McCormick on Lessons of Olympics

What do you do after you’ve done it all? Where do you go after you’ve got where you’ve always wanted to be? What do you climb after Everest?

Ordinarily, when you think of someone who’s living life in the afterglow, you think of some burned out old star living amid yellowed clippings and faded photographs.

But, what if you’re looking back on the good old days--and you’re only 20? Or even 30? What if your life is all nostalgia and you’ve only lived half of it?

Athletes, particularly Olympic athletes, live their lives backward. They go directly from birth to adulthood. They achieve their goals when most people are just setting out on theirs. Then they are treated as special people, somewhat like gifted children. Outside the main stream.

Patricia Keller McCormick knows all about the afterlife of the big star. Pat McCormick is one of the larger-than-life stars of Olympic history. Her name comes up in any conversation of the super performers of that sporting lore. There are Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, Mark Spitz, Al Oerter--and there’s Pat McCormick.

For one thing, she did something no one else has ever been able to do, win the platform and springboard diving events in two consecutive Olympics. In fact, very few have been able to win both those events in even one Olympics. Few people know Pat McCormick might have had a triple; she lost a place on the team in 1948 by 1/100th of a point.

Pat knows the Olympic experience as few do. From golden girl to life in the shadows. From victory stand to losers’ row.

It’s almost like being a child star in the movies. If you can’t move into grown-up roles, it’s over.

When the flags come down and the anthems die out and the Games go into history, some athletes are like exiles in their own land.

“I call them the post-Olympic blahs,” Pat McCormick explains. “There’s no depression just like them. I mean, they’re bottomless if you let them.

“Consider that some athletes have never had a conversation in their lives that didn’t have to do with swimming or diving, or running or jumping. They’re interested only in their muscles, their times, their scores. They were conditioned from earliest childhood to point to a pinnacle of their lives occurring at age 20.

“It’s scary. It’s like you were suddenly dropped off in the middle of a desert. At night. With no directions, and the stars aren’t out. I mean, you’ve got coaches for everything else. Lots of people can tell you how high to jump, how fast to run, how deep to dive. But nobody tells you how to fit into that larger world. A world you pretty much ignored. Or took to be unimportant.

“You lose your identity. You have no tools. Education was something you fit around your life in the water. It was, as they say so glibly nowadays, irrelevant. The hell it was.

“I think these blahs were what kept me going into a second Olympics. I think the sense of alienation was more profound after my first Olympics in Helsinki in ’52. Life was simpler on the high board.

“It’s an isolated, lonely feeling.”

The pitfall, Pat says, is that the athlete gets so totally absorbed in his own world, his own event, that everything outside it seems trivial. To become the best in the world at what you do requires the kind of tunnel vision of a stalking beast.

“The stress of success is hard to handle. The stress of failure handles itself, by comparison.

“You see, all our lives we have had someone to tell us what to do, how to do it. Then, your whole life dissolves into that one moment. When you step up on that victory stand, you’re going to be deserted. All the support systems you had are going after their next project. They can’t tell you how to handle success, they can only tell you how to achieve it.

“The trick is to stay on that victory stand. Never step down from it.

“I would tell the young athlete today, ‘First, never do anything impulsively. Don’t get married right away, don’t take that job that looks like you get paid for doing nothing. Weigh your options but set some goals.’ ”

Does this mean you should join a monastery or change your name and hide for the first year?

Pat McCormick, whose daughter, Kelly, won the silver medal in the ’84 Olympics, and who conducts her own business of motivational lectures around the world, shakes her head.

“No! You can’t withdraw from the world and say, ‘Hey! I’m special, I got a gold medal.’ That can be a key for you but not the whole opening. The worst thing you can do is wait for the world to come to you.

“You’ve got to say to yourself, ‘OK, the drive and preparation and dedication got me my gold medal in the Summer Olympics. Now, if I call upon the same sacrifices and concentration I can get up on a victory stand in the real Olympics: life.’ ”