Leora 'Sam' Jones & Lisa Dwyer
Articles describing experiences Leora Jones and Lisa Dwyer at the Seoul Olympics. These and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for these articles are:
"Leora 'Sam' Jones," ECU Report, Winter 1989, Volume 20, No. 2.
Rogers, Sandra. "Seoul Was an Interesting Place," ECU Report, Winter 1989, Volume 20, No. 2.
At least four Olympians making the trip to Seoul, South Korea, in September for the Summer Games had ties to ECU. Dr. A.P. Ferrante, a licensed psychologist and assistant professor with the ECU Student Counseling Center, was one of two sports psychologists invited to provide psychological support for the U.S. athletes and coaches.
Kay Yow, a 1964 graduate of ECU, coached the U.S. women's basketball team to a 77-70 victory over Yugoslavia for the gold medal.
Former ECU sprinter Lee Vernon McNeill failed to connect on a baton pass before running out of the exchange zone in the first round of the 4 x 100-meter relay, and the U.S. team was disqualified.
Team handball star Leora "Sam" Jones, who played basketball for the Pirates during the '80-'81 and '81-'82 seasons, was the second-leading scorer in the tournament with 35 points, but the U.S. women failed to advance to the medal round in overall play with a 1-3 record.
Post-Olympic plans for the retired and rested Jones, after a month's stay at the Mount Olive home of her parents, include an intensive job search in Greenville and re-enrollment at ECU. Here is her story.
After six years, this two-time Olympian says good-bye to team handball
If Leora "Sam" Jones had been a "good" girl and listened to her parents, she'd probably still be in Mount Olive, working at the pickle factory and raising a family.Instead, the bold seventh-grader defied her parents by staying after school and trying out for the junior high basketball team. Two scholarships, two Olympics and 35 countries later, Jones -- and hundreds of sports fans -- are the richer for it.
"You have to understand that my parents were very hard-working people," Jones says. "They didn't want to have to stop what they were doing every day to pick me up after practice because my school was almost in Goldsboro. They thought playing ball in the backyard with the neighborhood kids should have been enough."
But it wasn't enough -- for Jones or for the coaches who had seen her play during P.E. class at school. "I knew if I could play the guys I should be able to walk over the girls," she says. "So I stayed after school and thumbed home after practice. My parents didn't know where I was, and I knew they'd be furious. I snuck in the house and hid under the bed -- that's how scared I was."
Sports -- not academics -- remained Jones' top priority through three years at Southern Wayne High School. Although the self-described "jock" played softball and tennis, basketball was her favorite. "I daydreamed a lot in class about being a star, and that hurt me," she says. "I didn't realize then that I had to be more than All-American to go to college and succeed."
Jones was recruited by more than 60 colleges and universitites during her senior year but accepted a scholarship to Louisburg College. "By the time the end of the year got here I didn't have the grades, so most of the schools were afraid to mess with me," she says. "A lot of the players at Louisburg were in the same situation I was in -- they didn't have the grades -- so we had a powerhouse team."
Jones achieved All-American status at Louisburg and was highly recruited when her two years were up. Impressed by ECU Coach Cathy Andruzzi, who visited the star cager in Louisburg several times, Jones signed with the Pirates.
"We had a very strong schedule," she remembers. "We played teams that were always ranked in the top 10, like LSU, Southern Cal and Old Dominion. We would lose by two or four points. That meant we had potential to be in their league, but we didn't have a true center. But we always won our region, and always had a winning season."
Jones didn't have enough credits to graduate after her senior year at ECU and entered summer school as an undergraduate assistant basketball coach. That was the summer she discovered team handball.
Jones owes it all to Dr. Wayne Edwards, then-director of Intramural Services. He knew the National Sports Festival would be holding its South team tryouts on campus within the week, and encouraged Jones and several other athletes to try out.
The officials apparently liked what they saw -- Jones was named to the South team and was sent to New Jersey to try out for the national team. Only two weeks after she even knew the sport existed, Jones was on a plane flying to Europe for a tour with the national team.
"I had no idea my life was getting ready to go through a complete change," she says. "I was lost; I really didn't know what I was doing. But it was so much like basketball -- all the dribbling, fakes, picks, jumping -- that it was easy to pick up."
Jones devoted six years to the sport and was rewarded by being named U.S. Team Handball Federation Athlete of the Year three times. At the 1984 Olympics she was the fifth-leading scorer in the women's tournament with 32 goals. In 1987 she led the U.S. women to the Pan Am Games gold medal, qualifying her team for Olympic play.
Although the women's team fared poorly during the '88 Games, placing seventh out of eight teams, Jones missed being the high scorer by one point.
In a July 1987 article in The New York Times, Robert A. Garcia, a board member of the U.S. Team Handball Federation, called Jones the backbone of the team. "She's been an extraordinary role model for the sport," he said. "Sam's the kind of person you look at and want to emulate. She plays hard and never gives up."
Team handball is a physical sport that combines the dribbling of basketball, the scoring of soccer, the roughness of rugby and the penalties of hockey. For two 30-minute halves, the players race up and down a large indoor court and attempt to hurl a hard leather ball, about the size of a cantaloupe, into a net.
"I get a lot of scratches because I'm an offensive player, and I always have the ball," Jones says. "Normally when I'm getting pressed, some girl is always pushing me in the stomach, slapping my arms to make me mad and break my concentration. But it's fun; the good part is there's no limit to fouls."
The sport is as obscure in the United States as it is popular in Europe. With no other teams around to play, the U.S. team is forced to go to Europe every two or three months to compete. "We were so bad at one time that we were getting beat by third division teams, and we were a national team," Jones says. "At the world championship in '82 we lost a game to Hungary 32-4. But then over a two-year period, everybody started getting the hang of things, and we started beating first division and national teams."
According to Jones, most team handball recruits know nothing about the sport. "Team handball is set up so they can recruit good athletes," Jones says. "They know their sport is small and that they will have to teach you how to play."
Jones was initiated during a month's tour in Europe, playing some of the world's toughest teams. After her return to the United States, she participated in the National Sports Festival, leading the South team to victory. "I felt really good about my performance because I'm very competitive and everybody was an ex-star in some sport or another," she says. "My four years of basketball were great, but after that tour I knew I was put here to play handball."
Jones moved to New Jersey to train with the rest of the team following the Sports Festival, but got discouraged and stayed only one week. "Team handball is a perfect example of amateur sports," Jones says. "At the time I joined the team, we had to pay for everything. We were allowed to work, but we trained twice a day. The hardest part was the fact that 13 people were sharing a four-bedroom house. They were asking for too much, so I went back to school."
In December the team was moved to the Olympic training center at Lake Placid, N.Y., where room and board would be provided. Jones was asked to join the team again, and she accepted. "I wanted to play, and I wanted to travel around the world free of charge," she says. "The only thing that they asked was that you be the best athlete you could be and represent the United States in a good way. That sounded like a deal to me."
Jones' performance in the '84 Olympics was so impressive that many club teams in Europe recruited her. "I decided to go because I knew that when I got back to America I would definitely be better than anybody over here because I would be training with people at that level several times a week," she says.
Jones, who speaks fluent German, spent one year with a club team in Vienna and one year in West Germany. "I needed to work, but to work I had to be able to speak German," she says. "I had to go to an intensive German class from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. every day."
She returned to the United States in 1986 to begin training for the Pan Ams. "I got a house, a car, everything," she says. "As long as I stayed there, worked every day and played for their team, it was mine. But I was tired, and I was under a lot of pressure. I was over there to learn, but to them I was already a superstar and was treated like one. It's hard to learn when you've got a player in your face pressing you. Those guys were really good; they knew how to get in your face and cut you down."
Judging by her team's recent success in beating the power teams, Jones had hoped for a better performance in the Olympics. "We were predicted to be a black horse that could win a medal," Jones says. "Within the last year we beat the Russians, we beat the Koreans, and we tied Czechoslovakia. We've never beaten Yugoslavia, but we lost to them by two points.
"We got to the Olympics and our defense fell apart. We played the worst handball we have ever played in the six years I've been playing.
"I was so hurt," she adds. "I told myself I'd never in my life play a team sport again at that level. Even though I had a great Olympics, I couldn't win a medal by myself."
Armed with a lifetime of memories and enough trophies, medals and awards to monopolize her parents' living room, Jones has decided to retire.
"I'm 28 now, and I think I need to do something else other than just play handball," she says. "The main thing on my mind now is to find a decent, comfortable job and get back in school and get this degree over with. This is something that is real touchy for me because I know I should have done better when I was in school. I shouldn't have let myself just think sports, sports, sports."
Although her major was special education, Jones has decided to change to communications or criminal justice. "If I major in criminal justice I would like to be a criminal investigator," Jones says. "I love to talk, and I have traveled a lot, so I think communications may be something I need to be thinking about, too.
"Different people have contacted me about assistant basketball coaching, but I don't want to do that," she adds. "I just want to get this degree."
Marriage and motherhood are also in the future for Jones, who has been engaged for the past three years to a friend she met in Louisburg. "He works for a chemical company in Raleigh, he's in college, and he has his own heating and air conditioning company, so he's a very busy person too," Jones says. "We're not planning on getting married anytime soon. I've got too many things I've got to do first."
Seoul was 'an interesting place,' but Lisa Dwyer doesn't care to go back
Sandra Rogers, a senior majoring in English, conducted the following interview for an assignment in her non-fiction writing class. The interview was with Lisa Dwyer '86, associate producer of The Media Group in Washington, D.C., who worked for NBC at the Summer Olympics.Dwyer assisted a team of technicians in the videotape library and was responsible for keeping a record on the location of all videotapes of Olympic events. Since she viewed the Olympics on the monitors at work, her spare time was spent roaming the city of Seoul and learning about the Korean people.
As an undergraduate at ECU, Dwyer majored in political science, minored in broadcasting, and was an announcer for WZMB. Her employment with NBC was temporary.
Q: What was your first impression of Seoul?
A: After traveling for 25 hours, I arrived at the airport in Seoul and encountered soldiers pointing semi-automatic weapons at me. They leaned over all of us. I guess they were looking for bombs. It was a frightful first impression, to say the least. Besides the soldiers, I found that the air was extremely polluted. Seoul has no programs for smog control and since it was an industrialized city, the sky was dark and the air smelled bad. Also, all of the buildings were gray, and the only color that broke the monotony was that which was added for the Olympics.
Q: Was the security adequate?
A: There were two visible groups of security. Ninja-type guards patrolled the sewers while gateway guards secured the entrances to the Press Village and the International Broadcast Center. At the main studios, however, security was less than impressive. The guards would squeeze our purses and bags to check for bombs and guns. I really think if someone had wanted to plant a bomb, they could have done so with relative ease.
Q: Was there ever a time when you felt your safety to be in jeopardy?
A: Oh, yes! During the opening ceremonies, everyone was convinced something would happen.
Q: Like what?
A: Like a bomb exploding on the field or terrorists shooting at us. Fortunately, neither one happened.
Q: What was the most frightful event during the Olympics?
A: The Boxing Venue incident. First of all, the Koreans did not like our coverage because we were too inquisitive. We showed Korean people in their daily routines, and they thought we were making fun of them. Secondly, some NBC personnel ordered shirts which had the Korean flag pictured along with the logo "We're Boxing. We're Bad." NBC was considered to be defacing the Korean flag. Also, the Korean people, particularly the student demonstrators, took the logo literally. We had bomb threats and our security quadrupled. At that point, some of us considered ordering shirts saying "We came, we shopped, they're shooting, we're leaving!"
Q: Excluding student resentment, how were the Korean people in general?
A: Basically, the Korean people are wonderful. They will bend over backwards to help you even if they cannot understand what you are saying.
Q: What was your favorite experience in Korea?
A: Signing autographs. The Korean people, especially the children, swarmed around the foreigners and begged for autographs.
Q: What did you learn about contemporary South Korean culture?
A: They like to party and have a good time. The unsavory district of Seoul could teach New York City a few things. We drove through the district out of curiosity and were shocked to see that Korean call girls dress more conservatively than most American businesswomen. We thought that they would be scantily clothed. If a Korean associate had not been with us and pointed them out, we would never have believed they were call girls. In the market places, merchants sell cat and dog meat. I thought that was a rumor in the States, but it is true. Also, they had leather shops that would custom make an outfit for you on the spot.
Q: How were the cab rides?
A: Let me put it to you this way. It was not going to be a terrorist who did me in, it was going to be a cab driver. They virtually take the dust off of the bumpers of other cars. Somehow they manage not to hit them. It is amazing! Most of the cabs are orange or green Hyundais. Accidents are rare, but when they do happen, the chances of survival are slim. I saw a wreck in which no one survived. The police were throwing the corpses into the trunk. It was not very reassuring.
Q: Now that you are in the States again, do you have any desire to return to South Korea?
A: Although it was an interesting place, I wouldn't want to return unless all of its political problems were resolved. However, I did learn a lot about the Koreans, and I am very glad I was there.
