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ILLUSTRATED VOLUME 25, ISSUE 3 89 f third with then-synchro partner Nick McCrory. "So we have this brother relationship, where I'll dog him like crazy and he'll dish it right back out, but at the end of the day we're really good friends, really good team- mates, so we have this good partnership together and it helps in the training atmosphere. "Nine years ago, I never would have thought that this 9-year-old kid would be a training partner, so it's amaz- ing to see him develop through the past years." It was hard to picture back then. Johnson was only a kid, one who said little, instead stuffing his nose into his Game Boy during those long car rides to and from training. On the opposite, Boudia, now a 25-year-old devout Christian, husband and father, was loud and liked the attention. He wore an earring and backwards hat, pimped out his car with rims and blasted his music. "I was a punk," Boudia said. That's how Johnson saw it, too. "He was a jerk," he said. "He's a way different person now, resembles almost nothing like what he was back when he was 16 through the age of 19. He was definitely a wild child and he knows it. He just was what a stereo- typical teenager seemed like at that time to me. He was just too cool for everyone. "… But now it's great, because he's an awesome guy to be around." Maturity closed the gap, as did several incidents along the way. There was the time in 2008 when Thomas Fin- chum, Boudia's partner at the Games in Beijing, was injured, and the 12-year-old Johnson jumped in his place during a practice. The dives synced up well, leaving John- son to wonder whether they'd be able to compete together one day. Then, more recently at the World Cup in China last summer, John- son was a little nervous — freaked out might be a better description — before they had to perform a front four-and-a-half, a high-dif- ficulty dive that involves four full rotations, then another half to get nose down to the water. "(It's my) hardest and scariest dive and I hadn't hit it at all when we were there," Johnson said. "David saw that I was getting really nervous and he was like, 'Hey, Steele, look over there.' And across the pond behind the plat- form there was a basketball court, and there were like 100 people playing basketball down there on the courts. He's like, 'See that?' And I was like, 'What?' And he said, 'Those people right there don't care if we do this dive well or not, so don't freak out.' "During the competitions he says stuff like that all the time and it helps cool me down and the dives go as they are meant to go. But he definitely knows how to build me up and keep me calm, and I feel like I'm learn- ing how to do that with him too." That kind of knowledge, the ins and outs of how best to motivate one another, can only be forged over time. And Johnson and Boudia have more of it before they compete first at the USA trials, then at the Rio Games. It's helpful too that the duo has had the same coach- ing, first with John Wingfield in Indianapolis, then Adam Soldati at Purdue, helping them to naturally sync up. And they can continue to train together, at the Boiler- maker Aquatics Center, rather than being taught in dif- ferent locations. Boudia didn't have that luxury in '12, with McCrory being a Duke student and training there, while Boudia trained and studied in West Lafayette. "You make it work if they're not at the same spot," Soldati said, "but if they're at the same spot, it's that much better; you can literally train together at some Tom Campbell Johnson has his eyes set on the Rio Games in 2016, both with Boudia and as an individual. And he'll look for collegiate success at Purdue, as well.