Walden Lake residents may remember playing tennis with Bill Roetzheim sometime since 1985. Like many people, Mr. Roetzheim chose to retire in the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World after a long career in teaching and coaching at the high school and college levels.
Unlike many people, however, there was much more to the “Chief” than meets the eye — he was also one of the greatest American gymnasts of all time.
His home office, left untouched since his Feb. 26 passing, looks like a little museum. Housed in the biggest frame is his collection of earned medals — it’s missing a few but still impressive. Plaques and pictures of a young Mr. Roetzheim cover the walls, whether he was showcasing his talent on the bars, rubbing elbows with legends such as Jim Thorpe or carrying the torch in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
The torch itself is hanging on one of the walls, too.
Just about the only things that one can’t find in the Mr. Roetzheim household are the history books — and rule books — that the man almost single-handedly re-wrote.
RISING STAR
Born in 1929, in Chicago, Mr. Roetzheim’s first exposure to the sport was in a movie theater. His father, who worked for the city, took his boy to a showing of a film about the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, Germany. It was then that Mr. Roetzheim got hooked on the sport, and he began training shortly afterward.
In 1948, at 18 years old, Mr. Roetzheim’s years of hard work paid off with a selection to the U.S. Olympic Team — just in time for the Summer Games in London.
He competed for the U.S. men’s team twice, in 1948 and 1952, and also took home a pair of gold medals in the 1951 Pan-American Games — the first American to win at least one. But, arguably his biggest accomplishments came in the collegiate circuit.
Mr. Roetzheim first attended the University of Illinois at Navy Pier and had established himself as one of the top collegiate gymnasts in the country. After two years, though, he wanted to transfer to UI-Champaign/Urbana. This caused an internal problem.
He was so good that his school, faced with the possibility of losing him, made a pair of new rules on the spot to keep him around. First, UI-Navy Pier ruled it was a separate entity from UI-Champaign/Urbana, despite both schools operating under the UI flagship. Then, it ruled that transferring athletes would have to wait out one year before they would be allowed to compete in intercollegiate athletics.
Does that sound familiar? If so, it’s because a version of that rule is in place today. But, now, it’s been tweaked to prevent athletes from doing what Mr. Roetzheim did, at least when transferring to Division I schools.
Dr. Hartley Price, then the gymnastics coach at Florida State University, found a loophole in the ruling — UI-Navy Pier was not an NCAA school, like FSU was — and successfully recruited Mr. Roetzheim. In his five years at FSU, he brought the program to national prominence and won the school its first national championship.
That’s right — FSU’s first national championship wasn’t in football. It was the gymnastics team, but it was really Mr. Roetzheim himself: He scored 20 of the team’s 22 points, which was also enough to outscore all of the other teams by himself.
So, one could say he could have won a national championship all by himself, if he had to.
Now, thanks to the NCAA, no one will ever match that accomplishment. After Mr. Roetzheim’s big win, the institution completely revamped the scoring system to prevent a one-man show from happening again, thus evening the playing field.
AFTER COLLEGE
Mr. Roetzheim earned a master’s degree at FSU and went on to a career in teaching. He began at Proviso High School and also served as the school’s gymnastics coach. He held the position for 14 years, from 1955 to 1969. After that, he went back to college — serving as athletic director and gymnastics coach at UI-Chicago from 1969 until retiring in 1985.
His wife, Betty Jo “B.J.” Roetzheim, remembers the student-athletes loved her husband.
“They used to call themselves ‘Roetzy’s Rats,’” she says.
Students also called him the “Chief” and compared him to the drill sergeant in “Hogan’s Heroes.” He did not like to demonstrate anything to his gymnasts, instead preferring to coach them and help them figure it out on their own. Except for one instance, according to one former student.
“There was one guy who wasn’t doing a jam eagle right on the high bar,” Roetzheim says. “Bill told him over and over again, how to do it, and then he just got up on the bars and did it himself. The students couldn’t believe it — it was the best jam eagle any of them had seen, and Bill did it in his street clothes. He was 40 years old.”
He was inducted in 1975, into the Gymnastics Hall of Fame, then two years later into the FSU Hall of Fame. In 1985, the 14-time NAAU/NCAA national champion, two-time Olympian and gold medal winner called it a career.
BACK TO B.J.’S ROOTS
According to Betty Jo, part of the reason the Roetzheims retired to Plant City was to play tennis. But, the other part was because her family was here. Betty Jo was born and raised in Plant City and, until FSU, had never left town.
And, until she met her husband at college, she had never left Florida. It was there that the two met: She first laid eyes on him in one of the school cafeterias and had no idea he was an Olympian.
With a little help from her friends, the two began dating and, four years later, began a 60-year marriage that took the couple, their children and their dog all over the United States, North America, and the world.
“I know that people like to brag about their husbands, but life with Bill was a blast,” she says.
Many will remember Mr. Roetzheim for being a stellar athlete, but Betty Jo remembers him most for being a great husband — even in the last few years of his life, when he was plagued by memory problems.
“No matter what, he would wake up every morning and say, ‘Betty Jo, I love you,’” she says. “What more could you ask for?”
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.
A CAMPING ENTHUSIAST
One of Bill Roetzheim’s favorite things to do was go camping.
His interest was sparked during a family trip to Colorado, where Bill and Betty Jo saw a lot of families camped out at night — tents pitched, fires blazing, good times being had. So, he bought a holiday rambler, and the family went back. This started an annual tradition: For the three months that the entire family was on summer vacation (Mr. and Mrs. Roetzheim were both teachers), the clan would go on a camping trip.
They’ve been to national parks all over the United States, traveled up to Canada and even went down to Mexico — where they once set up camp at an airport in the Yucatan Peninsula.