Breaking the Surface (13 page)

My head didn’t really hurt, but my back was sore from hitting the water, covered with welts that swelled and split, like having razor cuts all over your back. Megan rubbed lotion on me to keep the skin from splitting even more. That was when Megan and I got very close. I made it through the night okay, and we left for home a day or two later.

Although my doctor had told me to take it easy for at least a month, I didn’t. Three days later, after returning to the University of Miami, which I was attending at the time, I was back on the platform. I did only three dives the first day, because they made me dizzy. But within a few more days I was back doing my regular routine. I had to—I needed to get ready for the World FINA Cup, which was less than two weeks away. I won.

Hitting my head on the platform was a pretty bad experience, but I was knocked out, so I don’t remember it. It was much more terrifying for my friend Megan, who saw it happen. I witnessed something four years later, in July 1983, at the World University Games in Edmonton, Canada, that was even more horrifying, and it’s something I’ll never forget.

There were thirteen divers competing on ten-meter platform, and I was standing on the 7.5-meter platform, waiting my turn along with a young Canadian diver who was diving ahead of me. A Russian diver, Sergei Shalibashvili, above us on the tenmeter platform, was about to dive. I saw the dive number 307C on the scoreboard across the pool, so I knew he was about to do a reverse three-and-a-half, a very difficult dive. I was the person who had started using the dive in international competition, and my doing it pushed the other divers to try to do it even if they weren’t fully prepared. Sergei and I were the only two divers attempting the reverse three-and-a-half at the World University Games.

In previous dives, Sergei had been coming very close to the platform, and we were all worried. In fact, one of the American coaches approached a Soviet coach to express his concern about how dangerously close some of Sergei’s dives had been. The Soviet coaches didn’t know that Sergei also wasn’t feeling well, but some of the American divers did. He’d been having severe diarrhea and was pretty weak, which added to the possibility of his having an accident. I didn’t think Sergei should have been diving, but it wasn’t up to me. If it had been me, I would have done the same thing and hidden the fact that I was sick. You do some stupid things just to compete. Every athlete does, and most of the time you get away with it, but it isn’t worth the risk. Coaches need to help athletes understand that winning isn’t everything— life is.

I had an awful feeling that he was going to hit, so when they announced his dive, I turned around and looked away from the pool. I plugged my ears with my fingers and started humming lightly to myself. I didn’t want to see or hear him hit the platform.

I didn’t see it or hear it, but I felt it. There was a jolt, and the whole tower shook. I unplugged my ears and looked toward the deck where the coaches were standing and scanned the audience to see their reaction. Everybody was out of their seats and people were yelling, “Get a stretcher! Get a backboard!” I ran to the edge of the platform and was about to jump in after Sergei when someone yelled, “Don’t jump in!” I looked over the edge of the platform and there he was floating, facedown, not moving. There was quite a bit of blood in the water, and a few people were in the water already pulling him to the side of the pool—Sergei was unconscious but still breathing.

At that point, I turned and walked to the back of the platform where the Canadian diver was standing. I could see he was pretty shaken, and I tried to calm him down by asking him about his next dive. I don’t think I helped him much, but it gave me something to do.

When the diving resumed, we were all still shaken. I still had a job to do, but it was almost impossible to concentrate.

My next dive was a back three-and-a-half, which I did fine, but then my final dive of the prelims was the same reverse threeand-a-half Sergei had attempted. Before I did the dive, I asked my coach permission to jump it out, to push out farther from the platform so there would be more space between my head and the concrete as I passed the platform on the way down. I didn’t want to take any chances, so I played it safe and jumped out. I got 4s and 5s, which wasn’t great, but in the finals, I did the dive as I usually did and I got 8s.

When we left Canada, Sergei was in the hospital in a coma. The rest of us headed for the McDonald’s International Invitational, which was being held at the Olympic swim stadium in Los Angeles. Toward the end of the LA meet, a reporter asked me if diving was getting too dangerous, given the example of the Soviet diver who had just died. I was stunned, and told the reporter that I hadn’t heard the news yet. The reporter was very apologetic. I said I had no comment.

I was terribly upset and felt that Sergei’s death was my fault. I know I didn’t put a gun to Sergei’s head and force him to do the dive. It was his own decision, his and his coach’s. But I still felt responsible. What made me feel worse was that his coach was his mother. I’m sorry I inspired Sergei to try using that dive, and I hope his death made us more careful. It was a tragic reminder that diving could be a dangerous sport.

To make sense of what happened and make sure I never made the same mistake as Sergei, I decided to look at a tape of what had happened and figure out what he did wrong. I watched it alone, crying through the first few times, watching the dive through my tears.

I played the videotape over and over and over. By the sixth or seventh time, I saw what Sergei had done wrong; as he was initiating his takeoff, bending into the platform and then jumping off the platform, he had his weight on his heels, and his back was very straight. His shoulders were over his heels, which pushed him up over the platform instead of away from it. If his shoulders had been forward a little bit, his weight would have been over his toes, not his heels. Also, as he was pushing off the platform, he should have projected his hips farther forward to carry him up and away from the platform. I watched the tape several more times, to imprint on my mind exactly what
not
to do, so I would never make the same mistake.

And on that dive, at least, I never did.

A
S AN ADULT LOOKING
back, I can see now that depression has been a major problem all my life. But as a child and adolescent, I just thought I was moody. Generally, my bouts of depression seemed to be triggered by a specific problem, like being called names or having a bad workout. Until fairly recently, I never thought of the depression itself as the problem.

Sometimes when I was young, the bad moods seemed like they would never end. One of those times was in the fall of 1977, when I was just going back for my senior year of high school. My strained back had kept me out of the pool on and off for nearly a year. Even when I dove, I was still in pain. I was beginning to think I’d never get the chance to redeem myself at the next Olympics.

I was also wrestling with my sexuality, mostly scared that I’d no longer be accepted if anybody found out. If I’d had somebody to talk to, I might not have felt so bad. I looked forward to my furtive meetings with the older man from the beach, but he wasn’t someone I could really talk to. At that point I didn’t even consider seeing a counselor or psychologist. I accepted my parents’ view that psychologists were for people who were mentally ill. I was depressed, but I wasn’t mentally ill.

I started to think that I should just leave, kill myself, commit suicide, but I didn’t act on those feelings right away. But one day at school I decided there was no point going on. There was a report due in my English class and I didn’t have it finished, so I made up an excuse that I’d been away diving. I did that a lot, especially in humanities classes. Most of the teachers would give me an extension, but a few of them would take off an entire grade for each day the paper was late, so I would get a C instead of a B. Even without the penalties, I was barely getting by.

My parents were unhappy about my schoolwork, but they figured I’d be going to college on an athletic scholarship, so my grades didn’t matter. But the grades still mattered to me, and I felt like a failure that afternoon. So I went to my parents’ medicine cabinet to find some pills.

As I looked through the various prescription bottles, I remember thinking to myself that I’d better be careful not to use too much of any one drug, because I didn’t want to get in trouble for taking my mom’s pills. So I tried not to take so many that my mother would notice they were gone, but I took what I thought would be enough to get the job done.

I wrote a suicide note explaining that I couldn’t take it anymore, and I outlined all the reasons why I was doing it—except my sexuality. One of the lines in the note was about how I couldn’t seem to do anything right. I told my parents not to blame themselves, because it wasn’t their fault, and I explained that I was simply too sad to let them know what was going on in my life. I swallowed a handful of pills, got into bed, and prayed that I wouldn’t wake up.

When I opened my eyes the next morning and realized I was still alive, I was angry with myself for being such a failure that I couldn’t even kill myself. I grabbed the suicide note off my nightstand and ripped it up. I was feeling pretty groggy, so I told my mom that I was coming down with the flu. I stayed home from school and slept for most of the day.

The next day, my mother discovered that some of her Valium and codeine were missing. She confronted my sister and me, concerned that we’d stolen the medicine from her to sell it on the street. I told her I didn’t know anything about it.

The next day, I went up to Belmont Plaza in Long Beach to train with Dr. Lee. I tried practicing on springboard, but my legs weren’t under me at all, and I almost hit the side of the pool. I went to Dr. Lee and told him that I couldn’t dive. I didn’t tell him what I’d done, but I told him that I had to call home.

I called my mom and told her that I was the one who took the pills. She asked me why I took them and I started crying. I told her that I took them because I’d wanted to kill myself. I was more ashamed that I’d stolen medicine from my mother and that Mom felt it was her fault. Her biggest concern was that I was okay, that I hadn’t hurt myself. It was easier for me to feel guilt and concern for my mom than it was to confront what my depression was really about. As soon as we got off the phone, I headed home.

My father spoke with Dr. Lee about the suicide attempt, and Dr. Lee suggested that I go to a friend of his who handled suicidal teenagers. My parents thought I would be better off talking with our family doctor, Dr. Easier. They thought, mistakenly, that since he was a friend of the family, I’d have an easier time talking to him.

Dr. Easier asked me a lot of questions, to which I gave my usual one-word answers. Before long, he gave up and I went home. I had learned this well-practiced tactic early on at school. If you just gave one-word answers, they gave up on you. I didn’t know how badly I needed to talk to someone who could help me sort out the emotional mess I was in.

My parents didn’t make me go back to Dr. Easier again. Instead, they grounded me for a few weeks for taking my mother’s medication. Like most people of their generation and background, they didn’t know a lot about mental-health problems or the psychiatric profession. They saw my suicide attempt as an isolated thing. I wonder how different things would have been if only I had dealt with my depression as a teenager. Maybe the rest of my life would have been changed for the better. That’s why I urge parents to take their children’s problems seriously.

The replacement for therapy for me, as always, proved to be my diving. My back slowly got better, my diving improved, and so did my outlook. The turning point was when I started diving with Ron O’Brien, whose diving camp I’d attended a few summers before. In some ways Ron reminded me of John Anders. He was the kind of esteem-building coach who taught his divers the difference between competition and competitiveness—in other words, to be good sportsmen rather than focusing on winning at all costs.