DaytonDailyNews.com

For years you saw him on television, part of that famed thrill-of-victory, agony-of-defeat introduction to ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Right there with that crashing Slovene ski jumper was Stivers High's Tom Gompf, diving off the towering cliffs of Acapulco and — because of his own precarious path and the angle of the camera — he seemed headed for certain disaster as he disappeared behind the jagged rocks.

"I made it," Gompf said with a laugh Tuesday afternoon from his Plant City, Fla., home.

But then what would you expect? One way or another, he's beaten the odds his entire life.

• At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, where he was way back in 18th place after the preliminary round of the platform diving competition, Gompf then hit two of the most difficult dives of the competition and skyrocketed to a bronze medal.

• Less than a month after the Games, Gompf, a captain in the U.S. Air Force, was piloting a C-130 Hercules assault transport from his Philippines base into Vietnam on the first of what would be hundreds of combat missions. Along with nearly 1,000 sorties inside Vietnam — moving everything from troops to supplies and bombs — his plane often got shot up, but never came down.

• Yet for what may be his most remarkable turn-the-tables performance, you need to come back to that first day in 1952 when he walked into Stivers High.

Along with being a budding gymnast specializing on the trampoline, he planned to be a competitive diver. Never mind that the Tigers had neither a gymnastics team or a swimming and diving team. Nor did the school still have a pool. The one that once had been in the basement had long before been drained, boarded up and turned into a girls' gymnasium.

Representing Stivers High — and downtown Dayton's Central YMCA — he won five national YMCA diving titles, the national AAU junior national diving title and, with classmate Jack Ryder and converted football and basketball coach Joe Sullivan, helped turn Stivers into a gymnastic power in Ohio.

Soon he was one of Dayton's most highly recruited prep athletes ever. Michigan, Ohio State, Florida State, Iowa, Iowa State and Illinois all wanted him, but he chose the Buckeyes, and ended up a six-time All-American diving champion and an NCAA national trampoline champ. He now is enshrined in the OSU Athletic Hall of Fame.

He's also in the Athletic Hall of Fame at the University of Miami, where he coached the Hurricanes' diving program into an elite national power. He's in the International Swimming Hall of Fame and the World Acrobatic Society's Hall, too, but says nothing may be as cherished as what will happen here Sunday.

The 68-year-old Gompf will be one of 16 former Tigers' athletes and coaches inducted into the Stivers Athletic Hall of Fame at a gala noon luncheon at the Presidential Banquet Center. Former University of Dayton basketball coach Don Donoher will be the emcee, and Gompf will be there.

"This is wonderful," he said. "I got my athletic start in Dayton. These are my roots and, when I think about it, it's really marvelous what's grown from that."

Tickets are available to the public at (937) 291-0967.

A 'tiger leap'

Growing up in the Belmont section of town, Gompf said he used to follow his older sister to the old Oakday Beach Club on Irving Avenue every summer day:

"They had several diving boards, and the big deal when I was a kid was being able to do something off the 20-foot board there. I think that's what got my daring aspect started."

Soon he was going to the Central YMCA and being tutored by physical director Lou Cox and volunteer diving coach Ray Zahin. While he became a national champ there, it was at Stivers where he turned into a real local attraction.

The school offered a tumbling class, and Gompf said Sullivan took the best students and made them the Tiger Tumblers:

"We performed at a lot of the schools and at halftime of the UD basketball games. We did everything from comedy bits on the trampoline to what we called 'tiger leaping.' People loved it. We'd stack seven or eight kids on top of a long horse, come off a minitramp and fly over them."

As it turned out, he'd spend much of his life as a high-flyer, be it winning two world high-diving titles in the early 1970s in Montreal, filming a TV special in Acapulco — where Ed McMahon and Tony Randall were the hosts and Mel Brooks the skit writer — or as a commercial pilot on overseas routes for National, Pan Am and Delta.

Today he lives in Plant City, Fla., with his wife of 46 years, Joyce, a Madison High grad out of Trotwood and an OSU alum, too. Their two kids and seven grandchildren live nearby, and Tom is still involved in the Olympic effort.

He's worked nine straight Summer Games — serving as everything from a diving judge to the U.S. diving coach — and the past couple of years he travelled worldwide as director of the International Diving Judges' School.

And while he spends a lot of the remainder of the time playing tennis and golf, he finds he never quite escapes his high-flying past.

"ESPN Classic just showed that cliff-diving competition from Acapulco not long ago," he said with a laugh. "It was just a little trumped-up competition they got us into against the Mexicans after that TV special, but we were the first Americans to actually go off the rocks, not a platform.

"I opted to go out the farthest. It was a tougher dive, but it'd take me into deeper water, so I didn't worry about the bottom."

While the Mexicans did swan dives, he tried a double somersault:

"In the air I got the feeling I wasn't gonna clear the rocks, so I basically cannon-balled it. On the air, the commentator said, 'Oh my gosh, he might hit the rocks!' And from the camera angle, you couldn't tell. That's why they showed it for years on Wide World of Sports.

"And so I was playing golf a while back and a guy in the next foursome says, 'I know him. He's that cliff diver!'

"Here I reached the pinnacle of amateur diving against the best in the world — won national championships, a world title, an Olympic medal — and yet it's jumping off that cliff that people remember. It's turned into my claim to fame."

Now — this Sunday here in Dayton — comes another fame claim and, in truth, the two are linked.

After all, it was at Stivers where Tom Gompf first learned how to take what appeared to be a rocky fate and turn it into reward forever remembered.