Let’s Get It On! (5 page)

It’s what you don’t see that’s the best part. Most of the real action is taking place underneath the water, where players can control position by grabbing, kicking, or colliding into their opponents’ legs and bodies. It’s all absolutely illegal, but players can make it look like they aren’t doing anything wrong.

When my coach had first sized me up, he hadn’t seen a swimmer. I couldn’t swim with these guys—they were rockets compared to me. In a line of speedboats, I was a tugboat. What he’d seen was an enforcer, a player who wouldn’t be afraid of dishing out or taking a few shots in order to score. My coach thought if I could just be kept under control, I could benefit the team. He was right.

I compensated for my average swimming abilities by playing dirty. I played the position of two-meter man, or the hole man, which is like the center in basketball. You take an ass-whipping because the ball is always coming to you and, like a football quarterback, you have to toss it to someone or take it to the net to score.

I didn’t shy away if I got hit. In fact, I went after the person to get back at him. Obviously, I knew what cheap shots and clean shots were, so I could usually weave my way in and out of the system without getting caught. When someone would cheap-shot me, I would try and be smart with my retaliation, but subtlety sometimes went out the window and I’d grab them and just start punching.

The pool we played in had an underwater viewing tank for spectators, and in the crowd my dad could see the guys getting hit and kicked under the water with elbows and knees flying everywhere. Water polo wasn’t only the hardest game I ever played; it was also the most violent, even more than my beloved football. Suddenly my dad didn’t have a problem with water polo anymore.

In fact, he started coming to all of my games, and it was hysterical to watch him in the stands.

In the summer league tournament finals one year, I had a problem staying in the game. When I was hit, I would start fighting. I got smacked one time too many and snapped, grabbing the guy’s cap and punching him in the face. I was swiftly ejected from the game.

On the sidelines, my coach ripped into me. “You won’t become anything. You can’t control your temper. You’re useless to me.”

All I could hear was my dad: “That’s awesome. Way to go, John!”

Meanwhile, the other parents stared at him like he was an escapee who’d forgotten to take off his straitjacket.

My dad wasn’t the typical parent, and I wasn’t the typical water polo player. A lot of these kids had grown up swimming competitively, which must have been nice for little Stevie with all his 100-meter butterfly medals. There was never any contact for these kids, however, and when little Stevie got hit and his nose started bleeding, his parents thought he would die.

With that kind of player out there, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I probably hold the distinction of being the first water polo player ever kicked out of the Junior Olympics. I wanted everyone to be afraid to come near me so I’d have more room to hustle my ass up and down the pool.

At Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, the football team during my junior year was the strongest squad my school had ever produced. Most of my friends were on the team and questioned my choice of surf over turf. They even started bashing the water polo team, so I made a challenge to them.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go on the football field and do any drill you want against anyone you want; then you can come into the pool and drill against any of us. We’ll see how you do.”

I knew I could handle any defensive or offensive football drill, but if they got in the pool, they would probably drown. Nobody took me up on the offer.

When I got behind a cause, I pushed it to the hilt. I had a T-shirt printed up with balls stuffed inside two nets dangling side by side. I think you get the visual. It read, “It takes balls to play water polo.” I was suspended a day for wearing it to school, but my dad was proud of me for standing up for what I believed in.

In high school, I was proud, confident, and considered a jock. I didn’t do clubs because they weren’t the cool thing to do. I was one of the guys pranking teammates by rubbing Icy Hot in their straps. Sports and friends—that’s what it was all about.

From the age of sixteen on, I always had a girlfriend and was never home. I was into dirt bikes, and when I was old enough, I graduated to street bikes. I saved enough money from my summer job as a pool lifeguard to buy my first bike, a black Yamaha XS850. The one thing I didn’t do was drugs—no pot, acid, mushrooms, or any other illegal substances.

My dad was scared to death of his kids doing drugs and wouldn’t have a user under his roof. He brought home pictures of overdose victims to show us more than a few times. In the pictures, we’d see people with stuff coming out of them that wasn’t supposed to or corpses bent in unnatural positions and staring vacantly at us with flies on their eyes.

It worked. I’ve never taken any kind of recreational drugs to this day. I can’t say it was entirely the pictures, though, because I think I was more scared of my dad and what he’d do if I touched them.

Alcohol was another story entirely. From the age of five, I’d been allowed to drink. If my dad was hanging out with friends and I wanted a drink, I could get a sip from my old man’s beer can or even have one of my own.

I drank with my friends throughout high school. One time I got so inebriated that I crushed my friend’s nose with a headbutt and didn’t even remember doing it. I didn’t like being out of control like that and not being able to remember anything, so at age twenty I cut back on drinking.

Genetics and economics took care of that for me eventually anyway. By the time I’d reached adult size, it would take twelve beers to give me a buzz and a case of beer to make me really feel it. Who wants to go through that, bathroom runs and all, to get a quick high? Not to sound cliché, but I don’t need a drink that bad to have a good time. Even today, I have only the occasional drink or two but nothing more than that.

My dad’s view on drugs was fairly predictable if you knew him, but there were some things from my teenage years that I could never anticipate.

My parents’ separation during the summer between my junior and senior years was totally unexpected. No one would have ever known it was coming. It wasn’t like they fought or anything like that. In the open, my dad always seemed loving toward my mom.

I’d noticed that my dad seemed a lot more miserable the last couple of years, and it had caused some friction between us. I hadn’t liked being around him. I thought he was a pain in the ass, always pissed off. Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough. If I scored four goals, there were still those two I missed. So I started drifting my own way and doing things completely the opposite of what he wanted.

When my dad asked me not to remove the roll bar off the truck he’d bought for me, I did it anyway. When he confronted me, I turned my back on him to walk away. He threw me over the rail onto the living room staircase for disrespecting him.

On the surface, the disagreement was about a rebellious adolescent trying to challenge his father. But there was more going on with my dad.

Of course, you find out those things later in life. People get married and believe someone is a certain way, and things turn out differently. Some people are compatible; some are not. Over time, some grow together, and some drift apart.

According to both my parents, my dad’s exit wasn’t particularly dramatic.

“You’re not happy,” Mom pointed out as they lay awake in bed one night.

“No, I’m not,” he answered.

“Then just leave,” she said.

My dad complied, stuffing some belongings into a garbage bag, then walked out the door while my sister and I slept.

When I found out the next day, I was angry he’d hurt my mother’s feelings. I’m embarrassed to admit I punched a hole through the front door. When he came back to the house a few days later, I confronted him. Most importantly, I wanted to know why.

He explained it all to me. He’d been unhappy for quite a while and had been trying to figure out how to take care of it. I think he’d thought of leaving when I was much younger, but he didn’t want me to grow up without him. He was just waiting for the right day, and to him this was it.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t look up to my dad quite as much. He seemed much happier, though, and gradually we would spend more time together again.

In the meantime, I took my frustration out in the pool. Coach Massey had been right on the money with me. In my junior year, the water polo team finished in second place in our league, and we qualified for the California Interscholastic Federation finals. In my senior year, I earned Sierra League first-team honors, was named the league’s player of the year, made all-CIF, and was an all-American honorable mention. Even without glowing SAT scores, I got a college scholarship.

I chose California State University Long Beach because the water polo coach, Ken Lindgren, was also the assistant coach of the Olympic team. Even though CSULB was thirty miles from my house, I
had
to live on campus. I’d become friends with a rival player from Los Altos, and we’d decided to room together.

At the age of seventeen, I set off for my first year of college in the fall of 1980. It was a rude awakening. At six feet three and 210 pounds, I was perfect for college water polo. But I was all wrong for college. I was young and free but didn’t have the right mind-set or the discipline for it.

The professors didn’t give a shit if we went to class, and who was I to argue with them? Still, it certainly made a difference come exam time.

I did excel in one way: I partied like a champion, and I was a shoo-in for any get-together because I never got carded. On every other dorm floor, an unlimited supply of girls pranced in and out while parties raged. I still have scars from getting drunk and falling off my bunk bed onto the furniture.

Things really hit the fan in the pool, though. My technique wasn’t even close to the other swimmers’, and there was a world of difference between the twenty-five-yard pool I’d plundered in high school and the fifty-meter pool in college.

On some level, I’d known this going in. I have to admit I was petrified the first day of practice. While the coach timed us, the team swam 16,000 yards—that’s ten miles of hell—with our shoes on for part of it. With each waning stroke, the thought ran through my mind that they were going to kill me. By the time the ball hit the water, I didn’t have the strength to pick it up.

I hadn’t come to college to swim; I’d come to play water polo my way. That wasn’t really an option here.

Since it turned out that I majored in failing and minored in partying, by the end of the first year I was on academic probation. This made it easier for my coach to approach me about redshirting the next year, meaning I would train but not compete.

I had a friend who’d redshirted the year before, and he told me it sucked. Being the levelheaded, rational guy I was, I said, “Shove your red shirt,” and walked out the door.

I try not to have regrets, but being a dummy during my abbreviated college career would probably be one of them. When I dropped out, my dad blamed himself for not being around enough. I moved in with my mom, who was now living in Irvine, and enrolled at Orange Coast College, a two-year junior college. But like CSULB, that wouldn’t last long.

One day, I got on my motorcycle and just started riding. To where, I couldn’t really tell you. Both figuratively and literally, my life suddenly lacked any sense of direction. We are all creatures of habit, and sports had always been mine. Without sports, what was I supposed to do?

On my way back home, I stopped at a random gym on East Chapman Avenue in the city of Orange. Samson’s Gym was a no-frills operation, where only serious lifters needed apply. In the corner, the gym had what they called the Power Pit, littered with racks of black weights, dumbbells, plates, and benches.

I worked out at Samson’s Gym for the next few months and caught the eye of the owner, Jim Dena, a former Anaheim police officer who would often come onto the floor and lift with me. Jim turned me on to bodybuilding and eventually gave me a job at the gym.

A group of powerlifters also worked out at Samson’s Gym, and one day they called me over to them. “You shouldn’t do that pretty posing lifting,” one of them told me. “It’s always better to be stronger than you look than to look stronger than you are.”

Turns out, I wasn’t getting advice from your typical muscled meatheads. These were some of the greatest powerlifters of the time. Terry Shaw had been a world’s record holder in the dead lift, and Terry McCormick was the world’s record holder in the dead lift (848 pounds), while Marv Phillips, also a police officer, held twenty world records and was called the King of the Squat.

So I dropped my weights and migrated to their side of the Power Pit to do some powerlifting. You know those lifting competitions you see on TV, where a constipated-looking guy in a uni-tard and tube socks squats, grunts, and huffs and puffs to stand with a massive weight bar on his shoulders? That’s powerlifting. It’s pure strength lifting and differs from bodybuilding, where you build and tone specific muscles to get an aesthetically appealing appearance.

In powerlifting, there are three lifts: squats, dead lift, and bench press. There is no powerlifting in the Olympics, but there is Olympic lifting with maneuvers like the clean and jerk and the snatch, which require speed, agility, and of course strength. However, Olympic lifters’ weights are light compared to the ones professional powerlifters use.