He’s Been Diving Through Barriers

Early morning sunlight warmed the Pierce College pool when Motoki Wakabayashi, the fellow from the Land of the Rising Sun, appeared through a gate, hauling a sports bag and powered by roller blades.

“Is this how you usually get around?” he was asked.

“No,” he answered. “My bike was stolen.”

Welcome to L.A., Motoki.

After being in town for little more than a year, Wakabayashi now can feel like he truly belongs, although this wasn’t exactly the acclimation he had in mind.

He would have much rather continued to make himself at home by spinning and twisting into pools, the way he has done with remarkable precision the past few months.

An affable 21-year-old from Saga, on the island of Kyushu in southwest Japan, Wakabayashi is a dynamo on springboards.

And a rare find for the Pierce swimming and diving program.

Wakabayashi, 5 feet 5 and about 130 pounds, was undefeated in eight dual meets this season in the one- and three-meter dives, won Southern California titles in both events two weeks ago and is among the favorites at the state championships today and Friday at Hartnell College in Salinas.

“I think he should win,” said Fred Shaw, the Pierce swimming co-coach with Mike Garibaldi. “Most of the [Northern California] divers he beat by a lot at the Cuesta Invitational [in mid-March].”

Shaw is understandably ebullient. In his fifth year with the Brahmas, he has never had a true diver, much less someone like Wakabayashi, who this week was selected Western State Conference swimming and diving athlete of the year.

But Shaw finally caught a break.

There he was a few months ago, hanging around the pool, when Wakabayashi turned up and asked for a tryout.

“It’s funny, people come in all the time and say, ‘I can do this and that,’ and 90% of the time they can’t,” Shaw said. “He got up there and knocked off a 1 1/2 with a twist and Mike and I said, ‘We got one.’ ”

If that display wasn’t enough, the coaches soon discovered Wakabayashi was no diving neophyte.

“I was 6 years old when I started diving,” Wakabayashi said. “I was No. 4 in Japan at the high school level . . . Nobody asked me [at first at Pierce], so I didn’t tell anybody. I just told [the coaches] I had been diving for a long time in Japan.”

Wakabayashi, who says he fears heights, got into the sport to emulate his older brother, Hideki, a former top diver in Japan and now a diving coach near their hometown. But, until joining the Brahmas, Wakabayashi had not dived competitively for two years.

For several months before moving to Woodland Hills and enrolling at Pierce in the fall, Wakabayashi studied English at a Santa Monica language school as a foreign student and lived with a host family.

He measures his words carefully, admittedly leery of making mistakes, but speaks clearly and tears down the communication barrier with disarming humor.

Like when asked what his brother said when told about his tremendous junior college success: “So?”

Like his stay with a host family in Santa Monica: “My host mother always said, ‘You are not Japanese,’ because I’m not uptight.”

Like what his Japanese friends here think of him: “[They] say I’m strange. I say, ‘You are strange. I’m normal.’ I like to have fun.”

When it comes to diving, though, Shaw says Wakabayashi is all business.

“He’s very serious,” Shaw said. “You can see him go through the whole dive in his head before he dives.”

The past few days, Wakabayashi’s head has been working full speed on a 3 1/2 front somersault in the pike position, a dive he hopes to perform at the state meet.

“I’m not sure if I’m going to do it. I don’t do it that good yet,” Wakabayashi said. “My real purpose is not to win. I want to do my best. If I do my best dive, no regrets if I don’t win. If I don’t do my best dive and win, I have lots of regrets.”

Nothing that a new bike wouldn’t help soothe.