Uphill Battle

GRESHAM, Ore. —  Bill Johnson can’t take his eyes off the fly.

It buzzes up and down the windowpane, a prisoner of time and space--its options limited. It wants to break free but can’t.

Johnson sits at the kitchen table in his mother’s home, back straight, eating a roast beef sandwich. Ever since the March skiing crash, at precisely noon, a synapse fires and the 1984 Olympian asks for lunch.

It is one of the mysterious quirks that accompany his brain trauma.

Beyond the window, and the trapped insect that so fascinates him, is a visage of postcard landscape, lush ferns and tall trees surrounding this rural route home in the shadow of Mount Hood.

Yet, it’s that damn fly slamming into glass--buzz then bang, buzz then bang--that has Johnson transfixed.

“Mom,” Johnson finally says. “I want you to kill that fly.”

Later, out of earshot from her son, D.B. Johnson confides, “This was not one of his better days.”

Two weeks later, Johnson would make news when he got back on skis and took a leisurely run down a slope at Timberline Lodge.

This was one of his better days, a slosh-step forward feat for the downhill champion who nearly lost his life last spring mounting a comeback attempt for a berth at the Salt Lake City Winter Games and instead will carry the Olympic torch for a short stint Wednesday through the town of Longview, Wash.

This recovery, however, is far from over.

It may never be over.

Physically, at 41, Bill Johnson still looks like a torpedo, comfortable on this sunlit Sunday in a baseball cap, fleece sweater and khakis. The 170-pound body sports scientists dubbed as aerodynamically perfect for ski racing is lean and taut.

Incredibly, Johnson did not break a bone in the crash. The only obvious sign of injury is the tracheal scar on his throat. Had the rescue team not made that incision, Johnson would have choked on his own blood right there on the snow, in Whitefish, Mont. The force of the face-first plant at 50 mph during the triple-A race caused his teeth to clamp clear through his tongue.

Today, Johnson and tongue have been reunited to savor the mayonnaise on roast beef and make casual, if not disjointed, conversation. The family does not trust him yet alone over a hot stove--he has been known to walk away from simmering soup. A list taped to Johnson’s mirror reminds him of daily tasks: Brush teeth, shave, take pills, make bed.

Johnson’s progress to date, from steps to skis, last rites to last night, has been remarkable, yet his comeback is far too short on memories--blanked out like someone recording over a cassette tape.

He cannot remember what he did last summer, or the one before, or the death of his father, Wally, six years ago.

“I don’t remember that my dad died,” Johnson says. “Apparently, he’s dead, but I just don’t know it. Everybody says my dad has died, but to me, it hasn’t happened.”

He hugs his two young boys, Nick and Tyler, but cannot make a cognitive paternal link. They come over for Thanksgiving, yes, he tousles their hair, yes, he loves them to death, yes, yet there is an awful disconnect.

“They know who I am but I don’t know them,” Johnson says. “I don’t. I don’t know them at all.”

What does he know?

“I know I’m Olympic champion,” he says. “I know that last year, I must have wanted to become Olympic champion again.”

Some things are better forgotten--like the bitter 1998 separation and divorce from Gina that people say prompted his longshot (insane?) comeback attempt.

He might prefer to be spared the gory details of his subdural hematoma; the beat-death’s-clock helicopter ride from Big Mountain resort. Good thing he was lost in a coma when a brilliant young neurosurgeon removed a fair chunk of his skull, literally put it in a freezer for a week and then fitted it back on his head like a jigsaw puzzle piece.

He is getting better, yes, slowly, steadily, but this is not Bill Johnson.

The crash has knocked the punk out of him, the unabashed arrogance it took to become the first American to win an Olympic gold medal in downhill.

Remember that? Johnson going to Sarajevo and telling the world he, not one of the Austrians, was going to win the downhill.

“I don’t even know why everyone else is here,” he said. “Everyone else can fight for second.”

It was the sort of braggadocio that typically sours foreigners on American sportsmen, also the kind of trash talk that can backfire.

Johnson, though, knew the instant he turned tips down that Bjelansnica course in the former Yugoslavia that what he said was no snow job.

Although Johnson was ready to conquer the world, the world was not so ready for him. He was dead wrong when he said his gold medal would be worth “millions.”

One magnificent run on his “Red Sleds” could not make everyone forget what a pain in the rear he could be, an American, born in Canoga Park, a guy who ripped off a car as a teenager. He was not Suzy Chapstick.

“If he had done what he did in 1984 today, he’d have the world by the tail,” his mother says. “People are more accepting of the color part of it, the Dennis Rodmans.”

Johnson had one blaze-of-glory year, 1984. Before Sarajevo, he won a downhill at Wengen, Switzerland. After the Olympics, he took races at Aspen, Colo., and Whistler, Canada.

He never won a major race again, yet he was still going downhill fast.

He fell victim to the rubber chicken tour, the fights and general carousing--Bill Johnson being Bill Johnson. There were injuries too. In 1986, he wrecked his knee in a race at Val Gardena, Italy, and two ruptured disks in his back left him in excruciating pain.

In 1988, he struck a coach with a ski pole and was left off the Calgary Olympic team because of poor results and retired in 1990.

His life unraveled like a Greek tragedy.

In 1991, he and Gina lost Ryan, the youngest of their three sons, when the toddler wandered out of sight for not more than a minute and drowned in a hot tub.

Johnson spent much of the 1990s in a daze, moving from town to town. He logged time as a figurehead ambassador at the Crested Butte ski resort in Montana and toiled as an itinerant carpenter. The post office had trouble keeping up with the 11 address changes.

Johnson lived for periods in a motor home--sometimes alone, sometimes with the family--king of the mountain becoming king of the road. Naturally, there was someone to blame.

“Oh, it was all his fault,” Bob Beattie, the former US Olympic ski coach and current television ski analyst, says of Johnson. “I don’t want to call him arrogant, but he was really cocky and shunned any kind of help.”

Up until his last race, March 22, Johnson was putting up his best bad-boy front.

Daron Rahlves, the reigning world champion in super-giant slalom, was one of the last people to see Johnson before he took the lift up.

“We were just hanging out, talking a little bit,” Rahlves recalls, “And he’s like, ‘Daron, I’m just in this for the chicks and the dough.’ It was hilarious.”

Actually, Johnson was hiding a deeper pain.

His mother says the divorce was devastating and the motivating force for his comeback, and possibly a rekindling of his marriage.

“The divorce was very sad. Gina took the boys and the boys were his life,” D.B. Johnson said. “He flailed around quite a long time. The fact he thought he could get his boys back was therapy. It gave him a goal.”

Gina, who lives with the boys in Sonoma, declined to discuss Johnson, or the motivations behind his comeback attempt. But last spring she told USA Today, “There were a lot of other factors that caused our breakup. I don’t think winning a gold medal would change our life.”

Starting Over

You ask why a 40-year-old man would risk life and limb and memory to make a comeback in downhill racing?

This is strapping up and going 80 mph down a mountain, risking death at every turn.

Ski racing today hardly resembles the sport Bill Johnson knew. The women are now going as fast as the men did then.

Everything has changed: the equipment, the technique and the size of the skiers’ quadriceps.

Most say Johnson had no shot of qualifying for the Olympic team.

Rahlves thought Johnson’s comeback attempt was a joke.

“Things have changed so much since he has skied,” he says. “It’s gotten a lot more powerful and it’s gotten a lot more technical. People don’t realize what it takes to go that fast, to be that smooth under control, and take those forces.”

Because he had not skied competitively in a decade, Johnson by rule had to begin his comeback from the lowest start positions. He began some races 99th in a field of 99. Course conditions tend to deteriorate with each run, so Johnson’s chances of winning were almost astronomical.

What a back-of-the-pack racer tries to do is better his start or “bib” number with improved performances. Although he remembers nothing of events leading up to the accident, Johnson is convinced there was a conspiracy against him led by Bill Marolt, chief executive of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.

“He didn’t want me to ski race,” Johnson says of Marolt, who was U.S. Alpine director when Johnson won his gold medal in 1984.

In reality, there are no bump-ups in the U.S. Olympic line, Marolt says.”He basically had to start over, that’s difficult and I understand that,” Marolt says. Johnson was no different than any other skier making a comeback and in fact was slowly working his way up.

The day he crashed, he wore bib No. 34 in a field of 63.

Some say Johnson’s age, 40 at the time of his crash, was a nonfactor in his near-fatal fall. As Johnson barreled down the course and entered a section known as Corkscrew, he caught the inside edge of his right ski and was forced face-first into the snow.

“Physically, I think he could handle it,” Rahlves said. “That could have happened to anybody else. He caught an edge.”

Others questioned his fitness level.

“I think the idea of having a comeback at age 40 is fine,” Beattie says. “However, he really wasn’t in great shape as I understand it. He hadn’t been on skis that much before he started racing.”

Coming Home

D.B. Johnson breaks opens her scrapbook, but these are not Grand Canyon vacation pictures.

They are detailed, graphic and grisly photos taken of her son after brain surgery.

If not for the breathing tubes indicating life, these could pass as autopsy shots.

In the photos, Johnson’s head is shaven, swollen like a melon. His head resembles a relaced catcher’s mitt, thick stitches forming a semicircle on his skull.

The pictures remind D.B. Johnson of what she nearly lost.

This was her Billy, youngest of her four children, the ski prodigy. She knew it the moment Billy was 7, when the family moved from the San Fernando Valley to Boise, Idaho, and the youngest son snapped into his bindings at Bogus Basin.

“The minute he put skis on, he was low to the ground and fast,” she says.

After Boise, the Johnsons moved to the Pacific Northwest, where Billy honed his skills at the Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Academy.

All these years later, Billy is back home, in the shadow of Mt. Hood.

It was minor miracle Johnson survived, that the rescue workers reacted so quickly on the mountain, that the helicopter was available and took only eight minutes to make the 20-mile trip to Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

Johnson underwent four hours of brain surgery and remained in a coma for three weeks. He was then transferred by plane to a hospital in Portland, where he spent six weeks, followed by three months at Bakersfield’s Centre for Neuro Skills.

When his insurance ran out in September, Johnson returned to Gresham, to live with his mother and continue rehabilitation under the Oregon Health Plan.

The ordeal has been a drain. D.B. Johnson runs her own business, ProSports NW, out of her home. She makes racing bibs, earns good money, but resources are tight.

She established the Bill Johnson Donation Fund on her son’s Web site but has been disappointed by the lack of contributions.

But she is not discouraged. Johnson will remain with her for as long as it takes. Doctors say it is unclear how much memory he will regain, or how long it might take.

“We’re faced with the fact he won’t get 100% better,” she said. “We’re just working with what we have today, hopefully he’ll get to the point he can take care of himself.”

There are going to be days, however, when Johnson prefers to chart the movement of flies on window sills, when he wrestles with his own predicament.

“He was a great champion,” Marolt says. “He did something Americans dream of. He won a gold medal in the Olympics. It’s a phenomenal accomplishment.”

After Johnson crashed, a friend went to retrieve his truck. You know what he found?

Johnson’s Olympic gold medal, tucked under the front seat, a reminder that all things are possible.

D.B. Johnson says she knows her son won’t ski competitively again, but he isn’t ready to concede. When was he ever?

“I don’t know why my mom says I won’t ski,” he says. “I think I will compete again. That’s a great goal for me. Because all I got right now, everything I own right now, is ski racing. It’s my life. I don’t know what else to do.”