I watched my first Olympics in 1996, when I was seven years old. My mom loved to watch the Olympics, and since I was competing in gymnastics at the time, I was especially interested in watching with her. In fact, the Olympics were a big deal for the whole family. Rather than watching TV shows or movies in the evening, when the Olympics came around, we gathered around the TV together to watch the games.
I can still picture the images of those Atlanta Olympics like they were yesterday. Amy Chow slipped off the balance beam and smacked her face in the process. Dominique Moceanu fell on two vaults. Kerri Strug did the same on her first vault attempt. But then, something magical happened. Strug had suffered a painful ankle injury on her first vault, hobbling off the mat. As she lined up for her second attempt, she looked at her coach, Bela Karolyi, for much-needed encouragement.
“You can do it,” Karolyi told her. “You can do it. You can do it.”
And Strug did, nailing her final vault to give the US women the gold medal—the first ever for the United States in the women’s team competition. I’ll never forget the image of Karolyi carrying Strug up to the podium and the look of joy on their faces. Because of my own involvement in gymnastics, watching the Magnificent Seven win that medal stoked my competitive fires. Competing in the Olympics became my focus, my inspiration, my dream, my god. I was going to be an Olympian. Not only that, but I was going to win—and I would revel in the fame and the celebrity it brought. And in the years that followed, I bowed at the feet of gods fashioned of gold, silver, and bronze.
From that point forward, I always perked up when I heard the Olympic theme song playing. My birthday and Christmas presents were always Olympic themed. One Christmas I received a pair of white shoes with the Olympic rings on them. They weren’t cool, but I loved them.
Though I played baseball occasionally, I spent more time playing soccer. I could run really fast and was often able to take control of the field. You win in soccer by scoring the most goals, so I always wanted to be the one to score all those goals—not necessarily for the benefit of the team, but to get the glory for myself. So I could be exalted, to use an old-fashioned word.
Now, I’ll stop right here because you may be thinking that sounds a little arrogant. And it was. But guess what? I’m not alone in this. If we’re honest, we all crave the praise and acceptance of other people. Maybe you compare what she’s wearing to your outfit. Maybe you compare his income to yours. You see? That’s a desire to be exalted as well. We want to be valued and loved, and we want others to think highly of us.
Here’s how it worked for me. If we lost 5–4, but I scored all four of our goals, I might be frustrated by the loss, but part of me would be happy because of how well I did. And I certainly wouldn’t take any responsibility for losing. My heart would scream, “Hello, look at me! I scored all four goals!” Even now, this remains a struggle for me. I’m constantly tempted to blame others for my failures rather than accepting responsibility for myself. That’s the typical human response to mistakes and screw-ups: we shift blame, we minimize, we deflect, we excuse, we hide, we justify. It’s been this way since the beginning of time. We’ve always had trouble accepting and acknowledging that we’ve done something wrong. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. And so began the trend that has persisted through human history.
When I started getting into the more advanced travel leagues, the ones that traveled longer distances to compete against other travel teams, I failed to make the A team my first year. I hated that. It bugged me to no end that I wasn’t the best and was relegated instead to the B team. That only made me work harder, until I eventually played my way onto the A team. Once I got there, I never lost that spot.
Soccer was fun, but gymnastics was where I excelled, and I knew that was my ticket to the Olympics—my tool for attaining ultimate happiness and satisfaction. I’d sometimes spend five hours a day doing gymnastics, especially during the summer. My mom took a job at the gym to help pay for my lessons. We were there constantly. During the school year, I’d head to the facility for practice immediately after school and would stay until late in the evening while my mom finished up her work.
That makes it sound like I worked hard, and I often did. But I was lazy as well, often choosing to live by my feelings rather than what I should have done. If I could find a loophole to get out of the work, I’d take it. I fight against that attitude even today. I might schedule a workout, but I’ll tell myself that it isn’t as necessary as my coach thinks it is. So I’ll slack off.
I don’t think that sense of laziness is exclusive to me. It’s human nature, and it’s rampant in sports, believe it or not. When people say they give 110 percent, I’m not convinced they’re being honest. As athletes, we too often look for ways to cut corners in our quest to excel. There’s always something more we could do in our training: more mental training, eating better, sleeping more or less. But the important principle is to not live based on how we feel. Whether in athletics or any other area of life, either we can choose what is easy now and guarantee more difficult circumstances later, or we can choose to pursue the difficult now and reap the rewards later.
We started a boys’ team at a gymnastics facility in Noblesville. Another boy and I quickly went through four different coaches because we were so difficult to work with. We were rebellious and didn’t respect their authority. We were stubborn. We would refuse to do things our coaches told us to do if we thought they were dumb. Sounds like a dream coaching job, no?
I was proud. I was arrogant. I was self-centered. I wasn’t interested in gymnastics for a legitimate reason like wanting to get the most out of the abilities God had given me. I was interested in gymnastics because I saw it as the path for my own glorification, for the accolades and praise of others. Even the Olympics, as much as I wanted to achieve that, didn’t provide compelling enough motivation for me to work hard. That was too far off in the future.
My immediate motivation was the desire to win the next competition. Or sometimes it was something more short-term. If I were especially grumpy, my mom or my coach would offer me a piece of candy if I’d do four circles on “the mushroom.” The mushroom is an apparatus similar to the pommel horse, which is one of the events you’ll see in beginning levels of gymnastics competitions. Gymnasts use it to learn to pivot around on their hands. The mushroom is a stepping-stone to the pommel horse. I absolutely hated the mushroom, but I’d do the work for that immediate gratification of the candy.
Still, even though I didn’t work like I should have, and even though I was rebellious and difficult to work with, I succeeded in gymnastics. I didn’t often lose in my competitions. In my very first meet as a competitive gymnast, sometime in third grade, I scored a 9 out of 10. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I knew I’d won the event, and that was all that mattered. My sister had a basketball game after that competition, and I proudly wore my medal around my neck the whole time I was at her game. I often took all the ribbons I won at competitions and lined them up in a nice, neat row in front of me and posed for photographs behind them. My bedroom was decorated with my medals and ribbons hanging from rods that my dad installed on the walls.
During competition season, we traveled all over the state. Every once in a while we would travel outside the state for bigger competitions, but that was rare. Winning state was my biggest accomplishment in gymnastics, and that felt awesome. I thought I was hot stuff. My parents praised me. My coaches praised me. Winning fed my desire for recognition and acceptance.
I didn’t discover until later just how enslaving that type of mind-set is. When you live for the praise of other people, you can never be satisfied. The ecstasy from a win today quickly fades, and you have to win tomorrow to recapture that high. It’s a relentless, unsatisfying, and elusive quest when you are fueled by the pursuit of your own glory.
It’s also exhausting. No matter how much praise you get, it doesn’t completely satisfy you. You’ll always go back for more. I was on that treadmill for years until I found freedom (which we’ll talk about later).
Amid all my striving, however, I did learn and develop some positive traits, despite my flaws. Persistence was one. I was a persistent kid. For instance, when traveling around the state for gymnastics competitions, I would see water towers in different towns with the town name prominently painted on them. My town, Noblesville, had a water tower, but it didn’t have “Noblesville” written on it. I thought it should.
So I began a letter-writing campaign to the mayor, lobbying for the addition of “Noblesville” to our water tower. If I didn’t get a response or see any progress toward that end, I would write again. And again. Eventually, the city name got added to the tower. I still don’t have any idea if it was because of my efforts or something else entirely, but I like to think persistence paid off in that case!
Despite my success in gymnastics, I eventually got burned out on the sport. I began dreading practice when I was about eleven years old. The sport had occupied so much of my time for so many years, with practice four or five times a week, that it seemed like gymnastics was all I was ever doing. It didn’t leave me time to play with my friends or get involved with anything else. I didn’t stop the sport suddenly, but I slowly transitioned and took lessons less and less often. Part of this had to do with being tired of gymnastics, and part of it had to do with something else.
I had discovered diving.