MORGANTOWN — Life is a four-letter word.
A short word, yes, but one that is filled with twists and turns, with happy moments and sad, a journey without a road map.
Some people simply wander through life, almost like a mouse on a treadmill, chasing a morsel of food that dangles there before them, never gaining on it, getting nowhere.
Then there’s Ronnie Retton, whose life has been as close to a perfect 10 as he could get it.
He escaped the coal mines of his youth, used athletics to go through West Virginia University, played in an NCAA Final, signed with the New York Yankees and played six years of minor league ball, worked to raise a family of five that included three boys who were good athletes and a pair of girls, one an All-American gymnast at West Virginia, the other was simply Mary Lou Retton.
He did it all and he did well and today he is reaping a benefit from it, being named to the WVU Athletic Hall of Fame along with six other outstanding athletes, an honor he didn’t think he’d ever get.
And when you ask him about that journey through life to this moment, 50 years after leaving WVU, he shakes his head and admits he doesn’t know where to begin. So you take him back to the beginning.
“I started in a small coal-mining town,” he said, having been born in Grant Town and lived in Fairview. “In those days there were no video games, no TV. You just stayed out and played ball.”
Blessed with speed and quickness, if not physical strength, and an undying desire to succeed, Retton migrated toward baseball and basketball. While baseball was his favorite sport and the sport for which he was given a scholarship at WVU, Fred Schaus recruited him for basketball, too.
The game was a bit different then, not quite as athletic at the time, so at 5-7 he was able to play basketball and it was a good thing, for his shining moment came on the march to the 1958-59 NCAA Finals.
Schaus was something of an innovator then. He had the team warm up with a special colored basketball and had put them in the same knee socks that North Carolina had popularized at the time, socks that were colorful enough that they actually helped the fast break on this Jerry West-led team.
“With those long socks when you were coming down on a fast break you didn’t have to look up. You could look down at the floor and see those socks and know it was one of your players running with you,” he once noted.
That basketball team had a penchant for coming from behind, wiping out 14 second-half deficits, in part with a zone press Schaus employed, something he took from West Virginia Tech’s Neal Baisi. It was in the zone press that Retton’s quickness was best served.
Against St. Joseph’s in the tournament’s second round, WVU found itself trailing by a point late. Jack Ramsey, coaching St. Joe’s, called one time out, then a second one to design an inbounds play.
It proved to be time wasted as Retton stole the pass, went down the court and scored to keep WVU alive in the tournament.
“Instinct,” Retton says today. “I don’t know how it happened, really.”
Certainly, that is a memory that stays with him, but it is not the prime memory of those days that ended with a loss to Pete Newell’s California Golden Bears in the NCAA final.
“Stansbury Hall,” he answers when you ask him about what he remembers most. “The wooden bleachers. That place was alive. They’d start stomping and the whole place started to shake. It was quite an advantage.”
And, of course, there were the days — and nights — when he and his teammate Bucky Bolyard would go off to shoot pool, often finding it easier to beat some of the locals than it was to beat curfew.
When he got out of college, Retton signed with the Yankees, a move that probably wasn’t the best he could make.
“I thought I was a big deal signing with the Yankees, but they had Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek and there was no free agency so you really couldn’t get to the big leagues,” he said. “I probably would have been better somewhere else.”
He played six years, rising to Class AA, playing with some pretty fair players like Jim Bouton, Roger Repoz and Roy White.
But he now had a family and was 26 and decided it was best to get on with the rest of his life, something he now sometimes regrets.
He is, however, able to joke about it, saying, “I think I still belong to the Yankees. They never gave me my release.”
That would be quite a pension.
His children, of course, inherited his love of athletics, the boys — Ronnie Jr., Donnie and Jerry — earning all-state honors and Shari becoming an All-American gymnast.
But it was Mary Lou who hit the jackpot, becoming America’s darling on one final vault to win the Olympic Gold.
“We were there but we didn’t know she needed a perfect 10,” Ronnie Retton recalled.
So while America held its breath and prayed, they were just rooting for her to have a good vault.
Now Ronnie Retton has a pretty good honor of his own to put in his memory vault.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
