THE RIVER RAT REMEMBERS Episode 11 Almost a Water Ski Legend

[Guest]

Episode 11 Almost a Water Ski Legend

 

 

 

Donnie Blank was a complex, tragic figure, a fierce competitor who came close to greatness before his skiing career, and then his life, were cut short. I don’t know how we came to be so close. He was older than me and, in many ways, my complete opposite. Somehow the Innocent and the Rouge became fast friends.

 

Of all the oddballs that I met through water skiing, Donnie ranks among the oddest. He was a foolhardy risk taker and loved motorcycles, sports cars, hang gliders and hitting 6-foot jump ramps as fast as he could. He played the lovable clown, perpetually and intentionally goofy. Sometimes his antics were hilarious, sometimes they were inappropriate and made him not so lovable. After completing a jump, he would sometimes flop on his back and ski with his knees in the air while the boat made its turn. One time he swung a bit too wide while doing this and disappeared in the bullrushes. He once rode his Kawasaki dirt bike down the stairs into his basement bedroom. Another time, Donnie got pissed off at his younger brother, drilled holes in the brother’s new slalom ski and bolted it, binders and all, to the bumper of his Austin Healy. At Christmas he would send me a photograph greeting card. In one, he and his buddies were printing counterfeit money and making moonshine. In another, he was sitting on the lap of a department store Santa Claus while flashing a raised middle finger.

 

Donnie’s relationship with his family seemed scripted for a sitcom. I stayed overnight one time at his home in Sharon, Pennsylvania near Sandy Lake where we were attending a tournament. Donnie’s father was a well-respected psychiatrist (!) and a pilot who flew in the D Day invasion. When I arrived at the house, his father was photographing the military academy accouterments of Donnie’s older brother, complete with sword and white gloves. The contrast between the sons, one a spit-and-polish straight arrow, the other a goofball rebel, was striking.

 

Donnie was carefree and lackadaisical about most things, except that when it came to water skiing he was deadly serious. He was an awkward trick skier and tricked only for overall, but he attacked short line slalom with frantic intensity and jumped like a madman. Watching him jump was one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever witnessed. Donnie would take an impossibly wide counter cut and wait and wait and wait. He would turn, rear back and nearly stop the boat. The bottom of his jumpers were lipstick red and from the boat the only thing you saw was a red streak crossing the wake to the base of the ramp, then you heard an explosion and, in an instant, those red skis were high above you, arching through the air abreast of the driver.

 

One night at home, I heard the phone ring about 2 o’clock in the morning. The phone was in my parent’s room and after a few minutes, my father came into my room. “It’s Donnie,” Dad said, clearly annoyed at having been rudely awakened. “He wants to know if you want to go to Petersburg with him for a few days.” That’s how my brother and I, two innocent babes, trained with crazy Donnie at Picture Lake. Donnie’s Austin Healy couldn’t hold all of us and our gear, so we took Big Al’s Chrysler station wagon. We stayed with Charlie Brown (his real name) and had the use of Charlie’s twin-rig Johnson Hydrodyne. That week, Doug learned how to run the slalom course and I ran short line for the first time in my life. If we had had Picture Lake and Donnie Blank more often, we both might have become slalom skiers.

 

I have two recollections of that trip, both classic Donnie: At the local grocery store, Donnie picked up a bunch of grapes and began to eat them as we shopped. When we reached the checkout counter, he handed over what was left of the bunch. Only about a third of the grapes remained and Donnie just gave the clerk a sly smile. She rolled her eyes and said nothing. At the gas station, we had put the empty tanks in the rooftop River Rat cargo box. Donnie rolled down the window and said to the attendant, “Fill up the roof.”

 

We were thrilled a couple of years later when Donnie was invited to the Masters. Donnie could give the top skiers in the world a run for their money and at last he had an opportunity to prove it on the sport’s biggest stage. But in typical Donnie fashion, he crashed his dirt bike a few weeks before the tournament and broke his leg. The photo in The Water Skier showed him in the stands with his leg in a cast. Whether as the result of that injury or a combination of factors, he never regained his place as the top jumper in the East.

 

With Donnie in forced retirement and me in college, we gradually lost contact with one another. Years later, after Susan and I had moved to Florida, we were saddened to hear that Donnie had died in a motorized hang-glider accident in South Florida. Fate had finally caught up with the risk taker. I miss that lovable clown.