Breaking the Surface (16 page)

One time I almost didn’t get through it. At the national championships in Indianapolis in 1986, I caught a stomach virus. I was very sick, but I did a few dives, went into the bathroom, threw up, and came back out and did a few more dives. I don’t know how, but I won.

I may cry easily, but I never give up.

The one sour note for me regarding the 1980 Olympic trials came during the Olympic team’s exhibition tour that followed. Some of my teammates didn’t want to be my roommate because I was gay. This wasn’t expressed to me directly—it rarely was— but I heard about it.

Most of the time, the fact that I was gay was ignored by the other divers, or I just never heard about it. Plenty of the divers knew I was gay, because I didn’t exactly keep it a secret. Some divers clearly kept their distance. I don’t know what they thought I’d do to them, but obviously they wanted to be sure never to be close enough to find out. Others were perfectly comfortable.

Over the years, a few of the younger male divers asked me questions about my sexuality, mostly out of curiosity. I had no problem answering their questions, and they seemed glad to have the answers. I explained that I was attracted to men over women. I made the point that I didn’t hate women, that I could appreciate a beautiful woman, but that my primary physical and emotional attraction was toward men. One of the young divers who came to talk to me was clearly confused about his sexuality and was struggling to deal with it. He came from a family in which he felt that his being gay would never be accepted, so I knew he was going to have a rough time.

Generally if I was teased, it wasn’t because I was gay; it was because I was winning. It was frustrating for the other divers, who worked very hard, that as long as I was diving, the odds were I was going to win. After the Olympic trials, they started calling me GL, for God Louganis. I didn’t like it, because it wasn’t meant in a complimentary way. Usually if someone said GL, it was under his breath, like I was being booed. But for any athlete in a lead position, that kind of teasing just goes with the territory.

The one time the antigay stuff was the most blatant was in Baton Rouge, at a National Sports Festival competition in 1985. One of the divers, who whispered “fag” whenever I walked by and called me names behind my back, put up FAGBUSTER signs all over the dorm where we were staying. His inspiration came from the movie
Ghostbusters
. The signs had the word
fag
in the middle of a circle with a slash through it.

I never saw most of the signs, because Megan went around pulling them down. But the first time I saw one, I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. They were as much symbols of hatred as swastikas or burning crosses would be for someone who is Jewish or black.

Megan was afraid that someone would try to hurt me physically, which never even crossed my mind. I never heard most of the things people said about me, and Megan didn’t tell me about them until recently. She remembers some of the divers saying that I wasn’t human, that it was time to get rid of the fag, or they’d make jokes about specific sexual acts. Megan always defended me, and I’m grateful to her for that.

Megan wasn’t the only one who would defend me, but there weren’t many and most were women. These same women also sometimes said things to Megan like “Can’t you convert him?” and “What a waste!” But the women didn’t say these things in a threatening way. For whatever reasons, the men were threatened by me.

No one ever did anything as overt as the “fagbuster” campaign after the festival in Baton Rouge. The diver who put up the signs boasted about how he was going to beat the faggot, but he didn’t. The faggot trounced him.

All I ever had to do was get on the diving board and let my record speak for itself, I stayed true to that belief for my entire career. Plenty of other lesbian and gay athletes had to put up with that kind of prejudice then, and they still do to this day.

I always wanted to tell the diver with the signs that his antigay attitude was not only bigoted, it also went against the principles of true sportsmanship. He wanted to be an Olympian, but he didn’t know the first thing about Olympic ideals, which have nothing to do with hate. But I never got the chance to say anything—until I spoke about what had happened in Cobb County regarding the 1996 Olympics. And then I got to tell the whole world that there’s no place for antigay bigotry in the Olympic movement. No young athlete should have to face the prejudice that I did.

A
FTER THE
U.S.
BOYCOTT
of the 1980 Olympics, there was no question that I would train for the next Olympics. But 1984 was a long way off, so the challenge was to come up with goals that would keep me busy, focused, and in shape for four years, which was not an easy thing.

One major goal was finishing my college degree. In December 1980, after all the tours and competitions following the Olympic trials, I started school at the University of California in Irvine, where I had an athletic scholarship.

When I first started classes, there weren’t a lot of diving competitions to get ready for, which meant I could concentrate on school. I needed all the time I could get. At the University of Miami we had had study groups for each of our classes. At UC Irvine I was left to fend for myself. It was a commuter school, so after classes were over, everyone headed home. There were no dorms where people got together for study groups. That wasn’t only frustrating, it was a disaster for me. If you didn’t maintain a certain grade point average, you couldn’t participate in the sports program. I was doing so badly that I barely scraped by. I could have talked to the athletic director about my reading problem, but I still felt embarrassed about being dyslexic, so I never said anything. I just tried my best to keep from drowning.

The bright spot for me again was the drama department. Among other things, I got to be dance captain and one of the lead players in a production of
Pippin
and assistant choreographer for a production of
The Gondoliers
.

The two big diving events ahead of me were the world championships in 1982 and the Olympics in 1984. But competitions alone couldn’t keep me motivated. On my own, I could never set goals. That wasn’t how I thought of things. I could focus only on doing the best I could on the upcoming dive and not much beyond that. It was Ron who first mapped out my goals for me and worked with me to come up with some of my own.

Ron came up with a list of competitions for me to compete in each year. Over the next four years, I competed in about twenty meets a year. Of those, about six were major competitions. Then he came up with records for me to beat. He wanted to make sure that I’d leave behind a record that reflected my ability, one that would be remembered long after I retired from diving. So he’d say something like, “How about winning the most national championships for a male diver?” By the end of 1981, I’d won eighteen national titles, more than any other male diver. The next goal was to beat Cynthia Potter’s twenty-eight national titles. I had to wait until after the ’84 Olympics to break her record, but I did.

We also came up with a few personal goals, like scoring perfect 10s on a single dive and breaking 700 points in a three-meter competition, all of which I did by 1984. As soon as I met a goal, Ron would come up with a new one. For example, he’d say, “Well, you have four gold medals from the Pan American games, but nobody’s ever won more than five.” I liked a good challenge, and Ron knew it was the best way to keep me going.

Another goal was scheduling enough training time to keep my dives polished and to learn new, more difficult dives. In 1982, the International Diving Federation approved a number of tough new dives for competition that had higher degrees of difficulty. That meant you could get higher overall scores, assuming you successfully executed the dive.

I learned the new dives, but not because I was a daredevil or anything. Given the competition, Ron and I felt I needed the more difficult dives for me to stay on top. We talked about the fact that the one way I could distance myself from the other divers, especially Bruce Kimball, was to do all these new dives.

Until Bruce Kimball came along, I didn’t really have to worry all that much about competing with anyone but myself. It seems hard to believe now, but by 1980 I was accustomed to coming in first on both springboard and platform without a tremendous amount of effort. My diving had become more of a performance than a competition. With Bruce, suddenly I was getting beat on platform on a national level. We’d been friends since we met on our first trip to Europe back in 1973, so the competition was always fun. I often found myself rooting for him, even when that meant I was rooting against his main competitor—me. Friendship aside, I didn’t like coming in second, and neither did Bruce.

I didn’t think I could compete with Bruce dive for dive, because he had excellent mechanics and he was consistent. His entries were incredible. But he wasn’t as strong as I was, so the only way I could beat him was by doing tougher dives and increasing my degree of difficulty. Because of the higher degree of difficulty, tougher dives receive higher scores than easier dives done equally well. Bruce had a more difficult time doing those dives than I did. I also hoped the new dives would give me a big cushion going into the Olympics.

But the new dives weren’t easy to learn, and before I did each one, I had to be able to visualize it, which meant that I had to see somebody else do it before I’d give it a try. When I visualized the dive in my head, it would take about three seconds to go through the dive, but I would see it in slow motion. I don’t know how I did that, but because I could see it in slow motion, I was able to take the dive apart and memorize it step by step. Fortunately, I had all of 1983 to see if the new dives worked for me. Then I added them to my standard routine.

One time, in 1983, at the Air Force Academy Natatorium in Colorado Springs at the National Sports Festival, they announced I was about to attempt a dive off the platform with a 3.3 degree of difficulty. The audience oohed and aahed. I was trying to get in position and concentrate, but I heard them and thought, “If they think the dive’s so difficult, why am I trying to do it?” I started to laugh, and the audience started laughing, too. When everyone calmed down, I did the dive and landed on my head, just like I was supposed to, and won the festival, more than twenty points ahead of the second-place diver, Dave Burgering.

The Air Force Academy Natatorium was a memorable place for me. Three years earlier, during a workout for the National Sports Festival, I had come pretty close to hitting the ceiling on a dive from the ten-meter platform. After that, somebody dared me to touch the ceiling, so I jumped up from the platform and put my hand through the false ceiling up to my wrist. They raised a big square section of the ceiling over the platform by three feet, which was plenty of room for me to dive.

Besides the competitions and training, there were also exhibitions at home and abroad, and there was testing, which I hated. But Ron has a PhD in exercise physiology, and he was committed to having his team participate in various studies. Periodically, he sent us off to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado or the training center in Squaw Valley, where they would run us through a whole battery of tests to measure our flexibility and coordination, and see how high we could jump.