Breaking the Surface (17 page)

In one test, which we all despised, they put you in a tank of water to find out how much body fat you have. The test itself wasn’t bad, but Ron rode us hard about ideal weight and percentage of body fat. When I was in shape, it was easy for me to go down to around 6 percent body fat. But for a lot of the women, meeting their “ideal” weight and percentage of body fat was a terrible struggle. A number of them wound up with eating disorders. Even the men used laxatives and ipecac to keep their weight down. If I thought I was going to be a pound or so over, I’d do laxatives the night before we had to go to the weigh stations.

At first Ron would let us know in advance what day we were going to be weighed. But after a while he’d just surprise us, because he knew we were trying to get around him. After 1984, Ron began to see that the focus on weight and fat ratios was doing more harm than good. It certainly didn’t help our selfesteem or make us dive any better.

At the Squaw Valley testing center, they also put us on an isokinetic machine, which provides resistance to test arm, leg, and shoulder strength. All kinds of graphs then tell you the results and compare the left and right sides. The machine could tell when you were backing off because of pain from an injury, which was valuable information. If it turned out, for example, that your left leg was 20 percent stronger than your right, you would have an imbalance in your hurdles. The test helped you adjust your training to bring the two sides into balance.

The worst test, which also happened to be the most painful, was part of a study at UC Irvine to determine why certain divers were more explosive in their dives than others. That meant taking muscle samples from our legs to determine what percentage was “fast twitch” muscle.

It felt like you were having your quadricep muscles yanked out of your leg. They took a scalpel and put a little slit right at the top of the quadriceps on the side of the leg. Then they inserted a cylindrical instrument that had clippers on the end of it. Once it was inside, the clipper was used to snip a part of the muscle and then pull it into the cylinder and remove it. They gave us a local anesthetic, but when they cut the muscle fiber, I just about jumped through the ceiling.

My test came back showing that my quadricep muscles were 75 percent fast-twitch muscle, which meant I was extremely explosive. That had seemed pretty obvious
before
the test, but I guess it was interesting to see it confirmed. I came in at the top of the scale. By way of comparison, at the other end was one of the women divers, with 30 percent fast-twitch muscle.

Of all the competitions between the 1980 and the 1984 Olympics, the most important was the 1982 world championships in Ecuador. In some ways it was my 1980 Olympics, because I got to go up against some of the divers I didn’t get to compete with in Moscow. It was also an event that set the stage for the ’84 Olympics.

As with any major competition, I trained very intensely in the months and weeks leading up to the event. At my peak, I was training five to six hours a day, six days a week. On top of that, I took aerobics classes to build up my endurance. Divers are not endurance athletes, so aerobics training wasn’t standard. I found it beneficial, although there were coaches who recommended against it. They believed that with aerobic exercise you’d lose some of your explosiveness. Apparently, it didn’t seem to diminish mine.

The irony about divers is that, like dancers, we were never the healthiest lot. A lot of divers smoked and drank pretty heavily, me included. I remember that in 1978 I showed up at the nationals one morning still half drunk. The day before, I’d missed the world championship team on three-meter springboard. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and I went out and got smashed. The next day we had the one-meter springboard competition and I wasn’t in great shape. I’d only gotten a couple of hours’ sleep and was still pretty drunk. I had no business being on the board, but it was only one meter, so I wasn’t going to kill myself. As it turns out, I won, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because it just made me think I could get drunk, stay out all night, and still win. You can’t.

Going into the world championships, I stopped the latenight partying. As I did with every major competition, weeks before the event I started to withdraw from everyone. Early in my career, I did this without knowing it. After Megan pointed out to me what I was doing, I began to do it as a more conscious thing, to psych myself up.

Generally, I would pull back from everyone and isolate myself. I’d become less playful during practice. I’d go in, do my list of dives twice, and leave. Ordinarily, I would have stayed around and done some repetitions or just hung out, but not in the weeks leading up to something like the world championships.

In time, I even stopped hanging out with Megan. A week before we left for a competition, you could hardly get me to say a word, although I’d go to the movies if Megan dragged me. Most of the time I stayed by myself and listened to music with headphones on.

At the competitions themselves, I’d create a little space for myself in the waiting area and go there between dives and listen to my music. If I saw anyone besides my coach, it would be Megan, and then just for a good luck kiss and a smile. Sometimes we’d just sit together and not talk, and sometimes we’d hold hands, like at the ’88 Olympic trials, where I wasn’t feeling that confident about my position. Most people didn’t know what was going on inside my head, but Megan knew. She was great.

During a meet, I’d go out and do my dive, and then go back to my space. It didn’t matter what country we were in, who the judges were, what the weather was, or who the competitors were. Most of the time none of that mattered. I just went out and tried to do my best because I wanted to be my best, not because I was focused the whole time on winning. If you focus on winning, you have to focus on other people. I would focus solely on doing my best.

At the world championships, I had to work hard to stay focused on each dive and not on the end result. I got to Ecuador with a cold, but that was nothing compared to that previous October, when I developed an impingement of the rotator cuff in my left shoulder, mostly from overuse. So I had to sit out until January. A week after I was back on the board, I dislocated the same shoulder diving in a dual meet for the University of California at Irvine. We were diving in a twelve-foot pool in Northridge, and I didn’t realize how shallow it was until I hit the bottom. I finished the competition, but after that, I couldn’t raise my arm above my head for three months. I didn’t start diving competitively again until May, which didn’t give me all that much time to get ready for the worlds in September 1982.

My main competition at the world championships was Bruce Kimball on platform and Aleksandr Portnov on springboard. Aleksandr had won the gold on springboard in Moscow. In Ecuador, when they made the introductions for three-meter springboard, they called Aleksandr an Olympic champion. Only gold medalists are called Olympic champions. I was introduced as the 1976 Olympic silver medalist. That made me angry, because I’d never had a chance to compete against Aleksandr for the gold. This was my chance to prove that if I’d been at the Olympics, I would have won the gold.

I wound up beating Aleksandr by 126 points. My nearest competitor was 116 points behind me, 10 points ahead of Aleksandr. The second- through fifth-place finishers were a total of only twelve points apart. If I’d skipped my final dive, I still would have won by forty points. I also won on platform. Bruce got a bronze medal, which was incredible given that he was just back in competition after a near-fatal car accident.

I was very happy with my performance at the world championships, especially on two of my dives. For my final dive on springboard I did a front three-and-a-half pike. It had a 3.1 degree of difficulty, which at the time was the highest for any springboard dive. I really ripped it, and I got five 10s, a 9.5, and a 9. When you “rip” a dive, that means you enter the water with hardly a splash, and it sounds like someone’s ripping a sheet. That final dive gave me a total of 92.07 points, which was the highest in the history of diving for a single dive on springboard.

The other dive I was proud of was on ten-meter platform. It was my fourth dive of the finals, and it was an inward one-and-ahalf pike. I got a perfect score: seven straight 10s. That was my first perfect score, and it was the first since Mike Finneran got a perfect score on platform at the 1972 U.S. Olympic trials. It was something I’d always wanted to do.

Unfortunately, getting straight 10s can be distracting. I still had six dives to go, and I managed to hold it together until my tenth and final dive. It was a new dive that I’d only been using in the last year. Fortunately, it had a high degree of difficulty, 3.2, so I still earned enough points to win, but just barely. I beat Vladimir Alenik of the Soviet Union by less than five points.

That world championship marked the beginning of my dominance internationally. Several months later, I finished college, and for the first time in my life I could really focus on my diving. From that point on, I was ready to take on just about any diving challenge.

If only that confidence had spilled over into the rest of my life.

I
N THE LATE SUMMER
of 1980, a couple of months after I first returned to California from the University of Miami to train with Ron, I met Kevin. I didn’t have anything to do one hot and sunny day, and I went to Laguna Beach just to hang out. There are a lot of steps down to the gay section of the beach, and because it was a weekday, there weren’t many people there. When I got down to the bottom of the stairs, I saw Kevin.

Maybe I was just lonely or maybe I just thought Kevin was very attractive, but I walked over and asked him if he’d mind if I sat beside him. I didn’t usually walk up to people, but Kevin looked like someone who was friendly.

I found out he was a couple of years older than I was and that he was an artist who also worked for the telephone company. We talked for quite a while on the beach, and that was the start of our relationship. Within a few months, we moved to a house in Costa Mesa, the first of three places we would live.

Very quickly, we settled into a comfortable routine. We never formally divided up the chores, but we each took care of different things, sharing the cooking. Most of the time we’d talk before one of us left for the day and I’d tell him that I’d pick up some chicken on the way home from my workout or he’d ask, “How does lasagna sound for tonight?” It was very domestic and very nice.

We always kept separate accounts and paid our equal share for things. For example, we took turns paying for the groceries. When it came to the day-to-day housework, I tended to have more time, so I did most of it. He was more handy with repairs and that sort of thing, so he did those jobs.

Kevin loved me more than anyone else I have ever been with, and I loved him with a passion that I couldn’t control. He was lots of fun to be with and he was really uninhibited. We even held hands sometimes just walking through our neighborhood in Costa Mesa. For me to do that, especially in a suburban neighborhood in the early 1980s, was a very big deal.

Not everyone in our neighborhood was happy to see two guys holding hands. One time when we were out walking, a group of kids drove by and called us faggots and threw eggs at us. Kevin had noticed them driving by earlier, and then they came back, I was just relieved that they didn’t hit Maile, my dog, which would have gotten me really angry.

Kevin had given me Maile for my twenty-first birthday. I’d told him that I wanted a Great Pyrenees, which looks like a big white polar bear. Kevin couldn’t find one, but he found a beautiful Great Dane puppy. I came home and found her waiting for me. He left her a couple of toys to play with, but she found my books far more interesting. She ripped them up and scattered them all over the house.

It made me more sad than angry that those kids had felt the need to throw eggs at us. Here we were in our neighborhood, not hurting anybody. Kevin was somebody I loved and he loved me. Why shouldn’t I hold his hand? It felt like the normal thing to do. We continued holding hands after that and nothing ever happened again.