Breaking the Surface (10 page)

O
N THE TRIP HOME
to California from Montreal, we had to change planes in Chicago. As we were walking through the airport to our gate, a guy in a business suit kept staring at me. I turned to my mom and asked if we knew him; she said that we didn’t. I looked down to see if my fly was open, but it wasn’t. Finally, he approached me and asked, “Are you Greg Louganis?” He told me that he’d watched me on television at the Olympics and wanted to congratulate me. It hadn’t occurred to me that people might actually have been watching the event. Even if they had, why would they remember me?

Recently, I came across a letter my mom wrote to her sister after that trip, which captures what happened pretty clearly.

I’ve never had a celebrity in the house before. It couldn’t have been any worse if he had won a “gold.”

We came in last Thursday night and the pilot on the plane announced Greg was aboard. Well, for four hours we were entertained aboard—free drinks and the bits. Then when we landed, that was something else. All the TV stations and newspaper people were there. Greg walked down the ramp and all of a sudden the lights came on. Pete walked around one side and I the other. There were people inside the airport with signs. It took us an hour just to get out and on the way home. When we turned the corner to home there were people everywhere with streamers and signs welcoming Greg home. I don’t know how many people were in the house. All I know is they went through twelve quarts of champagne. I stayed in the kitchen and got loaded on martinis. The TV people were in the house, too, and stayed taking pictures for an hour
.

Then Friday, his fan mail started. Greg asked me to take care of it for him. Well I figured a couple of days was all, but it has turned into a nightmare. Three hours each day is spent on his mail. He has received over two hundred letters and telegrams, two from President Ford, one inviting Greg for a tour and reception. I called the White House and told them why he couldn’t come and the next telegram was congratulating Greg on his achievement in winning a silver medal…

When the pilot announced that I was on the plane, I still felt embarrassed because I was only a silver medalist.

My sister was one of the first people to reach me when I got off the plane, and Despina stayed right by my side and helped clear a path for me through the crowd. She also helped me move along as people stopped me to talk to me.

At one point, the mayor of El Cajon stepped up to me and introduced himself. I had no idea how big a deal the Olympics were, that they meant so much. I thought diving was such a minor event. I had no perspective on what I’d done, so the crowds of people and all the press attention didn’t make any sense. Also, it wasn’t as if I had gone around telling everyone I was a diver. I knew that in the minds of a lot of people diving was a sissy sport, like dancing and acrobatics. But now everyone wanted to talk to me because I’d won a medal.

Finally we got home. But as we turned onto the street before ours, there were people holding banners and waving. Then we turned onto our street and it was filled with people. My dad suggested I get out of the car and greet people, which I did. People congratulated me, but all I could manage to say was “thank you” over and over again, to everyone. After a few minutes, Dad told me to get back into the car and we drove down the block and into the driveway.

Inside the house there were more people, and in the middle of the living room there was a big cake, with a platform on it and a little diver. There were people everywhere drinking champagne.

There was even one guy who crashed the party. My dad had been tending bar, and this guy went up to him and told him he’d tend bar. He told my father to go enjoy himself. After the camera crews left and it was just close friends and family, my dad asked me if he was one of my friends. I said I thought he was one of Despina’s friends. But Dad had already asked Despina. Dad asked him if he knew anyone at the party and he said, “Oh no. I just saw Greg on TV and wanted to welcome him home. I’m just helping out.” Dad asked him to help himself out the door.

I found out later that even before I came home, the local television station had gone to my Aunt Geri’s house to tape her reaction as she watched my diving events. She even had champagne on ice in case I won a medal.

Everyone seemed to be in on all the excitement. Everyone except for me.

I got lots of phone calls that night congratulating me. One of the calls was from a reporter asking about Sergei Nemtsanov, a Soviet diver who had defected in Canada earlier that day. I had been involved in helping to make it happen. Toward the end of the Olympics, word had gotten out to the Soviet team’s handlers that one of the male divers was going to defect. So all of them were restricted to their room, even having their meals delivered to them.

Sergei went to a diver from the Canadian team, Scott Cranham, to ask him to help him defect. Scott came to me to ask me to help figure out a way to get the Soviet divers out of their room for a little while, long enough for Sergei to slip away. Scott asked me because I was the one person he knew who had easy access to the Soviets. I had been hanging out with them, so it was perfectly natural for me to be seen by the Soviet coaches and the Soviet officials. Also, I was sixteen and looked innocent, so Scott figured that no one would guess I was in on anything.

I didn’t think twice about agreeing to help. I simply thought if Sergei wanted to live in Canada or the United States, why should his government try to stop him? Most of Sergei’s teammates agreed.

The plan was for me to use the excuse of leaving for home to get the Soviet divers to join me for my last meal in the Village. So I came down to their room with my bags and asked them if they would come down to the cafeteria with me for a good-bye meal. Their coaches were busy saying good-bye to people, too, so they weren’t paying that much attention.

In the cafeteria, we met up with Scott and some of the other Canadian and American divers. We had a quick lunch, and then it was time for me to leave. I thought I could just leave and have the Soviets see me off, but there was a complicated checkout procedure at the Olympic Village. Finally, we got out of there, and the Soviets helped me get my bags through security and out to the sidewalk, where I was meeting my father for the ride to the airport.

The Soviets’ good-byes were very emotional. Not only were they saying good-bye to me, they were saying good-bye to Sergei as well. Then I left with my dad to meet my mother at the airport.

During the good-byes, Scott and some of the other divers took Sergei to an office under the Olympic Village that was a “neutral zone” where athletes could seek asylum from their governments. It wasn’t until I returned to San Diego and got the call from the reporter that I knew Sergei had been successful. The reporter said that I must have known about it because I was friends with Sergei. I told her that I was friends with the entire Soviet team and didn’t know anything about it. That was the end of the conversation.

Sergei didn’t stay in Canada for very long. Life was a lot more complicated in the West, and he was overwhelmed by all the choices and by all the decisions he had to make, so he decided to go back to his family in the Soviet Union.

Despite how things turned out, I was proud of myself for having helped Sergei defect. To take on that much responsibility made me feel like a grown-up.

I was sorry that I couldn’t accept President Ford’s invitation to the White House, but I was only home for a short time before leaving for Japan and Hawaii on a month-long tour with Dr. Lee and Jane Ward, another diver he coached. In Japan we gave exhibitions and clinics, and I competed in the Japanese nationals. Japan was one of a number of countries that allowed foreigners to compete in its nationals. We were also wined and dined for the two weeks we were there, and then we went to Hawaii for two weeks, mostly for R & R.

When I got back home in October, El Cajon declared a Greg Louganis Day, and I was invited to speak before the chamber of commerce. They also made me the marshal of the Mother Goose Parade, which is held in El Cajon every November. It’s one of the biggest parades in Southern California. I’d performed in the parade before as an acrobat, but now I was in the parade as the guest marshal. It’s a little awkward to sit in a car filled with giant cartoon characters and maintain any dignity. But it’s all part of the job, and besides, waving is a lot easier than diving.

Things were getting crazy with all the phone calls from reporters and people we didn’t know, and we had to get the first of our unlisted phone numbers. Even with unlisted numbers, the crazies still got through occasionally.

One time, not long after I got back from the Japan tour, I answered a call on my sister’s line, which was still listed. I said hello, and the guy on the other end of the line asked, “Is this Greg?” I said it was, and he said, “I just wanted to ask your permission to masturbate to your picture.” I thought about what I could say, but all I said was, “Yeah, I guess so,” and hung up. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed for me or for him. That was when my sister got an unlisted number too.

That caller was one of the more extreme, but after the Olympics, I discovered that lots of people found me desirable, both men and women. More than a few girls I didn’t know called to ask me for dates, and a couple of girls called to ask me if I’d take them to their senior prom. At various diving events, I’d be surrounded by girls wanting my autograph. The
Evening Tribune
described the scene at the Valhalla High School swimming pool where I was practicing my dives shortly after the Olympics: “The young girls with sun-bleached hair sit together in the bleachers and ogle him as if he were Fonzie or Paul McCartney or someone…Louganis seems embarrassed and uncomfortable amid all the attention and does his best to concentrate on the task at hand…‘Ohhhhh, Greg,’ coos a pretty blonde with a camera. ‘Could you come over here so I could take your picture?’ Greg goes over, poses, chats for a while and then walks away, blushing slightly and shaking his head.” I always got the impression the reporters wanted to be in my shoes, surrounded by pretty girls who desired them. But it had more to do with them than with me.

The sexually charged attention made no sense to me. I didn’t see myself the way other people saw me. To them I was this sexy Olympic icon, an image the newspapers seemed to encourage when they described me as having a “muscular, brown, supple body.” I may have been all those things to others, but at sixteen, when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see anyone different from the skinny, dark-skinned sissy I’d been before I went to the Olympics. That would prove to be an ongoing problem for me. No matter how many nice things people would say about my looks, no matter how many times I would be photographed for magazine spreads, no matter how many men and women would make passes at me, I could never accept that I was attractive, let alone a sex object. Only now, in my mid-thirties, am I beginning to explore with a professional counselor why I’ve always had a bad self-image.

Although I didn’t win the gold at Montreal, it was clear that life wasn’t going to be the same anymore. It wasn’t. Nobody at school ever called me a sissy again—at least to my face—and I got more recognition on the local sports pages than even the football players did.