This is the latest in a series of stories highlighting the top 30 Mizzou athletes Dave Matter has covered in his time writing about the Tigers since the late 1990s. The series will run every day Monday through Friday.
I’m not sure how, but somehow I became the Mizzou gymnastics reporter when I worked at the Columbia Daily Tribune. I didn’t know much of anything about the sport, but the season fell in snugly between football in the fall and football in the spring, so in the meantime I spent many evenings at the Hearnes Center watching athletes do things that shouldn’t be humanly possible on a 4-inch wide balance beam.