We jumped out to a 6–3 lead in the second set, but thanks to a couple of Tian aces, the Chinese women fought back to go ahead, 9–8. The set was nip and tuck from there—tied at 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Kerri crushed the ball or slipped a line shot past the left arm of Wang, who jammed the ball down the line, hit a devastating serve that just bounced right off me, or blocked a Kerri shot. We scored the next two points, making it 17–15, and then Tian called a five-minute medical time-out, which lasted closer to ten minutes. We knew that Tian had a reputation for creating drama in her matches, in the hope of distracting her opponents. She’d asked a trainer to come out onto the court and rub her left forearm and elbow. But her tricks didn’t affect us: We were like two sharks, smelling blood in the water.
When play resumed, Tian hit a dink shot, from right to left, to cut the lead to 17–16. On the next point, Wang tried muscling the ball over on the second touch while falling backward, and the ball fell into the net. We were up, 18–16. The Chinese women weren’t fazed, and they went on to score the next two. Now, the score was knotted at 18–18. A kill by me put us up by one, and it demoralized the Chinese women. An attack error by them made the score 20–18. And finally, I served the ball, China passed and set it, and their attack went over Kerri’s block. I passed it, and Kerri slammed it straight down the center, putting an exclamation point on our victory, on our careers, and on history.
22
DANCING WITH THE STARS
You never know what doors an Olympic gold medal will open.
Never in a million years did I think I’d get asked to be on ABC’s hit TV show Dancing with the Stars. I’d interviewed with the show’s producers a few months before the 2008 Olympics, but I hadn’t heard back until halfway through our competition in Beijing. When they finally called and asked if I’d be interested, I jumped at the chance.
I’ve always loved to dance. I’ve hammed it up on the AVP tour, dancing my way onto the court during introductions or gyrating my hips after emotional points. I’ve also made my grand entrance by dancing my own creation, “The Turtle,” crawling onto the court on my hands and knees, wearing a turtle costume.
After Athens, I was hit with the typical onslaught of media opportunities, awards show appearances, corporate sponsorship gigs, and speaking engagements, but this time around, I wanted to take advantage of post-Olympics experiences that took me out of my normal setting, experiences that challenged me and stretched my limits. Dancing with the Stars was an opportunity that might only come around once in a lifetime. It was something I could tell my kids about one day. So I made the decision to participate in the show and turn down the usual post-Olympic stuff.
Little did I know how time-consuming it would become.
When I flew home from Beijing, the moment I stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, I was introduced to my dance partner, Maksim (Maks) Chmerkovskiy. ABC’s cameras were rolling to capture my reaction. I’d made sure to put on my big Chinese hat and my new Olympic gold medal for the occasion. I’d heard rumors Maks was going to be my partner, but I hadn’t known if they were true. I’d been a huge fan of the show since it had started, and he’d always been my favorite dancer, so I was thrilled when I finally met him. However, I was sorry that I’d flown a million hours, that I had bags under my eyes, that my hair was messy, that my teeth needed to be brushed, and that I desperately needed a shower.
Then the camera crew asked us to do some reshoots.
“Misty, can you come back out again?” they said. “And can you look surprised again?”
That’s show biz.
I rushed home to Long Beach, packed a little bag, and flew to Phoenix, where Matt and the Marlins were playing the Diamondbacks. I threw out the first pitch, wearing my new Olympic gold medal and a Diamondbacks jersey, and Matt, dressed in his Marlins uniform, caught me. I met Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.
Twenty-four hours later, I raced back to Los Angeles to start training with Maks. I immersed myself in dance practice, six to eight hours a day, over the next three days. Then, I was off to the AVP tournament in Cincinnati. Maks went along, too, so we could practice in our free time. He was a huge hit with the ladies. Nobody cared about Kerri and me. All we heard all weekend long was, “Is Maks here?” Well, Kerri and I ended up losing in the final to E.Y. and Nicole Branagh, 19-21, 21-10, 23-25, in an hour and forty-five minutes, the second-longest match in AVP history—our record-winning streak was stopped at 112 matches and 19 titles—and Maks blamed himself for our loss. He thought he’d tired me out with all the hours of dancing. He worried he was bad luck.
I tried to explain to Maks that nobody can understand how physically, mentally, and emotionally fatigued you are after competing in an Olympics, not even a professional dancer. I told Maks if he’d asked me before the Cincinnati tournament if I thought Kerri and I were going to win, I would’ve answered, “Probably not.” We’d just been through one of the most emotional tournaments of our lives, and we hadn’t had a whole lot left to give, on the court or off it. And that wasn’t even taking into account all the training, qualifying, and competing in our two-year buildup to Beijing. Sure, I went into Cincinnati hoping to win, but in the back of my mind, I knew if we lost, it really wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of my volleyball career or my life. You can’t be on top forever. You move on. Or in the prophetic words of Tiger Woods, who texted me after the loss: “START ANOTHER STREAK.”
Now that I’ve got the benefit of hindsight, I know Kerri was already pregnant by the Cincinnati tournament. At various points during that trip, and at other points that fall, I remember her saying to me, “I don’t feel well.” Or, “I’m tired, I’m going back to the hotel.” It just didn’t register that she might be pregnant, that she and Casey already had started working on their gold medal baby in Beijing. (Joseph Michael Jennings was born May 22, 2009.) However, her pregnancy wasn’t the reason we lost.
There are two questions people always ask me about Dancing with the Stars. How much weight did you lose? None. I went into the show in great shape. Although I did get leaner, which I didn’t think was possible. What was the hardest part of the show? Maintaining perfect posture and being light on my feet, especially in high heels.
On second thought, maybe just the high heels, period, were the biggest challenge. I’ve never been someone who lives for fashion or is addicted to shoes, like Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, or even Kerri, who loves to shop. Unlike Carrie and Kerri, I don’t have an affinity for expensive designer shoes like Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, or Jimmy Choo. In fact, my closet looks more like Foot Locker than Neiman Marcus. Having to walk, much less dance, in high heels, day after day, hour after hour, was a huge challenge for me. There’s no way around it: You’ve got to train in high heels, in order for you and your partner to get all of your dance steps down.
At times, I had such nasty blisters, I was wearing Band-Aids, as well as gauze patches and adhesive tape, seemingly all over my feet. The balls of my feet hurt the worst. My knees throbbed. My calves were tight. I was working so many different muscles. It was such a switch, training in high heels rather than in bare feet in the sand or in athletic shoes in the gym. When we started the show, Maks instructed me not to get pedicures because, he said, he wanted my feet to callus. He also told me that professional dancers were notorious for having ugly feet, that the better the dancer, the more beaten up their feet were.
Right from the start, I had a total blast. I loved Oscar-winning actress and comedian Cloris Leachman and her shtick. I hope I’m moving that well at her age—she was eighty-two when we did the show together—or, for that matter, that I’m even alive. Seven-time NFL Pro Bowler and Super Bowl champion Warren Sapp was a crack-up, too. The media kept calling him “a diva,” but I didn’t see it. He was a big teddy bear.
I got the footwork down quickly. However, not thinking about my feet was a true challenge. So was learning to express myself through my face and my arms. Segmenting my body wasn’t a
snap either. As an athlete, I move forward for the ball with my entire body. But as a dancer, I might have to step forward, without moving my entire body forward, so I can begin my next move.
All of our practice sessions were filmed. We had four weeks to learn two dances for the show’s season seven premiere. We learned our first mambo in three days. Then, we learned the fox-trot in three days.
Maks is a very gifted choreographer, and he worked hard to create routines that made me look my best. He’s also a very tough coach, at times even tougher than Dad. Maks saw something in me that I didn’t, and he drove me hard to get it out of me. He hammered home the basics. In some of the video clips of our practices, he looked like an absolute beast, but he pushed because he knew I could be good.
The biggest issue I encountered on Dancing with the Stars was time management. Practice time is based on each contestant’s real-life schedules. Maks and I were working six to eight hours a day, sometimes more, but as far as everybody else, I’m not so sure they were putting in that kind of time. I think some contestants were working two and a half hours a day. As an athlete, if your coach tells you that you have to be in the gym for six, eight, or ten hours a day, you’re going to be in the gym for that amount of time. You’re geared toward putting in a lot of practice time, as well as having somebody tell you what to do. Do I regret the amount of time we put in each day? Absolutely not. Although there never seemed to be enough hours in the day left to eat, sleep, get bodywork, and walk my two dogs. I would have liked to schedule massages and Pilates sessions, but it was impossible. I’d get into the studio in the morning and wouldn’t leave until night time, so it was tough.
The first week of the show, because it was the premiere, we performed Monday and Tuesday. We did the fox-trot to “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love),” and we scored twenty-one points out of thirty overall. Then, we did the mambo to “Black Mambo,” and again scored twenty-one. However, once the show got rolling, we’d perform Monday, with the results show on Tuesday. That night, we were given our dance to learn for the following week. Then, we had Wednesday through Sunday to work on it. Wednesdays, we discussed our costumes, and later in the week, we had fittings. Sundays, we had an hour blocked out to dance on the stage. We also had tanning sessions that day. Mondays, we had our dress rehearsal, and then the show was shot live, at 5:00 P.M., Pacific time.
Costumes are an integral part of Dancing with the Stars, and the designers never put me in an outfit I didn’t like. I was very open to their ideas. They’d always ask me which colors I liked wearing, whether there was a particular style or cut I wouldn’t be caught dead in. I really admired the costume designers, and the hair and makeup artists. They’re incredibly creative. I wasn’t used to wearing a lot of makeup, fake eyelashes, or rhinestones on my eyelids. They’ve got one of the most difficult jobs on the show: They have to re-create your look, right down to the most minute detail, for the awards show the night after your performance. They take lots of pictures of you after you’re all dolled up, so they can do just that. Although I must admit there were many times I looked at myself in the mirror after getting all decked out, and having spent hours in hair and makeup, and I thought, “Wow, I look like a drag queen!”
For those of you who think ballroom dancing is a skill, I can attest to the fact that it really is a sport. It’s athletic. It takes aerobic fitness, power, quickness, stamina, balance, plus discipline, determination, and drive. Professional ballroom dancers put in just as much time as professional athletes. It’s no wonder that in five of the eight seasons of Dancing with the Stars Olympic or professional athletes have won the coveted mirrored ball trophy: Emmitt Smith, Apolo Anton Ohno, Helio Castroneves, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Shawn Johnson. There are three reasons for that. One, obviously, there’s a tremendous amount of footwork involved. As athletes, we have to know, at all times, what our feet are doing. Two, we’re trained to perform, physically, under pressure. Three, we’re relentless. Like I said, athletes are among the few people who, when we’re told to do something, we’ll do it. If you tell us it’s going to take six or eight hours, we’re going to be there for six or eight hours. I just kept going and going and going.
Which is probably why I ended up rupturing my left Achilles tendon the third week of the season. It happened on a Friday evening. All day long we’d been practicing that week’s dance, the jive, an American dance that evolved from the jitterbug by removing the lifts and acrobatic elements. It’s very fast, full of bouncy movement, using the balls of the feet a lot and tons of kicks. We were in the middle of our second run-through in front of the cameras, and I was doing a move where I hopped backward from a jump on my left leg. For the first time in the contest, I was wearing flat tennis shoes instead of high heels, but my calves had felt tight all day. I thought, “Oh, they just need to warm up, and I’ll be ready to go.” I jumped back on my left foot, and I heard a pop, which was loud enough to be picked up by the microphones recording our practice. I asked pro dancer Karina Smirnoff, who’d just come out to the side of the stage with her partner Rocco DiSpirito, if I’d kicked the bottom stair up to the judges’ table.
“No, you’re five feet from it,” Karina said.
I tried to put down my foot, and the floor wasn’t there. I didn’t have an ankle. I didn’t have a foot. I knew instantly I’d torn my Achilles. Karina and Rocco, and the production crew, rushed to elevate my foot and put ice on my Achilles. It didn’t hurt when I did it; my foot went numb. However, once I elevated it, and the blood started pumping, it became really sore. The producers called an ambulance, and I was carted out on a stretcher, for the first time ever in my career. I was transported to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Maks insisted on going with me. He felt terrible, but I felt more terrible for him. The show was over for him.
Several minutes after rupturing my Achilles, I text-messaged Dr. Schobert: I HURT MYSELF, DOC.
In all this commotion, though, I held off calling Matt. It was about 9:00 P.M. Pacific time—midnight in Philadelphia, where he was, having had double hernia surgery two days before. I didn’t want to bother him, plus he’s a worrywart anyway. But I eventually broke down and called.
Then I phoned Dad because I didn’t have a ride home from the hospital.
“What are you doing?” I said, matter-of-factly.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Can you come to the hospital and pick me up?” I asked.
“No, pal, I’m in St. Louis at a wedding,” he said.
“Okay, peace,” I said.
So the show hired a sedan to take me home.
Saturday morning, Dr. Schobert came over to my house, unwrapped my bandage, and examined my Achilles. He ordered an MRI—the MRI facility is closed on Saturdays, but he was able to roust out some of the technicians, as well as a radiologist, all of whom were very accommodating. I know a lot of people think it was my high heels that caused the rupture, that practicing in those shoes had shortened my calf muscles, but Dr. Schobert says my Achilles could’ve gone at any time. He says I could’ve stepped off a curb and kaboom.
Sunday, Dad and Matt both arrived back in Long Beach. Dad recalls the comical scene when they came through the front door to greet me: me on my crutches, Matt bent over due to his double hernia surgery. When we tried to kiss each other, we looked like two old people about ready to fall over into each other.
“I’ve seen dogs kiss windows better than that,” Dad joked.
Two days later, after I appeared on Monday night’s show on crutches to publicly disclose my injury—I vowed to come back in the future and do the jive with Maks—Dr. Schobert performed my surgery, which took about seventy-five minutes. “You really trashed the hell out of it,” Dr. Schobert said afterward. The tendon was stripped from the muscle, he told me, making it difficult to suture. Normally, Achilles tendon repair is tendon-to-tendon.
Of all the injuries I’ve suffered in my lifetime, my ruptured Achilles tendon was the most difficult to rehabil
itate. It takes a solid year to get back into competitive form. The first eight weeks after surgery it’s completely non-weight-bearing on that foot. I felt for Matt because there he was, hunched over, trying to recover from hernia surgery, having to wait on me hand and foot. Our household was the walking wounded. He’d make breakfast and bring it to me on a tray. He’d make me lunch, too. He was able to get around, but when he coughed and sneezed, he was in a lot of pain. But I gave him time off every day, when I swallowed my pain pills and floated off to La-La Land for five or six hours.
For the first eight weeks, I was on crutches, or in a wheelchair or a motorized scooter. The scooter allowed me to be mobile, because there was only so much lying in bed that I could take. That way, when Matt walked the dogs, I could go with them. One day, while I was in a local nail salon having a pedicure, getting half of my toes done—you get a discount when it’s only one leg—a customer sitting at the station behind me recognized me from Dancing with the Stars. Her name was Carla, and she asked me for my autograph. We got to talking about my scooter, and she offered me her Hoveround power chair, a wheelchair that can do 360s in one spot. She’d bought it for her father, but he’d passed away. It was brand new, just sitting in Carla’s garage. It just goes to show you: You never know who you’re going to meet.
While I was in the hard and then the soft cast, I created a little game to distract myself. How long could I grow the hair on my leg before I was forced to shave it? The longest I went was three weeks. It would itch too much. I don’t recommend that game to anybody. The soft cast (a plastic boot that went up to just below my knee) was no picnic either. It had a foam sock inside, which was so hot it made my leg and foot sweat. After a while, it really smelled.
Misty Page 30
