Yes, I knew Bela Karolyi. For 25 years the Olympics, which was grand central to Karolyi’s gymnastics kingdom, were among my beats at Newsday. No, I wasn’t aware then of the odious sexual predator Larry Nasser, found to have molested female athletes while working as a team physician at Karolyi’s training center in Texas and at Michigan State University.

Did Karolyi and his wife (and coaching partner) Martha know what Nassar was up to? And, though not as damnable, did Bela’s open endorsement of the Darwinian model—pushing his young charges, almost all of them still in their teens, to their physical and psychological limits—border on abuse?

“They cannot slow down,” he insisted, “or the little ones coming behind them will swallow them up like they’ve never been there.”

There were mothers of his gymnasts who considered his system to be cruel, other parents (and most of his star students) who praised his “caring” approach even as he demanded perfection.

So it’s complicated. When he died last week at 82, all the plusses and minuses naturally made it into his obituary. But here’s the first thing that came to mind with the news of his passing: Puppies.

Leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I was assigned to spend time at Karolyi’s Houston gym and his ranch/training center in the East Texas forest an hour-and-a-half away. Having coached the previous two all-around champions in the most visible Olympic sport—Nadia Comaneci from his native Romania and Mary Lou Retton upon his defection to the United States—Karolyi had become People Magazine material, a bold-faced name.

He was 6-foot-2, an imposing, stern middle-aged figure with a gruff Eastern European accent and bad-guy mustache who dispensed bear hugs as well as strict orders. A sort of dictator who trained little girls, these wee critters conditioned to obey his every command. Puppies.

Which conjured up this story he told on himself in ‘88: Upon defecting from Communist Romania in 1981, he spoke Romanian, Hungarian, German, Russian, “a little French and sign language,” but no English. He and Martha had landed at a cheap Long Beach, Calif., hotel where he was cleaning the hotel restaurant by night to pay for his room and working the docks of the Long Beach harbor by day. At the harbor, he regularly heard fellow laborers exclaim, “Son of a bitch.”

“I am wondering,” he said, “what is this ‘son of a bitch?’ After a week is over, my wife is getting a little pocket dictionary and we are looking in there for it, but I couldn’t find ‘son of a bitch.’ So I find ‘son:’ Son of somebody. Okay, that’s good. And then ‘bitch.’ Female dog. Good, okay. So ‘son of a bitch,’ that’s a puppy. That’s not bad. That’s nice.”

Six months later, working in Norman, Okla., as a camp gymnastics instructor—he had been hired by Paul Ziert, a gymnastics coach he had befriended during international competitions—“the only thing I’m thinking nice to say to the kids is ‘good little son of a bitch,’” Karolyi said. “’That’s a nice little son of a bitch.’ And I’m patting them and being nice to them trying to encourage them and the kids eyes are big. And some are laughing, looking at me, and some are just staring.

“One day Paul heard me and explained to me: ‘It’s not a puppy.’”

And that immigrant’s tale of awkward assimilation was just one aspect of Karolyi’s embodiment of American clichés.

Raised in a Communist country, he became a prototypical capitalist. On the 53 acres he came to own in the Texas forest, he built 11 log cabins to accommodate 140 young gymnasts. There was a basketball court, tennis court, swimming pool, running track and a lake stocked with catfish, bass and sunfish; he had 12 horses, 30 head of cattle, a turkey, a peacock, a Watusi bull named Gorbachev “because he’s ugly;’’ a Texas longhorn steer, goats, pet deer, sheep, chickens and 18 hunting dogs.

He had pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Just out of high school in Romania, he had taken a job at a slaughterhouse, lived in the dorm at the local stadium, trained as a hammer thrower, rugby player and team handball player and took up boxing because his slaughterhouse boss was the national boxing coach, and the fellow who convinced Karolyi that “life is a fight. You make your life, you make your chances.”

Team handball was Karolyi’s ticket to a college scholarship, which led to a job teaching physical education to elementary students. He set up a gymnastics school for children in the town of Onesti, where a local girl—4 at the time—happened to join. That was Comaneci.

He was an advocate of rugged individualism. “It’s not the system,” he said of arguments that the old Soviet and East German sports operations were superior to democratic ones. “I’m not a political person. When people tell me these American kids won’t work hard, they’re lazy, all that; that’s a lousy lie. They’s not lazy. They’re just as excited and willing as the Romanian kids. It’s always, ‘You’re a athlete! It’s a challenge! It’s a great challenge!’ You should be able to say, ‘I’m a proud American but the athletic achievement is mine.’

“An athlete, she is the one who owns it because she put up the sacrifice, fighting like a lion. Some say, ‘Copy the Soviet system.’ That would be the ultimate disaster. That would kill the athletic achievement [in America]. All these guys saying, ‘I did it for the Communist system, the Communist system made me what I am’…Then you go throw up in the bathroom.” He dismissed sports administrators as “all these barking dogs. These people who only bark but don’t have the results.”

In that thick Transylvanian accent, he spoke Texan. (“Gol-LEE!”) He listened to country music constantly. He went to livestock auctions. He had a photo of John Wayne on the wall of his ranch house. “For me,” he said, “somebody without a country, to identify myself—‘I’m from Texas’—it’s good . You can say ‘Texas’ and that’s enough. It’s my country.”