Above All Else, page 8
The Game Changer
THAT YEAR, THE world of competition skydiving changed dramatically. Two teams acquired unprecedented financial support and upped the ante.
The owner of TAG Heuer was a Saudi Arabian–French skydiver himself. Skydiving and competition had become a passion of his, and he decided to sponsor the French national team. This was a passion, not a business venture, and money was no object. He provided them with training tools that included their own airplane, two sets of parachute equipment for each person, professional parachute packers, a ground-to-air video cameraman, an air-to-air video cameraman, physical trainers, and unlimited training jumps. TAG purchased a house in Deland, Florida, for the team to live in, covered all their expenses, and even paid them salaries. The French team set up their winter training camps and started jumping full-time and making in excess of one thousand training jumps a year.
TAG hired Tom Piras as their coach. This was the first real professional coaching job in the history of formation skydiving. I was shocked one day when Piras called me at the drop zone in Ohio and asked me to move to Florida to be his assistant coach, and possibly jump on a team together. Wow! I could be paid as a coach and be on a team with the best in the world. I had never imagined an opportunity like this could even exist, not to mention present itself to me out of the blue.
But I couldn’t do it. As great an opportunity as this was, I couldn’t just pack up and walk away from my business, and I certainly wasn’t going to leave Fusion when we were finally within reach of our goal.
The Golden Knights increased their training plans to try and match the French.
At that time, the sport was still thought of as being too great a risk for commercial sponsorship, considering the minimal media coverage (actually none) it received.
We couldn’t figure out a realistic approach to getting sponsorship, and without the possibility of any financial support, there was no way that we could match the training of the French and Golden Knights. 4-way training was their full-time employment; it was all they did. We had jobs, responsibilities, and very limited financial resources.
Within the constraints that we established for ourselves, Fusion trained harder than ever. We picked up an air-to-air video cameraman so that we could much more clearly review our training jumps and better evaluate new and old techniques. Fang built a ground-to-air video system to let us see exactly what the judges would see. We traveled to Florida for a one-week winter camp in Deland and trained side by side with the French team, trying to learn (steal) any ideas from them that we could.
When spring came and we were back to training in Ohio, the jumps started off at a whole new level. We were looking better than ever. In practice, our scores were skyrocketing and our confidence was soaring. We had stuck with it for five years and were now closer than we had ever been to reaching our goal.
But things sometimes change in an instant without any warning. A few months before the nationals, Woody injured his back and had to stop training. Though he managed to be ready to jump in time for the competition, the team never recovered. We placed fifth. The Golden Knights won the nationals in 4-way that year but were beaten by the new dominant French team at the world meet.
15
Wanting to Be the Best: Winning
BEFORE WOODY WAS injured, we had done over a 12-point average in practice. The Golden Knights won the nationals with 12.5, and the French the world meet with 13.4. We were so close I could taste it. Even with relatively minimal training and no outside financial support, we were within range of winning. I was pissed off and now wanted to win more than ever.
What was it going to take to make it happen? It occurred to me that when we had planned our training in the past years, we hadn’t truly asked ourselves, “What is the most we can do, the biggest effort we can put in, that will give us the best chance of winning?” Subconsciously, but in reality, we had asked ourselves, “What is the least we can do that may position us to where there is some chance of winning?” Not a question that is likely to lead to victory, and I promised myself to ask the right questions from then on.
My dream, and Fusion’s goal, was to win the National and World Skydiving Championships. How could we possibly match the training regimen of the Golden Knights and the French? No longer was jumping only on weekends going to be good enough. If we wanted to give ourselves the best chance, or even any chance of winning, it would require much more from us. What was it going to take?
We broke it down to the bare essentials.
• To make the number of practice jumps we would need, we would have to train full-time, which meant we’d need to move the team to a location with better weather year round.
• To move away and jump full-time, we’d have to leave our jobs.
• To come up with the necessary funds, we’d need to sell whatever worldly possessions we had and borrow the rest. Even then we’d barely be squeezing by financially.
• In order to save as much money for training as possible, we would have to minimize our expenses by living in our vans or camping on the drop zone.
• Even with this ambitious, bare-bones plan, we were coming up way short of matching our competitors’ training conditions. We still wouldn’t be able to afford a coach, second sets of parachute equipment, professional packers, ground-to-air video, physical trainers, and salaries. We would be the equivalent of a playground team going up against professionals.
• There was no financial reward for winning the nationals. Being 4-way champions wasn’t likely to create any new employment opportunities for us. Win or lose, at the end of the year, we would be completely out of money.
All this effort and sacrifice purely for love of the sport. And quite a love affair it would have to be because there was no “purse” or monetary prize of any kind awarded to the winners for either the national or world championship.
Did we want it badly enough to do what it was going to take to make it happen? If we wanted any chance of winning the national and world championships, this was our only option, the only road to follow. There was certainly no guarantee we would win. But there was an absolute guarantee we wouldn’t if we did any less.
The answer was no. Fusion was finished. The team had had a great run and shared an incredible few years together that none of us would ever forget or would trade for anything.
This was our collective dream, but the plan demanded more than my teammates were willing to sacrifice. They had put out a lot, but they didn’t want it quite badly enough to go to this level of effort and commitment in pursuit of their goal.
We all have our limits and we need to know what they are. For each of us, there could come a time when we should step away, and it is important that we know when we have reached it, when it is better to put our attention toward a different dream with its own goals. They had reached theirs. I hadn’t yet. But with the rest of the team stepping out of the game, the situation changed for me.
Now I was on my own. I had a dream that required a team, but no teammates, a plan that required funding, but no money, a sport that required sunshine, but it was raining. After my senior year at OSU, I thought I was ready for any challenge. But at that time I had everything I needed. It was just a matter of buckling down and getting the work done. Now I had nothing.
16
Dreaming Big
I WAS NOW INTO my fifth year running the drop zone. Soon after I had signed the contract and taken over the business, Jim and my relationship had started to steadily decline. It was becoming apparent to me that Cliff had been right. I was certain that after completing nine years of payments for the purchase of the Greene County Skydiving Center, I would be without an airport to operate from. I asked Jim to revise our contract to guarantee that this wouldn’t happen, but, as I expected, he declined. I was going to have to move on.
I started negotiations to end our agreement. It was decided that after making every monthly payment for four and a half years—half the contract—I would only be able to keep one of the Cessna 182s and seven of the new state-of-the-art student parachute systems I had purchased. According to Cliff, the way the contract was written I was lucky to get that.
I love every aspect of skydiving and had enjoyed the challenge of running my own business. This deal, as raw as it was, still left me with the minimal essential equipment necessary to open up another skydiving school. But I wanted to fly faster and to be the fastest. I wanted to win the world championships, and I knew I could do it if only I could figure out how to create the right opportunity for myself.
I spoke with friends and family about this. Almost all of them thought the idea of finding a new team and training full-time was ridiculous. I was being a crazy dreamer.
“Be realistic, Dan. You will have no chance of winning this year. The top teams are starting at a level you’ve only dreamed of, and they are already training right now.”
“You don’t have a team and you don’t know where to find a team. You’d be starting from scratch.”
“You won the silver medal, that’s good enough.”
“Open a new drop zone or use your degree to get a normal job.” But not everyone agreed with them. Gramps knew I loved skydiving and competing more than anything else I’d ever done in my life. It was largely because of him and his parents that I had the privilege of having a selfish dream like excelling in a sport at all. In their lives, most of their dreams were limited to survival, providing shelter, feeding a family, and getting by. The idea of pursuing something for no reason other than that I loved it so much and couldn’t imagine doing anything else was almost something he couldn’t fathom.
He wasn’t going to tell me what to do. It would have to be my decision. But he was certainly not going to be the one to hold me back, if anything, just the opposite. It was clear that he would have loved to have had dreams like this when he was my age. That wasn’t possible. He had worked so hard so that all of his children and grandchildren would have these freedoms and opportunities. In some way I almost felt like I owed it to him to go after the dreams that he had given me the chance to have. For me to have the chance and the courage to go after my dream was the definition of his success. He wanted me to.
Following my dreams had served me well so far in my life, but never had I dreamed so big. Never was the plan so unclear or the outcome so distant and seemingly out of reach.
Then I remembered the promise I had made to myself, that I would be sure to ask the right questions. “What should I do?” didn’t seem like the right question. Instead, I substituted it with what sounded like a better question: “What do I want to do more than anything else?” If this was going to be the last year of my life, how would I want to spend it?
The answer was crystal clear. More than anything else, I wanted to have one good shot, one chance of winning.
A couple of years earlier, a good friend of mine had given me a copy of the book Illusions, by Richard Bach. We all find valuable input and wisdom from a variety of sources and people. The ideas in Illusions had always worked well for me.
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
That was it, cut-and-dry and straight to the point. It was possible. I loaded up my van with all my worldly goods, two pairs of jeans, one pair of sweats, five T-shirts, three long-sleeved shirts, one shirt with a collar (just in case I needed to go formal sometime), tennis shoes, five pairs of socks, five pairs of underwear, two bathing suits, two towels, a shower bag, a jacket, forty-three cassette tapes, sunglasses, two twenty-five-pound dumbbells, and my parachute equipment.
I climbed into the driver’s seat, closed the door, buckled my seatbelt, put the key in the ignition, started to turn it and . . . paused.
I knew this was it: decision time. If I started the van, there would be no turning back. If I drove away in pursuit of my dream, I need to be 150 percent committed to not letting any obstacle stop me. It was all or nothing. Did I have the courage to turn the key and follow my dream? The fun-loving, enthusiastic, Lover of Life Dan spoke to me again: “Turn the key, Dan, turn the key. Just turn it.”
I was as scared, sitting safely in my parked van, and as worried about my future as I was on my first jump. But if I wanted a shot at my dream, this was the only possible course of action. Turning the key would be the first step to setting things in motion that could open up the possibility of becoming a world champion. Not turning the key and retreating would probably forever put this dream out of reach.
I turned the key, started the van, and headed south. The feeling I had at that moment was exactly the same as the moment of decision time when I let go of the plane on my first jump. I was flying.
The only thing I felt bad about was leaving James. He wanted to leave with me, but he was still in high school. I told him this didn’t mean the end of our dream, that he should stay at Greene County and continue working for Jim. Someday, when he was old enough, we’d have the chance to put our team together and go for the gold.
17
A Goal with No Plan
I HAD A VISION and a goal, but no specific map of how to reach it. It was fall of 1988, and the 1989 national championships were only ten months away. If I was going to have to start a new team, and I was, the ideal situation would be to put together a team made up completely of top-level, world-class competitors. A team with this caliber of teammates would be at a high performance level right from the beginning. To get past the Golden Knights, we’d have to be.
The best skydiving teams in the United States were from Florida or California; those were the only places I would find talent and experience like this.
Tom Piras was single-handedly leading the sport and taking it to new levels. Over the last few years, he had developed new training tools, strategies, and techniques that had led the U.S. Air Bears and the French TAG team to consecutive 1985/1987 world championships. His success continued when, along with Jack Jefferies, Tom’s new protégé, their team from Deland won the 1988 national championships. There were 4-way teams from around the world that were starting to train more seriously, and every serious team was training in Deland.
After being led to victory at the world championships by Tom, the French team chose to no longer work with him. As for Tom, he planned to beat the French, and his 1988 national champion team, the Deland Gang, was his first step toward building a team that could do it.
Back when Tom had called and asked me to move to Deland to be his assistant coach, Fusion was still going strong and the drop zone was busy. I chose to decline the offer, but had done so somewhat reluctantly. It was two years later, but seeing that he had called, I had a strong feeling an opportunity may still be there for me. And what a great opportunity it would be. I’d learn from the master, and being the new guy on the winning team is every competitor’s dream.
There was one small little detail that I felt might be a problem. As much as I respected what Tom had accomplished and wanted to learn from him, I wasn’t sure I could handle being on a team with him.
I had seen Tom at several training camps and competitions. Many times I had witnessed him insult and demean other people, other competitors, and even his teammates. I could have understood his behavior if he did this to try to get some kind of competitive advantage by “psyching” out his opponents, but most of the time it wasn’t about that. He seemed to just enjoy it. He seemed to believe that his skydiving expertise and competitive success made him a better human being than anyone else. How would I survive with this guy?
It would only be a year. I could put up with anything for one year. This was clearly the fastest way to the top and, based on logic, probably the only way to win that year. Did I want to win badly enough to do what it was going to take? Yes or no? “Follow your gut, Dan. Follow your instincts.”
I did, and the answer was no. The chance to win would be worth a lot of sacrifices, but not this one. I couldn’t be a teammate with someone who could treat people the way I had seen Tom do. I couldn’t be a partner, standing side by side, sharing my dreams, and depending on someone whom I disrespected on such a core level. Everyone has to have a certain ethical and moral code they live by. This code draws a line that is their definition of basic human decency, a line that they won’t cross under any circumstances. I might not have been a saint myself. But that was my line.
After having made this decision, a strange thing occurred to me. My goal was to win the national and world championships, or so I thought. Going to Deland would have been by far the best chance and quickest path of getting the gold medal. But I hardly considered it. I easily dismissed the closest thing there was to a guaranteed gold medal and instead chose to look for other uncertain possibilities that didn’t yet exist. There must have been something more than just “winning” that I was after. I wondered what it might be.
18
When I Started
Following My Gut
WE ALL GET gut feelings. As young children, these feelings determine most of our actions and choices. But over the course of growing up, we begin to ignore them. As adults, we often let these gut feelings, our instincts, go completely unnoticed.
When I drove away from Ohio, I didn’t have a clear map. There was no counselor who could say, “Go to this school, get this degree, and it will provide this future for you.” I didn’t know anyone who had accomplished or even attempted what I was trying to achieve now, so I had no proven path to follow.
I followed my gut and turned west to head to the Perris Valley Skydiving Center in California, the skydiving mecca of the West Coast. Perris was the home of the Gumbies, another top team that Fusion had frequently gone head-to-head with at the national championships.
I had become good friends with them, and our two teams had even joined forces and medaled together in both the 8-way and the 10-way events at the nationals. I was hoping they shared my dream and would be chomping at the bit at the chance to train full-time and go for the gold like never before.
