Former DJ comes full circle

By Brendan Buhler

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 | 2 a.m.

For 15 years Marcelo Figueiredo coached Brazil’s national women’s gymnastics team, training athletes for international and Olympic competition. One of his students went on to take silver at the 2001 world games.

In 2000 he brought his team to Oklahoma City to train with the United States team in advance of the Sydney Olympics. And then, what the heck, he decided to stay in the United States, but not in Oklahoma City. You can understand.

He took a break from gymnastics and got a job in Los Angeles, spinning beats in Hollywood nightclubs as DJ Talla.

(This is not as strange as it sounds. He’d deejayed in Brazil. And Talla is a nickname from childhood, when he would bug his dad, a professional soccer player in Rio de Janeiro, to buy a giant pickup truck, preferably one with big, tall tires. “Talla, talla,” Figueiredo would shout, until everyone called him Talla.)

After two years in Hollywood, Figueiredo moved to Las Vegas as the opening deejay for Krave nightclub. It was good, don’t get him wrong, but after a while the hours got to him, getting off at five or six in the morning, eating breakfast at dinner time, and then there were all the drunks who thought they should get to name every song. No, it wasn’t fun anymore.

So in 2005 Figueiredo took a pay cut and went back to coaching, taking a spot at Brown’s Gymnastics on Russell Road. He missed the sport and the kids.

Gymnastics is a young person’s sport, and Marcelo has been in it since he was 10, and in coaching since he was 16. It raised him and he’s raised others in it. Kids start when they’re 8 and might be with a gym through their teens. It’s not like planting a seed and walking away, Figueiredo says. A coach works his gymnasts almost every day, for hours. He gets to know the families and the kids, feels every sickness, shares their triumphs and feels their falls.

(When the kids go to competitions, Figueiredo averts his eyes during the balance beam event. Some things he can’t bear to watch, like kids falling off, over and over.)

Figueiredo is conflicted on whether he wants children of his own.

Because he’s not married, he could take off tomorrow for London or Barcelona, nothing holding him back.

“I like the freedom. And I have kids. They’re just not mine, but I get to spend more time with the kids than their parents do,” Figueiredo says.

And besides, he has a love of his life — a pickup truck, a Ford F-150, big and black. Talla, right?

“In Brazil, I never thought I would drive a truck, because my parents were so poor. But in America, you can do everything,” Figueiredo says.

“Well, almost everything, you know. A truck.”

Still, he’s thinking of getting rid of it. Better for the environment, better for his wallet. It was just one of those dreams kids have. He’s 40 now, and he’s been going to church for the first time since he was 12 years old. Maybe it’s time to quit coaching, start a business, get married, have kids of his own.

But not yet.

First, he’s got a kid to coach. He thinks she has a shot at London in 2012.