PRECIOUS MEDAL? : After His Career and Life Tumbled, Lenzi Decided to Take Another Dive

“Nervous?” the coach wondered.

“No,” the diver said.

Once, maybe. Once, standing on the three-meter springboard with all his hopes tucked in a pending reverse 3 1/2 somersault, Mark Lenzi might have freaked.

But not this time. Not in Indianapolis, on this Friday night, June 21, on this do-or-die last dive at the U.S. Olympic trials.

Not after where he had been. Not after winning gold in 1992 at Barcelona and sitting next to Jay Leno one week, then waiting for the phone to ring the next.

Not after Wheaties chose not make him the next American hero; after sitting alone in his Bloomington, Ind., apartment, college-kid broke, his body paralyzed by depression.

“It hit so hard I couldn’t get up,” Lenzi recalls. “I would be sitting on the couch, and I could not physically get up.”

Hobie Billingsley?

Well, Hobie was nervous enough for the both of them. Lenzi’s coach tried to put himself in Mark’s toes up on the board.

“I’d either go right in my pants or I would faint,” Billingsley estimates.

Gladly, he did not inform Lenzi of this. Billingsley, in fact, said little.

Lenzi knew the score. Everyone did. With one dive left at the Olympic trials, Lenzi was in fourth place. Only the top two divers in springboard would make the team.

Lenzi needed an almost perfect effort on the the most difficult dive in the sport to move up two positions and become an Olympian.

Billingsley sized up the situation.

“It’s like saying this: You’re in the U.S. Open, coming up to the 18th hole and you have to get a hole in one or you lose.”

Lenzi didn’t see it that way. He stood on the board in almost an eerie calm.

What single dive could be worse than what he had been through? What newspaper account could injure him more than the one he once read about himself--”Lenzi Threatens to Sell Gold Medal”--igniting a firestorm for the news hounds and tabloid tattlers who rang his phone off the hook and didn’t know half the story?

Sell his gold?

Growing up in Fredericksburg, Va., the son of a Navy physicist, Lenzi dreamed of winning Olympic gold as far back as he could remember; he felt predestined to do so. He started the quest as a swimmer, switched to wrestling in high school then, at 18, suddenly announced he wanted to become a diver, confounding his parents.

Yet, a year later, he had earned a scholarship at Indiana University. Three years later he was the FINA World Cup one-meter champion.

Six years later he won the gold in springboard at Barcelona.

Sell his gold?

Lenzi, 27, was born on the Fourth of July. How much more American could he get?

The pursuit of the medal cost him a social life. And a wife.

The engagement broke off the year before the Barcelona Games, Lenzi citing diving as one of the reasons.

“That was rough,” he says of the breakup. “I wasn’t suicidal, but I was close. That was the roughest time in my life. It took me years to get over that.”

The “Lenzi-selling-his-gold” story grew so many legs Lenzi gave up trying to set the record straight and started telling people what they wanted to hear.

Few seemed interested in the real story, which Lenzi says was this:

After Barcelona, he fell into deep post-Olympic blues. He never intended to cash in on his glory, but became rather full of himself after some fleeting post-Olympic fanfare.

He walked into a convenience store before his “Tonight Show” appearance, and some kid yelled out his name.

“You from Virginia?” Lenzi said, thinking the kid might have been kin.

“No,” the boy said. “I saw you on TV.”

Everything changed.

“I slowly began to realize what I did in Barcelona was a big deal,” Lenzi says. “I slowly fell into the trap, thinking I was something great.”

Lenzi’s 15 minutes of fame were up, but by then he believed he deserved “a piece of the pie.”

All he got was crust.

He returned to Bloomington, lived off sponsorship money and began a slow retreat into darkness. He quit diving, started sleeping until two in the afternoon after all-nighters at the local pubs.

Lenzi told few of his despair.

“I’d be sitting in my living room, and I’d just start crying for no reason,” he says, “I’d sit there, tears running down my face thinking, ‘Why am I upset?’ To this day I still don’t know.”

He gained 35 pounds. Still, coaches from U.S. Diving would occasionally call, imploring him to return.

“I’d say to these guys, ‘Forget it: I’m sick of this sport. Leave me alone. I’m done.’ I didn’t even want to go to a pool. I didn’t need people calling me up saying ‘You’re the only hope we have.’ I’m sick of this. That’s not going to make me come back.”

Lenzi says he didn’t decide to “sell” his medal in the depths of his despair. In fact, his plan, as ill-advised as it now seems, was hatched after he had emerged from his funk.

Lenzi never sought counseling.

“I kind of got up one day, walked into the bathroom, saw this fat, pudgy face and red eyes looking back at me and I said, ‘Whoa, wait a second.’ It was like, ‘OK, Mark, you’ve had your grieving time, now get off your butt and do something.’ ”

Lenzi decided to go to flight school, but the tuition cost $25,000. He couldn’t get a bank loan because he had no collateral.

Well, he did have this Olympic medal, wrapped in a sock.

Lenzi called Billingsley, his coach at Indiana, and asked him what he thought of using the gold medal as collateral.

The coach told him to tread softly.

“A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, what a crummy thing to do,’ ” Billingsley says. “ ‘This guy’s going to sell his medal.’ It’s not like it didn’t have any value to him. He was frightened. Scared. He didn’t know what to do with his life. He didn’t have anywhere to go. I’ve seen it happen to lots of Olympians, not only in diving. When they won the gold medal, it didn’t help them, it ruined them.”

Lenzi decided to float his idea of pawning his medal in newspapers.

“I thought if I mentioned to a reporter that I’d like to use my medal for collateral for a loan, maybe some wealthy individual would give me the money,” he says. “He can hold onto my medal, then I can go to school, then when I pay him back I can get the medal back.”

That’s not quite how it came out in the headline.

Lenzi claims no one has written that he was approached by a wealthy Virginian, who offered to pay his flight school tuition without requiring the medal in return.

“And I told him ‘No, I don’t want a freebie,’ ” he says. “If I wanted a freebie, I wouldn’t have said I wanted to use my medal as collateral for a loan. I would have said, ‘Just give me the money.’ ”

It turned out Lenzi didn’t have to give up his medal. ComAir, an airline with a flight school in Sanford, Fla., agreed to pay his tuition in return for promotional use of Lenzi’s gold-medal name.

The whole thing still irks him.

“What good was the medal doing me?” he asks. “I can’t display it. If someone breaks in they’re going to steal it. So what’s it doing? It’s the title that’s important to me. But I don’t want to get rid of my medal either.”

*

So there Lenzi stood, on that diving board in Indianapolis, staring at the longest dive of his life on the longest day of the year.

Compared to the depths he had explored, though, how difficult could a reverse 3 1/2 somersault be?

The night before the final, Lenzi seemed hopelessly out of the running. Yet, Billingsley went up to Lenzi’s hotel room and knocked on the door.

“Mark, I think you can still do it,” Billingsley told him. “I really do. If you stay focused and you dive your own game, someone’s going to crack. They’ve got to crack. And he looked at me with those big blue eyes and said, ‘I think so too.’

“It was the moment of truth, like looking that bull right in the eye.”

Lenzi didn’t know where he would be without Billingsley, who had come out of retirement to salvage this diving reclamation project.

Lenzi had decided to return in late 1994 while in flight school, after classmates coerced him into the apartment pool to teach them somersaults.

“That’s when I started to miss it,” he says. “I forgot this was fun.”

He vowed to wait five months to see if the notion passed, but five months later, almost to the day, he awoke in Florida in the spring of 1995 and decided he was returning to competitive diving.

Lenzi left Florida and reunited with Dick Kimball, his Olympic coach, at the University of Michigan.

But it wasn’t the same this time. Kimball’s intense program helped Lenzi shed the extra 35 pounds, but the workouts were taking their toll on Lenzi’s aching shoulders.

Because of injuries, Lenzi was out of the pool as much as he was in.

Last March, by mutual consent, it was agreed that Lenzi should return to Bloomington and work with Billingsley.

Both thought being ready for the June trials would be a longshot.

“The way he was going, he couldn’t have possibly made it,” Billingsley says.

Yet, a week after he reunited with Billingsley, Lenzi set the unofficial world record, 762.35, at the HTH Classic in Rockville, Md.

“This kid is a miracle, no doubt about it,” Billingsley says.

*

“Nervous?” the coach wondered.

“No,” the diver said.

Lenzi stood at the ready. He got the break he needed earlier in the competition when Dean Panaro, in second place at the time, failed to hit his reverse 3 1/2, opening a slight crack.

Lenzi moved down the board and sprang into action.

“The moment of decision is when you come out of the dive,” Billingsley explains. “You’re spinning around 3 1/2 times, within 1 5/8 seconds. How do you know exactly--it has to be exact--to reach for the water at that given moment? It’s like opening a combination lock. If you’re off one number, it doesn’t open the lock.”

Lenzi opened the lock, scoring 101.85 on the dive, receiving three perfect scores of 10 from the judges.

He finished with 1,198 points--finals and preliminaries added together--and ahead of Panaro, who ended up third with 1,187.16.

“In my 57 years in the sport, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Billingsley says of Lenzi’s dive.

Lenzi never had a doubt:

“As soon as I came off the board, I knew I was going to hit it. I expected it. I expected to hit the dive.”

Lenzi had capped a remarkable return with a dive for the ages.

He was back on board, back on the team but, in the end, back to what?

Back to the expectations preceding Barcelona and that post-Olympic bomb out?

Not this time, Lenzi says. Atlanta will not be the end-all. This time, Lenzi has a new perspective and a game plan. He has already enrolled for fall classes at Indiana. If he wins another medal and the endorsements come, fine.

If they don’t, fine too.

“This is one more time, for fun,” he says. “Then afterward it’s time to go and get a job, and make some money.”