Seven-Meter Board

Seven meters, twenty-one feet, it doesn’t seem like a long way. It’s the length of the typical, suburban garage; maybe as long as your driveway or backyard; not very far at all on the horizontal plane. Looking down at it is a different story altogether. It’s a massive distance when you plan to travel it using gravity; or any other means in which gravity may come into play, and gravity always comes into play on the vertical plane. Standing at the edge of a seven-meter diving platform for the first time and looking down at the surface of the water below is what you may call a “Come to Jesus” moment.

Do you know what Hare Courting is? It’s a sport in which you take two hunting dogs; if you’re using a male hare; one if you’re courting a female or if you just want the hare to have half a chance; if you use three dogs, you may as well just drop the hare into the kennel; you go to a large open field and release the hare first and then the dog or dogs. They call it courting because if the dogs catch the hare, the hare is fucked. Not proper fucked, mind you, but dead. It doesn’t take much imagination to come to some idea what the hare’s heart rate is during such an event. Well, compared to what my heart was doing at the edge of the seven-meter board, hare courting is a Zen moment.

The water looked deep and inviting. Not to mention cold and unforgiving, and a long way down. The smooth surface of the water was almost hypnotic. The shimmer of the lights reflecting off of the surface looked like strands of pearls dancing on the water; so beautiful and yet so unforgiving. It reminded me of a crocodile lying patiently, motionless and emotionless waiting for his prey to come to him. The pool stared up at me knowing I was its next victim.

I’m not a small guy; a little braver than most, or dumber as argued by some, I’m not as prideful as others, but I do have a healthy self-image. I am strong willed and not easy to intimidate. But when a little eight-year-old girl starts calling you “chicken” and telling you to “jump or climb down”, it hurts. And any chance इ had with her cute, divorced mother just died. When a whole class of eight-year-old divers starts to laugh at you, it hurts a lot.

At this point retreat is not an option. I tried to visualize Greg Louganis in a forward one and a half pike; over and over in my mind. I can do this off of the one meter board, that tiny little sliver of fiberglass way down there on my right, so why not from up here? Because this seven times as high as that little board and the impact from the attitude will kill me. Yeah sure the little girl can do it, but she’s tiny. Force equals mass times acceleration. She has no mass, therefore no force at impact. Obviously this is suicide for a man of my size.

There comes a point in a man’s life when he has to decide whether he can live with the shame of failure or if death is a better option; to decide on a course of action and stick to it regardless of the consequences. Semper Fidelis as the marines say, death before dishonor। I couldn’t go back down the ladder; partly because she was already on her way up. Knowing that my decent will look more like Jerry Lewis falling off of a stage than Greg Louganis winning a gold metal, I had only one option, gravity.