Keim Finds Peace of Mind, Diving Success

FEDERAL WAY, Wash. —  Jenny Keim started diving when she was 6 years old. She is 22 now and pretty sure that from the time she was about 6 1/2, she had only one identity.

“For as long as I can remember,” she said, “I was known as Jenny Keim, the diver.”

She was speaking after she had qualified for the 2000 U.S. Olympic team by winning the 3-meter at the U.S. diving trials Wednesday night. She dived with both precision and a joyous exuberance that comes from a woman who has found peace. She has found peace because she is no longer Jenny Keim, the diver.

“I go to the University of Miami and I’m majoring in political science,” she said.

This is the first time in her life she has gone to school with other people. To accommodate her diving, she had been home-schooled all through grade and high school. No playground dodge ball games or trading an apple for a cookie at lunch. No proms or sitting in the stands and rooting for her classmates, no huddles in the library with friends trying to decipher a calculus problem, no giggling in the girls’ room about boys or teachers or life. There were lessons at home and there was diving.

She made the 1996 Olympic team. She finished ninth in the 3-meter and didn’t smile much back then. Other divers found her aloof. Outsiders noticed a young girl who didn’t enjoy things, who didn’t seem to have an ounce of fun at the Olympic trials or even at the Olympics.

There is a 2000 version of her at these Olympic trials. Her name is Erica Sorgi. She is 17 and while Keim was talking about how getting an “A” at Miami is the coolest thing ever, how she has a great boyfriend and a group of pals who just know her as the person who sits next to them in poly sci, Sorgi was fleeing from the Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center in tears.

Sorgi, from Mission Viejo, has alternated between regular school and special classes taken at home. She has moved away from Mission Viejo and lived with someone else’s family in Orlando, Fla. She has faced the scrutiny, and the jealousy and the whispers about who does she think she is after producers of the Tom Cruise movie “Jerry Maguire” used Sorgi in an opening scene. “Erica Sorgi--you’ll see her at the next Olympics,” was the line.

But maybe you won’t.

She finished 12th in the 3-meter trials. She didn’t hit, not really hit, any of her final five dives Wednesday night. She dropped from seventh place after the semifinals to last among the 12 finalists. She cried and went into a bathroom to compose herself then cried again. There was a look in her eyes Wednesday night, a look no 17-year-old should have. She looked sad and lost. One friend said Sorgi was embarrassed, that she felt she had let down people. Who? Everybody, the friend said.

After the 1996 Olympics, Keim quit diving. Never did she think she would be an Olympian again.

“Pretty much, I sat on a couch for a year,” she said. “I finished up credits and got my high school degree and watched a lot of TV and didn’t do much else. I sure didn’t expect to be here right now or to be diving again.”

Her diving, though, could get her something more important than another medal or another newspaper clipping. “I found out I could get a scholarship to Miami,” she said. “I decided to try it.”

She was an NCAA champion on the platform this year.

“That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she said.

What she found at Miami was a coach, Randy Ableman, who didn’t push and yank and tug her away from the rest of life. Ableman wanted her to go to parties, to, as he said, “Have a life.”

Sorgi took two months off this winter. But how do you take off a year when the Olympics have arrived, the Olympics where you are supposed to win a medal? That’s what everybody has said about her since 1996. Maybe no one should have expected a 13-year-old to say no when a family friend mentioned to Sorgi she might have this bit part in “Jerry Maguire.” But maybe someone should have said no for her.

How does an unhappy 17-year-old say “I quit,” when the one big goal she has had in life seems so close? But maybe somebody should have urged her to say no this time.

Like Keim, Sorgi has a college diving scholarship. She is supposed to go to Stanford next year. Maybe she can look at Keim and learn something. Maybe Sorgi can see her way clear to grabbing time for herself, can be as happy with a well-written term paper as a ripped inward 2 1/2, can find herself some friends who never saw the movie “Jerry Maguire” and who never went headfirst into a pool.

“For so long,” Keim said, “I was so afraid of failing. Diving was all I had. If I didn’t win, I was a failure. The person I am now is totally different from the person I was four years ago and the person I am now is so much happier.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.