Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  DAD: I don’t really believe in motivating a child. Enabling, that’s a different story. Motivation has to come from within. What do I mean by that? Well, if you’ve got a truly motivated person, he or she will come to a thing on their own. They’ll take it on themselves and do what needs doing. They don’t have to be coaxed or prodded. Having been a CEO, having worked with a lot of young people over the years, I’ve seen the kind of success that happens when you have that wonderful combination of intellectual capability and emotional and passionate desire. I don’t care where you are in a corporate setting, whether you’re a marketing person or a warehouse person or a general manager, whenever I’ve seen those traits come together I would see the best of class. So that was my mind-set when Missy started swimming. We’d talk to other parents at meets, and listen to how they’d have to chase their kids to make it to practice, and D.A. and I would flash each other these looks. It’s like they were talking a whole other language. You’ve got to picture it. Colorado, first week of January. It’s 4:00 A.M. There’s six inches of fresh snow. Missy’s got practice. So what’s our role? To get her up and out of bed? To motivate her? Not exactly. Oh, sure, we’d be up and at it. D.A. would be downstairs in the kitchen, getting started on a full, nutritional, carb-loaded breakfast. After practice, there’d be another big meal, filled with protein. And me, before Missy got her license, I’d be up walking our dog Ruger, scraping the snow from the windshield, warming up the car. It’d be pitch-black outside, and we had to head out to some high school or rec center twenty miles away in the snow, in the cold. So we’d be up, we’d be getting ready, but we wouldn’t be getting Missy ready. No, that was on her. Always, it was on her. Once she got out of bed, we were there to feed her, to drive her, to enable her. And did she ever once miss a practice? Was she ever even late for a practice? Do you really need me to answer?

  They were pretty smart, my parents. Really, they’re the smartest people I know. But a big reason for their smarts in this one area was the fact that they’d come to parenthood after they’d been together a good long while, after they’d each built and nurtured successful careers, after they’d surrounded themselves with successful, striving colleagues who each had their own experiences and approaches. I’m repeating myself, I know, but it’s an all-important point. My parents had been through a lot by the time they’d had me, so they could take on their new roles as mom and dad as adults. They knew how the world worked. They knew what it took to be successful. And, just as important, they knew what it was to be disappointed, to set a goal and rise to meet it, to set off on a shared journey and maybe double back a time or two before they finally got where they were going.

  Instinctively, they knew the way to get me out of bed each morning was to leave it to me to get out of bed each morning. And I did.

  Years later, I heard a great line from my trainer Loren Landow that reminded me of my parents’ approach. We were talking about another athlete who couldn’t seem to get it together to get out of bed each morning and make it to practice, so Loren said, “I guess he likes the feel of his pillow more than he likes the feeling of success.”

  Loren’s got this great way of putting things, and here he really hit home—in more ways than he knew.

  How many of us know the full story of what our parents’ lives were like before we were born? What their parents’ lives were like? We know what has been handed down to us, what we’ve gathered from scrapbooks and old photo albums, but that’s where it ends for a lot of us.

  Me, I took in as much as I could, and this is what I’ve pieced together over countless dinners and car rides and late-night chats over cookies and milk. When you’re an only child, you spend a lot of one-on-one time with your parents—or, in our house, one-on-two time. Really, it sometimes felt like I was being double-teamed! That’s how present and in-my-face and wholeheartedly available my parents were, and in a good way! I was too young to realize that our family moved to a different rhythm than most other families in our neighborhood. I only knew what I knew, right? But as I got older, as I set off and made all these new friends through swimming, through high school, I began to see that we were cut a little differently.

  I guess the best way to share how things were growing up with my parents is to introduce you to them, to let you see how they grew up, because it was through these formative influences that they came together to raise me. Let’s start with my mother—she had what they used to call a hard-knock life, like in the song from Annie. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her father was an alcoholic, going back to his time as a radio operator in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He’d lied about his age in order to enlist—he was just seventeen! And to hear my mother tell it, he started to drink in order to keep pace with the older, wilder men in his unit. Plus, it was a pressure-packed assignment, so drinking was a kind of shared release. Only he didn’t handle it all that well. While the other guys found a way to set their drinking aside and get their jobs done, my grandfather became more and more dependent on alcohol. It was like fuel to him, my mother always said. It kept him going, and by the time he met and married my grandmother it was a part of his routine. He’d started out in school—he was studying to be a doctor—but the drinking got in the way. He ended up driving a taxi.

  Here, I’ll let my mother tell the rest of her story herself, because I only know these bits and pieces in this once-removed way.

  MOM: My parents fought constantly. I found out much later that my father was abusive. He never hit me or my younger sister, Cathy, but my mother had a hard time. We lived with my grandparents. My grandfather was an old country doctor in the Depression, so he never got rich. We had no money. His patients used to give him a chicken in exchange for his services, or a bucket of eggs. This was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and this was just how things were. My grandmother was a wonderful woman, but she had a drinking problem, too. I didn’t know this until I was much older, but she used to do a lot of drinking with my father, and the two of them would just go off. They were always having these wonderful parties at the house. My grandmother used to play the piano and sing, and what struck me as a child as a harmless bunch of parties was probably a series of wild nights with my father and grandmother a little out of control. Eventually, my mother did something about it. She was tired of the abuse. She was scared. My father was always getting rough with her, hitting her. She turned to her boss and confided in him. They ended up having an affair, and in those days you didn’t commit adultery. In Halifax, in the 1950s, it was somehow considered worse than my father’s drinking and abusive behavior. It was actually grounds for divorce, and the way things worked out, they were both found to be unfit parents. I was just six years old, way too young to understand what was going on, but it ended up that my grandparents got custody of me and Cathy. We never really saw my mother after that. My father still lived with us. He continued to drink. He’d be sober for a while, but then he’d just go off. It was no way for us kids to live, but it was the only way we knew.

  I knew only parts of my mother’s story before I sat down to write this book, because she never really talked about her childhood. She was the kind of person who focused on the present and planned for the future. The past was the past and there was nothing she could do to change it—and besides, she always said that her life didn’t truly start until she met my father. That happened when my mother was a senior in high school and my father was a senior in college, but I’ll get to that later.

  My eyes fill with tears now when I hear my mother talk about her childhood or read what she’s written about it. It’s difficult to think of what my life was like at that age, compared to how she grew up. It’s so incredibly sad—my heart breaks for the little girl my mother used to be. But then it also fills, because if she hadn’t been strengthened by such a difficult childhood I don’t know that she would have grown to become such a strong, accomplished woman. And, in turn, that she would have had the tools to raise a strong, accomplished daughter. />
  After her parents divorced, Mom didn’t really see her mother. She died when my mother was just sixteen. Mom told me she went by herself to the funeral home, to see her mother one last time, to say good-bye, to forgive her and to let her know she was okay. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, but out of that difficult childhood my mom found a precious gift—a lifelong relationship with her sister, Cathy, my auntie C.J. We’re all super close, and a big reason for that is the relationship they shared as kids. Their grandmother died when my mother was thirteen years old, so Mom became the woman of the house. Her sister was nine. Mom remembers that it was just before Christmas when her grandmother died, and she had to pull a cookbook off one of the kitchen shelves and figure out how to make Christmas dinner for the family.

  By the way, my mother’s real name is Dorothie Ann—everybody just calls her D.A. That started when she was about a year and a half old, when somebody pointed out that the family now had another D.A., because she had a great-uncle named David Andrew. So from that moment on, his nickname became hers, and she always joked that if she ever heard her full name when she was a kid she knew she was in trouble—kind of the way I always felt when I heard one of my parents call me Melissa.

  Mom did the wash, did the dishes, looked after her sister. She even tried to teach my aunt Cathy the facts of life, but that didn’t go so well. Mom ended up taking her to see a family friend, who happened to be a gynecologist. That turned out to be an eventful doctor visit—but I’ll get to that later, too. First I want to tell how my parents met, because I’m a die-hard romantic and could listen to or tell love stories all day long if I had to. They were on a double date with other people. Mom’s date was the captain of the soccer team at Saint Mary’s University, an all-male Jesuit school in Halifax where my dad played football. Dad’s date was his girlfriend at the time, but they weren’t really a good match, at least, according to Mom. To hear her tell it, this girl just wanted to dance all night, and while she was out there on the dance floor my parents got to talking, and when Mom went home that night she told her sister she was in love.

  The conversation went something like this:

  “I met this fantastic guy.”

  “What do you mean? You have a great boyfriend.”

  “But I’m not in love with him.”

  “Well, that’s okay. Maybe that will come later.”

  “No, I think I’m meant to be with somebody else.”

  “Somebody you’ve already met?”

  “I think so. It’s his friend. We were on a double date. I know we’ve just met, but I think I’m really falling for him.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Aunt Cathy must’ve been confused (who wouldn’t have been?!), but there’s one thing you need to know about my mother—when she sets her mind on a thing it’s as good as done, and here she’d set her mind on my father. Trouble was, he was in his senior year, and he was heading off to Toronto that week to try out for the Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. She’d known him only a couple of hours, and she really, really wanted things to go well for him, but she knew if he made the team she might never see him again. She was torn.

  This is probably a good spot to introduce my father, who, in a lot of ways, had his own hard-knock childhood. He came from a big family in southern Ontario, in a little town called Saint Catharines, which was a company town back then. Everyone in Saint Catharines worked for General Motors, to hear my father tell it. “It was all baseball caps and pickup trucks,” he says, of the way he grew up. His father was an electrician, and for a while he had his own firm, but he ended up going bankrupt and bouncing from job to job. The family moved around a lot—more and more, as my father got older. Dad went to four different high schools, which, as a football player, was especially difficult. It’s tough enough being a high school athlete, trying to win a spot on the varsity team, and you’re not just out for a spot on the team but a meaningful role. To have to do this four years in a row is hard to imagine. But my father always says you have to play the cards you’re dealt, and this was the hand he was playing. First in Ontario, then up to Quebec City, then over to Montreal, and back again to Ontario for his senior year. And then, of course, he went to college and had to fight his way onto yet another team.

  He was the oldest of four children and the second oldest of twenty-three grandchildren. His uncles were all welders, plumbers, electricians. They were blue-collar tradesmen, up and down the line, but Dad was determined to go to college—and he did, the first in his generation to do so. And yet for all his accomplishments as an athlete, my father never really had any support in this area. His father never went to any of his games, and when he did offer up a football-related comment or bit of insight it came in the form of criticism.

  “He was a hard guy,” Dad always said of my paternal grandfather. “He never really took an interest in my interests, other than sports, because my brothers and sister were so much younger. With them, he would sometimes make an effort. With me it was always, ‘Dick, get to work.’”

  There was abuse in my father’s childhood as well, most of it verbal, most of it visited on my father. Apparently, my grandfather softened as he and his kids got older, and Dad got the worst of it. His father was always after him to stand up for himself, to settle disputes with his fists—something my father could never do. He might have been a football player, but he’s a gentle soul. Still, his father rode him. Once, two of Dad’s friends buzzed by his father’s truck so fast, so close, they nearly forced my grandfather off the road, so he went back to the house, grabbed my father, and drove him to the house where the two friends had driven. Then my grandfather turned to Dad and said, “You’re not getting back into this truck until you kick the heck out of those boys.”

  Dad had no intention of kicking the heck out of anybody, least of all his friends, so he caught heck for it instead.

  Money was tight. When he was old enough to realize what was going on, it felt to Dad like his family was living day to day, paycheck to paycheck. My grandfather put him to work as soon as he could get him a decent job. At thirteen, Dad worked construction. In high school, he worked on the Saint Lawrence Seaway canal system, earning $2.50 an hour tying up ocean freighters.

  All along, the money Dad earned was meant to help his family pay the bills, and when he graduated his father told him he would have to start paying for his room and board. I suppose my father was expecting this, but it must have been a shock to hear it in such plain terms. By this time, Dad had squirreled away about $200, which he figured would be just enough to get him through his first semester of college. He’d been talking with the Saint Mary’s coach, but there are no football scholarships at Canadian universities, so he had to scramble to get a $400 student loan to help cover the rest of his tuition. Of course, he still had to find a way to cover his room and board, but his plan was to just get himself to school and worry about the rest of it once he got there.

  This part of my father’s story always spoke to me, because it says a lot about the kind of young man he was, the kind of husband and father he’d become. The takeaway for me was that things always have a way of working out. In my short time on this planet, I’ve found that this is a helpful approach. It’s a way of looking at the world I’ve come to admire. What’s the point in stressing about a situation as you lead up to it? All you can do is all you can do, right? The lesson here is to put yourself in a position where opportunities might find you, where good things might come your way—because, hey, a lot of times they will. On the other hand, if you avoid those tentative moments, if you shrink from situations where you can’t be certain of the outcome, if you take yourself out of the game before the game is truly over, you’ll always come away empty-handed. It’s like that famous Wayne Gretzky line, about missing 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. So why not take the shot? If you don’t, you’ll never be in just the right spot at just the right time, which might just
be where you were meant to be all along.

  Somehow, Dad got it in his head that all he needed to do was get to campus, fight his way onto the football team, find a way to pay for his first semester’s tuition, and everything else would work out. And, somehow, it did. Food turned out not to be an issue during football season, because the team took care of that, and Dad made sure his pockets were big enough to take home an extra roll or a banana or whatever else he thought he’d need to help him make it to the next meal. So that took care of his board costs. The room was a whole other story—and it’s probably best to let him tell it:

  DAD: I ended up staying with a buddy in a basement apartment. It was one room with a coal stove and one double bed. There was just a thin wall separating our place from the other basement apartment, which was rented to a sketchy woman. There was one shared bathroom, down the hall, but I wasn’t about to use it. Whenever I had to go to the bathroom, I’d walk three blocks up the street to the Lord Nelson Hotel and use the facilities there. Oh, we’d use the bathroom down the hall if we could go standing up, but we wouldn’t sit down. That was where we drew the line. We were both football players, both over two hundred pounds, but we found a way to make it work, even with that one bed. It got a little tricky, though, when football season ended and we weren’t getting food from the college. This meant a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, which in those days we could get for about thirty-nine cents for two boxes. We’d buy a month’s worth, and then add ketchup or whatever we could find to help change the flavor. My roommate, Garrie, and I, we fell into this nice routine, for the most part. Once, though, we got our signals crossed in a way that led to one of Missy’s favorite stories. I love telling it, because it makes her cringe. As setup, I should tell you that we used to use this stuff called Tuf-Skin before our games and practices. Basically, it was this sticky glue we applied to the skin so that we could tape our ankles and keep the tape in place. Naturally, before you put the Tuf-Skin on, you had to shave, and this wasn’t the most appealing chore in the bathroom down the hall, which we shared with our sketchy neighbor and her revolving door of clients, so a lot of times we’d just pull out a pot and do it in our kitchen. So this one time, I was shaving in the kitchen, rinsing off the razor and the shaving cream in the pot of hot water, going about my business. And then, being a single guy, being an idiot, I just left the pot to soak in the sink when I was finished. I didn’t think to tell Garrie, and for his part, him being an idiot single guy, too, he didn’t think to look too carefully when he came home the next day and decided to make some macaroni and cheese. He just dumped out the water I’d left to soak and boiled a new pot, and a couple minutes later I saw him gagging on his first spoonful, like a cat spitting out a hairball. That’s when I realized what had happened. He said, “What’s all this hair doing in here?” And I said, “Oh, I was shaving my ankles.” And then he let fly with a string of curse words I won’t repeat here, but you get the idea.