I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  In hindsight, those years as a teacher at Rising Stars were the best thing that ever happened to my brother, including the friendships he developed and every sacrifice he made there. He gave up ninety percent of his school friends in favor of the young students at the dance academy, but because all those kids grew up adoring him, they remained an essential core of people who helped make his life great.

  Smack in the middle of his time at Rising Stars, a golden opportunity landed at Maks’s feet. A Belgian dancer named Joanna Leunis, who would go on to be a professional world champion multiple times, and who at that time was world champion at the Amateur age level, lost her partner, a Ukrainian dancer with the consonant-crunching name of Slavik Kryklyvyy.

  Joanna searched the world for a new partner and eventually reached out to my brother. He was floored and overjoyed by the call, since she represented a gateway to the high-level world of European ballroom dance. Joanna Leunis was at the top of her game, and Maks had not even competed all that much. For her to recruit him from a family-run dance school in the backwater of Saddle Brook, New Jersey, was an amazing stroke of good fortune.

  She was in Amsterdam working with her coach, Ruud Vermeij, who had been one of the greats as a dancer before going on to become a superb mentor, teacher, and self-proclaimed “first doctor” of ballroom. Maks flew to Holland. Vermeij watched the two of them dance and judged their energy as a couple to be superb. Joanna told Maks she felt comfortable with him and liked the chemistry they had.

  “We’d love to go forward with this,” she said. “But you would have to live over here. I’d like you to move to Belgium or Amsterdam, somewhere that would make it easy for us to work together.”

  Maks called my dad. Here was a twenty-one-year-old kid looking at a chance to become a champion, with an opportunity to study ballroom in Europe, dancing with the best, competing among the best, and ultimately becoming the best.

  If Maks signed on with Joanna he would be living in Europe, not in Saddle Brook, motherfucking New Jersey. No offense to Saddle Brook or Jersey or the upstairs apartment that our family rented from the people downstairs. Whatever the attractions were back home, they didn’t include recreational marijuana, a red light district, the Anne Frank House, Rembrandt, Amsterdam. In other words, civilization.

  Taking the call at our home base in New Jersey, my father could hear the pride in his son’s voice. He was silent, listening to the spill of words about Joanna, Ruud Vermeij, Europe, and the excitement of ballroom competition. Maks finally stuttered to an end, waiting for a reaction.

  “But, Maks,” my father asked quietly, “who’s going to teach at Rising Stars?”

  Just that single, plaintive, heartfelt question. My father didn’t have to say anything else to my brother. The simple summons to hold fast to family responsibilities was enough. Keep your neck in the yoke and your nose to the grindstone was the unspoken message.

  To his credit Maks never wavered when it came to family. He told Joanna that their partnership wasn’t going to work out and flew back to the States.

  I tried to imagine what it must have felt like for him to return to Rising Stars, to stand in that makeshift ballroom studio, where his pops had laid the parquet floor despite having never laid parquet before in his life, and where we had installed a graffiti wall because all the students were little fucking hoodlums. The studio would have still smelled of sweat from the night before, and if Maks turned to look outside, what would he see? The cemetery next door.

  Meanwhile, his younger bro comes up to him, empty-headed, happy, and carefree, with precious little awareness of how his older brother’s hopes and ambitions had just gotten crushed.

  “Hey, Maks, how you doing?”

  He was carrying all the weight in the world, that’s how he was doing. That was my brother.

  Later on in life, whenever he thought about this period, Dad would sigh with genuine heartbreak. He could barely forgive himself for placing so much responsibility on his son at such a young age, even though Maks wanted it and willingly took it on. Our father should have known better.

  Maks’s interior voice back then might have sounded like a broken record of “I coulda been a contender.” In a few years my brother’s life would take a couple of spectacular turns. A wise man once said that we don’t know enough about the future to be pessimists. Dark as my brother’s life seemed at that point, a light would soon break.

  Competition (1)

  What was I doing while Maks was chained to his post at Rising Stars, facing the most agonizing choices of his young life? I was busy becoming the superstar of the family, the wunderkind, the world-beater, absolutely killing it in ballroom dance competitions on the national level and, finally, on the international stage.

  I’ve spent most of my life involved in competition. Charles Darwin taught us that struggle is the truth of the world. The peak moments I cherish the most came in the middle of competitive environments, either in a dance contest or on the basketball court or at a concert recital—the venue didn’t matter as much as the spirit of the struggle.

  I hate losing more than I like winning, and that’s a fact. Winners focus on winning. Losers tend to dwell on winners, looking on from outside the winner’s circle, perhaps a little envious and self-pitying, refusing to grasp the fact that they themselves had a hand in what has happened to them.

  To create a culture of winning you have to put together the whole package, an attitude, a lifestyle, an energy.

  It’s not about the word “win” or the word “lose.”

  It’s about effort, honest, unconditional effort.

  When you give your all, there’s no way you don’t win. You either bring home a title or a trophy, or you take away a hard-earned lesson. Either way, you win. You will always be in a better situation if you’ve worked hard. If you put in one hundred percent of your effort, then automatically you’ve entered into a win-win situation.

  On the other hand, if you put in, say, only ninety-nine percent of your effort, then the situation can turn into a nasty lose-lose proposition. Because at ninety-nine percent effort, even if you win you might somehow feel you don’t deserve it, since you didn’t give everything you had. In that case, how sweet can winning be? And if you lose, you’re left with a sour taste in your mouth. If only I had put in that last one percent of effort.

  Hard work. I don’t believe in anything else.

  The peak experience of winning is like the tip of the iceberg, where the huge mass of effort is submerged out of sight, so that all anyone else sees is the win and not the work supporting it.

  Effort created the most monumental winning moment of my life. I witnessed my father, almost insane with joy, shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and rushing to my side to gather me into a huge bear hug of love. I heard a crowded arena in Italy rock with the chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

  That incredible event happened in November 2001. Nothing else in my life has come close to that singular experience, a crowning achievement in my young competitive life. To demonstrate why it meant so much, I have to go back to the heartbreak that came before it.

  A year and a half earlier, in the spring of 2000, when I was fourteen, I traveled with my partner, Diana “Deena” Olonetskaia, to Sarajevo, Bosnia for the Junior World Latin Dance Championship. It was our first time going to a world championship together.

  The country of Bosnia and Herzegovina still showed the wounds from the civil war that had torn the whole region apart in the early 1990s. Flying in, we could see the devastation in Sarajevo, bombed-out neighborhoods reduced to rubble, old scars across the landscape. Beyond all that I could still appreciate the beauty of the city, its red roofs nestled among the green surrounding hills.

  On our way into town we passed an elegant modern building that looked as though it had been blown in half. “What’s that?” I asked the bus driver.

  “Oh, that’s our Parliament,” he answered.

  The trip went wrong from the start. At the airport we had discovered t
hat the airline had lost our luggage, which was bad enough in the normal scheme of things, but which now meant we were without our show costumes. Costumes are such an intimate, fundamental element of ballroom dance that they are like another character in the drama. I never take what I’m wearing for granted, and now there I was at the Junior Worlds, and it looked as though I would have to go out and dance buck-ass naked.

  My partner’s mother, Yelena, served as a chaperone on the trip. Yelena’s specialty was freaking out. She made a huge scene at the airport, complaining loudly and at length in frantic, broken English that the lost luggage would rob her child of the chance for a glorious future.

  Not an auspicious beginning. I worked frantically to cobble together some sort of outfit from odds and ends given to me by sympathetic fellow dancers. Like a beggar, I went around pleading for clothes. A Lithuanian kid lent me shoes he had used to practice for a previous competition. I would dance in the cast-off pants of a teenage dancer from Italy. I went to a mall and bought a shirt, purchasing a woman’s blouse because it was a little more flamboyant than anything else available.

  You have to understand that at the turn of the millennium, America still had pretty much a zero profile in international dance competitions. No one from the States had ever won a world championship at any age level, Junior, Youth, or Amateur. Here we were, Deena and I, venturing into the gladiator’s arena wearing cast-off clothes and hand-me-down shoes. On our way to the venue we could see bullet holes everywhere, left behind on buildings and walls. Blue-helmeted United Nations soldiers from several different countries patrolled the streets.

  We arrived to find a typical Eastern European arena, where basketball games were played and political rallies took place. Not the most glamorous spot in town, but the huge space helped render the occasion grand. Because I was accustomed to competing in American hotel ballrooms, the arena offered a whole different energy. European dance took place in a ruthless, more competitive atmosphere than in the States. But I was coming off a lot of good showings at national competitions back home, and I was focused and hungry.

  Occasionally, I was literally hungry, as in famished, since the American organizers of our appearance in Sarajevo did not exactly have their business together. Everything was done on a shoestring budget. Unlike other, more experienced contestants, we didn’t have a coach by our side, since the U.S. dance organization couldn’t provide accommodations for coaching personnel.

  My partner and I were so sad-looking and so obviously intimidated that we appeared like refugees who just wandered into the arena. We were nervous as it was, because we had never been to a world championship. There was no cheering section out there for the American interlopers. It was just me, my partner, and her mother, the three of us against the universe.

  The day before the event, the organizers held a rehearsal for the parade of flags planned for opening night, an Olympic-style procession that would feature all the countries involved. This rehearsal session also allowed the dance couples a chance to get a feel for the floor. At the rehearsal, the announcers went through the list of countries in competition, calling them out in Bosnian.

  The language was confusing and somehow Deena and I missed our call. Yelena concluded that the organizers had skipped over us and had one of her patented stage-mother meltdowns.

  “What about the United States of America?” she called out, jumping to her feet and bringing the whole procession to a screeching halt. Deena and I felt as though we wanted to crawl into a hole. The obnoxious American—or really, the obnoxious Russian-American—had struck again.

  When competition commenced the next day, I first encountered Nino Langella, a kid who would go on to become my rival, a beloved rival, a respected rival, but a rival all the same. At that time, my favored dance was the jive and Nino’s was the samba. He was super rhythmical and light, with a balletic speed and the ability to put a subtle, exquisite bounce to his moves. On the floor he gave off a sense of beautiful finesse.

  I was jealous of Nino, but I loved his style and was inspired by it. I was a fan. My jealousy was not the kind filled with hate. He was an Italian kid from Naples, a little kid from the street, just like I was a Russian kid from Brooklyn. That’s why we related so well to each other, because we came from similar worlds and had similar stories, which we translated into our performances. Nino’s dances were unique because he was unique, because he came from a unique place.

  The Junior World Latin Dance Championship, where we met that year, was all Latin, all the time. Everyone competed in all five of the Latin dances: cha-cha, samba, rumba, paso doble, and jive. Nino was good at all of them. He was the more beautiful dancer, with better lines, but I had more power. We both displayed adolescent charisma, but which one of us you preferred depended on whether you liked finesse or sheer passion and power.

  In Rush, the based-on-fact Formula One racing movie that’s one of my favorite films, there are a couple of lines that I always remember. An injured Niki Lauda says to his rival, James Hunt, “Watching you win those races while I was fighting for my life, you were responsible for getting me back in the car.” Later on, Lauda formulates the sentiment into a rule of thumb: “A wise man can learn more from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”

  That’s how I felt about Nino, and that’s how I felt about competitors in general. I needed my rivals. I possessed an athletic or a sports mentality as much as an artistic one. I had to have Nino or someone like him to challenge me. I didn’t want to win without facing the best in the world, and to me, Nino Langella was the best in the world.

  At the 2000 Junior Worlds, Nino fucking killed it and took home the championship trophy. That year, appearing at our first international competition, Deena and I came in thirteenth place, which wasn’t good, but wasn’t that bad, either. Thirteenth was close enough for me to be able to smell first place, but far enough away for me not to get cocky.

  A loss is a loss. I’m not here to make excuses. Excuses are a waste of my time, a waste of people’s hearing, and, honestly, a huge case of disrespect to all my mentors. For me to make excuses undermines the whole spirit of competition. So I keep them to a minimum. I am too proud for excuses.

  For me being too proud of victories veers into a boasting mentality, and that’s not part of competition for me. I am proud of accomplishment, of course. I am proud of Deena and me giving it our all, and proud of making it to Junior Worlds so that I could finally see what winning could look like, and what losing felt like. But I am proud of what my defeats gave me, too. I’ll defend my defeats all day long, because what I take away from losing is the stuff I’ll spin into pure gold later on.

  I RETURNED HOME FROM SARAJEVO IN THE SPRING OF 2000, not as the conquering hero, but as just another kid with homework and chores and friends to come back to. That fall I entered my freshman year of high school. In our household, extracurricular activities such as dance or violin did not let me and my brother off the hook for our other duties, particularly academic responsibilities.

  Along with everything else I had going on, I had to have good grades. Growing up, whenever I got a B, it came with an ass whooping. When I received an A-minus, I got a dirty look and a question about it. If I scored a 97 out of 100 on a test, my mom might be even more upset than if I had gotten an 82.

  “Those extra two minutes that you wanted to go and spend on that America Online Instant Messenger”—this was back in the AIM days—“you could have just as well been studying!”

  Later on, when I got my first tattoo, my mom was devastated, heartbroken. “I’ve failed as a mother! I raised a child that lowered himself down to the level of getting a tattoo!”

  No matter that by then I had completed three years of study at Pace University while holding a 3.7 GPA, had won two world dance titles, had never been arrested—not that my mother knew of, at least—and was a loving, studious, violin-playing paragon of a son. But because of a tattoo, she had failed as a mother. And what did I choose for my first ink? A script on
my left bicep that reads “Family Over Everything.”

  Such was the household where I grew up. “Accountability” was the byword. Everyone had to work. Nobody was dwelling on the fact that there was a wunderkind in the household. My brother was definitely not bowing down before my achievements. He was more interested in kicking my ass.

  My parents had no money, but they managed to hire violin teachers and send me to Europe for dance competitions. None of those activities put food on the table or paid for themselves. I felt the need to pitch in, too. I carried a burden of responsibility through the world, not as heavy-duty as my brother’s burden, but there all the same.

  I had to achieve. I had to do it for Maks, had to do it for Moms and Pops, had to do it for my friends, too.

  During those high school years, my mom drove me everywhere. Moms are crazy, moms are amazing. She wasn’t out there boasting about me, and wasn’t often on the sidelines. Instead, she was in the car waiting for her son to finish this or that lesson. For the past year, I had been attending the Hudson School in Hoboken, New Jersey, which I traveled to via the commuter train that ran through Saddle Brook. My mom was the person who picked me up in Hoboken after school to drive me to a youth orchestra on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then we’d sit in traffic, heading back through the city in order for me to rehearse ballroom dance from nine to eleven at night, because my dance partners all lived way out in Brooklyn.

  During all this shuttling back and forth she would always have sandwiches. Yulia, my mom, everyone was always making me sandwiches. On the way back home I would eat and we would talk. I’d play hip-hop music and my mom hated it, saying, “This is garbage!” but still letting me play it. I’d be blasting “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G. as my personal anthem while Moms winced behind the wheel.