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Post by mtnme on Feb 12, 2009 17:22:53 GMT -8
Broken Home, Broken Back, but Skating Still A Mother's Love Sustains Leveille
By Amy Shipley Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 8, 2006; E07
TURIN, Italy, Feb. 7 -- Somehow, sweet memories remain from those days. Before U.S. Olympic speedskater Ryan Cox broke his back, and after his mother had endured a bitter divorce, the two spent weekends cleaning mobile homes in Dawsonville, Ga., at $25 a shot. His mother already was working two jobs, one as a cashier at Home Depot, but there wasn't enough money to go around. Cindy Leveille remembers the surge of panic she felt when she saw just $500 in her bank account.
So she and her son, then 16 and a promising in-line skater, put on jeans and old shirts and took brooms and mops and buckets and rubber gloves, and they holed themselves up in other people's bathrooms and kitchens every Saturday wondering how they had gotten to that point. Sometimes the heartbreaking hilarity of the scene would hit them, and they would have to rest on their broomsticks, laughing so hard they cried.
"I think we held each other together," he said. "I don't think I held her together any more than she held me together."
Five years later, in a Gainesville, Ga., courthouse, Charles Ryan Cox legally changed his name to Charles Ryan Leveille (Lev-ee-AY). His mother stood by his side, tears streaming down her face, when he explained to a judge why he wished to give up his father's surname to take her maiden name, determined to show how much he appreciated her sacrifices in the most powerful way he could.
"I did it to honor her for everything she's done for me," he said of that day last May. "She's the strongest woman I've ever met. . . . She got me through everything."
"The judge," Cindy Leveille said, "was blown away."
When her son found out he made his first Olympic team, in team pursuit, during a closed-door meeting on Dec. 31 in Salt Lake City, he asked a roomful of U.S. Speedskating officials if they could please, for just one minute, hold that thought. Then he hastily dialed his mother's number, whispered the good news (which elicited a scream) and hung up.
There would be no such call to his father, Jimmy Wayne Cox. The two lost touch soon after the divorce in the spring of 2000.
"My dad faded out of my life," said Leveille, now 22. "He didn't support me or my skating career. . . . He's kind of gone off the face of the earth."
Cox, a dental technician in Marietta, heard of his son's name change through his daughter Jennifer, who has kept her old name and still sees her father occasionally. During a recent interview, his voice choked with sobs, he said it "broke his heart" to learn of his son's feelings about him. He said he decided to stay home from the Olympics because he feared he would be a distraction.
"I'd love to go to Turin but I'm afraid it would, if he knew I was there, take away from his performance," he said. "I'm about to cry now because I would love to be there but I don't think it would be good for him.
"There's no way in the world -- I'm pretty emotional -- I wouldn't want to hurt his chances at all. . . . I am so proud of Ryan. I don't know how even to say how proud I am. . . . I love him and want to see the best for him no matter what went on."
No one -- not Cox, his son or Cindy Leveille -- wished to discuss everything that went on. All agreed that Cox's drinking played a part, though he says he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for eight years in the past. Cox contested the divorce with such vehemence a restraining order was granted. The relationship between father and son deteriorated so rapidly that they "had a knock-down, drag-out [fight] one day," Cox said. "I'll never forget it; I'll never forgive myself for it."
Leveille said he was so traumatized after one such meeting that he went to the hospital hyperventilating and with spasms in his back. But his relationship with his father, he said, wasn't always characterized by conflict. He said he has fond memories of water-skiing on the lake behind the family's old house, skating, playing ball with his dad. "He was," Leveille said, "my childhood hero."
Said Cindy Leveille, "He loved [the kids] both so much, but it did decline, and it was through drinking that it declined."
Cindy Leveille, who did not work during most of her children's youth, kept the house after the divorce. Her daughter said she remembers that period for her mother's absence: She always seemed to be at work. Cindy Leveille said alimony payments from Cox inevitably came late; Cox contends he paid $3,000 a month to ensure his family was taken care of.
There is no dispute about one thing: It was Cindy Leveille who ensured that her son's promising skating career would not go by the wayside.
"She just made it happen," he said. "She never let me miss a race."
Already close, the two saw their relationships strengthen through their travels and travails.
"He was very attuned to what I was going through," Cindy Leveille said. "I was upset and he was upset."
Cox said he has some regrets about his behavior and choices but blames his ex-wife in part for the soured relationship with his son, adding: "I drink some. I'm not going to tell you a lie. I still drink, but I'm not a drunk."
Cindy Leveille said she tried to be honest with her children about what was going on so they would understand. She consulted both before deciding to go ahead with the divorce.
"It's a bad situation," she said. "I don't want to see it get any worse. [Cox] is trying to get on with his life. . . . I hate to pour salt in the wounds. He was there when Ryan needed him at a young age."
But by the time his son turned 16, Cox was gone, part banished, part vanished. As Leveille's life twisted and turned, it was his sister and mother -- mostly his mother -- to whom he desperately clung. Hoping to make the Winter Olympic team, he gave up his career in in-line skating in 2003. He joined a short-track speedskating program in Huntington Beach, Calif., and got immediate results. His success convinced him he could make the world championship team, and so he planned to compete at the 2004 U.S. championships. A week before the event, however, he fell on the ice, slid into a wall and broke his back.
He wore a body brace from his neck to his pelvis for four months. His doctor told him he came within an inch of paralysis. While his mother and her six brothers nursed his body and spirits, his father received word of the injury from Jennifer. The news, he said, hit hard. He, too, had endured a broken back.
"I sat on the side of the road when I heard about it," Cox said, "and cried for an hour."
When Leveille returned to short-track skating, he wasn't the same. He had won a place at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs because of his progress before the injury, but he never settled in comfortably. His back remained so inflamed it took him 20 minutes to get out of bed in the morning. Fearful of another calamitous injury, he competed hesitantly, poorly. He felt like an interloper among the more experienced skaters.
"I didn't have one ounce of fun there," he said. So he quit. He went home. He changed his name. He planned to attend college, moving to Knoxville, Tenn., where he took a job as a waiter hoping to win admittance -- and financial aid -- to the University of Tennessee.
But a former coach at the training center, Tony Goskowicz, moved to Milwaukee and prodded Leveille to join him, insisting he should consider long-track speedskating, which involves skating against a clock rather than other competitors. Leveille was skeptical, but he agreed, flying to Milwaukee on a round-trip ticket whose return he never used. He fell in love with the sport again and couldn't leave. Eight months after the move, he made the Olympic team.
Along the way, Goskowicz noticed something unusual about his talented student, besides the fact he transitioned quickly from one sport to another. Leveille constantly kept in touch with his mother. There were phone calls after breakfast, before taking the ice for practice, from restaurant tables, from the car, at night before going to sleep.
Cindy Leveille estimated that she and her son talk five to six times every day. She will be in Turin, watching from the stands when her son competes. For her, the Olympics will be a dream come true.
For Cox, who hopes to find the team pursuit on television, it will be something less.
"God knows I'd love to sit there and watch him skate," he said. "His dad's behind him 100 percent."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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