The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  Starting with Kevin’s earliest regattas, Gordon talked to his son over and over about the virtue of being gracious in victory, of exchanging the friendly handshake at the end of an event no matter who had won. Because Kevin was competing in singlehanded sailing, in which a crew of one commands the boat, the competition came not just from opponents, but from setting his own personal bests, a class of sailing that structurally was more like individual events in swimming or track. Kevin liked just about all of the kids he sailed with and against, so for him, that wasn’t a difficult task. Sure, Kevin’s first few months on the water saw some tears. Any child’s would, Gordon figured.

  Gordon also tried to talk to Kevin about whether he was doing his best, and when Kevin won, he asked him, had it been just luck or had he really put his whole self into the race? Gordon could see that Kevin was starting to internalize that question, that feeling of wondering whether, truthfully, he was sailing to his full potential or not. All told, Gordon felt that Kevin had a healthy attitude about winning, which was no easy task when people started throwing terms like “child prodigy” around.

  Kevin Hall (courtesy Hall family)

  The family’s dinner conversations revolved around sailing strategy and tactics that Kevin could deploy before heading out to his weekend competitions. Kristina enjoyed playing Atari with her brother and goofing around with him when their parents weren’t around, but she wasn’t much interested in talking about sailing, or about any competitive pursuit, really. Yet she was forced to spend hours in the car, either en route to do a boat deal or for Kevin’s competitions, across state lines. With compassion, Gordon echoed a refrain to his daughter repeated by countless parents through the ages: Life isn’t fair.

  KEVIN

  Kevin knew that his father and mother loved him whether he won or lost—Gordon and Susanne told him that repeatedly. Still, when he did lose, a sense of shame washed over him, a deep feeling that he had let his family and himself down. His losses were rare, but even so, the specter of defeat was always hanging over him, an invisible, unwanted companion in otherwise clear waters.

  As a teenager, Kevin continued to soar in the sport. His many lessons on the water now included discussions of how to deal with capsizes, which were to be expected: how to protect himself from injury if a vessel somehow became unmanageable, and how to safely get back on a boat if it flipped. He learned how to navigate storm conditions and to appreciate the virtues of wearing a life jacket, his coaches dutifully weaving together sailing’s teachings with bigger life lessons, one practice at a time.

  Kevin defeated dozens of other sailors in his age category, winning various regional titles, and at fifteen, he became a local news sensation as the youngest sailor ever to win the United States Junior Singlehanded Nationals. What’s more, he defended his title again a second time the following year. While most kids were merely studying for their SATs, Kevin had proved himself the best in the nation at something—twice. (And the best in the world, too.)

  At the rate he was going, the idea of making the Olympic sailing team someday started to seem possible.

  SUSANNE

  There was a problem, a secret, looming—two, really—that Susanne didn’t want to tell her children, or anyone else, about. She and Gordon could save lives, but they knew very little about how to run a business. The balance sheet of their boat brokerage company was unpredictable, and they were constantly improvising, with questions like “Which debt do we pay first?” floating in the air one month after another. Sure, they had made some savvy decisions, like becoming the first backers of the original line of 100 Olson 30s, a bet that had paid off financially and helped them quickly establish a profile as serious dealers. Yet the success, however grand, had felt short-lived when the economy went into a slump in the early 1980s4 and the super-wealthy stopped splurging on luxury items like yachts. The Halls’ business, which had also afforded Kevin access to boats he wouldn’t have been able to sail otherwise, began to buckle. With it, so did Susanne and Gordon’s marriage.

  At first, Susanne had thought it was a simple case of two people growing apart. They had been so young when they married. But as the years went by, the differences between their personalities grew vast. Small arguments became big ones, whether related to the boat business, parenting, or current events. They tried their hardest to keep their acrimony away from Kevin’s and Kristina’s eyes, and they didn’t tell them anything until they felt their divorce was certain. At times, Susanne wondered if she should have seen things coming more, but she also knew that raising two children was more of a priority than resting in regret. Her marriage felt like a failure, a thought that was arresting and painful and was the last thing she wanted to discuss at length with anyone, particularly her children.

  As Gordon and Susanne divvied up their debts and assets (it felt like more of the former than the latter), they argued about where Kevin should go to school. Gordon thought that the sailing program at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis would offer Kevin the best opportunities, or perhaps he could stay in state. But Susanne felt that her son’s creative side would be more fulfilled at Brown University, where he could both receive a prestigious Ivy League education and be able to sail with some of the best college-age sailors in the world. Kevin circumvented the parental squabble by applying for early admission to Brown, and was accepted. While his parents were arguing, he had made up his own mind.

  When Susanne told Kevin that she and his father were separating, he, like many teenage boys when confronted with emotional issues, didn’t seem interested in discussing it at length. His childhood dream of going to the Olympics and being a professional sailor seemed to be inching closer and occupying more of his mind. Brown’s highly regarded sailing program seemed a clear step toward the winners’ podium, as it had fed several stars to the Olympics through the years. Family problems receded to the background of Kevin’s mind, his future more in the foreground—at least for now.

  KEVIN

  Before heading off to Brown, Kevin had spent his junior year in France as a high school exchange student. He loved the French language, and some parts of his brain felt freer operating in it, as if through French he had unlocked some sort of secret code. In French literature, he encountered the same kind of magic and fantasy that he had loved in the C. S. Lewis and other books he had read as a child, along with the puzzle and joy of translating from one world to another.

  Gordon, Susanne, Kristina, and Kevin Hall (courtesy Hall family)

  While in France, Kevin sailed in regattas around Europe and began to dream and think in French, a breakthrough for anyone studying a second language.5 He lived with a French family whom his parents had met through the boat business and the family treated him both like one of their own and like a special guest.

  When Susanne stood waving Kevin off to France, a preview of the college separation soon to come, he seemed fine, all smiles. She, however, was choked up. With her husband and son gone, and Kristina hers to raise on her own, the outwardly perfect suburban life that she had known for twenty years had, in just a couple of months, completely disintegrated.6

  Kevin and Gordon Hall (courtesy Hall family)

  There would be even more debilitating news awaiting her just ahead.

  KRISTINA

  Separating? What were her parents talking about? The news seemed to be coming out of nowhere.7

  Of course they weren’t going to use the word “divorce,” because saying “divorce” would have been admitting failure, something she didn’t think either of her parents was capable of doing. Nor did it surprise her that neither her mother nor her father raised their voices when explaining their plans, a hallmark of West Coast passive aggression. Her family of four was gone—Kevin to Brown, her father to Big Bear, California, a nearly three-hour drive away, and her mom to Montreal and Los Angeles, where she was going to return to school to dust off her medical credentials and hopefully go back to work and repay some of the debts from the boat business.8 Kristina would be lef
t with some supervision in the family house in Ventura, with her mother dropping in occasionally to check up on her. Susanne didn’t like the idea of leaving her child for long periods, but felt she had no choice. Kristina would be going off to college soon and was going to have to get used to being on her own.

  It was bad enough, Kristina thought, that for years and years she had been dragged along to regattas and forced to suffer through seemingly endless hours of tedious and irrelevant conversation about boats and winning. But now her father wasn’t even going to be around at all? Kevin had benefited from a picture-perfect two-parent household, but Kristina was graduating into a different reality.

  KEVIN

  Upon arriving at Brown University in the fall of 1987, Kevin quickly blended in with the school’s thicket of overachievers. The school was made up of a collection of austere brick and modern buildings spread over nearly 150 lush acres in Providence, Rhode Island, connected by stretches of sprawling green spaces and a tangle of sidewalks. It maintained a musty Ivy League air, but its students and faculty also prided themselves on an attitude of crunch, with Frisbees flying through the air and political debates taking place right and left. It had an open curriculum, giving students more freedom to pursue their own academic interests; they were encouraged to create their own major if it didn’t already exist. A culture of brainy wandering was encouraged from the top down.

  It wasn’t long before Kevin started calling his father with questions and concerns about cheating in sports. In college sailing, the boats were small and underpowered, meaning they had little sail compared to the boat and weight of the team. But they could be rolled in a certain way—a wiggling of the rudder and the hull back and forth—that was illegal but nudged the boat forward, sometimes resulting in a win.9 Anyone caught rolling a boat was penalized in the competition, but like a lot of cheating in sports, it was easy to get away with. Before college, Kevin had spent his entire life learning and obeying rules and felt good about doing so. Now he faced the question of whether he should play honestly and compromise his results, or push the gray to suit himself with the other athletes and accept that this was part of what competing at the Ivy League level entailed. He told his father that he felt torn over what to do. Where was the line about what was legitimate and what wasn’t? Which side of it should Kevin be on?

  For Kevin even to ask such a question before college would have been unthinkable, and a moot point besides, as he usually won by such a wide margin that cheating wouldn’t have changed the outcome anyway. Gordon answered his son’s queries by saying that this kind of dilemma was the stuff of which character was made. Kevin listened to that advice and told his Brown teammates that he would never lower himself to cheating. If others beat him dishonestly, so be it. At least he would be able to sleep at night.

  Cheating or not, Brown’s sailing team was on the ascent, with some of Kevin’s competitors from the junior circuit now sailing with him every day as teammates.10 Coach Brad Dellenbaugh had built up the sailing program over several years into one of the nation’s best and had carefully recruited a broad base of young athletes, including women. The women were not only on the team but truly incorporated into Brown’s coed squads, with women and men sailing and competing together on a single boat. Brown’s team also boasted many young women who went on to sail at the Olympics, a triumph in that Title IX, which had expanded opportunities for women in sports, had only been passed in 1972. With such a talent-thick roster, there were times when the team’s own practice races were more competitive than the intercollegiate regattas.

  Like many student athletes, the young sailors had a strict schedule that kept them busy with practices during the week, competitions on the weekend, and a full load of coursework beyond that. There was a team meeting every Wednesday evening, often at ten or eleven at night because that was the only time when all of the athletes could make it. They were often the last students in the dining hall, having returned from the water just as the staff was cleaning up.

  A lot of things can’t be controlled in sailing, a sport that is often about the seeming paradox of preparing for the unpredictable, but Kevin was determined to take charge of whatever he could. He was among the most disciplined sailors on the team, meticulously thinking through everything from his workout schedule to what meals he was going to eat to when and for how long he was going to sleep. To his teammates, he seemed extremely organized and focused, but not strict or serious. He laughed often and enjoyed discussing movies, books, and Bob Dylan song lyrics.11 To all outward appearances, Kevin seemed to be flourishing in his new collegiate life, embedded in engrossing classes, challenging sailing, and new friends, all far away from the noise of his parents’ divorce.

  Yet stress began to mount on Kevin in his upper-class years. He spent November and December of his junior year bingeing on caffeine late into the night, studying texts tied to his seemingly opposed majors—French literature and math. As he edged closer to graduation, he began to feel the pressure of the question that hangs over so many anxious undergraduates: What the hell comes after college? One part of Kevin’s brain was immersed in French literature, concerned with themes of love, race, language, class, passion, and the creative life. The other part was consumed with his second love, math, with its geometric patterns, spatial relationships, and elegant formulae, a more analytical and practical field. Part of Kevin wanted to run away and become a poet, but then there was sailing and his dream of making it to the Olympics, which now seemed out of reach, not because of his abilities, but because of the financial logistics involved. To get the training he needed for that level of sailing, he would have to find a way to turn his sport into a paying full-time job.

  In school, Kevin was a student who didn’t raise his hand often, but when he did, he tried to have a pointed, intelligent comment ready. He turned his work in on time, attended class consistently and punctually,12 and asked his professors questions during their office hours. Math had come to him easily in high school, but in college, he felt intimidated by the whiz kids around him, including one who drew colored pencil renderings of complex algebraic equations.13 He felt an obligation to his father to slog through the difficult coursework, as his father wanted him to get a degree in something that he deemed more practical than French literature.14

  In that major, Kevin’s studies centered on Marguerite Duras, an edgy novelist and filmmaker whose work dealt with sexuality, politics, love, and death. Brown offered a whole class devoted just to her works, for which Kevin eagerly signed up.15 As he inhaled its reading list, he found himself particularly interested in what she wrote about her inner life, a theme that was discussed often in the course. It was Duras who quipped, “Very early in my life, it was too late” and, “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”16 In math, Kevin enrolled in two upper-level courses: topology, the branch of mathematics concerned with continuous deformations, surfaces that bend but don’t tear; and differential geometry, which uses calculus and algebra to study complex problems. His already fertile mind was ingesting new and more existential information than it ever had before, at a time when his brain, like those of most college students, still maintained some of the sponginess of adolescence.

  Kevin’s junior year also marked his first full season of training under U.S. Sailing Team coaches, the very people who helped prepare Americans for the Olympics. These coaches paid close attention to the top sailors in the collegiate pipeline, a critical feeder system for a country that continuously pushed up against sailing powerhouse Great Britain and other countries such as Norway, Spain, and France for medals. By plucking a few stars like Kevin for the training program, the coaches could gain a better understanding of how they performed on the water, while the young sailors learned the different nuances of the Olympic sailing classes and the rigor of preparation needed to compete at that level.

  Kevin’s selection as part of the U.S. Olympic training schema was exciting, but it pulled him away
from Brown’s sailing team and the routine to which he had grown accustomed. Undoubtedly, some of his Brown teammates who were not chosen by the Olympic coaches resented Kevin’s opportunity, but if they had to be honest about it, they probably didn’t miss the occasional bouts of arrogance he’d shown while on the team. He understood that he was talented on the water and had few qualms about discussing his shot at the Olympics, which he regarded more as a matter of when and how than if.

  What friends Kevin had, for the most part, were from sailing. His high school and college years had been almost entirely devoted to the sport, allowing him little time for socializing outside of it. As he walked around Brown’s campus that fall, he suddenly felt socially maladjusted, the idea of “hanging out” with no stated purpose never really having entered his head before college.17 Then he came down with a bad case of herpes zoster,18 more commonly known as shingles, and had to spend time in the infirmary with a fever and rash that kept him out of classes. Overwhelmed by the effort of keeping up with the most challenging pile of coursework he’d had yet, Kevin realized, for the first time in his life, that he probably would fail at something.19

  The parts of the body that trigger anxiety and excitement are similar on a physiological level, and in Kevin they were locked in an intense dance.20 He began to talk faster, enjoy music more, forgo sleep, and he started feeling euphoric in a way that he had imagined only hallucinogenic drugs could induce. He showed up to his French seminar one day with a boom box over his shoulder and insisted on playing two songs for the class, “Blood and Fire” by the Indigo Girls and another by a French artist. In scrambled sentences and wild gestures, Kevin tried to convey to the class that he felt the music was related to the works they were studying. No one else saw the connection, but because the songs took up only a few minutes of class time, the professor let him play them before politely regaining control of the room.21