Breaking the Surface (8 page)

Dr. Sammy Lee was going to be the coach to take me to the next stage in my diving career. He himself had won two gold medals in men’s ten-meter platform, at the ’48 and ’52 Olympics, and one of the divers he coached, Robert Webster, had gone on to win gold medals in the ’60 and ’64 Olympics in men’s platform. Dr. Lee had a medical practice, so we only worked together on Wednesdays and weekends.

I first met Dr. Lee at the Junior Olympics in 1971. It was the first time he saw me dive, and he later told me how impressed he was with this little eleven-year-old diver. From the time I started training with him, he thought I had a shot at making the 1976 Olympic team. No one had ever thought that of me before. Even though I hadn’t yet come close to diving at that level, I didn’t question him. Dr. Lee was my coach. His goals were my goals, and that’s what we worked toward.

Diving with Dr. Lee, however, was not fun. He was hardnosed and inflexible, and like with my father, it was his way or no way. His approach was very aggressive: go for it, get killed, get up, go for it again, get killed again. I had thought of myself as aggressive before, but not in the way Dr. Lee was. When I dove, I tried to do my best, competing against myself and not thinking about the other divers. What mattered to me was how I did in comparison to my own record. Dr. Lee wanted me out there competing with the other divers, beating everybody else at any cost. I didn’t appreciate that valuable lesson at the time, but it was one I would call on years later. All competitive athletes have to balance doing their best with outdoing their competitors.

Dr. Lee told me that I didn’t have a killer instinct, that it wasn’t in my nature to fight. By his measure I was not a fighter. Part of his training was to toughen me up, which I needed. He taught me to dive in all kinds of weather and to dive whether I felt like it or not, even if it was raining and cold and I didn’t feel good. He taught me to push through those difficult workouts when all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and pull the sheets over my head. Despite his telling me I wasn’t a fighter, however, Dr. Lee often expressed how much faith he had in me, which gave me the confidence I needed to compete. I’m grateful to him for that.

One of the ideas Dr. Lee introduced me to was the importance of being a proper role model. It was part of his image of me as an Olympic diver. He’d say, “You’re a role model, and you have to live an exemplary life.” Up until then, I hadn’t exactly been leading an exemplary life. At fourteen, I drank too much, and I’d been smoking since I was nine. At first I’d just sneak a few cigarettes out of the house, but by the time I was eleven or twelve, I was stealing whole packs of cigarettes from my parents, both of whom smoked. Dr. Lee had a very strict rule about not coaching a smoker. If I got caught, that would have been it. So I cut way back on my smoking to five cigarettes a day.

During those years, diving was still pretty much seasonal for me, and summer was the time when I had the opportunity to do concentrated full-time training. So the summer after I started training with Dr. Lee, in 1975, I went to Ron O’Brien’s diving camp in Decatur, Alabama. By then I knew that Ron was one of the top coaches in the country.

I was only supposed to go to diving camp for one week, but I stayed for three. I kept calling home and asking if I could stay a little longer. Ron gave me the technical help I needed at that stage of my training. He got me on the trampoline and helped me straighten out my twisters, which are dives where you’re somersaulting and twisting—sort of rotating like a top—at the same time. He started working with me on how to “spot.” Spotting is being able to spin and see where you are in your spin by picking out a point, like dancers do in pirouettes. The spot for a diver is usually the surface of the pool.

I also learned to do both back and reverse two-and-a-halfs on the platform, which was a real breakthrough for me. At the time, I needed to know these dives to remain competitive on a national and world class level. With a back two-and-a-half, you stand at the edge of the platform with your back to the water. You have the balls of your feet on the edge of the platform, with your heels hanging over the edge. You jump into the air and do a somersault, then another somersault, and then you kick up toward the platform and look for the water. With the reverse, you face the water, and when you jump up in the air, you do a somersault in reverse, spinning back toward the platform. That’s supposed to be a more difficult dive, but for me it was easier than the back two-and-a-half.

Ron really understood me. He knew that I needed help with both the technical and the mental aspects of my diving. I wasn’t the kind of diver who did a dive because I wanted to be a daredevil. I had to be physically and mentally prepared to do it. I had to be able to see it in my head. Each new dive had to be a part of my overall goals. If I thought that I needed the dive to do better in competitions, that would give me the motivation to overcome my fear and do the dive. Ron helped me with all of that.

I returned home after diving camp and went back to training part-time with Dr. Sammy Lee. In January 1976, I moved in with him and his family. Dr. Lee lived closer to good diving facilities. From the day I moved in, I trained every day, no matter what the conditions.

Dr. Lee’s family was very good to me, and I was only a few hours north of where my parents lived. I talked to them twice a week and saw them on holidays. Dr. Lee had a daughter, who was already in college, and a son my age. I loved Mrs. Lee, who welcomed me with open arms. I spent a lot of time helping her with the chores and cooking, and we really enjoyed each other’s company.

During the time I lived with the Lees, I’d go to school, and afterward we’d train in Dr. Lee’s backyard pool on his onemeter springboard and one-meter platform. Sometimes we’d train at Santa Ana College, which had a three-meter springboard, or at the Los Coyotes Country Club, where there was an outdoor ten-meter platform. We would also use the indoor facility at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach, but the swim team was usually doing laps, so we had to dive in between the swimmers. It was frustrating, because we were constantly driving around trying to find a place for me to dive. There was no one place where I could train indoors on both the three-meter springboard and ten-meter platform without having to dodge swimmers. Fortunately, I was pretty good at dodging.

As the months passed, I got more and more excited about the possibility of making the Olympic team. I knew I had a shot at qualifying for the team on ten-meter platform, because I’d come in second at the most recent nationals. That meant I’d get to compete for a spot on the three-man Olympic team at the Olympic trials. During the year leading up to the Olympic trials, I was always the top American diver on platform in any international competition. So it looked good for the Olympics.

Dr. Lee was not only sure that I’d make the Olympic team in platform diving, he was sure I’d win a gold. He was sure, but I wasn’t. That meant beating Klaus Dibiasi of Italy, who was favored to win his third gold in a row on platform. What made it even more complicated was that Dr. Lee himself had won two consecutive golds for platform diving. He was depending on me to keep Dibiasi from breaking that record. At the time, I didn’t put in perspective what a difficult goal that was. Just two years before, I’d failed to make the nationals and wasn’t even in the picture.

In addition to qualifying to compete in platform at the Olympic trials, I qualified in three-meter springboard, but only because of a calculating error at the nationals, which I was responsible for. Before the competition, I had to prepare a list of my dives for the people who tabulated the scores. On that list, you also put the degree of difficulty for each dive. A dive is assigned a degree of difficulty based on how hard it is to do— the harder the dive, the higher the degree of difficulty and the higher the final score. The way they tabulated your final score at that time was to take the scores given by the five judges, throw out the high and low scores, add the remaining three numbers, and multiply the total by the degree of difficulty. In 1976, the highest degree of difficulty was a 3.0, with most of my dives ranging from 1.6 to 2.8.

For one of my dives, an inward dive layout, I accidentally wrote down the wrong degree of difficulty, increasing it by one tenth of a point. Because of that extra tenth of a point, I made it into a round that I shouldn’t have, and wound up making it through the following rounds, which allowed me to qualify for the Olympic trials. They discovered the error only after I had qualified for the finals, which was too late to disqualify me. The whole mix-up left me feeling less than confident going into the Olympic trials.

The trials were held in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it was both exciting and frightening for me. My parents and Aunt Geri came to watch and cheer me on the whole time. I was glad they were there.

The first competition was in springboard, which Dr. Lee had told me to think of as a warm-up for ten-meter platform. Given what was at stake, he saw platform as the real event. Besides which, no one expected me to make the team on springboard, because the competition was stiff and I wasn’t as well prepared as I was on platform. Well, I shocked everyone, because not only did I make the team in springboard, I came in first.

It was no surprise when I made the team in ten-meter platform, but it
was
a surprise when I came in first again. I was now the top American qualifier going into the Olympics, which was exciting and scary. Everyone’s expectations were raised now, especially my own.

During the month between the Olympic trials and the Olympics themselves, Dr. Lee boasted to the press. When Steve Bisheff, a reporter for the
Evening Tribune
in San Diego, asked him about my being “America’s diver of the future,” Dr. Lee said, “To hell with that. I might not be here in 1980. Greg’s going to do it now.”

All the hype put more pressure on me. The fact was I was sixteen years old, I’d never been to an Olympics before, and here I was expected to win one gold, if not two. Yes, I could dive well, and maybe I could win a gold, but I was still young and inconsistent. I was capable of scoring 10s, but I was just as capable of scoring 2s. The worst part was that Dr. Lee was losing sight of the fact that this was about a young diver competing to the best of his ability; he wanted me to win a gold medal to protect his own record.

And I, of course, like always, was convinced that if I didn’t win that medal, I would be a complete failure.

O
NE MONTH AFTER THE
trials, we were on our way to Montreal for the Olympics. I was incredibly excited, awestruck, and frightened, all at the same time.

I packed all kinds of things for the Olympics, because it was going to be a two-week event, but when we arrived in Montreal, I discovered that I could have shown up with nothing. The U.S. Olympic Committee gave us parade uniforms, casual clothes, everyday sweats, warm-up sweats, around-the-Village sweats, award-ceremony sweats, and six kinds of footwear, from tennis shoes to dress shoes. They also gave us hair dryers, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shaving cream, razors, and cameras.

When we got to the Olympic Village, there were representatives from various companies giving away running shoes, Tshirts, and more sweats. You name it, we got it.

The first day of practice, I got into a really bad mood and my confidence went right out the window. Generally, in any competition, you have one diving board that’s really good, and everybody wants to use that one. It’s important during practice to spend time on the diving board you plan to use in the competition, because every board is a little different, and you adjust your dives accordingly. So whichever one you practice on is the one you use for the competition.

In Montreal, I wanted to use the good board, too, but I was intimidated and didn’t want to get in anybody’s way. This was a world-class competition, and I felt like I was just a kid. All these other divers who had a lot more experience at international competitions wanted to use the board, and I was reluctant to compete with them for it.