I am also going to use a teleprompter. But because I tend to read slowly, I have hated them since my days as a broadcaster for ABC and NBC in the 1970s and 1980s. I need to practice, so I discover an application on my iPad that simulates one down to the size of the letters and the speed. I set the iPad on the cushion of a high kitchen chair and then read aloud as it scrolls through the words. I do this dozens of times until I have it down perfectly.
But now that the moment has come…
I feel myself traveling back to fourth grade in Tarrytown, sitting there scared to death with sweaty palms as the teacher walks down the aisle like a prison guard looking for the next victim to read aloud. I can hear the snickers of classmates as I stumble, and I have just gotten used to the fact that it’s Bruce and Bruce is stupid. My elementary school years can be easily summed up: first one picked for dodgeball, first one to sit down in the spelling bee.
I have to fight through it, so I do. I am good at conquering adversity. I did it all my life, although never in a situation such as this.
I no longer see LeBron James or Brett Favre. I no longer see my children or my mother. Once again I don’t see anyone, almost as if someone else is giving the speech and I, too, am a curious observer.
The words come out:
All across this country, right now, all across the world, at this very moment, there are young people coming to terms with being transgender. They’re learning that they’re different, and they are trying to figure out how to handle that, on top of every other problem that a teenager has. They’re getting bullied, they’re getting beaten up, they’re getting murdered, and they’re committing suicide. The numbers are staggering, but they are the reality of what it is like to be trans today.
If there is one thing I do know about my life, it is the power of spotlight. Sometimes it gets overwhelming, but with attention comes responsibility. As a group, as athletes, how you conduct your lives, what you say, what you do is absorbed and observed by millions of people, especially young people.
I know I’m clear with my responsibility going forward, to tell my story the right way, for me to keep learning, to reshape the landscape of how trans issues are viewed, how trans people are treated. And then more broadly to promote a very simple idea: accepting people for who they are. Accepting people’s differences.
This transition has been harder on me than anything I could imagine. And that’s the case for so many others besides me. For that reason alone, trans people deserve something vital. They deserve your respect. And from that respect comes a more compassionate community, a more empathetic society, and a better world for all of us.
I get a standing ovation louder in my mind than the roars in the Olympic stadium when I finished the 1,500-meter run to win the decathlon. It certainly is more important.
I didn’t trip after all.
Chapter Three
Just Take It
L.D. Weldon is picking me up at the airport in Des Moines. I don’t even know what he looks like. He doesn’t know what I look like. How are we going to find each other?
I get off the plane and walk down the stairs. I go into the terminal and look around and feel a little bit like that book about the ducklings in Boston thinking everyone is their mother.
Are you my coach?
Suddenly out of the crowd comes a hand.
Jenner?
Yeah.
Hi, nice to meet you. L.D. Weldon, Graceland College.
How did you know it was me?
I can always spot an athlete.
That’s kind of cool.
Get your bags, Jenner.
I only have two of them. We throw them into the backseat of Weldon’s car for the seventy-five-mile drive to Lamoni.
I can’t pinpoint his age, but it’s obvious his days as a Chippendale—if he ever had them and I kind of doubt he did—are behind him. He has one hand stretched over the back of the seat and the other hand on the steering wheel. He’s looking at me while he’s driving and he’s also talking nonstop. He’s also going about ninety miles an hour.
It is an amazing feat unless you are next to him and just hoping not to die before you even see the college.
L.D. had built a few apartments in a back alley of Lamoni to house Graceland athletes so they could save some money. Anything that is free is a good thing, so I wasn’t about to complain. But I am not sure it would be fair to call them apartments. The entrance is in back through a door with cracks in it so huge you can literally see through it. And when the cold wind whistles through Lamoni, it is like sleeping on the surface of a skating rink. Behind a second door are four or five rooms and a single bathroom. It looks as if L.D. has converted a storage area, and my room is barely big enough to contain my six-foot-two frame. At least there is new paneling.
I unpack, which takes about two seconds—underwear, socks, a few pairs of pants, a thin jacket that soon proves useless in the weather.
I go to my first football practice. Although I have played quarterback in high school, I have also played a lot of other positions—running back, a little receiver. On defense I play safety, and it is my best position. It’s a lot more satisfying to hit than to get hit. I can throw the ball fifty to sixty yards without much problem. The greater question is where exactly I throw it. Receivers, in my experience, are often fleeting objects that suddenly disappear.
But they need a backup quarterback, so tag, I am it. I take a few practice snaps and then I drop back to pass and I throw a perfect bullet—right into the hands of Bob Hutchins, who goes both ways at running back and safety and is the star of the team, for an interception. Hutchins is sailing down the sidelines. I angle toward him and I am quick and I get a clear shot and I nail him.
An assistant coach named Bill Dudek comes running over.
Oh my God. You’re a defensive player! Change his shirt!
So I am moved to safety, a position that much better suits me. I adapt easily to Graceland. My only goal is just to fit in. I am a big man on campus, but a minor one. There is no obligation to show sexual prowess.
We are playing Tarkio. They line up to punt. I am a little bit behind the line, almost like a linebacker. We put a cross-block on to free the middle, and I sail through untouched. I have a perfect dot shot. I am hell-bent. But as I spring up to block the kick my right knee is extended, and one of their players hits me square on in the middle of it. I limp off the field, and I have the sensation that my career in sports might be over. I try to rehab it, but it goes out a second time during a game of catch, and I know I have to do something.
I have suffered medial collateral ligament damage and undergo an operation on January 2, 1969, in Danbury, Connecticut, by Dr. Robert Fornshell. He opens up the knee and puts a staple in to help stabilize it. He wishes me good luck. (I received a wonderful letter from him after the 1976 Olympics in which he said that most of his patients were now dead, so it was nice to see one who was still living and doing well. I, too, was happy about that.)
My knee is placed in a cast for six weeks, and I have already missed four weeks of the second semester when I return to Graceland. I can’t run track, so instead I have to watch everyone else. I am just trying to walk since my knee is horribly stiff from being in a cast for so long. L.D. does most of the rehab—massaging, cold treatments, hot treatments. I lay on a trainer’s table and he forces my leg down and it hurts like nothing has ever hurt before and L.D., being L.D., voices his sympathy in a distinct way:
Just take it.
I was used to the mantra because I had often whispered it to myself whenever my gender issues intensified.
Just take it.
Freshman year becomes a disaster: I have no motivation to stay in school when I’m deprived of the outlet of sports. The only good thing about my knee surgery is that I will most likely flunk the physical if I’m drafted.
I am a wanderer once again, aimless in ambition or pursuit, and already a discernible pattern has emerged—the less focused I am, the less I can grab o
n to something with all my conscious might, the more my gender confusion comes to the surface. I buy a pair of bell-bottom pants, the current style. They excite me with the tight buttocks and pant legs. They are form fitting, or as form fitting as any men’s clothing ever gets. I get a rush, an excitement in wearing them. It’s a silly pair of pants, but that’s how desperate I am to feel something, anything. That’s how bottled up I am, starved for any crumb of what I increasingly know is my true gender.
By now I always have the urge to be myself and cross-dress. But as a student at Graceland I have no privacy. Students and professors are always coming and going, and I still don’t fully know what is going on inside me except for my conviction that something is terribly wrong with me. Maybe I am really screwed up. Please just let it be a phase, because if it isn’t, I never want to face it.
I go back home after my freshman year and work for my dad again. I am thinking more and more that I don’t want to return to college, particularly after I am offered a job at Cypress Gardens, the best waterskiing show in the United States and maybe the world, headquartered in Winter Haven, Florida. I’m now nineteen, so living in Florida and waterskiing for a living does sound pretty good to me.
In the back of my mind I am also thinking about the decathlon, even though I have never participated in one. L.D. has a reputation for training Olympic-caliber decathletes.
I was versatile in high school. My best sport is still the pole vault, even if in my first attempt ever I cleared the height by a mile, then promptly hit the crossbar smack in the face and cut myself. But I was on crappy teams, and the coach would turn to me and ask:
Hey, can you long jump?
Yeah, why not?
Can you high jump?
Yeah, why not?
Can you run out and get me a coffee before the next event cream and extra sugar?
Yeah, why not?
I was always a very helpful person.
Even when I was a freshman L.D. had been planting whispers in my ear about the decathlon. So now I wonder if the best course is to return to work for my father and go back to Graceland in the fall of 1969.
I am staying in Richmond, Virginia, competing in a waterskiing tournament. I have to make a decision. Waterskiing in Florida or going back to college and training for something in which there is no guarantee of success.
I get into my car, a 1956 Ford Fairlane convertible (I wish I had kept that car rather than the accordion). I’m headed to interstate 95 with two choices—head north toward home and college, or head south to Florida. I’m almost at the on-ramps, and I still have not made up my mind. I’m in the right-hand lane to turn north. A car pulls up in the left-hand lane to turn south. If I want to go south, I have to either sharply apply the brakes or try to speed around it. The ramp for I-95 north is wide open, not another car on the road.
I head north.
There are many places in life where you see these crossroads—everybody has them, although usually not in such a literal sense. At the time it doesn’t seem like that big of a decision, but then you look back at it and think, Oh my God, what if I had turned left there?
My entire life would have been different.
I would not have won the Olympics. For better or worse I would not have become an American hero. I would not have gotten lucrative endorsements from major corporations. I would not have had fame and celebrity. I would have been largely anonymous. But I also would have been free of expectation. I would have been far more free to be my authentic self: no one outside of family and a few close friends would have noticed or cared. By going right I certainly prospered in a certain sense. By not going left I failed to prosper at all where it counts the most, to celebrate my difference instead of driving away from it.
After my return to Graceland in 1969 for my sophomore year, L.D. mercilessly bends my ear even more about the decathlon. In my heart I still see the kid who had been the dimwitted dyslexic growing up and loved burying himself in his mother’s closet. L.D. thinks that I have just enough athletic skill to be good. Because he later says that I am not close to the best pure athlete he ever coached. He ranks me fifth. Fifth? Fifth? Had L.D. ever told me that, I probably would have quit, which is why he never told me. But he also later said that when it came to the combination of athleticism and desire, there was no equal. I did have more drive than anyone else. I also had more to prove, maybe because I had more to hide.
L.D. becomes a father figure, not as a replacement for my own father but as an extension of him—wheedling, needling, pushing me to overcome fear, the hovering cloud that for all my outward jock-walk bullshit I am neither strong nor particularly deserving of being strong.
Just drop the damn ski…
L.D. doesn’t leave me alone, talking nonstop in his porkpie hat and oval-rimmed black glasses and coat and narrow tie—for some reason he reminds me of a bobblehead—talking more than any person I have ever met in my life (except perhaps for me).
It begins to make some sense. Sometimes in my head I jot down the number of total points I think I could register in the decathlon, even though there are some events I have never even competed in. It adds up to 7,000, which would be a school record on my first try. I particularly like the number of events. Ten. Ten different events. Ten events to train in any day or every day for as many days as you want: the 100 meters, the long jump, the shot put, the high jump, the 400 meters, the 110-meter hurdles, the discus, the pole vault, the javelin, the 1,500 meters, in this exact order. You can get swallowed up in that. You can lose yourself in that. Whatever thoughts you have inside don’t go away, but they do go numb. The Olympics? Who knows? In finding the drive to do something unimaginable, I am also finding the drive not to do something unimaginable.
The Grand Diversion.
I go home for winter break, and for the first time in my life see a sustained pathway. I am working for my dad to make a little money, and one day there is an emergency that brings me back to my other reality in which it’s time to stop the fantasy and get to work.
The top of a tree on Bantam Lake in Connecticut has broken off. It is hanging on the limb below and has to be removed before it falls onto several high-tension electrical wires. A co-worker and I drive out to the site. It is about zero degrees outside with a good twenty-mile-per-hour wind whipping off the lake.
The treetop is high in the air, dangling from the limb. These electrical wires are big boys—about three quarters of an inch thick. You get close to them and your hair kind of stands on end. Below the tree is nothing but rock wall. My dad goes out there with us. He tells us to cut down the treetop, and that’s pretty much it. He has other jobs to attend to.
Okay…
I climb the tree and I am freezing my ass off. All of the weight of the treetop is on this one limb that could snap at any second. Normally I would try to position in above the limb to have a place to support my weight, then use a saw to take the limb down. But because the treetop has snapped off there is no up above. I tentatively step out onto the limb, wearing a safety harness. I can see that this is ridiculously dangerous. It reminds me of my dad yelling at me to drop the damn ski. I was scared but did not want to disappoint him.
However…
I’m thinking to myself that I have the possibility of excelling in the decathlon. I am convinced now that I have an affinity for it. I want to train for it, for the first time in my life push myself beyond what comes naturally. I’ve got other things to do besides stepping out onto a limb that might snap. I don’t want to trim this tree. I don’t particularly like trees. I really don’t like climbing trees when it’s Siberia outside in eastern Connecticut.
The saddle is attached to a rope, so it’s easy for me to zip down. I go to my co-worker and tell him it’s silly and I’m freezing to death and he should go do it. He looks at me like I’m crazy. So we go to the truck and turn the heater on and continue the discussion.
I ain’t going up there.
I’m not going up there, either.
; We are satisfied with our decision when all of a sudden my dad drives up. I roll the window down.
What are you guys doing?
Dad, I got up there. There’s no safe place to cut the limb. It’s freezing cold, that branch could break off easily, and you have nothing but high-tension wires and rock wall below it. I don’t like it. I’m not doing it.
The co-worker chimes in:
I ain’t doing it either.
My dad looks at me:
Don’t do this to me.
Dad, you’re not going to convince me. This is a scary one, okay?
Don’t do this to me.
Silence…
He grabs the rope that is still attached to the tree in his jacket and tie. He shimmies up with two hands as high as he can in his jacket and tie. He balances himself on the limb in his jacket and tie. He takes the saw and perfectly drops the pieces in between the electrical wires in his jacket and tie. He shimmies down the rope hand over hand in his jacket and tie. He doesn’t say a word in his jacket and tie. He gets in his car and drives away in his jacket and tie.
I do think now about why my dad kept saying “don’t do this to me.” It may have been my defiance, which given past history was something he hated. Or the realization that I was never going to work in the tree business, not that that’s what he had in mind. Maybe he thought I was cowardly. But I was also saying to my dad:
Please don’t do this to me.
You have to let me live my life. Whatever it is and wherever it goes. I need to do something that totally preoccupies me, removes from my mind what is churning inside. I have never competed in a decathlon.
I may not be even good.
But I am going to try like hell.
Chapter Four
The Secrets of My Life Page 6