ORANGE COUNTY SPORTS HALL OF FAME: THE NEW INDUCTEES : McCormick Took Plunge to Reach Dreams : Springboard to Success Starts With Failures

Her first dives didn’t make headlines, but they did make quite a splash, not to mention the Long Beach police blotter.

Someone phoned the authorities to say a little girl was jumping off a bridge and splashing boats as they returned into the harbor.

“The police chief gave me the worst punishment he could think of,” said Pat McCormick, standing on the same bridge more than 40 years later. “He banned me from the beach for a week.”

Patsy Keller was 10 years old then, but she had reached a turning point. She had decided to quit playing football with her older brother after one of his friends had yelled, “Block that dame,” and another did, with much gusto.

“I was a tough little street rat and I worshipped my older brother,” she said. “I grew up playing football with him. But that block absolutely wiped me out. I got up and realized I’d flunked the physical. I thought, ‘I’m a girl. I’ve got to find another sport.’

“Growing up in Naples (Long Beach), I’d always been in the water. So I started swimming. I swam in the channels and the harbor. And I’d race anybody who’d race me.”

McCormick’s first official competition was a race from Long Beach Pier to Rainbow Pier (which is no longer there). She came in second. Well, there was only one other girl in the race. But McCormick had her first taste of organized competition. And her first trophy.

As it turned out, McCormick was better at tumbling toward the water than churning through it. A lot better. Her accomplishments as a diver are well known. She’s the only diver in history to win gold medals in both the springboard and platform events in consecutive Olympics (1952 and ‘56). She won 27 U.S. national championships, the Sullivan Award, the Babe Zaharias Trophy, the Thurman Munson Award . . . the list is long, indeed.

She has six favorites: the four Olympic gold medals, the Sullivan Award she won in 1956 and a tarnished little eight-inch trophy with an arm broken off the figure that adorns the top. She “won” that one for a second-place finish in a swimming race a long time ago.

But it was an honor she didn’t get that drove McCormick on to Olympic success.

It’s a story she’ll probably tell Monday night at the Emerald Hotel in Anaheim when she is inducted into the Orange County Hall of Fame, about a 17-year-old diver who missed making the 1948 United States Olympic team by one-hundredth of a point.

“Because of that failure, I started dreaming about the next Olympics,” she said. “In ‘48, I just wanted to make the team. I was standing there crying after I came up short and that’s when I decided I would win a gold medal in the next Olympics. Then I thought, “Why not go to two Olympics and win four gold medals?’

“So, the next day, that’s what I started working for. And that’s what I worked for every day after that until I had accomplished it. Because of that failure, I’m where I am today.”

If you believe the messages people leave on their telephone answering machines are insights into their personalities, then you can use McCormick’s as a case in point:

“Hi, this is Pat . Please don’t hang up. I promise I’ll get right back to you . . . remember, there’s magic in this moment. Right now!”

She believes anything is possible, and she uses her life to illustrate it in her burgeoning career as a motivational speaker. She speaks to hundreds of elementary and high school students each week and has presented her program for corporations such as IBM and Xerox. She also has sold thousands of copies of her audio cassette, “The Highest Step.”

Her speaking career began during the buildup for the 1984 Olympics. She was a member of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and was encouraged by Peter Ueberroth, organizing committee president, to use her life story as a motivational speech.

“The program is something I really love,” she says, smiling. “It’s the reason, I’m sure, I was put on this earth. In my own little way, I can help this world by changing attitudes. To me, the greatest dream in the world is the highest goal. I just teach people the process it takes to reach it.

“There are five parts. First, you must have a dream. Second, you’ve got to work. Third, you have to develop a high failure quotient . . . not be afraid to fail. Fourth, you need to surround yourself with greatness, a loved one, a coach, or a hero. And the fifth step is to continue stepping up from the victory stand.

“The realization of a dream isn’t necessarily winning four gold medals. This is just the process it takes to accomplish any goal, no matter how big or how small.”

The response to McCormick’s program has been overwhelming. She has formed her own corporation and has just signed a contract with the Olympic Committee to produce a video series called “Reach for the Gold.”

“When I started speaking during the Olympics, I just couldn’t believe the response,” she said. “It was almost scary. The kids are the best. After almost every program at a school, a kid will come up and hug me and tell me that no one ever told them they really could achieve their dreams. Or they’ll say, ‘Nobody ever told me it’s OK to fail.’

“Kids need role models. They need to see that some little gutter kid like me could come up and make it.”

Pat McCormick has been to the top of the victory stand often. She has been draped with gold medals, praised by presidents and heralded as the world’s best woman diver from Finland to Australia. In 1984, she saw her daughter, Kelly, win a silver medal in the springboard event.

But she can point to a low for every high she has ever experienced.

Her presentation includes highlights of her Olympic exploits in Helsinki and Melbourne.

She also provides the downside:

--”The biggest hero in my life was a man named Robert Keller. He was a reknowned war hero who fought in France in World War I and received France’s highest military honors. He used to tell me, ‘Patsy, don’t ever be afraid to be the best.’

“He was an alcoholic, though, and in 1956 they found this man dead on skid row in Los Angeles. All he had in his possession was some newspaper clippings about my Olympic wins. The man was my father. He was an important influence on me, in a good way, even though he was in and out of my life.

--”In 1952, I went through a terrible transition. I’d just won my first two Olympic gold medals and yet I was feeling so empty. I was lost when the Olympics were over.

“I compare myself to Len Bias. There, but for the grace of God and the fact it was a different era, go I. It’s a common thing that happens to any overachiever. You lose your identity. You have no tools outside your profession and yet you’re saying, ‘Hey, love me .’

“When I stepped out of my diving world, I felt terribly lonely and insecure, like we all do sometimes. And these are the times when we reach out for the wrong things.”

--”There are many tragedies without villains. The biggest in my life is when my marriage of 24 years (to diving coach Glenn McCormick) broke up. I did the usual, partying and fooling around. Then I woke up one morning and said, ‘You better sit down and take a look at yourself, babe, and you better get your life together.”

Obviously, she took her own advice. And now she’s telling others in a light way that has her in great demand. Her cheery demeanor and infectious enthusiasm makes her especially popular with children.

McCormick asks the youngsters squirming on the auditorium floor to raise their hands if they have ever failed at anything.

A few hands tentatively go up.

“No, kids,” she says. “Everybody get your hands up. We’ve all failed. It’s OK to fail. It’s how we learn.”

Just ask Patsy Keller, who was knocked down during a sand-lot football game, picked herself up and went on to channel her talents into other athletic endeavors.

Ask the young woman who couldn’t quite make the Olympic team in 1948, but couldn’t be stopped from winning gold medals in the next two Olympics.

Ask Pat McCormick, the woman whose marriage fell apart but was able to piece her life back together and eventually start her own business.

If this sounds like material for a screenplay, then you won’t be surprised to see a television movie about McCormick’s life. She said she has been approached about doing her life story, and though nothing is concrete yet, she says it will be a reality some day.

How about a title such as “The Pat McCormick Story: From Chairman of the Springboard to Chairman of the Board”?

“I like that, but I don’t care about the title. All I know,” she says with a wink, “is they better get Bo Derek to play the lead.”

PAT McCORMICK

Age: 56.

Hometown: Long Beach.

Residence: Seal Beach.

Accomplishments:

Only diver in history to win both 3- and 10-meter gold medals in back-to-back Olympics (1952-56).

Winner of 27 national diving championships.

Won one gold medal in 1951 Pan Am Games and two in 1955.

One of two women to receive Sullivan Award as amateur athlete of the year.

Member of Olympic Hall of Fame.