Back From the Depths

The scar on Alison Terry’s left wrist is still there, a reminder of where she has been and how far she has come.

“One day, I’d like to have it removed,” she said. “That part of my past is over, and now I’m looking forward to the future.”

Terry, 26, hopes her future includes earning an Olympic berth as a freestyle swimmer after a five-year absence from the sport. She swims in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday in Indianapolis and is one of a handful of competitors hoping to become the first African American swimmers to compete in the Olympics.

It was swimming that first showcased Terry’s talents, but it also was part of an equation that led to depression and a suicide attempt. And it’s swimming that she hopes will complete the dream she abandoned in her youth and help her inspire others while breaking down stereotypes.

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“ ‘I don’t know if I can do this life thing,’ I remember thinking. It seemed like too much. I couldn’t stop the overwhelming feelings. I didn’t know how to make it stop. More than anything, it was a cry out for help.”

--Alison Terry on her suicide attempt

Terry’s promising swimming career began in San Diego. By her senior year at University of San Diego High, she had become a national junior freestyle champion. On the advice of her club coach, she delayed college for a year to compete in the Olympic trials for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. But he abruptly quit coaching before the trials.

“I took it personally that he quit,” she said. “It was a joint decision that I train for the Olympics. But he never talked to me personally about why he quit. He coached me for 4 1/2 years. I was just 17 years old and I took it really hard because that’s who I thought I needed. I didn’t know what to do without him. I felt abandoned, and I panicked.”

She relocated to Mission Viejo to train but didn’t make a smooth transition and disassociated herself from her teammates. Then one night coming out of a nightclub, she found a racially offensive word scratched on her car. Terry’s father, Willie, is African American and Native American and her mother, Debra, is Spanish-Irish.

“After that, being biracial became an issue,” she said.

Growing up, Terry said she felt the pressure of having to choose between both races. In her youth, she had minimal contact with her father. As a teenager, she said she was ashamed of her frizzy hair and used products to straighten it. Her light hair and skin made it easy for her to assimilate into a sport that has predominantly featured white athletes. But even as she excelled in swimming, she still felt like an outsider.

“People were always asking me, ‘What are you?’ ” she said. “ ‘You have almost normal hair,’ they’d say. Then I started thinking maybe I wasn’t what normal was.”

Overwhelmed, she moved back to San Diego. She watched the Olympic trials on TV.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I still had a lot of built-up anger and resentment.”

A swimming scholarship to the University of Tennessee in 1992 seemed like it would be a turning point. She ended a long-term relationship with a boyfriend and left for Knoxville. But after arriving in Tennessee she said she discovered she was pregnant. She said feelings of depression followed after she had an abortion.

Terry said she felt alone and was indifferent about her training. She didn’t feel supported and clashed with her coach.

“I tried to cover up my repressed feelings by drinking,” she said.

She stopped going to practices and to school. Finally she got kicked off the team.

Terry returned to California and drifted. She began hanging out with a rough crowd, smoking and tending bar.

“I was angry. I felt guilty about quitting swimming, just felt crazy inside. Then I started dating this guy that wasn’t doing much with his life,” she said, recounting the time she spent with a new boyfriend. “I guess misery does love company because the people in my life at that time were a reflection of my bad feelings.”

Terry said she didn’t know who she was, her life was a mess and she felt she had let everyone down.

“I was very concerned,” Debra Terry said. “But I think I was in denial of the severity of her problems.”

Alison Terry tried to commit suicide by slitting her left wrist with a razor blade.

She said she was hospitalized briefly and tried counseling.

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“The thought had been in the back of my mind for a long time,” she said. “I was working with these kids, helping them pursue their goals and I wanted to be a good role model, but I couldn’t tell them to go after their dreams if I wasn’t going after mine. It would’ve been hypocritical of me.”

--Alison Terry on her comeback

Terry’s life improved after she enrolled in San Diego’s Mesa College. She moved in with her father and mended a once-strained relationship. She took courses in African American studies to expose herself to black culture. Then she met Starla Lewis, head of the black studies department, who Terry said changed her life.

“She was such a positive person,” Terry said. “Even though she had been through so much she was so strong. I just connected with her.”

Terry began thinking about her African American heritage and slowly began regaining her identity.

“We worked on facing what she was hiding from,” Lewis said. “For Alison it was dealing with her past failures and being biracial.

“She learned to transcend her negative experiences and began to embrace herself. Not as half this or that and having to choose, but as a whole person. That manifested in her attitude about her potential and reaching her goals.

“I told her that negative experiences are just lessons to move us forward. Everyone has made mistakes. We use those mistakes to learn from each other. We are not our mistakes.”

While working as a lifeguard for the city of San Diego, Terry helped coach a junior kayak team. Then she became a volunteer coach for the San Diego Clairemont High boys’ swim team. A year later she became the head coach.

The goal to make the 2000 Olympic team followed.

In January 1998, while participating in a masters swimming program, she asked the coach, Alan Voisard, to help her train for the Sydney Olympics.

“She felt she had some unfinished business to take care of,” Voisard said. “She had the fire in her all along. I just shared in her vision.”

A little more than a year later, she won a gold medal on the 400-meter freestyle relay team at the World University Games in Spain. That fall she and Voisard, 40, got engaged.

Since then, Terry qualified to swim the 100- and 50-meter freestyle at the Olympic trials. Only the top two finishers go to the Olympics, but the top six finishers of the 100-meter event will qualify for the Olympic relays. The field includes Jenny Thompson and Dara Torres, favored to win the events. Terry said she has a strong chance to make the relay team.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I had a chance,” she said. “For a long time, I questioned myself, I didn’t believe in myself. But that’s changed. I know what I can do.”

Added Voisard: “She’s as good as anyone. I know she has the perfect race in her. It’s just a matter of doing it at the trials. But there’s no room for mistakes.”

Lewis said her college classes taught her about the history of segregation, and how it impacted black swimmers. Since then, her mission has been to bring swimming to inner-city neighborhoods. Terry, along with her mother, began developing community programs that introduce youth to the sport at San Diego’s inner-city high schools, by recruiting minority lifeguards and teaching children to swim.

Terry travels to elementary schools in a bright yellow helicopter supplied by the San Diego Lifeguard Service and entertains children by using rap lyrics about water safety and swimming.

Her mother, a budget management analyst, obtained grants from U.S. Swimming and the city of San Diego that fund year-round swimming programs at inner-city schools for the first time.

“These are just some small victories,” Terry said. “There is still the stereotype out there that blacks can’t swim so some kids feel discouraged. We also have to improve the facilities; there are not enough programs. We just have to give these kids a chance and then the talent will come. I had to leave my neighborhood to have opportunities, there’s something wrong with that.”

No longer embarrassed, Terry wears her golden hair down and on a hot afternoon a week before leaving for the trials was swimming playfully with Joe McCarthy and Melanie Benn.

Benn had most of her legs and arms removed after she contracted bacterial meningitis, but, despite her disability, she glides effortlessly in the pool and jokes with Terry about who is the better swimmer.

McCarthy is partially paralyzed as the result of a diving accident when he was a teenager.

Benn and McCarthy are coached by Voisard and will compete in the Paralympics, which follow the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney.

“They bring joy to my life,” Terry said. “How can you not be moved by their passion for life? And my attitude about myself is a reflection of the people I surround myself with now.”

Terry realizes she might not make the Olympic team. But if she doesn’t, she is still proud of what she has overcome and how she has rebuilt her life.

Especially because she almost ended it.

“I look back at it now and can’t imagine being that sad,” she said. “I learned so many lessons. I needed to become responsible and realize the world wasn’t going to stop for me. So, I gained control. I chose to be happy and finally got clarity in my life.”