Former U.S. team member and four-time NCAA event champion Kim Hamilton Anthony told IG that she hopes her recently published memoir, Unfavorable Odds, will offer guidance and inspiration to others facing the struggles she has overcome.

“It’s about life lessons,” said Hamilton Anthony, who was on hand at her alma mater, UCLA, for a book signing last weekend. “I’ve had responses from so many people who have nothing to do with gymnastics, and they say, ‘I was laughing, I was crying, it made me think about my life, it made me think about my relationship with other people, it made me think about my relationship with God.’”

As a member of the Richmond Olympiad Gymnastics Club in Virginia, Hamilton placed 10th all-around at the 1984 U.S. Championships, and tied for fourth place all-around at the 1985 U.S. Championships. She won the gold medal on floor exercise at the 1984 Coca-Cola International in London, where she finished fourth all-around. The Coca-Cola field included famous Romanian gymnasts Cristina Grigoras and Daniela Silivas.

Hamilton later competed for UCLA, where she won the NCAA floor exercise title three times and the vault title once. In her professional career, she has worked as a commentator for ESPN and FOX Sports, host of the television show “County Connection” in Miami, and chaplain for the Miami Dolphins Wives. She and her husband, former UCLA and professional football player Corwin Anthony, have two sons.

In Unfavorable Odds, Hamilton Anthony chronicles the challenges she faced in and out of the gym as an African-American child raised in an atmosphere of poverty, drugs and violence.

“I was in the middle of these two worlds, and I would bounce back and forth,” Hamilton Anthony told IG. “I took the wrong approach in becoming a chameleon. I really struggled with my identity issue.”

Read a review of Unfavorable Odds in an upcoming issue of International Gymnast magazine.

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Ann said:

	... I bought the book at the ucla meet, read it that night. I couldn't put it down until i finished it. Great story!
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January 18, 2010
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