It Hasn’t Been a Model Life for Williams : Diving: She left her family at 14 to come to Mission Viejo and eventually won a bronze medal at Seoul. But she never felt that good about taking the plunge.

Wendy Lian Williams is only 22, but she feels old.

“I was watching the Miss Universe pageant the other night,” she said, “and I started thinking about all the times I watched it as a kid. I was awed by all the beautiful women then. Now, I’m awed by all the beautiful girls .”

Williams, too, is one of the beautiful people, which is worth mentioning only because it has opened the doors to a modeling career that allows her to continue her bid to remain one of the world’s best divers as she nears her 23rd birthday.

Her latest gig resulted in an ad for a swimsuit line that’s running in the current issues of Glamour and Cosmopolitan as well as other magazines. Williams’ body is painted like the clouds-and-sky background, highlighting the suit as she seemingly floats in the air, her face to the heavens, her back arching toward earth.

It creates the intended eye-catching ethereal effect, and unintentionally captures the essence of Williams’ diving career, a tumbling dream of confused images:

She wants to cry, but knows she must not. She’s so enraptured, it’s as if electricity is coursing through her body. Then she’s crying again, but she’s not sure why.

Wendy Lian Williams feels old not because she’s traveled all over the world or because she has won a world championship and an NCAA title and a bronze medal in the Olympics.

It’s just that when you stop and reflect on the emotional torment and the stunt-pilot-like highs and lows she’s experienced over the past decade, well, it’s enough to leave almost anyone drained.

Anyone except maybe Williams, who displays enough verve to supply a legion of cheerleaders. She can sit and recant her great depressions with matter-of-fact perspective and sum it all up with “Oh, but what a learning experience. It’s sort of a broader sense of knowledge that’s stored away for the rest of my life and will help me get through other hard times.”

Williams, the NCAA Women’s Diver of the Year in 1989, gave up her senior year of eligibility at the University of Miami when she decided to accept a number of endorsement offers last spring. But that was just one in a line of the mini-retirements on Williams’ resume.

Last month, she moved to Laguna Beach and is now training with Mission Viejo Nadadores Coach Janet Ely-Lagourgue, who competed in the 1972 and ’76 Olympics. Williams has embarked on another mini-comeback by competing in the platform event at the U.S. Indoor Diving Championships in Beaverton, Ore. She is second after the semifinals; the finals are Sunday.

“I feel so good about the move,” Williams said. “I found an apartment that is exactly the place I want to be and Janet and I have this really great rapport. I’m so happy now.”

Even with a piquant delivery and an everything’s-hunky-dory approach, there’s a trace of doubt in Williams’ voice. After all, no one knows better how easy it is to lose focus of the positive and how fleeting a sense of well-being can be.

“When Scott (Reich, the former Miami diving coach) resigned and left the sport (last May), I spoke with Wendy with the intention of trying to talk her into staying at Miami,” Ely-Lagourgue said, “but she was scrutinizing everything with a fear factor. She was a veteran athlete who felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her and she was not able to adjust.

“She was just too depressed at that point. She didn’t feel she would ever get herself out of the dumps so I think the change of scenery has helped. She’s training well, but her confidence is still sagging. There’s a great deal of pressure on an accomplished athlete to stay on top and a lot of factors have blinded her from seeing that she can be better than ever.”

So, yet again, Williams is standing 30 feet above a pool, waging war with her fears and self-doubts, and taking the inevitable plunge.

“You’ve got to be willing to fail,” Ely-Lagourgue reminds her newest charge. “It’s like that with a dive, or a workout, or a relationship with a man. You’ve got to decide to let go and take a chance.”

Williams’ story is not really a sad one, though. Indeed, it’s a story of accomplishment and glory, of a young girl’s determination and courage, and of a young woman’s battle to discover who she is and who she wants to be.

A little girl lay in her bed in Bridgeton, Mo., fantasizing about winning a gold medal in the Olympics. And then she would start to cry.

“I had so much motivation then, but I didn’t know what to do with it,” Williams said.

She began diving as a 3-year-old who tagged along with an older sister to workouts. Her father, Charles, was her coach during her preteen years and he made up in dedication what he lacked in technical expertise. He would come home from work, eat dinner and then drive an hour to a St. Louis pool where Wendy faithfully would work out for 2 1/2 hours.

Most nights, they were the only two people in the complex.

Williams says those hours she spent alone with her father were some of the best hours of her life, but it was a period both knew had to come to an end.

“I was diving with (University of Michigan Coach) Dick Kimble in the summer and it got to the point where my dad and I both knew he didn’t know what to do for me anymore,” she said. “I’d dive and he’d say, ‘What would Dick say about that dive?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, Dad. I can’t see it. That’s what coaches are for.’ ”

So Williams, 14 at the time, made what she says was a not-so-difficult decision to leave home and move halfway across the country to live with strange families and train with then Mission Viejo Coach Ron O’Brien.

“I sort of felt like I was smothering back home,” she said. “It was kind of like torture. I mean here was a board, here was a pool, but there was no one to help me improve. And I had so much drive.

“I wanted to dive so badly. I wanted it so bad. People said, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t leave your family. You’ll be lonely. You’ll get burned out. You’ll be sorry.’

“And they were all right.”

Williams lived with four different host families in Mission Viejo, staying about one year with each.

“The first two families, well, I was so young and it was just a very different lifestyle than the way I was brought up,” she said. “I have three sisters, all of whom are 10 to 15 years older, and I got a lot of attention. Moving was a very tough adjustment. I missed the guidance of my family.

“There were times when I was so lost and so lonely and I couldn’t even tell my parents because they’d say, ‘Well, you better come home then.’ So I used to fight back the tears on the phone because I wanted to dive.”

Ask Williams if it was worth it and she responds with an emphatic “yes.” But when faced with the next question, she pauses and sighs.

“If I had a son or daughter that wanted to do that, I don’t know if I could let them go. I don’t think I could let them go.”

From the first day she climbed the ladder and managed to push herself off the edge of the tower, it was obvious that Williams had the physical potential to make her mark as a platform diver.

But there has always been a question--at least in her mind, and that’s where it counts most--of whether or not she possessed the necessary mental tenacity.

“I always felt the tower was bigger than me,” she said. “I was always afraid of it and I always felt I was more afraid of it then everyone else.

“For a long time, I was never able to beat my fear and felt like I was doomed to finish second or third because the ones who could beat their fear could train just a little bit harder and be a little more confident. For a while, I couldn’t even fake confidence up there. Now, when I’m feeling jittery, I can fake confidence and when you fake it, it sort of comes true.”

In her teen-age years, she harnessed her boundless motivation and forced herself to climb that ladder one rung at a time. Once you’re up there, there’s only one way down.

That’s a platform diver’s credo that Williams’ once defied, however.

“Ron (O’Brien) was trying to teach me a new dive and I was just too scared to try it,” she said. “I was really distraught after climbing down and said I was quitting platform. Ron took me into his office and said, ‘Forget the dive but don’t quit tower. It’s your ticket to the Olympics.’ ”

And every time she attempted to abandon her career as a platform diver, she heard the same argument. So she persevered.

Then, in the summer of 1988, all the work and mental anguish paid the ultimate dividend: Williams won a bronze medal in the 10-meter event in the Olympic Games.

The Games. The ultimate experience for every amateur athlete.

Unfortunately for Williams, every moment of the bad times is burned in her memory. The best time is more like a sweet dream that fades when you awake. No matter how desperately one tries to fall asleep again, it can’t be revived . . . or relived.

“I was on such an adrenaline high, I don’t remember a lot,” she said. “It’s kind of like a blur from the time I made the team to the time we came back and went to the White House.”

Williams does cling to one vivid image, however, a stroll through the athlete’s village that remains a personal milestone, a peak life experience.

“I was walking back to my room and I passed about 25 different athletes. It suddenly hit me that everyone was in absolutely perfectly chiseled shape, men and women. It was like a heightened sense of awareness, I was so alert. Here was an African guy. There was a Russian woman.

“I thought, here are 2,000 of the world’s best-conditioned people. And then it dawned on me that I was one of them, I was one of the select few.

“If you dream all your life of being rich, you may accomplish it, but it usually doesn’t happen overnight. Some things you have to accomplish slowly and you don’t stop to realize your dream is coming true.

“That day, I understood that I had actually done it. I had accomplished my dream.”

The sensation may have hit her overnight, but Williams traveled a very bumpy road on her 21-year journey to Seoul.

It’s hard to find athletes who have been competing since their early teens who can’t pinpoint a period of their lives that they label “burnout.”

Williams’ “B” file is rather large. But for her, the Big Burnout hit just after her senior year at Mission Viejo High School and lasted nearly a year.

“That summer, I went to six major meets in six weeks and then left for the World Student Games in Japan,” she said. “I was so tired and I started getting lost (losing all sense of direction) on my dives and wiping out.

“Getting lost is usually a very occasional thing, but in a period of three weeks, I got lost 10 or 12 times and it was playing major mental games with me. Looking back, I think it was my mind’s way of saying, ‘You need a rest.’ ”

But this was no time for the weary. The national championships were held in St. Louis in the summer of 1985 and Williams was expected to return home from her four-year sabbatical in the aquatic promised land of Mission Viejo as a conquering hero.

“Everyone treated me regally,” she said, “and I wanted to have a great meet so badly. Unfortunately, I was afraid of my own shadow and really just dying to quit diving altogether.”

After two particularly painful wipeouts during practice, Williams spent a tearful session with a sports psychologist who suggested she take the rest of the day off, go home and relax in the warmth of family and friends.

She should have gotten a second opinion.

“I was driving home in my dad’s VW bug and the engine blew up,” she said. “I was on one of those curving, connecting ramps between freeways and the car just froze. It was a single lane, the speed limit was 55 and I knew I’d better not stay there. So I jumped out. There was no one coming, so I started pushing the car to the side of the road. There were flames coming out the back and everything.

“I didn’t realize it was sort of a downward slope and all of sudden I couldn’t stop the car. I couldn’t get in to put on the brake and it just rolled over the side down into a ditch and when it hit the bottom, it just went ka-boom into a ball of flames.

“I was just standing there bawling and shaking all over. And this was what I was supposed to do to relax.”

Apparently, it was a form of shock therapy that worked. Williams almost won both the platform and one-meter springboard events, placing second in both. She also took fourth on the three-meter and won the high-point award for the meet.

An ironic honor, considering she clearly was bottoming out emotionally.

“I was at the lowest of lows and everyone kept telling me how awesome I was doing,” she says, managing a giggle now. “It was such an incredible conflict. I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m really losing it.’ ”

So, with her morale sinking into an emotional abyss, Williams embarked upon her freshman year at Miami.

Isn’t college life in Miami supposed to be filled with sun, fun and parties? That’s not how Williams remembers her first year there.

“I muscled through the collegiate season, but I was so miserable,” she said. “I dove in the indoor nationals my freshman year and then I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

This time, she decided to do something about it. For six months, Williams disappeared. She didn’t move far--just down the road to Deerfield Beach, Fla.--but she left no forwarding address, or even a phone number, with her coach or friends.

“I was 18 and I’d never had a job because of diving,” she said. “I wanted to feel what it was like to have to struggle to support yourself.”

She admits now that it didn’t feel all that wonderful. She had two jobs, one as a waitress and one in a health club. The job in the health club intrigued her, but she learned what she now claims to be a valuable lesson about the real world: It’s not what you know, but how you got your credentials that counts.

“I wanted to train people, but because I hadn’t told them who I was, they couldn’t understand how I knew so much about weightlifting,” she said.

“But I didn’t want to be Wendy the Diver anymore, so I kept my mouth shut and they put me behind the smoothie bar.”

Williams reached the enough-of-this-real-world-stuff stage by midsummer and went home for six weeks, the most time she had spent there in more than four years. She was 18, had “been my own mother for years” and arrived home with the announcement that she was quitting diving.

It didn’t make for a heartwarming homecoming.

“I’d been independent for a long time, but now I was 18 and I was going through that thing that 18-year-olds go through,” she said. “There was a huge struggle between me and my dad and lots of arguing because he wanted me to go back to diving. It was the first time I ever felt like he was pushing me.”

She hadn’t been near a pool for more than half a year by this time, however, and she began to experience a void. She missed the feel of the wind fanning her wet skin, the canvas-ripping sound of a diver making a perfect entry, the smell of the chlorine and the sight of the ever-beckoning glittering turquoise water.

And there were less aesthetic considerations as well, such as how to pay for a college education.

“I really love the water and being outside and I decided that since I’d put this much into diving, it was pretty silly to have to pay for school,” she said. “So I decided to go back and just dive collegiately.”

With the pressure to be a world-beater removed, Williams rediscovered the unbridled joy of tumbling weightless through space, the feeling that had drawn her to the sport as a toddler.

“I didn’t have to be perfect anymore and I started diving better than ever,” she said.

Her father passed away in 1987, a loss she says she will never get over, but what followed was a heady couple of years for Wendy the Diver.

She won an Olympic medal in ’88. (“It was too bad Dad couldn’t have been there, but I figure he had the best seat in the house and I had a special guardian angel”). And there was a world championship and an NCAA title in ’89.

Then Reich retired and everything that had finally fallen into place was strewn asunder.

So she took another six-month respite, contemplating retirement all the while. But Williams is a diving survivor and she popped back to the surface in Mission Viejo. And now she’s back on her feet, wobbly though they may be.

“I don’t want to set any goals now because when I set goals I get too caught up in winning,” she said. “Sure, it would be wonderful to go back to the Olympics and win a gold, but I think if I set those kinds of goals, I lose track of what’s happening today and how to have a good time.

“I just don’t want to get to the point again where I forget how much I love diving.”

With a love-hate relationship like this one, that seems almost inevitable. As any diver--and especially one Wendy Lian Williams--will testify, what goes up, must come down.