Kimball Is at End of the Line : He Finishes 4th as Louganis and Jeffrey Win Berths

Patrick Jeffrey did not regret that he had only one dive to give for his country. It was enough. It was as good as gold. Or as good as silver, at least, because it saved him second place behind Greg Louganis in the men’s 10-meter platform competition at Sunday’s U.S. Olympic diving trials, booking his passage to Seoul.

And so, the Olympic trials of Bruce Kimball are over at last, and nothing remains but his own trial. He is not going to South Korea to fight for any medals. He is going to central Florida to face felony vehicular manslaughter charges, plus the prospect of up to 45 years in prison.

Kimball’s diving career came to a sudden halt Sunday. With two dives to go, Kimball clung tightly to second place, and he still had every opportunity to tag along with Louganis to another Olympics. They were America’s platform divers in 1984, Louganis getting a gold medal, Kimball a silver, and here they were, headed in that direction again.

Jeffrey, though, came out of nowhere. Undistinguished in international diving circles and noted mainly for having won National Collegiate Athletic Assn. championships this year in three events, Jeffrey was mired in fifth place, six dives into a 10-round fight. If anybody was going to catch Louganis and Kimball, the likely suspects were Mike Wantuck and Matt Scoggin, not Jeffrey.

By the end of eight rounds, though, Jeffrey was up to third place, and in the ninth round he shot into second, taking advantage of Kimball’s unwise decision to leave two dives with low degrees of difficulty for last. Kimball needed for Jeffrey to fall on his face in the final round, but Jeffrey did not, and he sent Kimball, a University of Michigan alumnus, into retirement with the final indignity of having been beaten out by a guy from Ohio State.

Kimball actually landed in fourth place at the end, as Wantuck also passed him in the 10th round. Although neither diver will have a chance to hear any national anthems from the winners’ pedestal at Seoul, Wantuck did at least get to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Sunday’s finals.

Afterward, Kimball left without a word.

“He took it hard,” said his father and coach, Dick Kimball. “He’ll just have to deal with it. It’s part of competition. It’s not the first time he’s been disappointed.

“He said he was sorry he wasn’t going to be there (in Seoul), and that now it was time to go and try to straighten out his life.”

Speaking for himself, the elder Kimball, who will still coach U.S. divers at Seoul, said: “I’ll just be glad to get out of here without everybody hounding me. It’s difficult to coach with everybody on your back. Maybe now people will let me live my life for a couple of minutes without being harassed.”

Not the least bit disappointed with the outcome were the seven ever-present protesters from Brandon, Fla., whose friends were killed or injured Aug. 1 when Kimball’s automobile careened into a crowd on a dead-end street. Their cause to keep Kimball off the Olympic team looked bleak when he scored three perfect 10.0s and four 9.5s on his second dive, but Jeffrey’s steady rise through the later rounds made their day.

“We couldn’t be happier,” said Kathy Chuparkoff, 17, a friend of the fiancee of one of the boys who died. “Greg Louganis and Patrick Jeffrey are the kind of all-American people who should stand for our country.”

Said another girl, Jennifer Beck: “I came here 17 years old, and I feel now like I’m 77.”

The group paid its own way to get here, and two of them were fired for missing work. They plan to hold a fund-raiser for families of the crash victims when they return to Brandon.

Using an unfortunate choice of words, Cherie Beck, mother of Jennifer and adult leader of the protest against Kimball, said, in addressing how much money was spent on this trip: “When you read about a murder in Brandon, it’ll be because my husband found my charge-card bill.”

It is difficult, at times, to avoid words and phrases of double meaning. Gail Kimball, Bruce’s mother, was discussing her son’s situation after Sunday’s competition and mentioned how she and the family had agreed beforehand that they “didn’t feel a need to hide, because you don’t solve a problem by running away from it. You’ve got to meet it head on.”

Remembering when her son competed in this same arena after he survived a 1981 auto accident that fractured his skull, shattered every bone in his face, ruptured his spleen, lacerated his liver, broke his left leg and caused him to be fed intravenously for two months as his weight dropped to 107 pounds, Gail Kimball said: “We’ve been through some horrible things in our lives. I didn’t think you could feel any worse than you could after that.

“You can.”

Losing out on the Olympics was not what she meant. Bruce has known failure as well as success in hundreds of diving contests before this. “He had a fair shot here,” his mother said.

Second place and the second Olympic berth belonged to Kimball for much of Sunday’s finals, because he shot past runner-up Scoggin one dive into the meet. Scoggin eventually faded to fifth. Louganis had a lock on the lead all the way, and he gave the audience a thrill in the fourth round by scoring six 10.0s and a single 9.5 on an inward 1 1/2 somersault pike.

Louganis finished with 1,331.19 points to Jeffrey’s 1,261.71, Wantuck’s 1,254.72 and Kimball’s 1,244.43. Louganis, who qualified for the Olympics for the fourth time, has never been beaten in platform or springboard in the U.S. trials.

“I don’t know how this guy does it,” Jeffrey said, patting Louganis’ shoulder. “Blows me away.”

Jeffrey, 23, of Madison, N.J., received a business degree at Ohio State last winter, after he first was a journalism major. The only major platform victory of his career was at the Volkbank meet in Austria two years ago, and, when asked what he was doing during the 1984 Olympic trials, Jeffrey replied: “Sitting in the stands.”

His big coup this year was when he took the 1-meter and 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform titles at the NCAA championships.

“Not even Greg can say that,” Jeffrey said, poking Louganis again.

Jeffrey, who was fifth after Saturday’s semifinals, said he felt discouraged, but then he studied himself in a full-length mirror before he left his hotel on Sunday and started telling his reflection: “You can do it. Come on. You know you can.”

His coach, Vince Panzano, said: “I didn’t see him do anything today that I haven’t seen him do before in practice. This performance was no fluke.”

Jeffrey said, “The trouble with being in my position is that you don’t have the luxury of blowing a big dive and not worrying about it, the way Greg can. Somebody like me, you’ve got to go all out on every single dive.”

Jeffrey saved two tough 3.2-difficulty dives for the final two rounds, and he did nicely on both of them, all 9.0s and 8.5s. Kimball’s scores were just as good, but his dives had 2.7 and 2.9 difficulty, and that cost him. Like a racehorse who needs the early lead, Kimball either had to have a big cushion after eight rounds to keep himself in front, or he had to get near-perfect scores on the lesser dives at the end. He did neither.

So ended a difficult week and a brilliant career. Kimball, 25, who has won six U.S. platform titles, bronze medals at two world championships and an Olympic silver, is now officially retired. His plans are to return to Michigan, change his physical education major and get a degree, if he is free to do so.

“Whatever happens next, he’ll pay a price for the rest of his life,” Gail Kimball said. “He’s a human being. He wouldn’t have this happen to anybody in the world, what happened to those children and what’s happened to him. He’ll never be able to stop dealing with this, no matter how it turns out legally.”

A preliminary hearing will be held in Florida a week from today. Dick Kimball, who has run one of his Kimball Divers camps in Brandon, is shutting it down and moving it back to Michigan. Bruce’s attorney, Frank Quesada, sat in the stands during Sunday’s competition.

Indications are that Kimball’s defense will center on the results of a Breathalyzer test taken by Florida police, and on the actual speed he was traveling when his silver 1984 Mazda RX-7 struck some parked cars and then bodies on Culbreath Road outside Brandon. Robbie Bedell, 19, and Kevin Gossic, 16, were killed.

Olympic diver Wendy Lucero, of Denver, who will compete in women’s 3-meter springboard at Seoul, was in Brandon the day of the accident. She was staying with a couple whose son was at the site, sitting on a car, when Kimball allegedly drove onto the scene. Lucero once trained with Kimball’s father.

“I can only give them support and love now, and hope it will carry them through this,” she said. “Sometimes you think you just can’t keep going. It gave me another reason for being here, I know that. It makes me able to walk away happy, because now it’s clearer to me than ever before that life can be over in a split second.”

Another Olympian, platform specialist Wendy Lian Williams, said: “I’m so sad for Bruce and his family. I knew from day one I couldn’t pass judgment on this. I feel such a bond with Dick, from all the things he’s done for me.”

Protest groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving, lined up against Kimball during the last week after he decided to compete at the trials. Now that he has failed to qualify for the Olympics, the protests can end.

“It doesn’t matter, though,” Gail Kimball said. “Bruce has always been the person who’s hardest on Bruce, from the time he was a little bitty boy. He’ll be harder on himself from now on than anyone else will.

“Almost all of the people we’ve talked to since we got to Indianapolis have been very kind, very compassionate. Bruce has had the most incredible assortment of total strangers offer him their support. One woman sent a telegram from Palm Beach, Fla, saying, ‘Go for it, all the way.’ Another woman begged our hotel desk to contact us just so she could tell him that she understood what he must be going through.”

And, as is to be expected with such a compelling human drama being acted out, at least two motion-picture producers have been trying to get in touch with the Kimballs during the last week.

“This thing is never going to end, is it?” Gail Kimball asked.