Breaking the Surface (15 page)

Even though I was busy, I somehow managed to find the time to have my first real relationships. Given my usual turbulent emotions and my almost complete inability to communicate in any realm other than diving, the experiences didn’t turn out all that well.

My first big crush at school was on Daniel (not his real name). We met in dance class, and I was crazy about him. I would have done anything for him. I thought about him constantly and always wanted to do nice things for him. He returned the affection and our relationship became sexual, but it didn’t have the same meaning for him.

One major problem was that Daniel was still struggling to find himself. He was still coming to terms with his sexuality, which is a tough thing to do. I was also part of the problem. I was clinging to Daniel with such desperation that he couldn’t breathe. After a few months, he told me he needed his space. I was crushed, and when I found out that he was seeing somebody else, I was devastated. All I knew was that the love of my life didn’t want me, and at eighteen, that was the end of the world.

Unfortunately, the end of the relationship with Daniel came at the same time as one of my low periods. Things at school had been difficult: my roommate’s girlfriend was practically living with us in our tiny dorm room, I was having a difficult time with freshman English, finals were coming up, and I was terrified I wouldn’t pass. All the negative feelings snowballed, and I decided once again that I’d be better off dead.

I don’t remember exactly what I took this time, but it was probably a mix of Quaaludes and black beauties, the kind of recreational drugs I could get my hands on. I collected them over a period of a few weeks as I got more and more depressed, thinking that suicide might be an option. Once I found out that Daniel was seeing someone else, I took the whole mixture.

Again, I woke up the next day feeling like a total failure because I couldn’t even manage to kill myself. I was pretty sick for a couple of days after that, and my friend Bob Strickland kept an eye on me, as did a couple of other friends. Bob brought me food and made sure I ate it.

A few of my friends suggested that I see a counselor, but I didn’t listen. After having tried unsuccessfully to kill myself three times, I started thinking that there must be a reason why I was still alive, and maybe I should try to figure out what that reason was. But for the second time in my life, I passed up the opportunity. I wish now that I’d made the effort to seek serious professional help rather than waiting another sixteen years to do it.

It took me a few months to get over Daniel, and by the next fall, I was feeling ready to meet someone else. One day during diving practice, I noticed a guy hanging around the pool. He was handsome, with curly brown hair and a nice physique, and he was taller than I was. He came back the next day, and during a break we talked for a little while. He asked if I’d like to get together sometime, and I said yes.

It turned out that Jeff (not his real name) was a graduate student. I liked him a lot, although I didn’t have the same intense feelings for him that I’d had for Daniel. A few weeks after we met, I moved in with him. This may sound a little crazy, but at the time it made perfect sense. It was coming up to the start of the next semester and it was time to pay for the dorm. I’d been complaining to Jeff about my roommate situation and he said he could help out, because he had a two-bedroom condo near the campus. I was over there all the time anyway, so moving into the second bedroom made sense.

I spoke to the coach’s secretary about the logistics of moving out of the dorm. We made the necessary arrangements, and I moved in with Jeff. I didn’t tell any of my diving teammates that I’d moved in with my boyfriend, but I’m sure at least some of them figured it out.

Moving in with Jeff was really nice, especially since we shared a lot of the same values. Unfortunately, we didn’t share the same values about relationships, which should have been a warning to me. We both agreed that we wouldn’t sleep with other men, but Jeff was still dating women. Sometimes he’d stay out all night, which made me furious. I didn’t think he should be dating anybody else, women or men. He gave me the option of sleeping with women, but I wasn’t interested. It was a strange and unfair double standard.

We had separate bedrooms, but Jeff and I usually slept in his bed unless he went out on a date with a girl. When that happened, I was in my own bed. If he brought girls home, I just shut it out.

Despite his dating women, I thought that Jeff and I were in a committed relationship—even though I was going back to California at the end of the semester. We both avoided talking about the future. Jeff was rooted in Miami, and I was determined to go back to California to train with Ron. Diving was more important to me than staying in Miami and having a relationship with Jeff. We talked about carrying on a long-distance relationship, but never very seriously.

Nevertheless, our breakup was dramatic and devastating. I was in the middle of finals, which I was trying to rush through because there was an international competition in Fort Lauderdale the first weekend in May. I was pulling all-nighters to get my studying done.

In the middle of all this there was a party that Jeff and I were invited to. We’d already been fighting before the party, over a grocery list. Things had been generally tense, because I was about to leave for California. At the party, I was determined to make him jealous—I admit it—and scoped out the cutest guy and started talking to him. I left the party early—alone—and went home to get some more studying done. I hadn’t said good-bye to Jeff, and he figured I had gone home with the guy I was flirting with. So he decided to teach me a lesson.

I was in my room studying when Jeff came home. I had my books and notes spread across my bed, but I’d been having a hard time studying because all I could think about was how bad I felt that we were fighting and that I was leaving soon. When I heard the front door open, I ran downstairs to greet Jeff with open arms, and there he was with another man.

Jeff introduced me to him. I was extremely embarrassed, and I made an excuse for myself: “Oh, I was just getting something to eat. Studying for finals. Good night.” And I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I didn’t take anything out, and after a few seconds of making some noise moving things around, I closed the door. I felt like a complete fool, rushing to greet him with open arms only to have the door slammed in my face.

After the introduction, Jeff and his friend went right upstairs, and I went back to my room and tried to study, but I couldn’t handle the noises coming from next door. I grabbed my books and ran down the street to where Bob Strickland and his roommate, Jim Crum, lived. I was crying as I told them what happened.

I spent that night at Jim and Bob’s, and the next day, when I knew Jeff was going to be at class, I packed my things and moved them over to Bob’s. In a few days I went up to Fort Lauderdale for the international competitions. Jeff came by the pool one day to talk to me, and I told him to leave. I was in the middle of a competition and I needed to concentrate on my diving. I was very angry and didn’t want to talk. We didn’t talk again until several years later.

I look back now at my relationships with Daniel and Jeff and realize how young and inexperienced we were and how much I had to learn about relationships. I didn’t exactly have a great model at home to start with, and I had no role models when it came to intimate and committed relationships between two men. I’m sure they existed, but I didn’t know any adult gay couples. So I had plenty more mistakes to make, and lots of lessons to learn.

Unfortunately, I seemed determined to learn all of them the hard way.

G
OING INTO
1980, R
ON
and I talked about what we thought was possible for me at the upcoming Olympics in Moscow—Ron wasn’t someone who talked about expectations, but based on how well I’d been doing at competitions, he thought it was possible for me to win both three-meter springboard and ten-meter platform at the Olympic trials and at the Moscow Games. Ron didn’t
expect
me to do it, but he thought it was possible, and we both thought it was something we could work toward. It was a goal to reach for.

One thing Ron didn’t do, which I really appreciated, was talk to the press about the goals we set for ourselves. When he did speak to the press, he was always careful to keep things in a realistic perspective, especially after I started winning consistently. It got to the point where every time I got on the board or the platform, the press expected me to win.

Ron also helped
me
keep perspective by reminding me that on any given day someone could beat me. The danger, he said, was thinking I was unbeatable, because that was the day I’d get beat. Ron drove home the point that each competition was new, and I couldn’t count on winning if I didn’t make the effort every time.

It didn’t matter how much effort I made in preparing for the Olympics, because history intervened and there was no 1980 Olympics for the U.S. Olympic team. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, and President Carter demonstrated the U.S. government’s displeasure by deciding to boycott the Moscow Olympics.

The boycott was a terrible disappointment. All of us had been working toward the Games, and now suddenly it was gone. To make matters worse, we were all expected to fall in line and support the president. I never paid much attention to politics, so I really didn’t care why we were boycotting. Whether the goal was to humiliate the Soviets for invading Afghanistan or to express dramatically our government’s disapproval of the invasion, the bottom line was that we weren’t going to compete. The athletes and the fans paid the price for the message.

In the long run, it wasn’t too bad for me; I still had plenty of time left in my career. For some of my fellow divers, 1980 was their last best shot at making the team and competing in the Olympics. Megan was one of those people. She came in first at the 1980 Olympic trials in both springboard and platform, and she won the world championships two years later. She might have won medals for both three-meter springboard and ten-meter platform had we gone to Moscow.

Despite the boycott, we still had the Olympic trials. At first it was like we were just going through the motions. The trials were held at the end of June, in Austin, Texas, at the Texas Swimming Center at the University of Texas. Fifty-three of the top men and women divers from around the country came to compete.

For the two weeks before the trials, Ron took our team, the Mission Viejo Nadadores, to a training camp in Cleveland, Ohio, to fine-tune our dives and help us get focused. Ron didn’t give us much time to feel sorry for ourselves over the boycott, because he worked us really hard. His attitude was that this was a competition for the Olympic team, and if we wanted to be Olympians, then we had to prove it by doing our best.

The two weeks in Cleveland paid off, because six of the thirteen divers to make the Olympic team were from Mission Viejo. Some of the reporters asked us what we thought was the key to Ron’s success. We said it was a raggedy doll we’d given him on Father’s Day, but the key was Ron.

I don’t think I surprised anyone when I came in first in both springboard and platform. But success in diving is never guaranteed. All it takes is one mistake, and you can blow your entire lead. I had to concentrate from my first dive to my last.

In the springboard competition, I was happiest with my seventh dive of the final round, a reverse two-and-a-half pike, which is a difficult dive. I got six 10s and a 9.5, an almost perfect score. My total score at the end of the final round was 940 points, twentyeight points ahead of the second-place finisher. Then on platform I finished sixty-five points ahead of the next diver. I scored several 10s in that round despite the fact that I cut my palm on a pipe at the bottom of the eighteen-foot pool on my first dive.

When you dive off the ten-meter platform, you’re going thirty-two miles per hour when you hit the water, and your hands hit the water first. So with a cut palm, it really hurt. But by that point in my career, I didn’t let a minor injury get in the way of a good dive.

Ron once told me that I dove with more pain and suffering and sickness than any diver he had ever had. A lot of my injuries were just routine, sprains and stomach viruses, but sometimes I did klutzy things. One time I sat down on a glass when I was in a boat and cut my butt. That doesn’t sound like anything big, but when you’re in the middle of a dive and you’re pulling your legs up to your chest, the stitches hurt like crazy.

A week later, I was diving on springboard and I slipped going up the ladder and gashed and bruised my leg right on the spot where I had to grab my leg and squeeze hard during the dive. Each time I dove I wanted to scream.

Another time, I had some warts on my hands and feet that I needed to have removed. I don’t know why I decided to do it ten days before the nationals. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but when I hit the water from the ten-meter platform, the pain brought tears to my eyes.