(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 08, 2024 ) Hell Gate-Triborough Books is pleased to announce the release of The Gymnast: Disability, Sport, and Romance Memoir by Patrick J. Bird. The story, set in the 1950s and 1960s, is about a kid from a working-class New York City family. Polio has left him with an atrophied leg. With grit and dedication, he overcomes his ugly disability to find romance and love and achieve athletic success as a college gymnast. The Gymnast is a heartwarming and humorous, though often painful, tale of self-acceptance and luck (lots of it).
This coming-of-age story begins in 1942. Seven-year-old Pat has just returned home after a 19-month hospital stay, recovering from polio. His ex-prizefighter dad teaches him to stand up to bullies, and he develops a “don’t f–k with the crip” reputation in his rough neighborhood and later at rougher Chelsea Vocational. After Chelsea, Pat, unable to find work in his electrical trade because of his disability, becomes a mechanical-electrical draftsman, finds success, buys a ’39 Chevy, and attracts Peggy despite his limp and stick-like leg. Pat falls madly in love.
Meanwhile, Pat joins a YMCA gymnastics team and labors to adapt his feeble leg to the sport. The Y team wins the 1956 YMCA Nation Championship. At a Florida gymnasts’ clinic, the university coach casually invites Pat to join his team, but without a scholarship. Peggy encourages him to go, and Pat leaves his beloved NYC after much agonizing.
At first, the university rejects him as “academically unqualified,” but the coach convinces Pat to stay and take a high school equivalency exam. He enrolls at the university high school to prepare, lives with the coach’s mother, and supports himself by teaching gymnastics and bussing dishes at the Moose Lodge for a warm-hearted waitress. The high school experience is at first humiliating but then fun, and he is eventually admitted to the university with a work assistance scholarship.
Pat is on top of the worlduntil Peggy visits and then jilts him. Next, he is hospitalized with mononucleosis and then slammed by his coach in the school paper for “…not living up to expectations.” Pat’s world implodes. He seeks counseling very reluctantly. That and a torrid affair with his waitress restores his shattered ego but ironically costs the team an undefeated season.
Over the next four years, Pat’s team won four Big Ten and two NCAA championships and exhibited with the Finish and Russian Olympic Teams on Cold War Goodwill Tours. The team selects Pat as the Most Valuable Player in one season and captain in the next. But he falls short of his primary athletic goal and continues to pine for Peggy.
Pat’s final colligate competition is not as a gymnast but swimming in the 1961 National Wheelchair Games. He learns important life lessons about disability, his own and those more severe. After graduating, Pat is named the university’s assistant gymnastics coach and acting head coach for the following season. Coaching, however, leaves him questioning that as a career. After earning an MS in Exercise Science, he focuses on getting a PhD and leaving coaching behind. Then, out of the blue, Pat is asked to coach and study at another university. He and Peggy head off in their 1962 Volkswagenyes, after ardent love and heartbreaking loss, Pat wins the heart of his childhood sweetheart.
At 304 pages, The Gymnast is available online through Outskirts Press. It will also be sold through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for a maximum trade discount in quantities of 10 or more and is being aggressively promoted to appropriate markets with a focus on the memoir category.
ISBN: 979-8-218-96280-7 Format: 6 x 9 paperback Retail: $23.95 eBook: 10.00
ISBN: 979-8-218-98231-7 Format: 6 x 9 hardback Retail: $37.95
Genre: MEMOIR
About the Author: Patrick J. Bird, PhD, is also the author of A Rough Road and Easter Sunday 1956, plus numerous articles published in magazines such as Scientific America (online), Women’s Health, Cooking Light, and academic journals. He wrote a weekly column, “Keeping Fit,” for the New York Regional Times Group and the St. Petersburg Times for 13 years. Dr. Bird has BS and MS degrees from the University of Illinois and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. He has held academic and administrative positions at the Universities of Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, and Illinois and coached gymnastics at Illinois and Minnesota. Pat is married with three children, one of whom is deceased, and lives in Gainesville, Florida.
About Outskirts Press, Inc.: Outskirts Press offers full-service, custom self-publishing, and book marketing services for authors seeking a cost-effective, fast, and flexible way to publish and distribute their books worldwide while retaining all their rights and full creative control. Available for authors globally at www.outskirtspress.com and located on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, Outskirts Press, Inc. represents the future of book publishing today.
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