Breaking the Surface (3 page)

I still remember how quiet it was under the water, completely silent. I remember that I had a moment to enjoy the relief of having done the dive without hitting my head again. I knew it was a pretty good dive. As I swam up toward the surface of the water, I started to hear the crowd. I could tell that they were cheering for me. But as I neared the side of the pool and the water drained from my ears, the cheers got louder and louder, until they sounded like a roar. I couldn’t help but smile. I had never felt that kind of approval before, and it was all a little unreal.

I didn’t get a perfect score, but I did get 87.12 points, the highest score for any dive in the prelims. Ron thinks it was the best dive of the Olympics, even though I was still a little too close. He reminded me that I had one more dive to go, and it was my most difficult. Before I went to the ladder to get back on the board for my last dive, Ron said, “Jump it out a little bit, okay?” Then he told me to believe in myself.

The final dive was just fine, and it was such a relief to be through. I wound up coming in third in the preliminaries. All this just for a chance to compete for the gold.

I sometimes can’t believe what I had to go through to get to that point. And it wasn’t just the bump on my head, not just the HIV diagnosis, but a lifetime of fear and pain and always feeling that the next dive would make it all right. I’d survived once again, but that ninth dive changed everything.

Ron was in a hurry to get my wound properly cleaned up and re-stitched. On our way out of the building, reporters, waiting to ask questions, stopped us. One of them yelled, “What happened?” So I said, “I hit my head on the board.” But then she asked, “How did it happen?” So I looked at her and said, very matter-of-factly, “Well, I guess I was too close to the diving board.” All the reporters laughed, including the one who had asked the question. Someone else called out, “Did it hurt?” I smiled, and said, “What do you think?”

There was an official van waiting for us outside, and I was driven to the Olympic Village, where I went to see Dr. Puffer. He redid the stitches, but again didn’t use gloves. I should have told Dr. Puffer that I was HIV-positive so he could take the proper medical precautions. He never asked me about my HIV status, but AIDS wasn’t something people in sports talked about in 1988. They just figured we were all perfectly healthy. It’s no excuse, but I wasn’t the only one in denial about AIDS in 1988. The whole world was still in denial then, as many people still are in 1995.

After Dr. Puffer was done, Ron walked me back through the Olympic Village courtyard to my room. We talked about going up there the next day and doing the same thing, except that this time I wasn’t going to hit my head. Neither of us considered dropping out.

Besides worrying about me, Ron had his own worries. His mother had been very ill with a rare neurological disorder. She had taken a turn for the worse just after we got to Korea, and Ron had thought of leaving before the competition began, but the doctor said she was in a coma and that there was nothing he could do. Still, he was tempted to go home, but he said that his mother would have wanted him to be at the Olympics. Just before the springboard preliminaries got under way, Ron got the news that she’d passed away. He didn’t tell me about it until after the Games were over.

In some ways, getting through those last two dives after I hit my head was easier than getting through the night and preparing for the next day’s competition. I really didn’t have a lot of time to think about those final dives, but I had all night to think about what I’d done wrong: what I’d done wrong on the dive and what I’d done wrong in life. Had I put someone else in danger, and what had I done to deserve HIV? Was AIDS a punishment? What would happen tomorrow? I tried to figure it all out, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out any of it. So I focused on the ninth dive, and kept playing it over and over in my mind, trying to get my body to understand what had gone wrong. Ron had told me what I’d done wrong mechanically, but I couldn’t see it in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t get my body to feel it. Usually, if I could see it and feel it, I could make the correction. This time I couldn’t. I couldn’t correct any of it.

Even worse, I couldn’t relax enough to mentally go over my list of dives for the next day. Normally, the night before a major competition, I’d run through my dives in my head, imagining them in the pool that I was competing in, complete with the visual surroundings. That always helped me get to sleep. But that night I couldn’t sleep. And as I tossed and turned, every once in a while I’d hit my head on the headboard. It hurt—a lot.

I finally fell asleep for a while, but my alarm went off in the middle of the night. I was taking AZT to keep the HIV in check, and I had to take it every four hours, around the clock. In the months since I’d been diagnosed, no matter how hard I tried to pretend that everything was normal, I always had my AZT alarm to remind me every four hours that my life was changed forever.

I hardly slept at all, just stayed in bed until around six in the morning, time for practice. The final round of the springboard competition was only five hours away. I had no idea how I was going to get through it, but I knew deep down that I had to. I couldn’t give up now.

B
Y THE
1988 O
LYMPICS
in Seoul, I’d been diving for nearly twenty years. When I was nine, my parents had a swimming pool built in our backyard, and I very quickly began practicing my gymnastics stunts off the diving board. I had a lot of fun, but I landed on my back a lot. If you looked at our old family home movies, you might wonder why I didn’t give up after the first couple of times.

Long before I became a competitive diver, gymnastics and acrobatics were my real loves. By age nine, I was already a seasoned performer on the local talent show and convalescent-home circuit. I’ve heard my mother tell the story of how I got started so many times that it feels like
my
memory. It also sounds like the song “I Can Do That” from
A Chorus Line
.

My sister, Despina, was taking dance and acrobatics classes at the Hallik and Vaughn Dance Studio, and my mother would take me along when it was time to pick her up. We’d get there early, and I’d struggle to get out of my mother’s lap and go into the rehearsal room. I could hear the music, and I could hear the teacher calling out instructions, and I wanted to see what was going on. Sometimes my mother would let me sneak into the back of the room to watch. But I didn’t want to just watch, I wanted to jump right in there.

The teacher found it hard to ignore an eighteen-month-old kid in diapers doing acrobatics, so after a couple of classes she talked to my mother about putting me in the class. My mother had some reservations because I was so young, but the teacher pointed out that I was a quick learner and that I seemed to be having fun. So Mom signed me up for the three-days-a-week class. The only problem was that I learned everything so quickly that my sister and the other kids in the class had a hard time keeping up with me. Most of the time I could outdo everyone. My mom was very proud, because the other parents kept telling her how good I was. Years later, in newspaper stories about me, reporters always said that I got into gymnastics when I was diagnosed with asthma. I was already pretty active in gymnastics by the time I developed asthma, but the doctor simply said that I should keep doing it because the exercise would be good for me. Eventually, I outgrew the asthma.

I was three when I was first paired with Eleanor Smith, a very pretty blonde-haired girl who was usually an inch or two taller than I was during the nine years we performed as a pair. We were more than partners—we were also friends. We went to dance and gymnastics classes together and did hundreds of routines together: somersaults, back handsprings, and jazz choreography, all set to music.

Eleanor and I worked very hard. We always competed with each other, but it was always fun. We each had to learn the same things: I would learn a trick and then Eleanor would have to learn it. Then she would learn one and I would have to learn it. We constantly pushed each other with a bit of one-upsmanship, and as the years went by, we learned more complicated routines.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Eleanor’s mother had arranged for her to take private classes so that Eleanor would be able to keep up with me. I only learned this years later from my mom. There was one time when I got to the dance studio early and saw Eleanor working on something new with the instructor, but I just thought they had gotten started without me. I had no inkling that Eleanor needed extra lessons to keep up with me.

I always got along better with Eleanor than I did with my own sister. We never fought, even though we spent an awful lot of time together in class, at each other’s houses, and performing. We performed all over the San Diego area. The dance studio we belonged to made the arrangements, and we performed everywhere from convalescent homes to the local naval base. I loved the people at the nursing homes—some of them reminded me of my grandmother, and they’d say nice things about how wonderful we were to come and entertain them. It was difficult when they’d wheel in someone who wasn’t conscious or when someone would have to be suctioned during the show to keep from choking. Sometimes the homes weren’t particularly clean and the floors were sticky and smelled of vomit. Sometimes it was depressing.

What was more disturbing was performing in homes where there were mentally handicapped people. I saw myself in those kids, and sometimes I thought that’s where I belonged. At school my classmates were always calling me a “retard,” because I had trouble reading. I’d look in the faces of the kids in the homes, most of whom were older than I was, and the reflection of myself that I saw scared the hell out of me. When the kids would rush up to us after a performance to give us hugs, I’d just freeze. My mom knew I hated to perform at these homes, but I never told her why. I’m glad now that I did the performances, but it was tough.

What I loved best about acrobatics were the talent contests. I loved winning trophies. Eleanor and I often won first place. One of the most exciting competitions was the 1970 sweepstakes at Grossmont High School in La Mesa, which was for people from dance studios all over San Diego County. The performances went on for two days. The competition was broken down into jazz, tap, acrobatics, and music. There was even a Tahitian dance category. Eleanor and I competed in Pee Wee Jazz, Pee Wee Acrobatics, and Pee Wee Tap. The ten highest-scoring acts performed in the final round, and we were one of the ten.

While the judges were tallying the final scores, they had the previous year’s winning act perform its routine for everyone, but I couldn’t wait for the judges to announce the final results. When they announced that we’d won, Eleanor started crying—so I started crying, too, because it seemed like the right thing to do. They gave us a trophy that was about three feet high. Winning that trophy was great, but then you always want more.

Even as a kid I was a perfectionist. I practiced my routines over and over again until I got them perfect. When I was three, my dance instructor suggested I play the performance music at home and do the routine in my head. Instinctively, I understood: I would do every step over and over in my head until I visualized getting it right. That was how I memorized the whole routine.

One of my biggest fears was always being out onstage and forgetting what I was supposed to do next. By practicing over and over in my head, I stopped worrying about going blank. I had the routine so deeply memorized that I could feel it. Dancers call it kinetic memory. I memorized each routine so well that my body could do it without my even thinking about it.

I’ve thought a lot recently about why it was so important to me that I do everything perfectly. I wasn’t very good at school, particularly in reading, and this was one way to prove that I wasn’t retarded. I may have brought home Ds from school, but I could go out onstage and get applause and win first prize at competitions. I found the one thing I was good at, but being good at something wasn’t enough—I had to be the best at it.