McCormick Has the Gold-Medal Touch as a Speaker Too

When I was growing up in the ‘50s, my young friends wanted to be Stan Musial or Willie Mays or Roy Rogers. I wanted to be Pat McCormick. I wanted to dive like her from the high board, without fear, my body making twists and turns in two seconds’ time that defied reason, my entry into the water coming with the same grace I’d witnessed McCormick display in all those newsreels.

A fear of heights, and an even greater fear of smacking my brain against the end of the board, ended that fantasy. But Pat McCormick always stood out to me as one of the great athletes of the world. Four Olympic gold medals for diving, the first athlete ever to perform the “double-double”--double somersault with a double twist. And I knew nothing about the hurdles she had to overcome to become a champion--50 stitches in her head just before the 1952 Olympics (she’d hit her head on the bottom of a pool) and competing in the 1956 Olympics only three months after giving birth.

Though Pat McCormick is a famous Orange County name (born on the second floor above a grocery store in Seal Beach), I’d never had the chance to hear her on the lecture circuit. Until Wednesday, when she was the kickoff guest for a series at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove called Possibility Speakers Luncheons. You couldn’t listen to her story without leaving determined to do more with your own life.

McCormick is a motivational speaker, but don’t mistake her for one of those types who bore the daylights out of you on those TV infomercials. She breaks down the dive into five steps--focus, approach, takeoff, execution and completion--and shows how each step can relate to the lives of those in her audience.

She brought with her a few props to provide a little inspiration for the rest of us: an Olympic torch, an Olympic flag given her by her colleagues at the 1952 Games and one of her four gold medals. For fun, she held up a swimsuit worn by today’s women swimmers (almost see-through, and with not much material).

“I wore those Esther Williams suits,” she said. “If I’d worn one of these, I would have gotten 10s on all my dives.”

The doctor who delivered her first son in between Olympics, Ralph Graham, was in the audience. He told me later what her coach had said at the time: “Others might have had more talent; Pat had more determination.”

McCormick kept saying that we could all be champions. But I wonder: To reach her level, she dived 100 times a day, six days a week, 12 months a year. “The bigger the prize, the bigger the price,” she said.

She talked about “DD”--and she didn’t mean Dungeons and Dragons. She remembers how upset she got when she lost a match because a competitor had performed a dive with a greater “degree of difficulty” (DD). “From that moment on,” she said, “I was determined to never go into a competition unless I had the highest DD.” That may have been McCormick’s best lesson for us: Maybe we all need to stretch to a higher “DD.”

What I enjoyed most was McCormick reliving for us one of the most dramatic moments in Olympic history. It was 1956, Melbourne, Australia, and she was seeking her fourth gold medal. But she was in third place and had to be near perfect on her final dive.

Her thoughts on those final moments:

“I remember walking up those steps--there were 33, I counted every one of them. And all I could think was, ‘You can live a lifetime in a moment.’ And this was my moment. I got to the end of the tower, took my ready position. I focused in. I visualized the dive. Get your hips up. I had to get that rip entry [perfect finish]. They blew the whistle. I hit that tower so hard you could see it shake. I spun, I dropped, I looked like a cup full of bubbles, and I got the rip entry. When I popped up, I heard [from the judges] 10, 9.5 and 10. Later, someone asked me where the great performance had come from. The tears were steaming down my cheeks. I touched my USA sweatsuit and said, ‘I’d never represented anything so great as my country.’ ”

Another Important Swim: Some other determined people will soon be headed for the pool. They are a group of people suffering from severe head injuries, most due to traffic crashes, who are involved in the High Hopes Head Injury Program in Costa Mesa. The nonprofit program is holding its “High Hopes 100” at the Newport Harbor Pool on Oct. 6. Those in the program will swim for sponsors, to raise money to keep the program going and to raise scholarship money for many of them.

High Hopes, which began in 1975, provides prevocational training and other service programs, such as speech therapy and therapeutic swimming, for people who suffer head injuries. Each will swim (except those unable to swim, who will walk the pool) 100 lengths. Call (714) 646-7458 if you’d like to be a sponsor or learn more about it.

Hero Worship? Oliver North will speak at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo on Friday. In the latest issue of the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce newsletter, Assemblyman Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside), who will host the event, calls North a hero and says: “When you think of Oliver North, you think of a modern-day patriot.”

Oh, please. The king of the shredders, the heartbeat of the Iran-contra scandal, a hero? Even congressional leaders from North’s own Republican Party protested his failed run for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia in 1994. It’s scary to think this might be the kind of political activist the students at Saddleback College are admiring these days. I asked Chris Miller, vice president of its student government, what he thought about it. This was his answer:

“Some students have already protested the invitation. We expect them to be there. But I believe in freedom of speech. Mr. North will be talking about the Constitution, and we thought it was appropriate, since this is Constitution Week. He has the right to have his say.”

My feelings about order on college campuses are stronger than my opposition to North. We can only hope North opponents will use common sense and express their own freedom of speech by simply staying away, instead of trying to interrupt him.

Wrap-Up: McCormick won 77 diving titles in all and numerous awards, including the prestigious Sullivan Trophy in 1956, given annually to the year’s best amateur athlete. Some of her medals are at the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame at Anaheim Stadium.

In November, McCormick will receive yet another award, along with Olympians Bonnie Blair and Kip Keino. The three were chosen as “Olympians with a Heart of Gold” for their community efforts by the national Humanitarian Hall of Fame. McCormick raises money each year both for education for at-risk students and for future Olympians. The honor comes with more than a medal: That hall will donate $10,000 to the Pat McCormick Education Foundation.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail tojerry.hicks@latimes.com