We drove nearly every day from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn to Jersey, and meanwhile I’d be worrying to myself, “Holy fuck! How am I going to do my homework for tomorrow?” Then, answering myself, “Oh, okay, I’ll do it on the train in the morning.”
That was it, that was our routine. For years. There was so much time, so much love, and so much sandwich-making invested in me.
That first Junior Worlds championship, where Diana and I came in thirteenth place, was held in April 2000. The following year’s Juniors were scheduled for Turin, Italy, in October 2001. So it was a year and a half between those two competitions, and after that year and a half I was a completely different dancer. I had turned fifteen by then, and the difference between a young fourteen and an older fifteen was a difference of cigarettes, girls, and a little bit more teenage swagger.
Two crucial competitions led up to the 2001 Junior Worlds in November: the German Open and U.S. Open. That August, I entered the German Open with Deena. It was a competition that had always been good to me. My first appearance on the international stage had been there, with another partner, three years before.
This time around, I was third. Because of age limitations, Nino Langella did not compete at the German Open that year, which robbed the event of some magic. Alex Zampriello came in ahead of me, an amazing dancer, but a by-the-book systems guy. He danced with his sister as his partner. Where’s the chemistry in that? What can that arrangement be but synchronized movement? When you’re dancing with your sister, how much fire can that rumba have?
A week after the German Open, still at the end of summer 2001, I met Alex again at the U.S. Open in Miami. As I mentioned, in Latin dancing the order of the five dances is cha-cha, samba, rumba, paso doble, and jive. I had a rule of thumb for winning: it wasn’t how you start out in the cha-cha, it was how you finish in the jive.
Jive was my shit. I owned it. One of the reasons I excelled was that I played basketball my whole life, almost every day since I had come to America. In Brooklyn, round-ball represented a way to make friends when I didn’t speak the language. The basketball moves carried over to dance. Jumping, twisting, using my legs, it all filtered into the jive, where my athleticism combined with my love for rhythm and movement.
In jive, only the strong survived. The dance wasn’t only a certain style of energy—the jive had nuance, not just the rock ’n’ roll aspect but the jazz rhythms that were deeply embedded within it. The jive energy came into the world over the last hundred years, and it burst into competitive dance only in the past few decades. As a ballroom dance form, jive was influenced by East Coast swing, West Coast swing, the Lindy, the twist, rock ’n’ roll—it was an all-American creation. I made my name with that dance.
At the U.S. Open that year, I again came in third. I couldn’t believe it. By the end of August 2001, leading up to October’s Junior Worlds championships, I was hungry, starving for a win.
For the first time in my life, I consciously gave myself an ultimatum: I gotta get this. I had been dancing since I was a kid, and I was willing to do whatever it took. My dad and I always spoke about the opportunity for me to be the first American dancer ever to win four World titles, a champion in each age category: Junior, Youth, Amateur, and Pro—sort of the grand slam of ballroom dancing.
But if I didn’t win the Juniors in 2001, I wouldn’t get another chance at a grand slam, because by the next year I would age out of the Junior category and be bumped up to the Youth class. Beyond the grand slam, I just wanted to be the first American to win the Juniors, period. That would put me in the record books, and I wanted to live forever. I wanted to come back to my home country and be like, “Yo, I just won Worlds! I’m the best in the world! I’m a champion!”
But a dark element in our lives belittles every single effort that we make toward what we love. In a minor-key counterpoint to crowing over successes, don’t we all hear the chorus of discouragement from our interior nag? I know I did. What are you doing? Man, you’re not even that good!
That negative voice has met me at every single stage of my life, and thank God for the fact that every time I’ve encountered it, I’ve been able to dismiss it. As I’ve said before, pride worked to save me.
Pride killed the cat—or, no, really, curiosity killed the cat, but pride was there as a coconspirator. Pride can be a force for delusional behavior. Being too proud to fail can suddenly turn into being too proud to try at all.
But that wasn’t the case with me. Not only did pride fail to kill off my ambitions, it made my ambitions. It made my work ethic, made me want to work hard enough to win, harder than I’d ever worked for anything before. And it was that same pride pushing me forward as a recently arrived immigrant who wanted to be the first American to ever win a title at Junior Worlds—Valentin Aleksandrovich Chmerkovskiy from Brooklyn, motherfucking New York.
Competition (2)
What happened next, just a month before the 2001 Junior Worlds, was obviously not about dance at all. At that time my brother was twenty-one, and Brooklyn College had just started a dance program. He was way overqualified, but he represented a huge “get” for the school, so they gave him a free ride as long as he would participate in dance classes.
I was still going to the Hudson School, and Maks and I usually took the train together in the morning. I would hit the streets in Hoboken, and he would continue to Manhattan on a PATH train, switching to the subway at the World Trade Center station to carry on to Brooklyn College. There was a Century 21 store across the street from the World Trade, and on that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my brother, always the garment enthusiast, had a momentary thought that he might go over and check out some fashion.
Maks decided against it, got on the subway, and headed over to Brooklyn. As soon as the train emerged from the tunnel beneath the East River, every cell phone in the car started going off.
Behind him in Lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center was on fire, and the world as we knew it had ended.
My school was located across the Hudson River from Downtown Manhattan, and we witnessed the tragedy in real time, as it was happening. The Twin Towers were right there, only a couple of miles away. Of course the situation was pure mayhem, and the school administrators sent all the students home. My parents were frantic, but thankfully Maks was okay, I was okay, everyone in the core four was safe.
In the aftermath, the whole New York City area was paralyzed with grief and uncertainty. What do we do? Do we go to school and work the next day? Everything normal had crashed to the ground with those towers, the attack on the Pentagon, and the nosedive of Flight 93 into a field in Pennsylvania.
A lot of Russian immigrant families were in computer programming, and many of them worked in the World Trade Center. My father’s first computer programming job had been in the towers. The Twin Towers represented New York City for me, and as far as I was concerned they made up the skyline of the world.
Like a lot of people, after 9/11 happened I went a little numb. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Ballroom dancing had been placed in a harsh perspective, fading into insignificance, yet on the other hand it was all that I had to hold on to. On September 12 Rising Stars reopened, basically because we didn’t know what else to do.
I called my partner, Deena. “Are we practicing today?” The Junior Worlds were a month away, coming up in October. We would be returning to the competition where we had placed thirteenth the year before. As I said, I had changed since then, and definitely the world had changed utterly when the towers fell.
It’s an odd reality, but as trivial as dancing appeared to be in the wake of an enormous tragedy, somehow I became all the more intense in my devotion to it. Dance seemed to me to be some sort of fortress that I could erect against all the evil, all the violence, all the hatred in the world.
I began to train with a vengeance, channeling my anger, fear, and hurt into making my muscles scream for relief. A combination of factors figured in, not only the events
of 9/11, but my responsibilities to my parents and brother, my third-place finishes in recent competitions, and my unyielding determination as an immigrant to do my country proud.
Most mornings before school, my father would take me to a track at a nearby Boys & Girls Club. I’d put on my headphones and listen to Nas’s It Was Written, running laps until I dropped. I would swim twice a week, too, run the other days, and I came to love the burn.
No one else in ballroom dance was doing anything like that. Especially in the United States, dancers weren’t generally into body conditioning. They treated ballroom as a hobby, while I had begun treating it as an athletic enterprise, as well as a lifeline in times of despair. Working out saved me.
There was no accepted exercise regimen for ballroom dancing back then, and I had no one to look to for a blueprint. The more it hurt the more I loved it, because the more I knew I was growing.
“If you cheat on your road work in the dark of the morning,” said the boxer Joe Louis, “you will be found out in the big fight under the bright lights.”
I had tunnel vision, focusing on the belief that hard work would always pay off.
In the middle of October 2001, we headed off to Italy for the Junior Worlds once again: my father, my partner, Diana, and her mom, Yelena, and dad, Valodya.
This time around we didn’t lose our luggage. This time we weren’t rookie outsiders. This time we were ready.
ON THE DAY OF THE COMPETITON, I STOOD WITH DEENA ON THE sidelines, preparing ourselves mentally for what was to come, listening as the opening announcement came over the loudspeaker. “The Junior World Championship is a celebration of international community through ballroom dancing,” said the announcer. “This year we even have representation from the United States of America.”
The night before the contest started, my dad and I had taken a walk around Turin together. It was late, but Italy keeps a late schedule, and there were still people in the restaurants. The tradition before competition was usually very strict. You go to bed early in order to wake up early. There’s a whole schedule that I would normally adhere to. But my father was clearly in a thoughtful mood, so we strolled in the darkness along the river Po.
We didn’t speak much, just quietly enjoyed each other’s company. I’ve always raved about what a great father he is, how supportive and motivating he’d been to me, but in truth he was still awkward as fuck around his sons. We never had the sex conversation, for example, we never had a heart-to-heart about weakness, say, or nerves, or courage. My dad always kept it simple.
“You physically ready? You good? You need anything?”
Our walk that night was not about talking so much as taking in the environment. The weather was warm and perfect, and in Italy the air always smelled like history to me. We both realized the magnitude of the occasion, how close we were to our dreams. There were no fancy speeches. For my father, action always meant more than words. But I’ll take to my grave that near-silent walk along a river in Italy. It was a moment suspended in time.
“Go to bed now,” my father said to me as we returned to the hotel. “You need to get some sleep.”
I woke up ready the next morning. As a pregame ritual, my father always helped affix the competition number to the back of my costume. The numbered placard was made out of paper and when you sweat it could become a little ragged. You attached it to your costume with four safety pins, but not all competitions provided the pins, so Dad always brought his own. He also had clear Scotch tape that he would wrap around the number to make it solid, so no amount of flop sweat would matter.
My dad was a man of consistency and a certain devotion to regimen and patterns. We never compromised. If we had pinned the number on and wrapped it in tape before, we would do that again for every competition. It wasn’t about superstition, really, so much as being in the moment and remembering the details each time I stepped out onto the floor. As a father-and-son duo we weren’t perfect, but the bond between us was unbreakable, because an immense sense of gratitude lay behind all these small, seemingly insignificant actions. The pinning on of the competition number was a pure gesture of fatherly love.
That morning I danced in competition with a little American flag sewn onto my shirt. It really wasn’t something that you do in ballroom dancing, not at all. There was a high risk of offending the traditions and conventions of the dance world. I also had a tracksuit with an American flag on the front and “USA” emblazoned on the back in large letters.
You could say it was too much, that it was jingoistic, but you have to bring yourself back to the period I’m talking about. Many Americans were driving around with the Stars and Stripes on their car antennas. As a display of patriotism, it wasn’t much, but as a country we were desperate for solidarity.
This wasn’t to say I walked around after 9/11 pounding on my chest, shouting, “America! America!” Yes, there was a huge sense of pride in my country, but that pride was there before the World Trade Center was attacked and will be there forever afterward, too.
The tracksuit also helped me feel like an athlete psyching myself up for a big game. When I walked onto the competition floor and warmed up, wearing the flag provided an extra sense of drive. Deena and I already stood out, because at the Juniors that year we were the only U.S. couple in competition. In that sea of tracksuits we were two American flags, floating free.
“We have a really incredible opportunity here,” I told her. “Let’s take advantage of it. We have a chance to do something great. Let’s do it, okay?”
In hindsight I have to second-guess myself a bit. “You little fifteen-year-old shit! Who do you think you are, Russell Crowe in Gladiator?” Actually, that’s exactly who I thought I was.
We went into the competition and started killing it. The dance felt good, and the good vibes only increased as Deena and I survived cut after cut. By the time we got to quarterfinals—the top twenty-four couples—the event had gone into an evening session that started after the same formal parade from the previous year’s competition.
I’m not going to lie, my dad and my partner’s dad might have had a drink or two that evening. As Deena and I walked in the parade, the production values were a little higher, the spotlights were a little brighter, and the audience was a little louder. I was feeling it. But I was also feeling the flag I was wearing.
“Yo,” my cocky fifteen-year-old Brooklyn self said to my partner. “We have fifteen more dances. Let’s do this!”
I could not wait for the music to start. Deena and I killed in the quarterfinals and went through into the semis. Now we had five dances in a row. Ordinarily contestants get to take a break, catch their breath, or talk some strategy. A coach or parent might come over to say, “Hey, you really aced the cha-cha.” My father would never do that, but I would look over at him and he would always throw me a thumbs-up. When I got that thumbs-up I became bulletproof. I turned into a superhero.
The semifinals came down to the top twelve couples, and we were all out on the floor at once, so there was a direct comparison of dancers right next to each other. We started out the semis with the cha-cha and we were both on a roll. We were cruising. We have a chance to do something great. It was just a tiny bit of grandiosity from a young kid, but it had the effect of putting Deena and me on the same page.
Ballroom dance judging was always subjective and open to political influence, and contestants didn’t make the step from the semis to the finals for a lot of different reasons. Shit happened. I didn’t know what kind of political game existed among the judges, but I did know there were two Italian couples who were definitely in the top rank, as well as two Russian couples. I felt as though Deena and I should definitely be up there, too, but I really didn’t know how it would fall out.
But we did end up making the finals, so I was riding on an enormous wave of energy. By this time both our fathers were feeling extra loose and courageous, and in an arena full of Italians these two drunk Russian-American fathers made more noise than an
yone, waving an American flag in pride and intoxication, hand in hand with this symbol of freedom.
The MC introduced the remaining six couples. I experienced mad fears. I had these two inebriated dudes, shouting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and I was afraid we might get disqualified simply because of the antics of our supporters. We performed our bows and right afterward they made an announcement in Italian.
“One last time, please give it up for your finalists and their last dance, the jive!”
Poet that I was, I heard the announcement’s rhythmic energy build and could anticipate the music starting. I began doing the moonwalk in silence right in front of the judges, arriving perfectly in time at the perfect spot. It was fly and it felt good. Even so, I was terrified, thinking my American showboating might offend the international judges.
No one in the audience could help themselves. Every eye in the place turned to us. On the floor stood Alex and his partner, and they had claimed their space, but I passed right in front of them. It was as if they weren’t there. Once I managed to claim the crowd, no other couple in the arena had an audience. The air sort of went out of everything that everyone else was doing, which was a pretty disheartening development for them. It wasn’t just the judges who noticed the shift in attention, but everyone in the hall.
I performed my little moonwalk introduction, and right as Little Richard slammed into the title words to the song “Tutti Frutti,” I jumped into a half split like James Brown, bounced back upright, and started the routine.
It was incredible. The moonwalk and the James Brown split have nothing much to do with ballroom dancing. They are both just subliminal influences for me, because I wasn’t even that much of a Michael Jackson fan as a kid. But that little move, that small, riffy variation, that divergence from the norm, with a melting pot of pop music elements poured into the dance—that was the American in me, and that’s what made the routine unique and special.
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