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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Giddy Gowdy has
a reason to smileSOME interesting facts about Hawaii's honorable-mention All-American, Mike Gowdy:
"The first thing is," he says, "I am not a SCUBA diver."
No, no, he is of the "swimming and" variety.
"And then, yeah, I do wear Speedos," he says. "I don't choose to, but it goes along with the territory."
He's got a sense of humor about it. He loves this. Gowdy, who is reigning conference Diver of the Year and finished 11th last season in the 1-meter at the NCAA national championships, paces the Duke Kahanamoku Aquatic Complex between dives with a giddy half grin.
The sun. The breeze. The latest attempt at pushing his mind and body toward perfection in pursuit of athletic art.
"It's a beautiful day to be diving," he says.
If only we knew.
Diving, except in Olympic years and Rodney Dangerfield movies, is apparently not much of a spectator sport. Yesterday (on a weekday afternoon, granted), I counted one family, one UH athletic official and perhaps a handful more, total, from the swim side of the family (who were showered with undying gratitude for bothering to show up).
"We're sort of invisible," UH diving coach Mike Brown admits. "Which is too bad, because he's a great athlete. Mike's a great athlete, Jonathan Coyle's a great athlete. And not many people have seen what they do."
Our loss.
This guy Gowdy is ...
"He's ... ," Brown says, searching for words, grasping for them, before finally settling on ... "good."
Yes, he is.
"Oh!" says a guy from another team, the sound bursting out of him, involuntarily, after another spectacular warmup dive. "He's too good. They should take his ability and spread it among the rest of us."
Forget it. The rest of them congregate, talking story, sitting in the hot tub between dives. Gowdy is alone, prowling the pool, that grin on his face, stalking his next dive in his head. He walks around, dunks himself, dries off, stops for a word or two with Brown, takes another walk, over to the shower, where he gets wet again. He's in the zone.
And then he soars off the springboard, an Icarus without wings, twisting, turning, maybe somersaulting, into the blue below.
Nothing like it.
"You have to have a picture set in your head (to pull it off), you have to have a routine," Brown says. "One or two clues, because you can't process more than one or two things in that amount of time."
You can see what he means, today and tomorrow, at the Duke pool at UH, at the Hawaii Diving Invitational.
You can see Gowdy display the form that won invitational meets at USC and Texas this season.
You can see him break concentration only long enough to set up a special poolside chair for his wife, Loren Parodi. ("We're eloped," he says; the big ceremony and name changes are upcoming.)
So divers get the chicks?
"Yeah!" Gowdy says, and this time the smile is a big one.
Well, at least that's something.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com