Moseley tells graduates the price of narcissism

Olympic skiing champion Jonny Moseley found mortar boards no more daunting than moguls Friday when he delivered a heartily applauded commencement address at UC Berkeley.

With his good-natured grin and spiky bird's-nest haircut, the popular gold- medal winner from Tiburon won over the audience with self-effacing humor and a touching confession of a life of narcissism that ended only this past February at the Winter Olympics in Utah.

Some Cal students earlier grumbled that the 26-year-old Moseley, who dropped out of UCLA, didn't fit behind the commencement rostrum for the nation's top-ranked public university, but that view was not evident among the nearly 350 appreciative seniors in black gowns and about 2,500 other people gathered under a sunny spring sky at the Greek Theatre Friday afternoon.

No diplomas are handed out at the ceremony, and not all seniors attend. About 6,500 undergraduates will have graduated at some time during the current school year, receiving their degrees at separate departmental graduations.

Before Moseley's speech, Chancellor Robert Berdahl told the skier, "You may think you have little in common with last year's commencement speaker, Janet Reno . . . but you do share one achievement. You've hosted 'Saturday Night Live.' "

Moseley, whose nonskiing appearances have tended more toward TV talk shows and cereal boxes, won many laughs at the opening of his short speech.

He acknowledged being surprised when asked by a committee of graduating seniors to appear. "What?" he asked himself. "Me speak at the Berkeley ommencement? Is Maya Angelou speaking at the X Games? What's going on here?"

But, he added, "In fact, today I'm fulfilling a lifelong dream to participate in Cal's commencement . . . I can remember the last time UC Berkeley contacted me. It was through the admissions department."

He soon took a more serious tone when he described his response to the public adulation showered on him after his inspiring gold medal victory at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. It was America's first gold of the Games and gave a big boost to national spirits.

The flood of endorsements and praise made him feel "constantly happy," he said, "because people were constantly reassuring me of my righteous self. But as time went on, the intensity of the recognition started to fade, and as a result, so did my happiness.

"So there I was a few years after the Olympics, my celebrity's dwindling, satisfaction waning -- I need a fix." His craving was what drove him to return to the Olympics this year, he said.

Moseley cited the book, "Culture of Narcissism" by Christopher Lasch, saying he fit the definition of a narcissist as "someone who depends on others to validate their self-esteem and cannot live without an admiring audience."

But he didn't realize his narcissism until the moment he conquered it, which came when he persisted in performing his famous "dinner roll" spin in Utah, despite knowing it would probably cost him a medal.

He then stepped out from behind the podium to the front of the stage to demonstrate the move in slow motion, much to the audience's delight.

He placed fourth at the Games with no medal, but he had performed "the best dinner roll I'd ever done," and it felt "like the greatest day in my life," he said. He said he learned to let success be defined in his own terms.

"If you do not depend on awards, money or other validations to dictate your well-being and your measure of success," he said, "you will own your own happiness."

Charles Burress,
Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle,
Saturday, May 18, 2002