Breaking the Surface (14 page)

Dr. Lee recruited Ron to coach at the new diving center at Mission Viejo, about an hour north of where I lived. It was a great facility, with an Olympic-competition diving pool, one-meter and three-meter springboards, and five-, 7.5-, and ten-meter platforms. So when Ron got there in May 1978, I started training with him on the days when Dr. Lee couldn’t work with me.

I first met Ron in 1969, around Christmas, at the Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale. I was in a competition, and Ron was there to train his divers over the Christmas holidays. He came over to say hello to me and to meet my coach. I don’t remember what Ron said to me, but I stood there with my arms crossed in front and my shoulders forward. When he talked to me, I kept my chin down and just peered up at him. Ron says that I came across as a “meek little guy,” and I guess I was. I wasn’t afraid to throw myself off a diving board, but I froze up when it came to meeting new people.

Years later, Ron told me that when he saw me dive in 1969, I had body lines, strength, grace, and control you never see in a kid that age. He said he knew I’d be a great diver if I stuck with it.

I didn’t see Ron again until I was fourteen, in Decatur, Alabama, when I was competing in the senior nationals. I took twelfth place on platform and thirty-third on three-meter springboard. Not exactly an impressive performance. But Ron still thought I had great talent, although it was clear that I needed some technical help, especially on springboard. He thought some of my problems came from trying to do dives that were harder than what I should have been doing at the time.

When I finally worked with Ron at his summer camp, I saw how well balanced his divers seemed. I learned that he believed it was important for his divers to get a good education and become happy and successful people. Although I agreed with Ron’s philosophy that if you got too narrowly focused on diving, your whole happiness and self-worth would be dependent on it, somehow I still tied my self-worth almost entirely to diving. But I liked that Ron encouraged his divers to do more than dive.

Ron’s coaching style, most of the time, was to remain calm and on an even keel. Ron wasn’t the kind of coach who yelled at and belittled us the way Dr. Lee did. He was more nurturing, and he tried to instill a sense of calm in us by teaching us not to get riled up over one bad dive. As great a coach as Dr. Sammy Lee was, his pressurized coaching made me feel worse when I blew a dive. A competition involves many dives, so it doesn’t help to feel bad just because you made one mistake. Ron’s focus was always on doing your best on each dive. If you did a bad dive, you went on to the next and tried your best again.

Another thing I became more aware of after I’d been diving with Ron for a while was that when he critiqued a dive, he’d start with a positive comment, which always got me to listen, and then he’d go on to explain what needed to be improved and he’d offer some suggestions about how to do that. Then he’d finish with a positive statement about the overall dive or something specific about the dive that worked well, always ending on an up note, which helped me go into the next dive with a positive attitude.

A short time after I started training with Ron, I gave up training with Dr. Lee. I’d finished high school a semester early, so since January I’d been free of that obligation. Despite my low grades, I managed to accumulate enough extra credits from coaching and my outside part-time job to finish in three and a half years. With school over, I picked up another two part-time jobs to save money for college. Then I started diving with Ron, so I was working with two coaches, training double time. For example, on the weekends I worked with Ron’s team on Saturday morning, but while they had the rest of the weekend off, I dove with Dr. Lee on Saturday afternoon and for a few hours on Sunday. I never got a chance to rest. Ron and Dr. Lee didn’t communicate with each other very well, so I was getting conflicting messages about what I should be doing. I couldn’t possibly keep both of them happy, and there was no way to keep my jobs and still spend so much time diving.

The decision to give up one coach was easy. Dr. Lee wasn’t happy about it at first, but eventually he agreed that it was the best thing for me.

I surprised Ron by coming out of my shell when I joined his team. I was still a little shy, but I was a lot more open. I even became a bit of a joker, always trying to make people laugh. Somebody would be getting ready to do a difficult dive and I’d make a remark and break the tension. Or in the middle of my doing a handstand, I’d crack a joke. Ron didn’t put up with a lot of messing around, but he encouraged us to have fun. He made us feel like a team.

But I could still be moody, and sometimes I would get very down. Ron noticed that one day I’d be fine and the next day I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I still had no idea why I had such bad moods, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. Ron would sometimes ask me what was wrong, but my usual answer was a shrug. One time that summer, when I was in a really bad mood, Ron called me into his office and told me I wasn’t leaving until I told him what was going on. He could tell I’d been upset, because he’d seen me at practice that morning standing in line waiting to dive with tears coming down my cheeks.

Often I got in bad moods for no particular reason, but this time there had been a reason. Eventually, I told Ron that I was exhausted from working the three part-time jobs and diving. My diving schedule didn’t leave me enough time to work just one full-time job.

My average day started with opening the recreation center at 5:30 a.m., before my morning workout. Then I worked out for a couple of hours before going to my other job at Chess King, a clothing store in Huntington Beach. Then I’d come back to the pool for my second workout. I’d have two hours off, and then I’d go to the Westminster Chess King to close that store. The pressure was weighing me down. Ron got me to talk about it and helped me adjust my work schedule so I could quit one of the jobs and not run around so much.

After that it was a little easier for me to talk to Ron about things that were going on in my life outside of diving. In Berlin a few months later, at the world championships, I suddenly clammed up again. I’d had a really negative attitude in practice and wasn’t diving the way I should have been. I didn’t really know what was bothering me, but I felt miserable and was letting my moodiness get to me.

In a competition, even if I was in a bad mood, I was able to kind of turn the switch when I got up on the board and still do a good job most of the time. Ron was pretty gentle with me when I was in a bad mood. This time he felt that I needed a jolt.

Between dives, I stood under the hot shower to warm up. The shower was located under the stand for the three-meter springboard. I was there for a while, and Ron came to talk to me. While he was talking to me, I started to turn around to walk away, and he just kicked me in the butt—literally—and told me to get back up on the platform and dive. Well, he got my attention.

After the practice, Ron pulled me aside and told me we had to talk. He asked me what was going on, and at first I started bitching. Then I started crying. I couldn’t explain why I was upset, but Ron kept me talking, and eventually what came out was my anxiety about going from the competition to the University of Miami for my first semester of college. I was already feeling homesick. Ron suggested that I call home, which I did, and I felt a lot better.

Ron convinced me that I could trust him, that I didn’t have to keep all my problems to myself. I never liked burdening anybody with my problems, but Ron made me feel it was okay to tell him something that was bothering me. I knew he cared, because he kept pushing for answers; he really wanted to get to the bottom of what was bothering me, and he didn’t let up until I opened up. And then he’d come up with some pretty insightful solutions.

Over the years I got better at going to Ron and asking him for help. And over the years I would need his help with things even more difficult than a reverse three-and-a-half.

D
ESPITE MY MOODS, WORKING
with Ron was great. I made a lot of progress with my diving, especially on springboard, where I really needed the help. But we only got to work together full-time for a few months, because in September I left for my first year at the University of Miami. I was scared, but I was also very excited, especially because I was the first one in my family to go to college. My mother and father didn’t have the opportunity, and my sister had chosen not to go even though she did really well in high school. If it hadn’t been for diving, I’m not sure I would have gone myself, because I certainly didn’t have the grades.

When I left for the University of Miami, some people thought I was going there because Julie Gapps was there. She was a sophomore and a nationally ranked diver. The real reason I went there was because they gave me an athletic scholarship and they had a great drama department, but I was happy to be near Julie. Even though I knew I was gay, I still thought it was wrong, and I thought I should make one more attempt to see if I could have a relationship with a woman. Julie seemed like the right woman.

From the time I arrived at school, the two of us palled around like boyfriend and girlfriend, although we weren’t having a sexual relationship. In my mind we were dating, but then I heard around the pool that Julie was dating a swimmer, which made me realize I was only fooling myself. I was gay, and even though people thought it was wrong, even though I felt bad about it, nothing was going to change. I gave up on the idea of trying to have a girlfriend, and eventually I told Julie that I was gay. We continued our friendship without skipping too many beats.

I went to the University of Miami with the intention of spending only two years there. I planned to leave early at the end of my second year to go back to California and continue training with Ron O’Brien full-time in preparation for the 1980 Olympics. After that, I thought I might transfer to a school in Southern California or continue diving full-time. That decision would have to wait until after the Moscow Olympics.

My time at the University of Miami was a mixed bag of experiences, between diving, meeting other gay people, having my first relationships, and taking acting and dance classes.

Acting and dancing were great releases for me, because they were the only things outside of diving that I really enjoyed doing. I first got the idea to study acting after the 1976 Olympics. Several people told me that I could be an actor or that I could do commercials. Also, I was inspired by two Olympic athletes, Bruce Jenner and Mark Spitz. I wasn’t sure I’d wind up acting or doing commercials, but if I did, I decided that I wanted to be prepared. I’d seen other Olympians try acting and commercial work. I didn’t want people laughing at me, so I thought I should study acting before I went out there and tried it in public.

It wasn’t difficult for me to get up in front of an audience— I’d been doing that for years—but it was a new challenge for me to get up in front of a crowd of people and speak. So, going into my first acting classes, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to communicate feelings and ideas.

Frankly, I wasn’t great. One of my teachers was even cruel enough to tell me that the only way I’d make it in acting was because of diving. I assumed he meant that without my celebrity from diving, I could forget about making it on my acting abilities alone. That was disheartening, but as bad as my self-esteem is, my stubbornness is stronger. I wasn’t about to give up. Besides, I still had several years of diving left, which meant lots more time to study acting before I had to make a serious attempt at an acting career.

So whether or not I was going to be a great actor, I still had fun, and through the drama department I had the chance to meet and spend time with other gay people, which was great. I went to my first gay dance clubs and bars with other students from the drama department. Sometimes just two of us would go together, and sometimes we’d go in groups of boys and girls. Most of the girls weren’t gay, but we all had a great time dancing together: boys with boys, boys with girls, girls with girls. I’d never seen two boys dance together before, and at first it was shocking. But once I got used to it, dancing with other guys seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I’d always been a good dancer, so I really had a great time. Suddenly there were all these other people like me out there. It was such a relief to know I wasn’t the only one.

I was only vaguely aware of the gay rights movement and the gay student group on campus. I’d heard about Anita Bryant and the hateful things she said about gays. I knew that we were supposed to boycott orange juice because she was the Florida orange juice spokesperson, but that was the extent of it for me. I didn’t pay much attention to those things. All of my time was taken up with trying to get my schoolwork done, getting to theater rehearsals, and keeping up with my diving.

My schedule at school didn’t leave me much time to catch my breath. I had an hour and a half of diving practice in the morning before I went to class, followed by more diving before lunch, then back to class. Next was rehearsal for scene-study class, and then rehearsals for whatever production was being done at that time. I barely had time to eat.