HEART OF THE DIVER

By Steve Wulf

The dive of death is a reverse 3-1/2 somersault in the tuck position. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, it had a degree of difficulty of 3.4, compounded by 2-the number of divers who had died attempting it. But the Dive of Death is what Greg Louganis needed to win the gold medal in the 10-m platform competition, his second of the Games. He nailed it, straight in, no splash.

That was 6-1/2 years ago. Had we known then what we found out last week, Louganis might have been hailed even louder and longer than he was. Then again, the greatest diver anyone has ever seen might not have been allowed to compete. Appearing with Barbara Walters on abc's 20/20 last Friday in conjunction with the publication this week of his autobiography, Breaking the Surface (Random House; $23), Louganis revealed that he was hiv-positive when he competed in Seoul and that he now has AIDS. Imagine the uproar then-it was cacophonous enough last week-over the cut Louganis received when he hit his head on the springboard during the preliminaries. Carrying his teddy bear with a matching bandage to and from the pool might not have played quite so well, or assuaged the AIDS paranoia of the time.

Only a handful of people, among them his coach, Ron O'Brien, knew of Louganis' condition in September '88. When the diver pulled ahead with that last platform dive, he embraced O'Brien and started sobbing. Asked by Walters what he told O'Brien, Louganis replied, "I said that nobody will ever know what we've just been through."

They know now. Following the sweeps-month interview with Walters, Louganis embarked on a nationwide tour to promote his book, co-authored with Eric Marcus (Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990). Excerpts will be published this week in People just as Louganis appears on Oprah. The publicity blitz seems calculating and somewhat cynical, adjectives never before ascribed to Louganis. The big question hanging in the air last week was, What took him so long? And right below that were some others: Should he have told the International Olympic Committee in '88? Didn't he at least have a responsibility to tell the team physician, Dr. James Puffer, who stitched him up right after the accident? Why hadn't he come forward before and made himself a standard-bearer for the cause?

In truth, Louganis began to come out of his tuck a year and a half ago. He took over the role of Darius in Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick's sometimes hilarious, sometimes moving off-Broadway play about gay love and sex. Darius, who dies of AIDS in the play, is described as "a true innocent, a handsome, completely sweet dancer in his 20s." It's hardly the sort of part Louganis would take if he wanted to keep his sexual orientation a secret. Says Rudnick: "He was wonderful in the role because he was playing a character who the audience had to believe was innately good and wanted to embrace. That's very tough because you can't act that."

Long a contributor to AIDS-related causes, Louganis further extended himself last summer when he gave a diving exhibition at the Gay Games in New York City and declared himself a homosexual. The gay community had known this for years, of course, but it still took courage for Louganis to come out to the general public-the most famous male athlete ever to make such a declaration. He decided to do the book because, he writes, "I hope my story will help anyone who has to face adversity...Maybe I can prevent one teenager from being infected with HIV, and maybe I can give hope to people who are in abusive relationships...It's not my intention to shock anyone, but looking objectively at some of what I've lived through, even I find parts of my life shocking.''

Indeed, Louganis has lived his entire life in a sort of quiet terror. He was adopted by a San Diego bookkeeper and his wife, Peter and Frances Louganis, when he was nine months old. Because his biological father was Samoan, Greg had dark skin that targeted him as a "nigger"; because he was dyslexic and a stutterer, he was often called a "retard." While his mother encouraged him to take dancing classes, his father virtually ignored his "sissy" son. Growing up with all those stigmas would have been pure hell had the nine-year-old boy not discovered diving.

And the diving world soon discovered him. "The first time I saw him," said former Olympic diving champion Dr. Sammy Lee, "he was 10, and I knew he would be the greatest diver in history if he got the right coach." Lee became that coach, and at the '76 Olympics in Montreal the 16-year-old Louganis won a silver medal. It was also in Montreal that Louganis developed a big crush-on a Soviet diver called Yuri in the book. "I fell for him like a boulder off the 10-m platform," writes Louganis. It led to nothing more than a night of drunken cuddling. "It was the most natural thing in the world, and I felt no guilt."

But upon returning home to California, Louganis, as divers say, "lost the water." Disoriented and depressed, he drank, dabbled in drugs and even attempted suicide. He left the hard-nosed Lee for the gentler O'Brien, who somehow kept Louganis focused through all the fallow non-Olympic years that stretched between Montreal and Los Angeles. (The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Games.) In 1984 Louganis won both the springboard and platform competitions. "That was the peak," says O'Brien.

The years before Seoul, though, were troubled ones for Louganis. He became involved with an abusive lover who then became his business manager and stripped him of his self-respect-as well as thousands of dollars. In the book Louganis refers to him only as Tom, but in a lawsuit filed in 1989, after Louganis had been stalked and threatened with blackmail by his former lover, the man was identified as Jim Babbitt. By this time Babbitt already had AIDS, and Louganis had been tested. "Greg told me he had tested positive early in '88," O'Brien recalls. "I was devastated."

Although O'Brien saw no change in Louganis' physical condition that year, he did have to deal with a tired diver. "He could never get a full night's sleep because he had to take his azt every four hours," says O'Brien. There was also the burden of the shared secret. "We knew then that the risk of his spreading the virus through an open cut was infinitesimal, and besides, how many times does a diver-much less Greg Louganis-get wounded? But we thought it best to keep his condition to ourselves . This was 1988, remember. People had a hard time with Magic Johnson playing in the Olympics, and that was 1992."

Then the improbable happened: Louganis hit his head on the springboard on the ninth of his 11 qualifying dives. "I was in a total panic that I might cause someone else harm," he writes. "I wanted to warn Dr. Puffer but I was paralyzed . Everything was all so mixed up at that point: the hiv, the shock and embarrassment of hitting my head and an awful feeling that it was all over." (Louganis finally told Dr. Puffer less than a year ago, and the physician subsequently tested negative for the virus.)

When he stood on the podium to receive his second medal, Louganis recalls wondering, "How soon before I get sick? . What would the people cheering for me think if they knew I was gay and hiv-positive? Would they still cheer?'' O'Brien, who had kept Greg's secret for so many years, says, "I'm glad that I can finally share the story of his heroism. I never even told my wife. There are very few divers who could've come back from that springboard incident and won two gold medals. If that isn't courage, I don't know what is."

Greg's earlier coach, Dr. Lee, was escorting a group of 10-year-old California divers in China when the news broke last week. "All the kids are concerned for him and very depressed,'' he says. "They all aspire to be Greg Louganis." Last summer Greg told Speedo, the swimsuit manufacturer, about his illness; they renewed his endorsement contract.

It was during his four-month run as Darius that Louganis decided to write his autobiography. He had always found it difficult to talk about being gay, let alone being hiv positive. A year ago he could barely discuss his infection with his closest friends. But the play seemed to change that. As Darius says, when he comes back from the dead to give Jeffrey some advice, "Just think of AIDS as the guest that won't leave. The one we all hate. But you have to remember: hey-it's still our party."

--With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by DAN CRAY/LOS ANGELES AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK