Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SOLOMON CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If his new book, ``Breaking the Surface'' (Random House, $23), were one of those unauthorized celebrity biographies, the ones attended by angry denials that boost sales, no one would believe it. No one.
But this is an AUTObiography. By Greg Louganis, the greatest diver his sport has ever known.
In the world of international athletic competition, which creates heroes every four years and then pretty much forgets them, Louganis would seem to have been among the few unforgettables.
Well, if he wasn't before, gang, he is now. He may want you to cry for him. Ultimately, you won't.
Because the perfection that was Greg Louganis, the champion diver, was not what it seemed. So stunning are the episodes in ``Breaking the Surface,'' so naive, self-absorbed and self-destructive is its subject, that this book will force you to set it down half a dozen times and shout, ``What?!?''
There's enough in these pages to fill an Olympiad of creep-talk shows.
Remember when Louganis cracked his head on a diving board during the '88 Olympics in Seoul? Everyone who watched it, who read about it, remembers the drama. We cringed as a nation, then were thrilled as he persevered.
Louganis, it turns out, was HIV-positive even then. And he knew it.
``So many things went through my mind,'' he writes. ``One stream of thought was: Did I get any blood in the pool? ... Then I worried about [team doctor Jim] Puffer, who wasn't wearing gloves ... ''
He hadn't told the team doctor.
That's only the first shocker. It comes in the opening chapter, and you figure it's just the hook, that nothing will top it, that the story will quickly mellow into the standard tale of the great athlete driven to succeed by a difficult childhood - that Louganis' homosexuality, made public in a noble if redundant coming-out last year, merely would give it a twist that would separate it from, say, ex-drunk Mickey Mantle's two recent confessionals.
Not exactly.
Yes, there is a tragic edge: He and you will now share the knowledge that AIDS probably will kill Greg Louganis, 35, before his 40th birthday.
``I'm doing it now,'' he foreshadows in the introduction as he explains why he agreed to write the book, ``because I want to tell the story in my own words while I still have the chance.''
Before you finish his book, that edge will be ground to dullness by the realization that Greg Louganis, for all his gifts, is as much a victim of his inability to take responsibility for his own life as he is of that insidious virus.
Maybe he never had to.
``Diving,'' he will write more than once, ``had always been my refuge.''
Three times he would attempt suicide, the first time at 12. By high school he already was a heavy drinker and smoker, preferred speed to pot (which he was selling), and was locked up after kicking his beloved mother in the chest so hard that, he learns only years later, she would need surgery.
``I was so caught up in my world that I didn't know anything about it,'' writes Louganis.
That ability to internalize, to block out the rest of life, would contribute to his success as an athlete. As early as age 3, he says, he could replay a dancing-school routine in his head again and again, visualizing it ``so well that my body could do it without even thinking about it.''
As it would years later, in front of millions, off a 3-meter springboard and a 10-meter platform.
His, at its most obvious, is the story of a gifted though troubled athlete who, through his own drive and with the support of coaches and a few loved ones, achieves greatness on a global stage - while growing up gay and trying to project a sex-neutral image while living in a relatively transparent closet.
Those two dominant elements of his life inevitably are impossible to fully separate, and they intermix in this book as well.
At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where he wins a silver medal as a 16-year-old still uncertain about his sexual identity, he is propositioned by a male judge.
``I managed to say no,'' he writes, ``as graciously as I could.''
Also at the 1976 Games, he writes, he develops a crush on Yuri, a Soviet diver. As the years pass, there are more infatuations and tensions and affairs and fears. None of this, in the context of what has been long assumed among those who traveled in his circle, what was commonly known by writers who chronicled his achievements and what we all now know about Greg Louganis' sexual orientation, is particularly unusual or surprising.
``Plenty of the divers knew I was gay,'' he says as he reviews the 1980 Olympic trials, ``because I didn't exactly keep it a secret. Some divers clearly kept their distance.''
That he spends much of his adulthood as a battered spouse is a revelation.
But first, at 20, there was Kevin. The brutality in that relationship, Louganis tells us, was mutual. Finally, Kevin goes to a counselor and Greg doesn't - a theme through the book.
``I found his therapy very threatening,'' Louganis says. In 1987, some years after their breakup, ``Kevin wrote to tell me that he had HIV. From the tone of his letter, I got the sense he was blaming me. ... It just as easily could've been the other way around.''
Yet he doesn't get himself tested then, and he doesn't even after his next lover, Tom, shows symptoms of full-blown AIDS.
``All around us,'' he writes, ``gay men were getting sick, getting tested, getting educated, but we remained in denial. We were also in denial about safer sex: When we did have sex, we continued not to take any precautions.''
Tom. They begin seeing each other in 1982. Sometime the next year, Tom accuses Greg of cheating on him and rapes him at knifepoint. So naturally, after the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles - where Louganis wins two gold medals - they move in together.
Tom, Greg notices, always seems to have money but no job.
Hello?
Tom somehow becomes his business manager. Eventually - and we're talking years here - Louganis learns what friends and family have been trying to tell him: Tom has been a very, very bad person.
And yet ...
``No matter how irrational it was,'' Louganis tells one friend, ``I still love him.''
If ``Breaking the Surface'' has a real hero, it's Louganis' final diving coach, Ron O'Brien. In the space of a few pages covering a few weeks in 1988, O'Brien's star diver tests positive for HIV, his son-in-law commits suicide, his dog dies (``I don't mean to put a suicide and the death of a dog in the same league,'' writes Louganis, ``but ...''), his mother dies, and then that star diver opens his head on a diving board and leaks potentially lethal blood on various people.
That's the kind of book this is.
There are, as there have been in Greg Louganis' life, some wonderful moments, and he and co-author Eric Marcus re-create them effectively. The acting experience in ``Jeffrey,'' a successful 1993 off-Broadway play in which Louganis - infected and still in the closet - portrays a young man dying of AIDS, is told with honesty and sensitivity.
It is in New York, appropriately, that he sees the light, that he finally has a clue. He is 33 years old.
The diving sequences are given just enough detail, though it's not until the '88 Games that the grandness of the Olympic experience comes through. The final dive of that Olympics, with everything it meant, is brought to us with chilling detail and full emotion.
Like poring through a child's diary containing embarrassingly personal things, ``Breaking the Surface'' is a fascinating yet uncomfortable read. Clearly, and pointedly, Louganis is trying to teach - yet even now, he remains more assured when talking about others' mistakes: ``That's why,'' he says firmly of his adoptive parents' failure to provide an effective counselor after a suicide try, ``I urge parents to take their children's problems seriously.''
He took the risk of revealing himself, and it isn't pretty: a man who, as a boy, felt a worthlessness that prevailed through adulthood even as others unconditionally admired his Olympian achievements; who, as a young man, was content to be swept blithely along by events and an abusive lover; who, after years of facing the inevitability of early death, remained until now unable to truly begin his teaching process.
But he's assuredly correct: If he hadn't written this book, someone else would have. It wouldn't have been the same book. It wouldn't have been as good a book.
And no one would've believed it.
by CNB