Suella Steel speaks with that Atlanta twang, and you feel like she comes from another time and place.
“I had a chance to compete on the (U.S.) Olympic gymnastics team,” recounts the Southern California Tennis Hall of Famer and inductee into the San Diego Hall of Champions.
“It was the same weekend as the prom queen (at her high school). My mom wanted me to stay home and try for the prom queen. I stayed home and I didn’t get prom queen anyway.”
She shares the recollection with a laugh, having accomplished so much in sports before and after the incident. This was before Title IX launched girls and women into much greater opportunities in athletics. Even her mother favored the prom queen contest over gymnastics at the time.
“It killed my coach, Lyle Wells. I was ‘national champ’ twice, as a 15- and 17-year-old. As a 16-year-old, I was runner-up. It only covered five states in the South, including Georgia. Gymnastics for girls wasn’t emphasized much.”
But, the 5’4″ powerpack, now age 74, confides: “I was good.” She had the perfect build, a fiery temperament–and a skilled coach. Wells was the men’s coach at Georgia Tech, and she was fortunate to get him.
“I did the double back somersault on the floor,” she reports, a move that was near revolutionary at the time.
After missing the Olympics opportunity, she received partial scholarship offers from colleges to continue gymnastics. She declined them.
The tennis only came later. She rolled the clay court behind her family’s home in Atlanta as a child, but, “It wasn’t accepted in the South at that time for a girl to compete in tennis.”
Steel, a fitting surname for the intense senior USTA player and long-time coach of Gold Ball winners in San Diego, picked up the sport after becoming a housewife and mother of two when her sons were ages five and seven. She could fit practice in between “mom taxi” rides and other motherly duties with her boys. “I started playing at age 33, and by age 35 I won a Gold Ball in the 35-and-over age group. I got good fast.”
Suella has won 86 Gold Balls, emblematic of winning an age group, and she has done it on all four surfaces: clay, hard court, grass, and indoor. She won two Grand Slams, winning the titles on all four surfaces in a year twice. She was ranked number one in singles in the world in her age group as recently as 2000.
In coaching, in which she is also still active, she coached for 17 years at Lomas Santa Fe Club in Solana Beach and was named Pro Coach of the Year.
But gymnastics, considered feminine enough for a girl at that time in the South, was where Steel could devote her competitive fire and hone her athletic skills. She says that when she took up tennis a decade and a half later, the agility and concentration she had gained in gymnastics carried right over.
“(As a child) I took tap dancing,” she explains. “I did not take the ballet. I had to go back and learn ballet later. We (American gymnasts) could do all the things the Russians (the world gymnastics power at the time) could do.
“Do you remember Cathy Rigby? (1968 U.S. Olympic star) She was the first American woman to put together the ballet (with gymnastics).
“I wasn’t fluid, because I picked up ballet later.”
A true Southern belle, she was given a compound name which blends the names of a grandmother on her father’s side, Sue, and a grandmother on her mother’s side, Ella.
She became a favored tutee of Wells, her gymnastics coach. “I’d go down (to Georgia Tech) during the summer. He was a really nice guy. He would use me as a model (for his other athletes). I was on the mat with him (like an assistant coach).”
Wells put her in the training harness, suspended from the ceiling, to learn new flips. “I’d throw up (my upper body) to try the move and fall. I was a little girl, 99 pounds, five feet, maybe 5’1″, and I wouldn’t get hurt. Knock on wood, I never got hurt.”
She can help instill in the athletes she coaches in tennis a tough attitude because she herself has mastered the mental game. “You need to be able to concentrate,” she says, “If you can stay in there the whole routine, you can stay in there the whole match,” applying the mental discipline she learned in her first sport.
“I’m very competitive,” she repeats. “I just like to make people win. I think coaches have a lot of responsibility. I can make my players love tennis. I can make them hate it” by the way she handles them. “I love teaching.”
Told by a reporter that his grandmother, from Mobile, Alabama, was disowned by her family after marrying a Northerner, she says she married a Northerner, too–though without the family backlash.
The story is told that Tracy Austin, a star pro woman tennis player from Los Angeles, once walked up to the practice schedule, erased a competitor’s name from a practice time Austin desired, and inserted her own name. Steel has a critical response for that kind of underhanded tactic: “Let your racket do the talking.”