She must train with Johnson's coach, even if that meant leaving her family in Virginia.
'She started saying, 'I need that coach. I need Coach Chow,' her mother...Liang Chow soared to
international fame as a Chinese gymnast before settling down in the
middle of Iowa to teach American gymnasts. It was there where Johnson
morphed from a 6-year-old novice to a world-class athlete. But Chow's gym was 1,200 miles away from Douglas, her siblings and her mother, who didn't think the idea would work.
'I said, well, I can't
move the family to Iowa. I'm a single parent; I didn't have the
resources to do something like that,' Hawkins said. But Douglas wasn't just headstrong; she was a rare talent who vaulted up the ranks of gymnastics at an early age. She won a Virginia state championship at age 8, just two years after starting formal training. 'She just never wanted
to come out of the gym,' Hawkins said. 'She loved it. She would just
practice all the time. So I saw then the hard work.' But in order to reach
her full potential, Douglas insisted she needed an elite coach --
specifically, the one she had admired on TV.
At age 14, Douglas
received her mother's blessing to go train with Chow. The tiny athlete
headed west and moved in with a host family with four younger girls,
including another one of Chow's students. Both Hawkins and her daughter would have to learn how to be a family five states apart."
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CNN.com
