey was my longtime. She didn't know it, but she was my mentor and I looked up to her and I still do. And then my other interview partner is Ron O'Brien, who I was fortunate enough to call my coach. And he took me to the Montreal Olympic Games and we won a gold medal in 1976.

[01:21] SPEAKER C: My name is Ron O'Brien. My age, unfortunately, is 81. Today's date is Friday, November 1, 2019, in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor Hotel. My interview partners are Mickey King and Jennifer Chandler Stevenson And my relation to them is I was a coach when they were diving and I coached Jennifer on my team.

[02:02] MICKI KING: Well, I am proud to be here to talk about some history in our great sport of diving. And you know, I started diving way, way, way before women and girls were involved in sports in a formal, competitive way back in 1950s. When I was growing up, there was no sports in high school or college for women. So when I started diving at the local ymca, by the way, it was flat for fun. I did it because it was fun to twist and spin and to try to make more somersaults than the little kids that were diving with me in the YMCA pool. And so my start was very basic and it was literally just for fun. And. And if it wasn't for that YMCA in my hometown of Pontiac, Michigan, where they let girls and women use their pool two times a week, if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be me today. I wouldn't be an Olympic champion. I dived in some YMCA meets as growing up, and at these meets was some divers, some women divers from University of Michigan, and they were being coached by Dick Kimball and Dick. I saw Dick giving them hints and helps and I thought, wow, that's pretty cool. And that's what I wanted. And that's how I ended up at the University of Michigan. Dick Kimball did not even know that I was going to go to school there. I showed up one day at the pool and walked in and introduced myself, and he was, as was Ron O'Brien, open to coaching women. Even though it was not in their job description. They were not coaching women. That was not what they did. They did it as a hobby, and they did it because the girls that showed up in their pools wanted to learn. That's exactly why they did it. And they were actually defying the rules. At least Dick Kimball was of their university. Should I stop here and let Jennifer or should I continue? The whole time.

[04:37] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: We'Re just kind of talking to each other as we go.

[04:39] MICKI KING: That's why I wanted to start with that how I started. And Jennifer obviously coming quite a bit behind me, I'm 15 years older than she is, would have a different start.

[04:52] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Well, I got started at a small, small country club in Birmingham, Alabama, out in the middle of the woods, where they didn't have anything but a pool and two pools, actually, in two locker rooms and a potato chip machine. That's all we had out there. And my first coach was Carlos de Cubas. He was the Olympic swimming and diving coach from Cuba and had escaped to this country and happened to have a summer job at Mountain Brook Swim and Tennis Club away from his college job at Birmingham Southern College during that summer. And so my mom was the swim team chairman, and I was on the swim team. And we were losing all of our meets because we didn't have any divers. And my mom was a diver, too. Mickey, I don't know if you knew that.

[05:33] MICKI KING: I did not know that.

[05:34] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Yep. But she suggested to me that I maybe take it up. So I did. And my idol was a girl named Farrah Smith. And whatever Farrah Smith did, I did. Unfortunately, she was more of a swimmer than a diver. So she dived out in the middle of the pool. She bent one knee and had flat feet. She was terrible. And consequently, so was I. Well, then about halfway through that first summer, Farrah quit. And I went and announced to my mom that I was going to quit, too. And she said, no, I don't think so, because you've made a commitment to the team, and so you have to do it for the rest of the summer. And then let me know what you want to do. Well, after Farraquit, I started listening to Carlos and I started diving pretty good, and I started having fun. So it was a different introduction to the sport, but it was so much fun to me. I mean, it was really. We'd get out to the pool in the morning, about 7:00, and we'd get picked up that night about 6:00. And we would spend all of our time looking in the skimmers, diving. Even when practice wasn't taking place. I would dive all day long in between practices because I like the flying flight.

[06:40] MICKI KING: Thankful coaches for putting up with us gals. And I'm really curious to hear about Ron and his willingness to take gals on the team when you knew that wasn't, quote, permitted at the college level.

[06:58] SPEAKER C: You said two things in your statement. One was a local ymca. That's how I got started.

[07:07] MICKI KING: Interesting.

[07:09] SPEAKER C: There was one about four blocks from my house. I went there to learn to swim. And then they had a springboard, only a 1 meter. And I got into diving and that's how I got started.

[07:24] MICKI KING: Where were you? And YMCAs don't get credit for. They were the. They were the bases back in the day.

[07:29] SPEAKER C: Yeah, they were a good place to grow up. The other thing you said was about coaching women, especially at the college level. I remember when I started coaching at Ohio State, there was no women's. There was a women's swimming team, but it was in a different place.

[07:49] MICKI KING: And a club team. It was a club team. It was not a ncaa. They weren't representing the college the same.

[07:56] SPEAKER C: Right. So I decided to start a women's diving team.

[08:04] MICKI KING: You broke some barriers.

[08:07] SPEAKER C: Yeah. I used to run a summer camp and a couple of the girls from there. And then a local girl who also became an Olympic medalist wanted to train. So I started a team and I figured the heck with the athletic department.

[08:25] MICKI KING: And Ron and Jennifer that was all AAU back then. There was no NCAA, so we dived AAU until Title 9. I mean, Title 9 then becomes the big barrier breaker for us all. But it was coaches like you that got us started before title nine and gave us a place to be.

[08:46] SPEAKER C: Well, I figured women needed the same opportunity as the men. Why not?

[08:53] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Was there any difference in coaching the women athletes and the men athletes?

[08:56] MICKI KING: No question.

[08:58] SPEAKER C: Not really. I think I treated everybody the same. I expected the same out of them as I did from the men. And so they were all, in my mind, they were all equal. Of course, they didn't do the same.

[09:15] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Dives, but not right away. Not right away, but we did later.

[09:21] SPEAKER C: Yes, girls did catch up.

[09:25] MICKI KING: You know, one of my favorite statements by my coach, Dick Kimmel. And by the way, I keep mentioning Dick because Ronnie was not my coach. He was coaching gals that were trying to beat me. And I was trying to beat me, exactly. But the respect was. Was so eminent, you know, and we. And we continue that as we go on in life. But Dick Kimball said something I think I would like to have documented one day. He was. I won my first national championships. And an interviewer, local newspaper guy, came up with this pencil and his pad in hand to take a quote down from Kimball. And he says, coach. He said, what did it feel like to coach a girl to an NCAA or to, excuse me, an AAU championship? You know, what did that feel like? You know, you've coached men, champions. How did it feel to coach a girl? And he said, oh, I don't coach girls. And he said, come on, coach. You just coach Mickey's. You just won the nationals. You know, how did it feel to coach a girl to a championship? He said, you didn't hear me? He said, I don't coach girls. And he said, all right, I don't get where you're headed. What are you saying, Coach? And he said, I don't coach men. He said, I don't coach women. He said, I coach people. And that's a quote that I think is eminent, needs to be out there. Because at the time, there was a difference between men and women. Had he not had that attitude, had Ron O'Brien not had that attitude that he was coaching people, then Jennifer and I wouldn't be the champions we were in that day and age.

[11:05] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: That's true. And Mickey, I know I went to Dick Kimball's camp one summer. I think I turned 13 down there. But I knew that you would go to the pool early before everybody and do at least three of each of all your required dives before everybody else got there. So when I started diving with Ronnie and we were training for the Olympic trials, I went out to the pool before everybody else. And I did the same thing you did, because I figured if it worked for you, maybe it would work for me. And you weren't down there. We were working out at Point Mallard in Decatur, Alabama, on the Tennessee River. And there was something so magical about getting out there. I was the only person there. And the steam was coming up off the river. It was quiet and beautiful. It was just early morning. And so I want to thank you for giving me that little bit of training tip. You never knew that I did wow.

[11:56] MICKI KING: I did not wow.

[11:58] SPEAKER C: Well, I just want to tell you a little story about how I ended up being a coach all through high school. I took science classes. I wanted to be an engineer in the summer after I graduated from high school. I had kind of a mentor at the Y, and I worked as a lifeguard at the pool where he was running the program that summer. And I just watched how he loved working with the kids, and the kids loved working with him. And I thought, I don't want to deal with numbers. I want to deal with people.

[12:45] MICKI KING: Wow.

[12:46] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Wow, that's awesome.

[12:47] SPEAKER C: So that's when I changed my mind.

[12:51] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: You know what? I always thought that was awesome that you did as a coach. You brought that engineering, that love of engineering with you into the sport of diving because you taught us some mechanics that were unbelievable, and you were always ahead of your time on what we were doing on the trampoline in the weight room, what we were doing. You brought a whole different approach, I think, to coaching than other coaches did.

[13:16] SPEAKER C: Well, when I went through college, I took. I was in. I was a physical education major, but I took kinesiology, anatomy, physiology, all the science things so that I could apply them to the sport when I finally got the coach. And then when I was a coach, I read stacks of science books, and I used to read Russian literature that was translated to see if it was about other sports, but if I could transfer something from another sport into the sport of diving, because I felt like physical training was as important as doing a dive, because you couldn't do the hard dive unless you had the strength and flexibility.

[14:10] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Well, you also had us watching films of the Soviet divers and the East German divers and all the other people from around the world that I don't know. I don't know if other coaches did that or not, but I remember walking into your office one time at Ohio State when I was a freshman. You said, I want you to watch these films. And I thought, what? I mean, like, for an hour and a half, but you pick up. You learn so much. Well, that's when I started diving with you to begin with, Ronnie. It was so. Because I was Carlos only diver, really, that was moving up to the national level. And it was an opportunity for me to dive with divers that were better than me and older than me, that knew how to do more than I did. And so just visually learning by being around people who are better than you is hard to put into words.

[15:02] SPEAKER C: Yeah, that's true. The other thing I used to do is six weeks before a major national title or trials, we switched gears from, I didn't really coach the dive anymore, tell you you're over short or whatever, but we used to have simulated competitions three times a week where everybody had to go find their spot, sit down, come up and do their diving, get scored, go back and sit down, just like they would at meet. We did that three times a week. And then the other three days we worked on the dives that weren't very good. So we had quite a long preparation for those big events. I think mentally probably helped divers to stay calm and settle down because they've been through it so many times.

[16:08] MICKI KING: You know, one thing I think back about is, you know, you look backwards in the day and I. You know, I think about the Ohio State and the Michigan and all the schools that were competitive in basketball and football and how that was a big. A big deal. But there was also competition in the swimming, and it was way littler than Michigan beating Ohio State and football. Michigan beating Ohio State and swimming was not a big deal to anybody except all of us on the swimming and diving.

[16:41] SPEAKER C: In our minds, it was, yeah, us.

[16:44] MICKI KING: On the swimming and diving teams, but the relationship between Ron O'Brien and my coach, Dick Kimball, and then Ron O'Brien and all the other coaches in the conference, I mean, that's huge how you guys were trying to beat each other every day, but good friends, you were.

[17:03] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: All teammates under Mr. Pepe.

[17:06] MICKI KING: And I think that would be interesting to discuss that. You know, how it started and it developed outward.

[17:14] SPEAKER C: Yeah. Dick Kimball never was under Mike Pepe, though. Hobie Billingsley and myself. And I'm trying to think who else. But there was a few, and Dick was always a Michigan guy, and that's okay. Yeah, that's true.

[17:37] MICKI KING: And when you think about it, there were really only about four or five major swimming and diving colleges in the country. I mean, you had UCLA and, what, Stanford or something, and then you had Indiana and you had the Big Ten. And then after you guys coached kids who then went into coaching themselves, and then it started getting down into the sec, but for a while, it was you and Dick and Dick Smith and Glenn McCormick.

[18:08] SPEAKER C: Who else?

[18:09] MICKI KING: And Hobie, I just named the five in my era. Yeah. And now there's 205 that are. That are from the tree that you started. They're. They're branches from that tree.

[18:22] SPEAKER C: Yeah. Well, there's so many more programs today.

[18:26] MICKI KING: And that's again, because they expanded into Title ix, recreated more. More opportunities for the girls and that colleges had to have more sports, so. But anyway, you were the Olympic coach on my Olympic team, but you weren't my coach. Now what happens, my mom and dad paid Dick Kimball, to go down to be, to sneak coach me. Well, the only reason that can happen is because you understood. You got it. You know, you figured out that Mickey's got here by help, being helped by her coach, Dick Kimball. And so again, that relationship, that friendship, and it was about. It was bigger than you personally and Dick personally, it was about our sport, and it was about helping the athlete. So I just want to thank you for that understanding and knowing that and having that big of a heart, if you will.

[19:27] SPEAKER C: Well, after I retired and I had a chance to think a little more back toward what it was all about, I came to the conclusion. And several of my divers have contacted me and said this. Yeah, it was about winning, it was about reaching your potential, but it was the process that you had to go through. And I've always said it's like you hold a carrot out in front of somebody and you say, do you want that? And say, yeah, I really want that. Okay, here's what you have to do. And I came to the conclusion that not only was I coaching, I was preparing young people, giving them the right attitude, the right way to work, to become successful in the rest of their lives. That was really more important.

[20:41] MICKI KING: And that speaks volumes about this man that we're chatting with right now.

[20:45] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Yes, it does.

[20:48] MICKI KING: And that's, in the end, what sports are about. The truth is, because sports are not lifelong in your competitive mode, you know, as you get to a peak, and then you have to say, hey, continuing isn't going to make me any better.

[21:05] SPEAKER C: Well, some of the sports that go on to professional status are different than ours.

[21:12] MICKI KING: Good point. Yes, yes, yes.

[21:14] SPEAKER C: Yeah. Because they're in it for the money. Yes. And there ain't no money in diving.

[21:21] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: No. I mean, I used to work at the Alabama Sports hall of Fame and I ran the outreach programs and we had students come from all over the state to come in and do a little hunt around, treasure hunt around the museum to learn about the different athletes. And I was standing next to my case in the Alabama Sports hall of Fame, and this fourth grade little girl looked up at me and said, well, how much money did you win when you won your gold medal? And I said, well, I didn't win any. And she looked at me and said, get out. Then why did you do it? Well, you could have stabbed me through the heart because I said, let me ask you, my dear. What, what are you passionate about? What, what in your life can you, not just you, you can't not do it. And she looked at the ceiling and looked back at me and she just didn't even know. So back to your. When you started out and it was fun, but at some point it became a passion. And it became a passion because of.

[22:23] MICKI KING: Yes.

[22:24] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: People like you who encouraged me to let me know that if you, if you, if you work hard, you can, you can achieve this. But I didn't know. I didn't even know what the goal was yet when I first got started. You know, it takes someone who's got a vision and a belief in you that if you do work hard and you don't give up, that you can't achieve your dreams no matter how high you set your goals. And then, and then also, what's so incredibly valuable. Valuable is to teach a young person that it's really okay to set your goals high. You know, go ahead and dream big.

[23:02] SPEAKER C: Right. I agree.

[23:04] MICKI KING: You know, you've made me flash back to an incident similar to talking to someone who didn't understand then and now. And again I came. I'm a pre title IX, so I'm diving in the 60s. I graduated from high school in 62. In 1966, I'm graduating from college and I'm thinking, Gosh, there's two more years before the 68 Olympics. And my mom and dad had said, hey, after your college, you're on your own. We ain't covering you anymore. And I needed to go to work, but I also needed to make that Olympic team again. I'm an amateur, but I had gotten so close and I needed to make. Well, I'm confusing the two Olympics, but the point I'm trying to get to is that I went into the Air Force in order to have a job so that I could continue training on my own after college because there was no place for women. And I had the place in college because Dick and Ronnie were big enough to allow us. But anyway, I go into the Air Force because now I had a job. And at this job, and this is again a history lesson, is in 1960s that there was no such thing as equal pay for equal work.

[24:33] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: There still isn't.

[24:35] MICKI KING: Well, good point. But the point is I could work in the assembly line at General Motors truck and couch next to a male doing the exact same job he did and get less pay. Okay? So I wanted to make sure that I got equal pay for equal work, and I went into the military because the government type jobs were equal pay for equal work back then. So that's an important history lesson. But more than that, when I was giving a speech at an event and talking about the fact that when I grew up, there was no diving or no sport at all for women girls. In high school, I was sitting next to a banquet for high school students getting awards, and I gave the speech and said, hey, I'm so proud that this event is recognizing girls who can finally get medals and get trophies and get recognized for being athletes. So I went and sat down, and these two girls that I was bragging about, they leaned over to me and they whispered to me, we didn't know it wasn't always there for girls that they totally get up in the morning, and it was always there. They didn't understand that there was a fight for it. They just. And it's a little bit like suffrage, you know, the voting. I mean, we forget that women couldn't always vote. I mean, that women had to go to jail and had to go on hunger strikes so we would get the right. So we forget we go vote, and we just go vote. But we. And that's okay, except we can't forget history. We can't forget history of the voting, but we can't forget history that it wasn't always there for women, and we can't take it for granted, and we can't let it fall on the wayside. It's up to today's gals and history going forward that women continue to have their spot.

[26:35] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Ronnie, what did you do to get yourself psyched up before an Olympic event?

[26:41] SPEAKER C: To get myself what?

[26:43] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Psyched up. I mean, did you have to calm your own nerves? Did you have to talk yourselves through this? Were you nervous?

[26:48] SPEAKER C: I always felt the worst thing a diver can have in an event like that is a nervous coach.

[26:56] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Yeah.

[26:56] SPEAKER C: So I worked hard on keeping my emotions down, staying steady, not doing anything different than I did in practice.

[27:13] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: I'm so glad you didn't yell at me in Montreal, because he yelled at me sometimes in practice. But I deserved it. I deserved it. One thing that. It's a good thing that you were keeping calm like that during those competitions. Because, Mickey, when we got to Montreal and we were working out before the meet started, people were asking me questions, and I was answering them, but it had nothing to do with what they were asking me. And I didn't even know. I was very. I was not in control of what was happening. And I had barely been able to make it back two and a half for months. And I did it back two and three quarters to my face. I did a gain or two and an egg out in the middle of the pool. I Mean, it was sad. It was sad.

[27:56] MICKI KING: You remember them? Every one of them?

[27:57] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: I remember every one of them. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, what is happening? I have zero control of my mind or my body. And I did something else equally horrific. And Ronnie just came up and said, okay, that's good, let's go get warm. And I was thinking, okay. He didn't panic, he didn't say anything. I was panicking. And then I was so nervous before the meet that of course I got drawn first order, which I hated, everybody hated. But between every dive, he made me go back to that massage table and he made me lay down, face down, and he would pound me from my neck to my ankles into that table. Then he'd make me go jump in the warm up pool for the swimmers, which was about 78 degrees, and then jump in the hot tub and then do my dive. And so I basically got freeze dried between every dive, pounded so I could even breathe. I was so tight and I couldn't.

[28:56] SPEAKER C: Really move to help you relax.

[28:59] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: I know, and it worked. But you were in charge. You were large and in charge. Because I had. I did not have a clear idea of where I was or what was happening, you know.

[29:09] MICKI KING: Jennifer did you have we mentioned in this interview that you are the last USA woman diver, springboard diver to get a gold medal since 1976?

[29:23] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah.

[29:24] MICKI KING: That since 76, when you won your gold medal to Today, which is 2019, no other woman in USA has gotten a medal in springboard diving. I think that's an interesting medalist.

[29:38] SPEAKER C: But not gold medalists.

[29:39] MICKI KING: No, I'm talking gold. Yeah.

[29:41] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: And Mickey was gold in 72. Just saying.

[29:44] MICKI KING: But we had won gold medals all the way back to Pat McCormick in the 40s. USA had diving, women diving, gold medals on springboard diving, pretty dominant. Dominant with a capital D. And then your gold medal in 76 is the last one to this day, 2019, I think that's a sad status and I think we need to face that. And hopefully, you know, we're going different. But what's happened just so. Because we can. And I need coach to intercept here and say that if I'm right, is that the other countries are just catching up with us. And I think the NCAA is taking over and making it different. But.

[30:38] SPEAKER C: Well, when you look back through the years, we didn't really have a planned system, but we had a program that kids went from the club to the high school and then they went to college and some of them got scholarships. So there was a continuous program to Help people to continue to get better. And in the years since then, we still have that same system, but other countries are getting tremendous government's support financially and they're building training centers and they're taking kids when they're 7, 8 years old and putting them into a training program. So they've changed and we haven't. And I think that's one of the reasons because we haven't had that many men either.

[31:36] MICKI KING: Okay, good point, Good point. I think the NCAA has killed our diving programs in this country because the NCAA is more concerned about an athletic director who's the boss of the diving coach, wants you to get that NCAA title. They want you because that's their job, making an Olympic team. If a college kid makes an Olympic team, that is really nice. Oh, that's great how they do in the NCAAs, though, you know, so it's a bonus to a college coach. And that's where most of our coaches are now to get a call an Olympic athlete. It's their job to get the nc And I think they actually kind of then ease off after school stops. And summer coaching is just not toward Olympics. What do you think?

[32:31] SPEAKER C: Yeah, I agree. The focus is on the NCAA and keep your job.

[32:39] MICKI KING: Okay, thank you. And that's a sad thing.

[32:41] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: There's another sad thing too, and that is the fact that diving boards have been taken out of facilities all over the place and have been for years. So there are no clubs with 3 meter springboards anymore and some of them with no one meter. So no. Children aren't even aware that diving is a sport. They know swimming is a sport, but they don't see anybody diving. And so because of liability issues, you know, everybody's worried about getting sued and kids getting hurt and somebody was going to get sued and get hurt. It would have been mean. It didn't happen. So I wish they just let these kids have fun and give it a shot. But. So Ronnie, I remember you telling me that you would have these talent identification camps all over the country and you would go out and try to get kids to come out and just see if they like the sport, just introduce them to how to do an approach and how to do a jump and how to do a front dive.

[33:34] SPEAKER C: Well, we put a. When I was national technical director, after I finished coaching, we started to put a program together where we had a national training center, we had a regional training center down in Oklahoma. We put a group of scientists together and developed talent ID program, a testing program where a coach could say, okay, we're having talent ID testing today. Come on in, and you take about maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes, and the kids through the program and you tell them and their parents, hey, your kid's pretty good. You could be a good diver. But that's all gone now. And really, the college coaches run the sport.

[34:33] MICKI KING: And again, their emphasis is on winning their college championship. They're not caring about the Olympics. The Olympics is a hobby to the college coach. Their job is the NCAA's.

[34:47] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: So how can we get young students, young kids exposed to the sport of diving now?

[34:55] SPEAKER C: You gotta go out and recruit them. The talent ID kit's still sitting in a closet somewhere. USA Diving, it's all ready to go. It's been done. You just got to get the coaches to go out and run the program. And I don't know who's doing what in USA Diving anymore. Okay? But they need a plan, and they don't have a plan anymore.

[35:33] MICKI KING: Well, I think in wrapping all this up, there is a start of the United States Olympic Committee trying to bring the national governing body, which USA Diving is under their umbrella a little bit more and forcing these kinds of things to start happening again.

[35:54] SPEAKER C: That'd be great. I think it would make a big difference.

[35:57] MICKI KING: So we need to know going forward that we have some hope there because we're dying on the vine and we need to rekindle it with new enthusiasm.

[36:10] SPEAKER C: Yeah, I agree. There's one other topic I thought about that would be worth discussing in the last few minutes. How the Olympic games has changed. 1968, when you were on the team, the fence was about 5ft high. There was no barbed wire. There were no armed guards inside.

[36:33] MICKI KING: My sister climbed over the fence and stayed in the dorm with me in 72. Don't mean to interrupt, but I know where you're headed.

[36:43] SPEAKER C: Yeah. And so now you have to have.

[36:47] MICKI KING: An escort to get in.

[36:48] SPEAKER C: Yeah. Well, nothing happened. I mean, there weren't any. Well, there was a shooting, but that was government, not Olympic. It was a very friendly, easygoing Olympic Games. 1972, the Munich people, the police were dressed up in gay little outfits. The fence was still kind of low. I went over it right before the Palestinians went in and murdered the Israelis. The Israelis, yeah. And that changed the Olympic Games. The next one, when you were there, Jennifer we had a high fence. We had barbed wire. We had dogs walking with armed guards. Yeah. And you had to go through a metal detector to get in the village. It just changed the whole world.

[37:51] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: And then in 1980, when we had the famous Boycott. That completely changed the Games, even on.

[37:58] MICKI KING: Another level, because 84. We had a mini Olympics. Because the Russians didn't.

[38:03] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Right. Because we didn't go to theirs. They didn't come to ours. And so basically what happened was the whole spirit of Olympism in the Olympic Games and what it was brought back for by Baron de Coubertin was to celebrate the human achievement in the world of athletics, to put down your differences, whether they be cultural, religious, politics, whatever. Can you just for two weeks, let the world come together under a umbrella.

[38:30] MICKI KING: Of peace, a cloud where all that's gone. It's only people.

[38:33] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: And now we're back to. It's all about politics and money. Yeah, that's a downer to stop on. Honestly, what I do want to say to you, because we're running out of time. I know, is that, Mickey, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such a great example and mentor to me. I loved you dearly then, and I love you even more now. And, Ronnie, if it weren't for you, there's no telling what my life would be like now. Because When I turned 17 on June 13 in 1976 and then won a gold medal in Montreal on July 20 in 1976, it put my life on a path that I could never have dreamed about. So thank you.

[39:15] SPEAKER C: Makes me feel so good to hear that.

[39:19] JENNIFER CHANDLER STEVENSON: Well, it's been a great journey, and I look forward to continuing it.

[39:23] MICKI KING: I'm honored to be with the two of you. This is special. This is special, and I thank you. I'm glad it's going to be kept in a place where it will last and could be appreciated.