Once upon a time, when we thought life was simpler but it wasn't, Greg Louganis thrilled the world with an act of courage that the network boys would call an Olympic moment.
Everyone who watched the 1988 Olympics must remember it.
NBC made sure of that. It was a made-for-TV event. Star diver collides with board. Blood spills into pool. Fear fills the hall. In the slo-mo replays, you could see the board vibrating where Louganis' head had landed.
Four stitches and only minutes later, Louganis dives again. He mounts the 3-meter board and hits the dive as well as he had ever hit the dive, meaning as well as anyone ever has.
The drama builds as Louganis must dive the next day in the finals. And he does. My God, he does. The day after a night of please-God-let-me-get-through-this, Louganis -- courageously, majestically -- performs the same dive that had gone so wrong and goes on to win another gold medal.
You would never see a braver, more inspiring performance. But once they draped the gold around his neck, all Louganis could talk about was the fear. A Russian diver had died just the year before after hitting a board. A few years before that, Louganis had been carried out of a pool unconscious.
On this day, with his head bandaged, and his lucky teddy bear's head bandaged, too, Louganis said of the dive heard round the world, "I had to get over the fear."
That's what courage is, of course -- doing something you're afraid to do. I remember writing at the time how most athletes live in a macho world where fear is the last thing they can admit to anyone, even themselves -- and how different Louganis was.
That's how it seemed then.
Now it looks slightly different. Yes, Louganis was brave. And, yes, he was scared. He was so scared, in fact, that he was paralyzed.
That's the word he used in his TV interview, airing tonight, with Barbara Walters. He was paralyzed by the fact that he was bleeding blood that was infected with HIV -- the AIDS virus -- and that he couldn't bring himself to tell anybody.
He didn't tell the doctor who stitched up his head and who didn't use gloves to protect himself.
He didn't tell the officials who might have cleaned up the pool to ensure that no other diver could be infected (doctors now say that the chances of transmitting the disease in a pool are remote).
He didn't tell anyone.
If nothing else, this lets us understand how terrifying the stigma associated with AIDS can be.
Louganis had a secret. Only his coach and a few other people knew that he was HIV positive. It wasn't his only secret, either. There was the open secret that he was gay, but it wasn't the kind of thing an athlete admitted to, then or now.
Louganis admitted nothing.
When he landed in the pool, he didn't think about the pain. He thought about the blood. He covered his head, hoping to stop the flow. He thought about telling somebody, but found he couldn't.
In his interview with Walters, Louganis would explain: "I was so stunned, I mean what was going on in my mind at the time was, 'What's my responsibility, do I say something?' It's, you know, this has been an incredibly guarded secret. You could throw the entire competition into a state of alarm. Even more so than just having hit my head on a board. I was paralyzed with fear."
But imagine if he had come clean. Remember, this was before Magic Johnson's revelations. And before Arthur Ashe's.
What if, in the middle of the Olympics, Louganis had come forward to tell of his disease? The Games, if not the world, would have come to a dead stop.
Louganis was brave. He was brave enough to risk cracking his head open. But he wasn't that brave. He wasn't brave enough to protect the doctor who treated him. In fact, he didn't tell the doctor until about a year ago. The doctor had himself tested, and the results were negative.
But Louganis has found his nerve. A year ago, he publicly said he was gay. Now, he goes on national TV to say he has AIDS, the disease that kills and yet does so much more. For much of the world, it makes you a pariah, too.
It's a sad commentary. And so is this: That, even all these years later, telling his story remains a remarkably brave act.