The Time of My Life (2 page)

Halloween night, 1970. It was a balmy Saturday evening in Houston when I ran onto the field with my Waltrip High School football teammates, ready for a big game with our crosstown rivals, the Yates Lions. We were pumped up to play, since we’d heard there would be college scouts in the stands checking us out. Little did I know then, but this night would change my life forever.

It was my senior year at Waltrip, and this was my chance to show the scouts what I could do. Yates was a good team, physical and aggressive, and the stands were packed with screaming fans, so the stage was set. At five-eleven and 180 pounds, I wasn’t your typical big, bruiser football player, but I was fast, running the hundred-meter dash in just ten seconds. With those scouts in the stands, I was hoping to have a big game— we didn’t have enough money for me to go to college, but a football scholarship would take care of that.

High school football isn’t just a game in Texas; it’s more like a religion. There’s something magical about the smell of fresh-cut grass, the coaches yelling, the fans stamping their feet, and the twenty-two men on the field going at one another hand-to-hand,
in primal battle. I loved the competition, and the rough physicality of it. Whenever I took my position on the field, I had something to prove. I wanted to run faster, cut more sharply, and hit harder than anyone else out there.

But that night, I was the one who got hit hardest. On a midgame kickoff, I caught the ball and started to run. With blockers in front of me, I ran up one sideline, then cut back against the grain and tried to outrun the shifting defenders. But a couple of their big guys launched themselves at me, helmets first. One came in high, the other one low on my blind side. And they hit me at the exact moment my left leg planted on the ground.

My knee snapped, bending grotesquely, and I went down like a shot. In that moment, most of the ligaments in my knee had ripped in half, completely destroying the joint. But I didn’t know that at the time, even as I screamed in pain hitting the turf. All I knew was that even though my knee felt like it had exploded, I wanted to get right up and walk it off—to show they hadn’t hurt me, even though they had.

I tried to get up, but collapsed, as my left leg couldn’t bear any weight at all. I got up again, determined to walk off that field, but again I fell to the grass. Finally, the coaches ambled over to check on me. One of them, a tough redneck son of a bitch, looked down at me and sneered, “Too much dancing, huh, Swayze?”—as if that, and not the two human rockets that had launched at me, had caused my injury. This was rough-and-tumble Texas, and even a star football player was the target of mockery if he happened to be a dancer, too. I glared through a haze of pain and said nothing as they finally lifted me up, put me on a stretcher, and carried me back to the locker room.

As I lay on a training table in the locker room, the pain in my knee began to dull, replaced by shock. And that was enough to make me want to keep playing. “Let me get back out there!” I told the trainer. “Let me just finish out the game!”

“Nope,” the trainer said. “You’re done.”

But I wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I swear, I’m okay,” I told him. “Just let me walk it off and get back out there!” No matter how many times he shook his head, I wouldn’t shut up—I just had to get back on that field.

“Okay, then,” the trainer finally said, tired of hearing me jabber on. “Go ahead. Get up and go!”

I slid off the table, but as soon as my left foot touched the floor it felt like someone had jammed a dagger deep into my knee. It buckled, and I fell to the floor, passing out. The next thing I remember was hearing sirens and seeing the flashing lights of an ambulance.

My knee joint was pretty much destroyed, and I ended up having surgery—the first of many I’d have over the years. The doctors repaired as much damage as they could, after which I spent three months in a hip-to-toe cast, which left my leg completely atrophied and my knee joint hopelessly stiff.

For a young man who had always been athletic and active, being in a cast was difficult and painful, but it was nothing compared to the agonizing rehab process of physically breaking and loosening the scar tissue that had formed in the joint. My knee could barely bend. I remember lying in my bed at home, hearing my mother crying inconsolably in the next room. I thought I heard her say through her sobs, “His life is over. His life is over.” It scared me. Would I be able to do all the things I’d done before the injury? Or would my physical abilities forever be compromised?

My days of playing football were over, but what would happen now to my dreams of competing in gymnastics, or dancing professionally? In all my eighteen years, I’d never questioned my ability to do anything I set my mind to do. But now, for the first time, I was facing a true test. Thanks to that one fleeting moment on a high school football field, it was the first of many I’d have to face.

My family’s roots go way back in Texas, and my parents’ relationship was the classic Texas story of the cowboy who falls in love with the city girl. Jesse Wayne Swayze, known to one and all as “Buddy,” was a onetime rodeo champion who’d grown up on a ranch outside Wichita Falls. Unpretentious and bright, he worked for years as a butcher, then put himself through home study to get a degree in drafting. He got a job with an oil company and continued his studies, earning another degree and becoming a mechanical engineer. He put all the money he had into his family, especially into the dance company and school my mother ran.

My mom, Patsy Swayze, was a choreographer and teacher, and one of the founders of Houston’s dance scene. She had the energy of a dancer combined with the steely strength and determination of a pit bull. Mom was an amazing teacher but a demanding one, and we kids worked hard to win her approval in a series of competitions we didn’t yet realize we could never win.

I was the second of five kids, and the oldest boy. My older sister, Vicky, and I both studied dance with our mother from the time we could walk. Mom’s studio, the Swayze Dance Studio, was like a second home for us, a place where we spent
endless hours hanging out and studying dance. My mother never asked Vicky and me if we wanted to study dance—it was just expected of us. And not only that, but we were expected to be the absolute best at it. In fact, my mother chose the name Patrick for me because she thought “Patrick Swayze” would look good on a marquee. But like my dad, I went by the name “Buddy”—or, when he was around, “Little Buddy.”

Our younger siblings, Donny, Sean, and Bambi, also felt the constant pressure to perform in whatever activities they undertook. We called it “growing up Swayze”—an almost manic drive to be the best, do the most, and lead the pack in whatever we attempted. Both our parents were very accomplished: Dad had been a Golden Gloves boxer and Mom was one of the leading lights of the Houston dance scene. But that’s where the similarities between them ended.

My mother was a perfectionist, and she expected the same in her children, no matter what we did. This was a double-edged sword, as her pressure implanted in me a burning desire to be the best at everything, but it also led to a near-constant, deeply rooted feeling of inadequacy. I couldn’t be everything she wanted me to be, for good reason—no one could. But I was going to do it or die trying, a trait that has never left me.

My dad was more laid-back, the gentle cowboy. He was the rock our family was built on, a steady and stable presence in our lives. In some ways, we were nurtured more by my father than by my mother, and growing up with a father who was both strong and sensitive made a huge impression on me. It made me realize that having a gentle side didn’t make you less of a man. In fact, it made you a better one.

We didn’t have a lot of money, especially while my dad was working in the butcher’s shop, but my mother always carried
herself with dignity. I can remember feeling embarrassed while walking into Mass one morning, since the sole of one of my shoes had partially torn off and made a flapping noise all the way down to my pew. I can also remember that our neighbors in North Houston kept their distance, since we were “those arts people”—not a label anyone really aspired to in 1960s Houston, Texas. Especially at that time, even Texas’s big cities were still rough, redneck, conservative places—a fact I learned all too well as a young male dancer.

By junior high school, everybody knew I was a dancer, as I was always performing in theater productions and wore my hair long, unlike the other boys at school. I got picked on, called “fag,” and beaten up more times than I can count, and each time it made me more determined to get those boys back, one way or another. But it wasn’t until one particularly bad beating when I was about twelve that my dad finally stepped in and gave me the tools to do it.

Five boys had jumped me at once, and although I fought back with everything I had, those are bad odds for anyone—I got my butt handed to me. When I got home, with my face all bruised and cut, my dad decided it was time for me to learn hand-to-hand combat. My brother Donny and I had just started studying martial arts, since there was a Black Belt Academy in the shopping complex where Mom’s studio was, but Dad had something else in mind. He’d been a serious boxer, and he wanted me to learn how to fight his way. So in addition to dancing, I spent the next couple of months studying martial arts and learning how to box.

When my dad thought I was ready, he drove me back up to the school. He walked me into the football coach’s office and said, “I want you to pull those boys out of their classes so we
can settle this thing.” When Dad went on to say he wanted me to fight these kids again, Coach Callahan just stared at him. These bullies had kicked the shit out of me just a couple of months ago—and now my father wanted to invite them to go at me again? “But this time it isn’t going to be five boys on one,” my dad said. “It’s gonna be one on one, fair and square.”

It took some convincing, but times were different then, so Coach Callahan quickly deemed it acceptable educational policy to pull boys out of classes, put us in the weight shack by the football field, and let us fight it out. Dad and I walked down to the weight shack, and the coach soon met us there with the five boys. My dad was holding two pairs of boxing gloves, but when the first boy and I got ready to square off, he put them aside. “Just go ahead,” he told us. “I don’t think you need these.”

“Now, hold on,” the coach said. “We can’t do this, Mr. Swayze.” But though my dad was a gentle soul who rarely raised his voice, he did have a temper, which he unleashed at this moment. “Just go on ahead,” he said to me, then turned back to the coach. “Buddy deserves a chance to do to these boys what they did to him,” he said, his eyes burning with anger. “They think they’re tough? We’ll see how tough they are.”

I won’t deny that I was scared. My father obviously believed I was strong enough, and a good-enough fighter, to beat all five of these boys. As I prepared to square off against the first one, I could feel my adrenaline pumping—not because I was afraid of getting hurt, but because I didn’t want to let my dad down. But I felt my senses sharpening and my heart beating faster, and I had a realization. I suddenly understood that you can conquer fear by making it work for you. And so I did. I beat all five of those boys that day, one by one. As each one left
the weight shack, bloody and bruised, I could see the flickers of pride cross my dad’s face.

That didn’t solve my problems at school—in fact, once word got around that I was the new “tough guy,” everybody wanted to fight me. And since I was playing violin at the time, the “tough guy” was an even more inviting target, with his ballet shoes stuck in his back pocket and a violin case in his hand. I got into plenty more scrapes with boys at school, but I never forgot the lesson of how to turn fear to my advantage—a lesson that has served me well my whole life.

And although my dad had taught me to fight, he also taught me two unbreakable rules about when and how to do it. “Buddy,” he always said, “if I ever see you start a fight, I’ll kick your ass. And if I ever see you not
finish
a fight, I’ll kick your ass.” If there’s one thing I learned from my father, it’s that you might not always win, but you never, ever give up. Ever since that day in the weight shack, I never have.

When I was about ten years old, I climbed onto the roof of a two-story house being built down the street. “Hey!” I yelled down to the construction workers below. “How much will you give me if I jump?”

The men looked up and saw a wiry kid, hands on his hips, perched at the edge of the roof. One of them shook his head. “You want us to give you money to jump off that roof and break your goddamn neck?” he yelled up at me.

“How much?” I asked. “Come on!”

“I’ll give you twenty-five cents,” the man replied, while the others chuckled.

“Give me fifty cents and I’ll do it!” I yelled back.

He nodded and waved his hand. “Well, go on, then,” he said.

And this was the moment I’d waited for. Everyone’s eyes were on me, my blood started rushing, and I jumped off that roof—right into the sand pile they’d been using to mix the cement. I hit the pile and rolled, my momentum carrying me right back up to my feet after a couple of turns. The man reluctantly fished a couple of quarters out of his pocket and handed them to me.

I might have looked crazy to the men, but I’d spent my whole childhood running and jumping and flying through the air. I knew how to fall and how to roll, and as a result I careened around not afraid of anything. With all my gymnastics and dance lessons, I knew my body inside and out, and knew exactly what it was capable of.

As soon as my younger brother Donny was old enough to run with me, he and I charged through the woods near our house like a couple of daredevils. I always loved heroes like Doc Savage and Tarzan—not superheroes with special powers, but ordinary guys who pushed themselves to do extraordinary things. I’d play Tarzan and Donny would be Cheetah, or Boy, depending on the mood I was in. We’d swing around on a network of vines hanging from the trees behind our house, wearing our specially made Tarzan suits: old Speedo swimsuits with a belt around the waist and the crotch cut out to look like a loincloth. More than one neighborhood girl was shocked at catching sight of all the Swayze family jewels flying around overhead.