Sugar And Spice—and Iron

Marquette started his club 10 years ago and decided to coach only girls because, "Boys have so much going for them in sports—football, baseball, basketball. Girls are always put down."

"I envy Marquette," says Armando Vega, a former Olympian and now men's gymnastics coach at LSU. "If I could start it all over again, I would become a girls' coach also. Girls are much more rewarding because they are fanatics."

"I would say that girls are very adaptive toward regimentation," says Marquette's assistant, Doug Mead, "but you have to know how far you can go. Bud's tactics are to hit them hard and then lay off."

"When Cathy pushes her chin forward and puts on that little bulldog face," says Marquette, "I know I have to leave her alone."

A friend recently asked Rigby what she likes to do most during her spare time. "Just sitting without having anything to do," she answered, "and not having to talk."

Every year Marquette and the SCATs travel around the U.S. or Europe, putting on shows, much like the Ice Capades, for donations. "Last year we covered 14,000 miles in the U.S.," says Marquette. "We were in 38 cities. Every night they performed in a big arena or in some little dinky place on all kinds of equipment. They are pros."

During her travels Rigby sees little more than gyms. "I can tell you about every gym in the world," she says. "There are also a lot of castles in Europe. Every town seems to have one, and they all look alike." When the SCATs were in Edinburgh, they visited a tomb at the castle. Cathy lay down on it. In Switzerland, at a wax museum, she slipped under the rope and posed with the statues.

Cathy commutes between her home in Los Alamitos and the gym in Long Beach in a white-and-blue Pinto. She lives in a burgundy-colored house with her parents, one brother, a sister, a dog, a gopher snake, an alligator named Beauregard Frump, a desert tortoise and a monkey. There was once a duckling which drowned in a bucket of water where Cathy had left it while she was at school. "I didn't know ducks couldn't swim that long," she says.

Every afternoon at four o'clock Cathy rushes home from the gym for two hours to prepare dinner for the family. One reason for this is that she loves to cook, another is that her mother has been partially paralyzed for 21 years. Anita Rigby contracted polio while she was pregnant with her second child. She could not walk for many years, and even today needs crutches.

Two and a half years ago Mr. Rigby lost his job as an aeronautical engineer in a general layoff at Douglas, and his wife became the main breadwinner for the family, which included five children. She made $110 a week as a material analyst at Douglas, while her husband helped out by working as a truck driver and a bartender.