0202110297
DETROIT FREE PRESS
020211
Monday, February 11, 2002
METRO FINAL
1A
Photo DON RYAN/Associated Press
Bill Johnson won the Olympic downhill at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics.
He nearly died last year attempting a comeback.
American Bill Johnson ruled the ski world after his downhill gold at the
Sarajevo Games in 1984.
MITCH ALBOM FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
SALT LAKE 2002 WINTER OLYMPICS
Copyright (c) 2002, Detroit Free Press
JOHNSON'S ORDEAL: OLYMPIC GLORY TO BROKEN MAN
PARK CITY, Utah -- In the dream, Bill Johnson was flying down another Olympic
mountain. In the dream, he wasn't 40 and slow, he was somehow young and faster
than ever.
In the dream, his wife, Gina, was waiting at the finish line, the wife who had
divorced him because of his frustrating immaturity. When he won the gold medal
she would take him back. That was in the dream, too, maybe the best part.
The money that he had so anticipated -- "millions!" is how he'd answered
reporters back in 1984 when they asked what his gold medal would mean -- that
money came in the dream. And his two sons? They moved back in with him. They
had a nice house again. The bills went away. In the dream, everyone was
cheering for (Wild) Bill Johnson, the way they did before things went bad and
he was jobless and alone, living in an RV.
The dream was what he wanted, so he chased it madly. Never mind that he hadn't
raced in more than a decade. Never mind that nobody comes back to an Olympic
downhill in his 40s.
"He was aiming for Salt Lake," said his stepfather, Jimmy Cooper. "He wanted
to do what he does best.
"Mostly, he wanted his family back."
In the dream, it happened. But dreams are for nighttime. Last March, in the
broad daylight of Whitefish, Mont., Bill Johnson, an aging ex-champion, went
down, face first, at 50 miles an hour.
And the world went black.
Now, 11 months later, here was Johnson at the men's Olympic downhill Sunday.
He had indeed made it to Salt Lake City -- but not the way he planned. And not
as the man he once was.
He was in the stands, wearing a green ski parka with the hood pulled up.
Suddenly, in the middle of a question from a reporter, he pulled the hood off
his head.
"You wanna know why I am the way I am?" he said, his words a bit slow and
foggy. "It's because of this."
He rubbed the scalp beneath his matted blond hair.
"They took a quarter inch of my brain."
He turned.
"Go ahead. Feel it."
The reporter rubbed his head.
"You feel it?" he asked. "Why did they do that?"
A white-haired woman standing next to him leaned in and said softly, "They had
to relieve the pressure."
Johnson nodded. "Yeah. Relieve the pressure."
He sighed.
"This is my mom," he said.
The terrible crash
"WE ARE 15 MINUTES FROM THE START OF THE RACE!" Up near the start hut, the
best and bravest skiers were preparing to barrel down the Grizzly course, a
twisting icy carpet so steep that most of the run would be made not on the
bottom of the skis but on the edges, where the mountain demon lives.
It was an edge that did Johnson in. He caught one during that race in Montana.
Doctors later said the crash was so brutal Bill had bitten his tongue in two
and his lungs had filled with blood. If not for an emergency air tube that ski
medics inserted into his throat, he might have died right there on the
mountainside.
Instead, he lived to be airlifted by helicopter. He lived through tedious
brain surgery. He lived through a long coma. He lived to awaken and,
eventually, when the insurance money ran out, to come home and be with his
mother.
But he was not the same brash man who charmed the ski world at the 1984
Sarajevo Olympics. He was more like a boy. He needed to learn to walk again.
He could only handle fourth-grade math. When they put him in a pool -- he had
been a champion swimmer in high school -- he got in and out, in and out,
because he couldn't grasp what to do in the water.
"He had to learn everything over," his stepfather said. "But he's made great
progress."
He looked over at Johnson, who was now attracting a small crowd. As spectators
asked for autographs, Johnson smiled.
"Do you have a favorite in the race?" someone asked him.
"I have a favorite," he said, haltingly. "My mom is my favorite."
"Do you remember the accident?" someone asked him.
He paused. "I have trouble remembering a lot."
"Do you think it's just as well?"
Johnson's eyes lost their focus. "It's very well. Yeah. Very well."
Bill Johnson was once the heavyweight champion of the Olympics. It should have
been enough. He beat the mountain demon.
But Johnson -- who never won a major race after 1984 -- couldn't shake the boy
inside the man. He got greedy. He got proud. He got married and fathered
children, but never felt obligated to a settled life. Even after a terrible
tragedy, in which his infant son drowned in a hot tub, his attitude did not
change. He began hatching unlikely get-rich schemes, such as day-trading
stocks, or buying an RV and traveling to golf courses in an effort to make the
PGA Tour.
"He wouldn't grow up," his mother, D.B. Johnson, has said.
It cost him friends. It cost him money. It eventually cost him his marriage
and children.
In the end, the mountain demon was all he knew. So he chased it again, hoping
to get the glory thing right the second time around.
"Hey, Bill," came a voice.
"Yeah?" he said, looking around.
"Tommy Moe. Just wanted to say hi. Good to see you."
"Uh-huh. Good to see you."
Moe smiled, but when Johnson didn't seem to register, he walked away. A decade
after Johnson's miracle, Moe came up with his own, winning the Olympic
downhill in Lillehammer, the only other American man besides Johnson to do so.
"It's really sad," Moe said, when he was far enough away not to be heard.
"We downhillers love the danger. But then again, it's ironic he was trying to
come back when he was 40.
"For me, by the time I was 30, I was done with it."
Mountain never loses
"FIVE MINUTES UNTIL THE DOWNHILL BEGINS." You put your life in fate's hands
when you push onto a downhill. Rare is the skier who hasn't had multiple major
surgeries. Many see their careers -- or chunks of them -- stolen by crashes.
Austria's Hannes Trinkl would have been a favorite Sunday, had he not suffered
a fractured skull during a recent training run. Switzerland's Silvano
Beltrametti was paralyzed after a crash in December. Picabo Street, America's
Olympic sweetheart, has been reconfigured more often than a Rubik's Cube.
Bill Johnson is proof that if you keep playing the mountain, the mountain,
like the casino, always wins. His is one of the rare stories in which the
siren call of the Olympics had terrible consequences.
His wife did not come back. The kids visit only occasionally. Johnson stays in
the lower bedroom of his mother and stepfather's home not far from Portland.
Still, somewhere underneath is an iron will. His math and reading have
improved greatly. He can swim and was able to trot with the torch during the
opening ceremonies. He has even been out skiing, more than a dozen times. He
says he skis "fast."
No one corrects him.
At one point Sunday, Bill Johnson reached into a pouch and pulled out the gold
medal from 1984. He held it up as spectators admired it.
"I won this," he said.
"Why did you win it?" he was asked.
"Why did I win?"
He smiled, and his eyes crinkled. "Because I was that good."
People laughed. Johnson laughed, too. This was the setting he had fantasized
about, but not the story. And as younger, healthier Olympians flew down the
hill, risking life and limb for that same small hunk of metal, it is worth
noting that gold alone, while precious, does not make dreams come true.
Only people can do that.
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or albom@freepress.com. Catch "Albom in
the Afternoon" 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760).
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