THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 24, 1996 TAG: 9607240646
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C3 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Olympics '96
From Atlanta
SOURCE: Tom Robinson
LENGTH: 99 lines
Mike Thornberry, a member of the U.S. team handball squad, will compete against Sweden tonight.
It's a great melange, Mike Thornberry says. A great mix. A good life.
It's no surprise that the 23-year-old from Suffolk has become an upstanding citizen and military officer. Chances are most Eagle scouts who've never given their parents a sleepless night and easily drop ``melange'' into conversation follow similar paths.
But an Olympic athlete? Where'd that come from? Out of the fog on the Hudson, that's where. From the halls of the U.S. Military Academy, the reserves of his competitive spirit and the serendipity of timing, the magnet that's brought it all together.
``I would have never known or forseen that I'd get this far,'' says Thornberry, who debuts tonight as a U.S. team handball player against Sweden. ``It's like I won the lottery, not with money but with all these great chances and opportunities I've had. ... I was always thinking I was going to be this great basketball player. I would never have thought I'd be an Olympian playing team handball.''
(We pause for the obligatory explanation of team handball, a passion in Europe but off the map here. Terribly misnamed for quick American comprehension, it's a rough combination of basketball, water polo and hockey in which a volleyball-sized ball is dribbled, passed and thrown into a goal.)
Thornberry's been at the sport for six years, virtually no time at all. But had Thornberry, West Point '94, graduated a year earlier or later, you wouldn't be reading about him now. That's where timing's been his friend.
The Army, for whom Thornberry is a second lieutenant in air defense artillery, through its world class athlete program allows Olympic-caliber athletes to join national teams no more than 2 1/2 years before an Olympics.
If Thornberry left school in '93, it would have been too long till the Atlanta Games for him to become a national-team member under the Army's program. Had he graduated in '95 and joined the U.S. team, time likely would have been too short for him to make the Olympic roster.
So '94 provided the perfect chance for Thornberry to join the U.S. team right from college, improve his game and transform himself from a longshot into the youngest of America's 16 Olympians.
``Even if I'd have planned out what was going to happen and how I was going to progress, it couldn't have gone any better,'' Thornberry says.
Thornberry is the 6-foot-6, 230-pound son of Westhaven Lakes residents Gary and Elsie Thornberry, the older brother of James Madison chemistry whiz Matthew Thornberry and the fiance of El Paso's Lora Lilley, whom he'll marry Aug. 31.
He was born in Virginia Beach, spent four years in Decatur, Ill., when Gary, a chief financial officer, took a job there, then returned with the family to South Hampton Roads in 1987 when he was 14.
Thornberry played basketball at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy and bagged a four-year ROTC college scholarship. He gave it back, though, when he earned entry into West Point at the urging of his mother, a guidance counselor at Tallwood High School.
She knew West Point thrives on well-rounded individuals and vice versa.
``We're very blessed,'' Elsie Thornberry says about her son, whom she calls a renaissance man for his major in French and minor in systems engineering.
Thornberry the basketball nut did not play at West Point but took a turn for its national champion team handball squad as a freshman. The speed, movement and contact of the game appealed to him. ``It was something that was easy to take a ken to,'' he says.
Four years later, Thornberry's skills, not to mention his size and ability to set the screens crucial to team handball, were easy for the U.S. team to accept. He was asked to join and a year later played in the world championships in Iceland. That's their son's knack for playing up to the competition, his parents say.
``Neither Gary or I are athletic, but Michael's loved sports since he was a very small child,'' Elsie Thornberry says. ``He's a big teddy bear, but on the field he's very serious. Every game is like life or death.''
Since last summer, Thornberry's trained with the U.S. team in Atlanta, where the Army stationed him at Fort McPherson. McPherson has no air defense artillery, however, so Thornberry's duty has largely consisted of speaking to school groups about the Army when not training with the team.
Where he goes post-Olympics is the question, because the world class athlete program doesn't kick in again till 1998. Thornberry sees himself playing in at least one more Olympics, as well as world championships before then, and hopes to work out an arrangement that can keep him in Atlanta with the U.S. team.
The Thornberrys believe it will all fall into place. When has it not?
``I'm just beginning to understand the uniqueness of what he's pulled off,'' Gary Thornberry says. ``I thought the high point for him was going to West Point.''
Instead there's an officer, a gentleman and an Olympian in the family. A nice melange, if ever there was one. ILLUSTRATION: LAWRENCE JACKSON photos, The Virginian-Pilot
Mike Thornberry, at 6-foot-6, 230-pounds, likes the speed, movement
and contact of team handball. ``I was always thinking I was going to
be this great basketball player,'' he said. ``I would never have
thought I'd be an Olympian playing team handball.''
Team handball is a rough combination of basketball, water polo and
hockey in which a volleyball-sized ball is dribbled, passed and
thrown into a goal. by CNB