Diana Nyad, the Movie

By Rick Boettger

Diana Nyad came back to town, as well-reported by me and the Editor, ten years after her famous swim to Cuba.  It was both a reflective celebration, and in recognition of an excellent movie just made of her historic accomplishment.  What I wrote before is at this link: https://konklife.com/diana-nyad-10-years-later/

The movie, simply Nyad, is, deservedly, highly reviewed.  Our own Ian Brockway’s review is the most on point, even more accurate than the NYT’s or Ebert’s, at https://konklife.com/tropic-sprockets-nyad/.  So I won’t give an overall review here, but tell you what I learned at her reappearance on our beach, where I showed up and spoke with her, as immortalized by Michael Blades in the accompanying photo.

First point is that the real Diane is even more buff than Annette Bening, who is certainly in line for another Academy Award nomination for her own heroic performance.  At the beach reunion, Diana began the presentation festivities by dancing up to the bandstand, and OMG, does that woman have calfs—they’re like a pro soccer player’s, notably the most calfy legs in sports.  And she’s a good dancer, made it to Dancing with the Stars, among her melange of interesting accomplishments.

The movie is mostly praised for its portrayal of the intensely devoted friendship between Diana and Bonnie, erstwhile lover and lifetime coach and devoted confidante.  Jodie Foster shows her range away from Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, almost showing up Bening, and at least as likely to get a major award.  The real Bonnie is obviously as close to Diana as portrayed in the movie, a little cuter and at least as lively and loving.

The most intense story told by Diana’s team at the beach event was by the young MD who saved Diana from the box jellyfish.  Diana had been viciously attacked on her fourth swim, and most everyone who gets stung NEVER goes back to where it happened.  Instead of giving up, Diana broadcast a plea for defense against the boxes.  Her MD wrote a long treatise back, far better than anyone else’s, and Diana and Bonnie rushed her so hard they finally convinced her to take off from her medical practice to join the long swim prep and event.  She told a harrowing story of seeing one of the ten kinds of Straits boxes coming onto Diana almost within sight of Key West.  She jumped into the water herself, without gloves, and grabbed the damn thing, a small one at a mere handful, and carried it out of the water back to the boat.  With her bare hand.  Which got stung like it was on fire.  Somehow, this didn’t make the movie.

I spoke to Diana before she danced her way to the bandstand, and asked one smart question and made one stupid hypothesis.  The smart, kind of obvious question, asked what other sport or challenge was like what she did, being the only person to make the ridiculously impossible swim trough shark and jellyfish infested waters for 53 hours?  Diana said it wasn’t that special, it was like mountain climbers, those who take Everest.  “We both have to watch the weather, endure the pain, and rely on a whole team of supporters.”  The only thing she found maybe less good about the Everest climbers is that they don’t adequately applaud their sherpas—Diana credits her team repeatedly in her books, the movie, certainly in public at the beach event.

I thought about it, and the Everest climbers are simply not in her league.  First, 800 went last year, almost 6,000 since Hilary in 1953.  That is, they pay around $45,000 to join a herd of fellow-sufferers enduring edema and hypoxia to join a very large club of sherpa-led rich folks.  Diana is in a club of ONE.

A bigger difference is that there are no, for example, snow leopards threatening anyone on Everest.  The only person to swim from Cuba besides Diana relied on a shark cage, which also made the swim easier.  Diana braved not only the sharks, but, as before, the even more dangerous box jellyfish.

Okay, for the first time in Konk Life I’ll admit to something dumb.  I asked Diana if she ever worried her Team felt they were enabling something like an abused spouse, going back to the man who beat her, again and again.   I’d heard that it was so painful for her team, as I wrote in 2013, to see her swollen face and body from the box jellyfish attack, her four times defeat at what seemed to be a Sisyphean task.  She simply politely demurred, and I immediately felt stupid.  The abused wife suffers from an intentional individual.  The sea, the sharks, the jellyfish are simply natural forces of nature, like gravity to a climber.  There was no warped psychology to Diana’s relentless persistence, simply a necessarily monomaniacal superhero who inspired her team much more than she distressed them.

Diana, I am sorry,  I trust you quickly put that bad metaphor out of your mind, bathed in the love of your crowd of adorers on the beach that day.  My further shame was that at merely the same age as her, I had to leave halfway through, with the heat, and knowing I had a 3-mile bike ride home.  How sad to be so lame in the presence of a woman like Diana Nyad, the person I respect most of anyone I’ve met in my life.

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