Above All Else, page 7
When the final results were posted, Fusion came in seventh place, beating one of the Mirror Image teams. Within the thirty-five-second working time, we had averaged just over eight points (formations) per jump. By definition, we were now one of the top teams.
It was at that moment that everything changed for me. If we could do that well our first year, it was possible to win the nationals. If we could win the nationals, it was possible to win the world meet. I could be a world champion.
I had never before thought much about “winning” anything or even made much of an attempt at winning anything because I didn’t think there was anything I could actually win at. But the idea of being the best in the world at the sport I loved grabbed me like nothing ever had before. Now that I believed I could win, I wanted to.
13
Going into Business
COMING IN SEVENTH and beating one of the top teams at the 1983 nationals was better than we had ever hoped to do. Fusion had reached the level of the top teams after only 150 practice jumps, roughly half as many as our main competition had done. If we could make as many practice jumps as they did, we might be able to medal, even win. Our best chance was to keep our team together and to add more training days to our schedule. With the extra days and a little luck on the weather, we hoped to be able to come close to their speed and accuracy.
I had been working at the drop zone since 1981. In addition to being a jumpmaster and instructor, I had also become a licensed parachute rigger and a single-engine pilot. I could run the place by myself if I had to. I loved every aspect of the business and took great pride in the job I did there.
Jim West, the owner of the drop zone, asked me if I wanted to buy it. This seemed like the perfect plan both in terms of pursuing a career and for how best to approach my top priority, training to win the nationals. I would have my own business doing a job I loved, and I’d be able to arrange it so that I could do as many training jumps as the other members of Fusion would agree to, something that a “regular” job may not have allowed.
Decision made. At twenty-two, rather than using my new college degree to enter the normal workforce, I became a full-time professional skydiver and the owner of my own skydiving center.
Jim was the only person to ever have a franchise of drop zones. He had made several deals like this and had enjoyed quite a nice living from them. The way the contract read, the purchase of the business would be spread over a nine-year period of healthy monthly payments and would include three planes, one hundred old student parachute systems with round canopies, and parachute rigging tools. The monthly payments would also cover the monthly lease on the airport, clubhouse, and hangar, which Jim owned. At the end of the nine years, everything would be paid off and the business would be mine. The one part that wasn’t in the contract, but that Jim had assured me of, was that at the end of the nine years, I would be able to continue to use the airport and buildings for a minimal rental fee.
My brother Cliff, now a law student at New York University, advised against it. He explained to me that as the contract read, after paying for nine years, Jim would have no obligation to continue providing me a place to operate. He could legally kick me off or charge me a fortune to stay. I would own the business, but it wouldn’t be worth much without an airport to run it from, and airports aren’t easy to come by. My father agreed with him.
Jim wasn’t willing to make any changes to the document but promised me that between friends like us, a contract was merely a technicality. Of course he would let me operate the business there and would never do what Cliff said the contract allowed him to.
Having had the good fortune of being raised in a family where unconditional love and trust were a given, I had become a very trusting, if not naïve, person in my twenty-two years. Jim had taken me under his wing when I only had fifty jumps. He had taught me to fly and given me the opportunity to excel at the sport I loved. I trusted him like he was family.
At this point in my life, I was beginning to buy into the idea that there are few things in the world that are not entirely under our control, and that we must have faith and trust that the world will allow these things to work out for us as they should. Signing an ill-written contract would prove not to be one of those things.
But for now I had it all. I was running the business, jumping with Fusion, and having a ball. My drop zone was at the forefront of developing new skydiving instructional programs. We were one of the first centers in the United States to retire the round military-type parachutes and replace them with state-of-the-art systems using rectangular, winglike “ram-air” canopies for our students. (That made the purchase of the student equipment from Jim a complete waste of money, but I felt allowing new jumpers to use that old crap would be negligent when this new and far, far better equipment was available.)
We started taking first-time students on tandem jumps or accelerated free fall (AFF) instead of static line. On tandem jumps, the students are directly attached to their instructor under a parachute system made for two. AFF students would wear their own parachute system but jump with two instructors holding onto them until they deployed their parachutes. Then a third instructor guides them from the ground, communicating by radio.
All of these contributed to completely revolutionizing the sport. Previously, most new skydivers were athletic men between eighteen and thirty years old who were strong enough to carry the heavy equipment and withstand the punishing landings. The new lighter-weight gear and soft landings opened up the sport to men and women of all ages, sizes, and levels of physical conditioning. With static-line training, one instructor would teach a class of twenty students. With tandem and AFF, there are one or two instructors per student. This more nurturing, personalized attention changed the mood of skydiving training completely. And we drew the staff that had the personalities for it.
David Layne was an old friend of Jim West’s from England who had moved to Xenia a few years earlier with his wife Rita, eight-year-old son James, and six-year-old daughter Caroline. The Layne family had been a presence on the drop zone for a few years before I actually took it over. The Greene County Sport Parachute Club was a family business with a club atmosphere back then, and like other members of the “club,” the Laynes contributed to keeping the place moving.
I had become very close with Rita, David, and their kids. Once I started running it, the drop zone became the Greene County “Skydiving” Center. In many ways, it was still a family business, and the Laynes were my family. David became the chief instructor, Rita ran the office, Caroline helped Rita every way she could. And James, well, James went crazy about skydiving.
The school bus dropped James at the drop zone every day, and he would be there until sunset or past. For all practical purposes, the drop zone became his second (or maybe his first) home. In addition to his drop zone “chores” of cleaning planes, mowing grass, washing bathrooms, and running the snack bar, he sat in and observed the first-jump courses, listened to the jumpmasters as they talked on the radio to the students, and even learned to pack parachutes. When Fusion was jumping, James would watch us prepare for the jumps and listen to us review them after landing. By the time he was thirteen, he knew everything about everything and could easily have taught the class if we let him. He wanted to jump so badly.
James became an expert in skydiving training, free-fall skill, and canopy flying long before he ever made a jump. There weren’t official skydiving “coaches” during that time. Anyone who knew anything willingly offered help to anyone who knew less than them. James would see student and novice skydivers who were struggling, and in the casual, comforting tone of a lovable thirteen-year-old, he would offer tips and advice to them. Because James was so genuinely caring and nonthreatening, they would often benefit more from James’s input than from the expert skydivers and licensed instructors.
Working at the drop zone presented James the opportunity to learn many things more important than the technical aspects of skydiving. He learned a great work ethic. He learned how to get along with a wide variety of characters and to not let the little stuff get the better of him. He learned what to stand up for and what things were not worth fighting about.
According to the United States Parachute Association (USPA), no one under the age of eighteen could learn to jump. But occasionally exceptions were made for sixteen-year-olds who had parental permission. The only parents who would usually give their kids permission were also skydivers. Letting kids under sixteen learn to skydive was pretty much unheard of. The equipment was just too heavy, the first jumps too punishing, and the price of making mistakes too daunting. But the new tandem rigs and state-of-the-art AFF equipment changed that completely.
It took lots of convincing from me and begging from James, but we finally got an eager “thumbs up” from David and a hesitant “okay” from Rita. We took James on his first tandem jump when he was fourteen. Of the thousands of people I’d trained to skydive, James was the best.
As a general rule, kids become comfortable and take on new sports more quickly than adults do. This was especially true with sports like ice skating, skiing, skateboarding, gymnastics, and skydiving. Kids have several advantages. First, they are only doing it because they love it, not because they’re trying to prove something to themselves or someone else. For the same reason, they couldn’t care less about making mistakes and don’t fear looking like a dork. Plus, they’re fearless. Last, unless there is an obsessive coach or parent involved, they’re not trying to win anything so they don’t fear losing.
At fourteen, James had all of this going for him. But it wasn’t just that. In the mideighties, there were no vertical wind tunnels to practice in and very little free-fall video being used. Without these tools, it was much more difficult to figure out the body mechanics of flying and how to coordinate our body movements to make us go, stop, turn, move forward, backward, sideways, up, and down. We did the best we could during the average forty seconds of free fall we had on a jump, but there was minimal data and feedback for us to work with. We didn’t know how to teach skydivers the finer skills of “body flight” mechanics back then because we really didn’t know what they were. Some people just “had it” and some didn’t. James had it. Woody and Fang thought I was the ultimate natural flyer because I could “just do it” without thinking. Well, that’s at least what they thought until they saw James fly.
James was so smooth and effortless, so relaxed. Sometimes we’d watch what he would do with his body to make a certain move and it didn’t make sense to us. In free fall, straightening your legs and pointing your toes should move you forward, while doing the opposite and bending your knees so your feet are on your butt should move you backward. But how we said it worked and what should happen in the air didn’t matter to James. He seemed to have his own intuitive methods. I would try to copy his flying but couldn’t even come close to the same results.
The only problem James had learning to fly was that he was so small. In addition to flying his own body, he also had to control the huge parachute rig on his back, a piece of equipment which was wider and longer than his torso and almost half his body weight. Even when we tightened down the rig as much as we could, it still slipped and slid all over him. In free fall, it would shift to one side and try to drag James across the sky. He would naturally do whatever was required with his body to compensate, hold himself still, or even drag the rig along and fly in the other direction if he wanted to. When we finally found a rig that fit him, it was like letting a bird loose from the chains that had held it down. His flying became even more phenomenal.
James blasted right through the AFF program. By the time he was sixteen, he had over a thousand jumps and had earned his instructor and jumpmaster ratings. He would fill in on the team anytime one of the members of Fusion wasn’t around, and even at that level, he continued to amaze us in the air, effortlessly doing flying moves the rest of us had worked for hundreds of jumps to learn, and he did them faster than any of us. James and I would often speak about the day when I’d have him on my team. We’d win it all for sure.
None of James’s success in skydiving ever went to his head. He was extremely confident but never arrogant. Even though in no time his flying ability had surpassed all of his childhood idols, he never thought that his expertise as a skydiver made him any better a person than anyone else. He only used his uncanny ability to help others enjoy the sport as much as he did and to become the best they could be at it.
James was the closest thing I’d ever had to a little brother. With the extra elements of having ten years’ difference between us and an employer-employee factor built into the relationship. We were buddies, but I was also his boss. He was my student who in time became more like a partner. We spoke about things at work and at school, about jumpers and friends, about girls, and about becoming champions together someday.
I had always been the little brother, the youngest in school, and the new guy on the team. As the youngest sibling, I was completely carefree. I didn’t have anyone to watch out for other than myself, and no one looking up to me that I had to be conscious of being a good (or bad) influence on. I had never been a role model or mentor of any kind, and I hadn’t recognized how important it was to be aware of what I said and did and how I said and did it. I discovered that my best intentions could create the opposite results if I presented them with the wrong words or actions. I also realized how much I could learn from someone younger than me who was my student. I learned more about coaching and communicating through working and playing with James than I ever had in any other way.
I loved James like a brother and wanted everything for him that he dreamed of. Because we shared so many of the same dreams, I was in a position to have a direct effect on helping to make his dreams come true. It was an amazing feeling to realize how important I was in James’s life. I always wanted to come through for him and never let him down.
The weather in Ohio forced us to nearly close the drop zone down in the winter months. With little or no work that time of year, I had found a drop zone near Tallahassee, Florida, that needed a plane. I flew one of my Cessna 182s there for them to use while things were slow at home.
The first time I was there I met a young jumper and pilot named Mikey Traad. What a character this guy was. He was going to the Florida State University in Tallahassee, premed, and by twenty had earned a commercial pilot license and had made over two hundred jumps. He had the loud, goofy, playful, youthful enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old but the abilities and brains of a person much older than he was.
Like James, Mikey was a natural at anything in the air. He was an excellent “seat of the pants” pilot and a skilled skydiver. I took an immediate liking to him and invited him to work at Greene County during the summer break when he was out of school. Mikey would always jump into the conversation when James and I would talk about putting our team together. He was nowhere near up to James’s level, but he made it clear that he was going to be as good as the “kid” someday. My net was always wide open looking to catch future teammates, and I loved the idea of having these two on my team. With Mikey and James under my wing, I was quickly becoming the senior member of the group, quite different than the role I was accustomed to.
So picture this: You come out to the Greene County Skydiving Center to make your first skydive. You’re nervous but you’ve always dreamt of making a jump and you’ve finally decided to go for it. You show up at the drop zone and are welcomed by the twenty-five-year-old owner who introduces you to your sixteen-year-old instructor. After the class, you climb into a little Cessna 182 with Mikey, your twenty-year-old pilot, at the controls. It may have appeared we were operating on youthful enthusiasm alone, but this young staff had more experience and talent than most who were twice our age. It didn’t take long before even the oldest, most cautious students realized it. When they returned to continue their training, they often wanted to jump only with James and from a plane that Mikey was flying.
All of our jumpers and staff weren’t this young. But this young core-staff team injected a level of excitement into the drop zone that helped it take off. The place was busy, we were having a great time, and we were on the cutting edge of a fantastic sport that was truly coming of age.
During the same time Fusion had continued to progress. Year by year we kept plugging away as we continued our climb to the top. At both the 1984 and 1985 national championships, we came in fifth. Tom Piras and his team from Deland, the Air Bears, won in 1985 and went on to become the world champions of 4-way that year.
Mark left Fusion after 1985, and we picked up Marilyn Kempson for the coming year. Our perseverance paid off. After the last round of the 1986 nationals, we were tied with one of the U.S. Army Golden Knight teams for second place. All the other teams watched as they sent two planes up with only our two teams on them for a jump off round to break the tie. We went head-to-head, point for point. We tied again and were called to do another jump-off round. Every jump was like the first round of a one-round meet. It all came down to those thirty-five seconds. I had never felt the competition intensity at this level. I was scared and I loved it.
After two jump-offs, as the sun set on the final day of the championships, Greene County Fusion had averaged eleven points per jump and finished still tied for second place with the Golden Knights. We won our first medal, and Marilyn became the first woman ever to win a medal in 4-way at the U.S. Nationals. Finally, we had arrived.
After our 1986 finish, Fusion was sure that 1987 was going to be our year. The world championships were held every other year on the odd-numbered year. In order to become the U.S. National team and to represent the United States at the 1987 world meet, we first had to win the 1987 U.S. Nationals.
14
