2014 MSU Athletics Hall of Fame Class: Dave Thor
9/19/2014 12:00:00 AM | General
By Steve Grinczel, MSUSpartans.com Online Columnist | @GrinzOnGreen
After Dave Thor completed his Hall of Fame gymnastics career at Michigan State, he went on to live a hall-of-fame life that's part Forrest Gump, part Walter Mitty.
When it came to counting degrees of separation in a recent conversation with Thor from his home in Sandy, Utah, the former All-American with the superhero last name never reached six.
"Growing up in Los Angeles, the Midwest was an awakening for me," Thor said. "I made lots of friends, coming to Michigan from California, who have stayed friends." The first time he ventured away from his home state, aside from a trip across the Mexican border, was when he left for MSU. During Thor's initial visit to Jenison Field House, George Szypula, the late Spartan gymnastics coach, introduced him to legendary football head man Duffy Daugherty.
"I'm 6-feet tall, which is unusual for a gymnast, and Duffy looks at George and says, `This guy's a gymnast? He looks like a tight end,' " Thor recalled. "He couldn't believe I was a giant gymnast."
Thor forged a close friendship with Emmons Hall floormate, Don Miller, who was a legend-in-the-making in his own right, "though I didn't realize it at the time," said Thor, who later shared an off-campus apartment with Miller. "Those guys were always playing basketball with the football players, which I didn't have time for that because I was working out all the time.
"Don was a real gung-ho guy, and to get support from the people around you, means so much especially when you're injured. He was instrumental in keeping my spirits up, but I never even put it together that he was a sports guy. He was just my roommate..., playing basketball against Gene Washington and Bubba Smith at the IM Building."
Miller went on to coach hoops at Maple City Glen Lake High School, which in 1977 produced a story along the lines of "Hoosiers" by upsetting Detroit East Catholic, of the powerful Detroit Catholic School League, for the Class D state championship. Schools north of Clare rarely made it to the state finals, but Miller also guided Glen Lake to a runner-up finish in '96.
Miller is notable from a Michigan State point of view for another reason. He played a role in developing Spartan women's basketball coach Suzy Merchant, who as a Traverse City youth attended his Leelanau County Basketball Camp.
Thor's collegiate career took off with the first of his three Big Ten all-around championships and individual titles in the pommel horse and floor exercise in `66. He also finished third in the all-around at the NCAA Championships. An injury prevented Thor from competing in the national championships as a junior, but he burst onto the international scene with a bronze-medal performance at the '67 Pan American Games in Winnipeg.
 | "Michigan State gave me the opportunity to get a college degree, to learn about competition and how to survive in the world. I certainly owe a lot to George Szypula. He was a great coach and a really nice man." -Dave Thor |
After leading MSU to its only Big Ten title as a senior in '68, Thor finished second in the pommel horse and third in the all-around in the NCAA Championships. He also became the second Spartan, and just the third gymnast overall since its inception in '66, to win the Nissen Award - the gymnastics equivalent of the Heisman Trophy.
Thor earned a spot on the U.S. National Team selected to compete in the '68 Mexico City Olympics and was favored to win the pommel horse. However, he finished in a four-way tie for fourth in all-around qualifying and a peculiar tie-breaking rule prevented him from moving on to the medal round. Had today's Olympic format been in effect, Thor would have advanced to likely become the first American male of the modern era to win a medal.
Despite being denied a shot at the gold, Thor has rich memories from the Olympics. Of his eight roommates in the Olympic Village, six were gymnasts and two were track-and-field athletes. Triple-jumper Art Walker suffered a fate similar to Thor's. Despite recording a world-record jump, Walker finished fourth.
"So there I am feeling sorry for myself, but I would have really hated breaking a world record and still not get a medal," Thor said.
The other track athlete was 200-meter dash champion Tommie Smith, who infamously, along with John Carlos, donned black gloves and staged a controversial Black Power salute during the playing of the National Anthem at the medal ceremony. Smith and Carlos were subsequently banned from the remainder of the Games by the International Olympic Committee.
"I talked to Art a lot but didn't get to talk Tommie much because he disappeared," Thor said. "So one day we're lounging around in the Olympic Village, and this was before Munich (and the terrorist attack in the '72 Olympics), so things were kind of loose. And so there's this knock on the door and I open it, and there's a guy standing there and he says, `Is Tommie Smith here?', wanting an interview or something.
"After he leaves Steve Cohen, the guy from Penn State who won the second Nissen Award, says, `You know who that was don't you?' And I said no. He says, `That was Howard Cosell.' That was before he got famous on Monday Night Football."
Thor's 26th-place finish in Mexico City was the highest of any American and Cosell rose in prominence, in part, because of his outspoken support for Smith and Carlos.
After the Olympics, Thor performed in a fund-raising exhibition with Kathy Rigby, who parlayed her popularity as a gymnast into an acting career that included a long stint as "Peter Pan" on Broadway. The following year, Thor was the U.S. national champ in the pommel horse and floor exercise.
A math major at MSU, Thor earned his master's degree at Southern Connecticut State, where he also was the assistant gymnastics coach. From there, he became the head coach at Temple University, in Philadelphia, which in 1976 was selected to host the NCAA Gymnastics Championships in conjunction with the Bicentennial.
"I think I was the first guy to run it like the Olympics," said Thor, who was inducted into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1999. "Always in the past, they had two sessions and we ran it all in one session, which is good for judging because you want to judge everybody at the same time with the same judges."
Thor returned to California to run a gymnastics school in Sonoma County for six years, and taught junior-high and high-school math.
Then, to satisfy his competitive drive, he took up hang gliding.
"I ended up in Utah as a result of coming out here for the national championships," said Thor. "I competed for a decade or so and flew for about 20 years in the mid-90s."
While he has had flights covering more than 100 miles, he never enjoyed the heights of victory he reached as a gymnast.
"I took seventh in the masters of hang gliding competition in North Carolina one year," he mused. "I did well in regional contests, but never really placed very high in nationals."
These days, Thor is a semi-retired substitute teacher who has attained his goal of teaching math at every grade level, including kindergarten. His involvement with gymnastics consists of "spotting" his granddaughter, who's perfecting her back handsprings for cheerleading.
"Michigan State gave me the opportunity to get a college degree, to learn about competition and how to survive in the world," Thor said. "I certainly owe a lot to George Szypula. He was a great coach and a really nice man."