Patrick Finley: 'Bouncing rig' now has place in Olympics

Dagmar Nissen Munn's father could make them, and be correct.

George Nissen owned a women's basketball team, the Iowa Cornets (how great is that name?), and produced a movie. He was a national champion gymnast at the University of Iowa and served in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.

Most importantly though, he invented a training device.

And then a sport to be performed on it.

And then the sport's national championships and world championships.

Eventually, it reached the Olympics, where it remains today, as the only American invention to be included as a Summer Games sport.

(We can quibble over BMX; cycling is European, but BMX is very SoCal. As for basketball, James Naismith was Canadian.)

Have you guessed the invention yet?

You probably see one every time you walk the dog through your neighborhood, peeking over neighbors' backyard walls.

It's the trampoline, and its rise is detailed in Green Valley resident Munn's book "My Father's Dream of an Olympic Trampoline," released last month.

In it, she describes how her father returned home after a 1939 stint in Mexico, where he spent his days diving with the national team and his nights performing as an acrobat in nightclubs. There, he had been given the nickname "Campeon de Trampolin," or springboard champion.

He was fiddling with his invention in his Iowa garage - a "bouncing rig" he first built five years earlier to practice his tumbling - when a neighbor asked about it.

"The trampoline?" Nissen asked, and the name was born.

He made it his life's work, founding his own trampoline production company and traveling the world to promote the product.

He campaigned for half a century to get the sport of trampolining - which features gymnasts performing acrobatics while bouncing - accepted into the Olympics.

Maybe, his skeptical friends said, it would happen in the Year 2000.

"That became, almost, the family joke," Munn said.

Instead, it was prophetic.

The sport made its debut in Sydney, Australia, in 2000.

Nissen, the sport's godfather, was even allowed to do a couple of bounces himself at the Games.

Munn, 60, decided to write the book after hearing incorrect versions of the trampoline invention story following her father's death at 96 two years ago.

"It is one of those products, and one of those things, that can get lost in history," she said.

When Nissen died, he received an 800-word obituary in The New York Times.

There was a lot to cover.

Nissen trampolined atop an Egyptian pyramid, and next to a kangaroo after a week's worth of training in Central Park. He did handstands into his 80s and headstands after that.

Written over 15 months at Munn's dining room table, her first book - which you can find at www.nissentrampoline.com and major Internet booksellers - is a breezy, fun read about an unusually American topic.

"It could have been the encyclopedia of the trampoline, or gymnastics," she said. "But my theme was his dream."