High-Water Mark Leaves Impression : Every 4 Years, Waves of Wistful Memories Return to Gorman, a Sherman Oaks Business Executive Who Earned Silver Medal in Diving in ’64 Olympics

Frank Gorman went looking for his first job nearly 30 years ago, a time when athletes had not yet learned how to turn their accomplishments into marketable commodities.

He was 25, fresh out of the Navy, an officer and a gentleman as well as a Harvard grad. All this he emphasized on his resume, but there was one biographical footnote he knowingly played down: his silver medal in the 1964 Olympics, which he listed at the bottom under “extracurricular activities.”

“I’ve never worn (the medal) as a badge,” says the 54-year-old telecommunications executive who lives in Sherman Oaks. “Even today, most people I do business with don’t have any idea about the Olympics.”

After finishing second in the 3-meter diving event, Gorman retired from the sport and put the silver medal in a drawer, where it remained for the next 25 years. But every four years, the Olympics remind him of his own experience in the Games. As the Barcelona Olympics approach this summer, he is filled with wistful memories.

“It’s hard to describe being that high in the air, on a board by yourself, with thousands waiting for you,” he says. “You almost can’t feel anything. You’re hoping that everything works as you want it to. Your dive feels like slowmotion. You can feel every drop of water when you enter the water, from your fingertips to the ends of your toes. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience.”

But the flashes from the past also bring back bittersweet feelings for Gorman, who lives with the disappointment of letting the gold slip through his fingers in Tokyo. He seemingly had it all locked up with two dives left. But his penultimate dive--a back 2 1/2--looked like a cannonball and he could score no better than 8.5 on his last attempt, a reverse 1 1/2 in layout position.

“It was devastating,” he says. “I did that back 2 1/2 in my mind every night for a couple of years. I’d learned it that summer and scored 9.5 with it at the trials. (In the Olympics), everybody was going long. I remember a coach telling me, ‘Make sure you don’t go long.’ I went short by a lot. I didn’t even make it to vertical.”

Gorman received a score of 3.5, but he still could have won the gold by receiving at least a 9.0 for his last dive. “I knew it was the last dive of my life,” he says. “I went for 10s. I did a long, slow, high, graceful extension. The Russian judge gave me 9.5. The other judges liked it, but not enough.”

Although the gold would have been the crowning achievement of his career, Gorman says he still wouldn’t have put the medal on his resume. And while not winning hurt for a while, he has gotten over it.

“As far as I was concerned, I had done the best I could,” he says. “I competed in the best way I knew how. It was a chapter in my life I played out to the fullest. I have no regrets.”

Gorman may have had a momentary regret the day about 47 years ago when he did a somersault off a pier at a lake in Brewster, N.Y.--without knowing how to swim. With his four bemused older brothers watching, Gorman thrashed around for a while, until he realized he could stand up. He learned to swim immediately thereafter.

“I was crazy about the water,” he says.

As a 13-year-old high school freshman in Queens, N.Y., he tried out for varsity swimming but was so small the coach would not consider him for anything but diving.

“I did a front 1 1/2 somersault,” Gorman says, “and with that one dive, I made the varsity. I didn’t even know I was a diver. But the things I had learned from my brothers were more than anybody else could do.”

Anybody in the whole state of New York. As a freshman, Gorman won the state diving championships and then four-peated. “If I can believe the press clippings, I was real good under pressure when the stakes were high,” Gorman says. “I was a far better competitive diver than workout diver.”

Gorman says he had about 10 scholarship offers and wound up at Harvard. Only 18 in 1956, he didn’t go to the Olympic trials that year but set his sights on the 1960 Games. After graduating Harvard with a psychology degree, Gorman went to East Lansing, Mich., to train for the trials with other college divers. He thought he could make the team, but he came in ninth at the trials and decided that his diving career was over.

“I went home totally dejected,” he says. “I had bombed.”

Gorman moped around for a while trying to figure out the rest of his life when the government made it easy for him. “Greetings,” a letter from the U.S. Army said. Faced with two years in fatigues, Gorman enlisted in the Navy. After officer training, Ensign Gorman was shipped out to Japan for three years.

Going through communiques one day, he spotted an item that rekindled a still-burning fire within him. The Navy was looking for a few good men--or is that the Marines?--to take part in international sports competition. “They said, ‘If you were man enough to compete,’ ” Gorman recalls.

Gorman took the challenge and wrangled shore duty at Alameda Air Station in the Bay Area. Only problem was, the base had no coach and no diving board, but Gorman found all that at the Oakland Athletic Club.

Fortunately for him, U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was only on a modest scale at the time, so the Navy could indulge its personnel. Gorman took advantage, arranging a transfer to the Naval Academy and then to the Dick Smith Swim Gym in Phoenix, where he trained with 11 national diving champions.

Preparing for the ’64 Olympics, Gorman and the others worked out about six hours a day. He recalls the singleness of purpose, the intensity of the competition. “We all wanted to make the Olympic team and we made every dive as if it were the finals of the Olympics,” he says. At 25, Gorman was older than anybody there and “wasn’t yet as polished,” he says, “but I felt every bit as talented and strong.”

Six of the 12 made the Olympics, with Gorman finishing first in the trials on the 3-meter board. One of his more more whimsical memories in Tokyo was his introduction to the crowd every time he dived. The announcer read his name off the computerized scoreboard, which didn’t have room for his entire name, so he was called “El-tee-jay-gee Frank,” the abbreviation for lieutenant junior grade.

Gorman’s style was appreciated by the Asian audience, he says. Diving more like a classic dancer than an acrobat, “I was striving for long lines, grace and elegance,” says Gorman, who is 6-foot tall.

After believing that his diving days were done in 1960, Gorman considers the Tokyo Games “a gift to me. I got another chance to dive.” But there would be no more competitive diving for him after Tokyo. Now a grandfather of seven, Gorman is active with U.S. Diving Inc., the Olympic arm of the sport, but doesn’t take part in Masters events.

“I don’t want to compete against my friends,” says Gorman, still at his diving weight of 164 pounds. “Truthfully, I don’t want them to beat me.”

Gorman’s home is equipped with a pool and 3-meter board--”No self-respecting diver would be without one,” he says. Sometimes, Gorman invites other divers over, many of whom are past national champions, and neighbors come over to gawk. No one keeps score.

“We just play,” Gorman says. “I get enough competition from business.”