I'll Never Change My Name Read online

  I was about to embark on a journey with this superhero, and I thought, “Damn, that’s a huge responsibility. I better do a good job.” Laurie clearly possessed everything necessary to be a champion. At the same time, she was still young, just turned sixteen that summer. She had a maturity about her, for sure, but she still displayed a youthful presence. I thought it might be her eyes, so large, so full of energy, brimming with life and curiosity.

  I would find out that Laurie could look down from her towering height of four eleven—or look up, rather—and those eyes, man, you would just sink into them. They spoke of innocence yet strength, pure humility through and through. Whenever I encountered a personality like that, I felt an overwhelming sense of wanting the best for the person, a need to help and protect her. I wanted to do all I could to communicate whatever knowledge I had accumulated, to provide her with all the tools from the huge toolkit that by then I’d been lugging around for over thirty years.

  With every partner I had on Dancing with the Stars, women from varied backgrounds and wildly different paths in life, I tried to discover the overlap in our lives, attempting to plant our shared flag on common ground. What did I have in common with a sixteen-year-old Hispanic girl from New Jersey?

  I thought of the journey Laurie Hernandez had experienced breaking into a world that in the past had never welcomed people who looked like her. Gymnastics remained very white, three-quarters white by a recent survey, with Latinos making up less than four percent of all participants.

  “Si Dios lo quiere, to represent the U.S. as the only Latina gymnast would be such an honor,” she told the press before the games. “I feel I could be a role model to other Hispanic gymnasts interested in the sport, but I also want them to understand the importance of being focused, determined, and not giving up, despite all the struggles.”

  Laurie must have had a hard time busting out of the box people wanted to put her in, perfectly symbolized by the white-black-Hispanic choices on the U.S. census questionnaires or the SATs. Going through the public school system, I had to fill out similar forms myself, with neat boxes for “White,” “Asian,” “Hispanic,” etc. For a long time I checked “Other,” because as a recent immigrant that’s how I saw myself. I wasn’t the white that I thought of as American white, I wasn’t black, I wasn’t Hispanic.

  I was an “other,” an outsider, and maybe Laurie felt that way, too. In a lot of ways she was the most American kid I had ever met. She loved her church, her family, and her country, and she served all three very well. As brilliant as her achievements had been, I could hardly imagine the obstacles she overcame along the way, the folks stepping up to tell her that no, little Laurie from the block could not possibly do what she dreamed of doing.

  In an odd way, we seemed to share similar battles of identity. She was a Hernandez, I was a Chmerkovskiy, but we had both carried the country’s flag with pride, standing on a champion’s platform to hear our national anthem. Not the national anthem of dozens of other potential countries that could have had their victories honored—no, it was our anthem, played for the whole world to hear because of our personal efforts on our country’s behalf. Her road to the honor was through gymnastics, while mine was by way of championships I won representing my country on the parquet floors of international dance competitions. But that was my past, and presently I was looking to the future.

  Dancing with the Stars was a show all about renewal, about busting down barriers, breaking out of assigned roles, forging new identities. The celebrity athletes, singers, and actors who came on weren’t known for their dancing ability. They wanted to demonstrate that they weren’t just a football player, a pop star, or a face on a hit TV series. They were human beings capable of embracing a lot of different roles and fulfilling themselves as people in a lot of different ways.

  Over the course of our season together, I would come to find out that Laurie and I had more in common than people might think. But at that moment in the parking lot, our time on Dancing with the Stars—an intense, wonderful, and rewarding period—still lay ahead of us. The sound techs signaled to me that they were ready to go, so I climbed out of the car and headed in to meet my new dance partner.

  I’VE THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT MY EXPERIENCE WITH LAURIE HERNANDEZ recently, because I’ve been increasingly feeling restless over being labeled, boxed in, and pigeonholed.

  I might be a Russian immigrant and Maks Chmerkovskiy’s little brother, and she might be Laurie Hernandez and an Olympic champion, but when we danced we were just us, just Val and Laurie. We blew up the assumptions people made about us, dismantled the boxes they shoved us into, and just generally had a blast, changing the world one dance step at a time.

  If someone says of me, “Oh, he’s the Dancing with the Stars guy,” I have every reason to be proud. I’ve built a great relationship with the show, a relationship that first of all is about gratitude. It’s given me so many friends and so many opportunities that before anything else I have to say, “Thank you!”

  But there’s a small voice inside me eager to disagree: “Hey, wait—I’m not just the Dancing with the Stars guy.” That can sound ungrateful, and believe me, I don’t mean it that way. Just like when I hear, “Oh, that’s the dancer dude.” Yes, I’m happy for anyone to say that, but there’s that same voice that rises up to shout, “No, I’m not just a dancer!”

  I’m so many other things, too. I’m a poet, a boxer with a passable left jab, a classical violinist, a killer basketball player who loves hip-hop. I never want to be cornered by a description, never want to be boxed in, limited, defined. I’m proud of the variety, proud of the paradoxes, the weirdness, and the fact that everything I’m not is exactly what makes me who I am.

  Oh yeah, that guy, he’s the ballroom dance guy on TV. When someone labels you, it means that they can stop thinking about you as a human being.

  That’s why I’m writing this book. I want to show you the whole me, the real me, the one beyond all the preconceptions and stereotypes. We’ve all experienced being labeled and dismissed, and we’ve all felt the frustration of not being appreciated as a fully-rounded, independent individual. Who hasn’t peered out at society and muttered, “There’s more to me than meets the eye?” I knew that Laurie had told herself that, and then went out and proved it to the world.

  Whenever someone typecasts me, my first impulse is to shrug it off, not to dwell on it, to keep it moving. In Ukraine, where I spent the first eight years of my life, I was stereotyped as a Russian because I spoke the language. But in Russia I was considered to be Ukrainian because I was born in Odessa. Later on, when I moved to America, Russians judged me as a person who left the home country, while to others I was stereotyped as a refugee, an immigrant. Not Val, not an individual who is complex, and who like all of us, has as many aspects to him as a mirrorball has mirrors—no, just another immigrant.

  I am Valentin Aleksandrovich Chmerkovskiy, and I will never change my name, thank you very much. No matter how many times I say it, Chmerkovskiy will never sound less foreign, but that doesn’t make me less American. And it definitely doesn’t make me less proud to be one.

  This book is about a different kind of patriotism, the kind that comes from the gratitude of the immigrant who pledged his allegiance to this incredible flag. It’s about all the steps I’ve taken to make it to where I am now, dance steps and other kinds of steps, and about all the connections I’ve created and bonds that I’ve forged on and off the dance floor, people who taught me more than I could ever teach them. It’s also about the promises that I’ve made along the way, many of them unspoken, pledges to family, teachers, mentors, and friends that their efforts on my behalf would never be taken for granted.

  So that’s the journey I invite you to take with me in these pages. We will erase a few labels, explode some boxes, and have some fun in the process. With stories of love and family, and with insights such as how pride ultimately saved my life, I’ll seek to inspire you by showing how I was inspired. It’s a journey
of fulfillment, exploration, and celebration. It just might help you on your own journey, or at the very least entertain you along the way.

  Come dance with me.

  Part 1

  A Journey in Dance

  DWTS

  In the summer of 2005, when the first season of Dancing with the Stars dropped, I remember that my initial reaction was simple and immediate. I rejected the whole idea. The formula of pairing professional dancers with celebrity partners, which was imported from a British program called Strictly Come Dancing, struck me as gimmicky and false. I feared the new show would do damage to the ballroom dance world that I loved, but which had always struggled with being taken seriously.

  Ballroom wasn’t a goof for me. It wasn’t a game. I had been at it practically my whole life, and the art form as I knew it was as deep and powerful as that of more prestigious forms such as ballet, painting, sculpture, and drama. I had also been trained as a classical violinist, so I understood the aesthetic possibilities of a Mozart sonata, say, when compared with a finely executed paso doble, and I knew they could both tap into passion and humanity at the very highest levels.

  Purely on a physical basis, I also knew the kind of dancing I was doing was an athletic activity as demanding and intense as anything else out there. All the common elements of athletics were present in ballroom—requirements of skill, competition, and fitness, as well as the real possibility of injury. Over the years an alliance of dance organizations lobbied to get our competitions officially classified as a sport. I was part of that movement, which rebranded ballroom as “dancesport.”

  My dad, my brother, and I helped in the push to get dancesport into the Olympics. That was the level of respect I thought it deserved. By no means was I a revolutionary, but when it came to dancesport my family and I were certainly among the founding fathers. We felt that the combination of aesthetics and athletics was precisely what made ballroom dance special and exciting. In figure skating, perhaps, or ballet, you had a similar kind of artistic physicality, but ballroom enjoyed nowhere near a status comparable to those disciplines. Meanwhile, rhythmic gymnastics had been in the Olympics since 1984.

  My father saw his sons as athletes first and artists second. Matching dance professionals with celebrities? Somehow it didn’t ring true. I doubt if anyone had ever considered doing a show with Michael Jordan teaching Michael Jackson how to do a layup. As a small community on the rise, ballroom dancers worked hard to give our art form a better reputation. Within that context, Dancing with the Stars seemed like selling out.

  In the summer of 2005 I had just turned nineteen, and you have to understand where my mind was at that point in time. With my partner, Valeriya Kozharinova, I was dancing in ballroom competitions at national and international meets, and we were absolutely killing it. We had just won at the Blackpool Dance Festival, which was the oldest and in some ways the most prestigious ballroom competition on the international circuit, our version of Wimbledon. We also landed in the semifinals of the World Amateur Latin Dance Championship, and we were winning everything in the States that we could possibly win.

  On the business front, too, the various Chmerkovskiy family enterprises were booming. There were four of us: me, Maks, and our parents. Our Rising Stars Dance Academy maintained its standing as the top children’s dance studio in America. The dance competition we hosted in Brooklyn, the Grand Dancesports Cup, was fast becoming the premiere competition on the youth dancesport scene.

  Finally, our chain of Dance With Me studios—which was just starting up at the time—looked to be a wave of the future, both for the family and for the dance world in general. Right from the start, our Dance With Me social dancing schools offered the best of both worlds, featuring the heart of a family business combined with the execution of a Fortune 500 company. Under my father’s leadership, and in alliance with a powerhouse businesswoman named Jhanna Volynets, Dance With Me was proving to be ragingly successful, helping to put our family on a firm financial footing for the first time since we had arrived in America a decade before.

  With all this happening, why would we bother ourselves with an upstart reality TV show on the West Coast? We were fighting the good fight on our own, and were too proud and too busy to drop everything in order to babysit celebrities in Hollywood.

  But there was someone in our family who might have benefited from a little away time. During this period, my brother Maks appeared sullen and exhausted. He had to watch from the sidelines as a partner he had declined to dance with, Joanna Leunis from Belgium, rose to the top of the ballroom world. She had completely changed the life of the man she wound up dancing with, making Michael Malitowski one of the leading dancers in ballroom and winning the World Latin Dance Championship with him.

  That could have been Maks. His opportunities with other partners dwindled away. My brother played all this over in his mind, not feeling a great sense of regret, necessarily, but definitely questioning where his life was headed.

  Such was the situation within the Chmerkovskiy family that summer when the telephone rang.

  Hello, Hollywood calling. They reached out to my brother first.

  Hey, Maksim Aleksandrovich! Come on down!

  It was like an invitation on The Price Is Right, a game show that was actually taped on the same lot as Dancing with the Stars. Later on, my parking spot at the studio would be two slots away from Drew Carey’s.

  A gig on a popular TV talent show offered Maks an opportunity to shake off the blues, change his environment, knock down a solid paycheck, leave behind the responsibilities that had boxed him in for so long as a dance instructor and provider for the family—in short, he would be able to get away from the headaches plaguing him in our home base of New Jersey.

  So of course he said no.

  From his perspective, the decision was a no-brainer. Naturally he was going to turn down a project that paired up dance professionals with celebrities, because it might make a mockery of all that we had invested our energies promoting. He would not go Hollywood just for a bigger paycheck and a bigger audience. That’s the kind of move the Chmerkovskiy family considered a compromise, and we weren’t going to do that.

  So thank you, but no thank you. We’re flattered, but we’d rather starve than eat a five-course meal on our knees. Righteous? Yeah, right—righteously idiotic! But very Chmerkovskiy-like. We thought we knew what we were giving up, and believed in our hearts that we were making the right choice.

  I remember going over to a friend’s house on June 1, 2005, and watching the first episode of Dancing with the Stars, airing back then on Wednesdays on ABC in the 9 P.M. time slot. I was a boxing fan, and as I watched former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield massacre a fox-trot, I almost had to cover my eyes. The survivor of the infamous “Bite Fight” against Mike Tyson barely survived with his dignity intact. He left the show with no bite marks but potentially with a bruised ego.

  I shouldn’t be too tough on Evander, though, because I found out later that he was the reason Dancing with the Stars wound up on the air in the first place. At the last minute—at the very last minute, according to what I’ve been told—Evander signed on, and ABC gave the program the green light. If Evander had said “No” to the show I’d still be back in Saddle Brook right now, teaching kids to cha-cha.

  There were only six couples in competition that first ramshackle season, with soap star Kelly Monaco teamed up with a Belarusian-born dancer named Alec Mazo to win the first Mirrorball Trophy.

  While there was some great dancing on the show, watching back then I wasn’t too impressed overall. I was still immersed in the more serious world of dance competition. As far as I was concerned, ballroom was a respectable sport, not something for the entire world to giggle about, witnessing some punch-drunk, one-eared palooka stumble around on the floor. Firmly seated upon my high horse, I could do nothing but look down on this new entry onto the ballroom stage.

  In retrospect my reaction seems a little ridiculous. But we as a famil
y made our decisions on an idealistic basis rather than on coolheaded cost-benefit analysis, and that strategy had always served us well. People were always tugging on my father’s sleeve with opportunities, wanting to use our success to further theirs. Dancing with the Stars represented only a minor blip on the radar screen. We were right to turn our backs on it, weren’t we?

  How were we to know that the little reality TV import from Britain would blow up to be one of the biggest phenomena in American entertainment?

  Success changes everything, and success in America, the land of success, sends an especially powerful message. Whatever the highfalutin, high-flying Chmerkovskiy brothers thought about the show, the rest of the country embraced it with full-hearted enthusiasm. The finale that first season brought in twenty-two million viewers, an incredible number for a broadcast television program that was just starting out.

  Suddenly the picture swam into sharper focus. Did the Dancing with the Stars producers hold it against my brother for refusing them the first time around? Oh, when we were nothing but a summer replacement show, you turned up your nose, but now when our viewership is in the millions, you want to change your mind? No, the showrunners weren’t proud. They again invited my brother to come on the show as a professional.

  “Hey, Maks!” said the producer on the other end of the phone call. “We’re interested in casting you for the second season. It’s going to be a ten-week gig this time around. Here’s the pay. [Insert the sound of a ringing cash register here.] We will put you up. We’ll take care of everything for you. We’re very interested in having you participate on our show.”

  I would love to say that my brother politely declined, but his response wasn’t as polite as you would probably think.

  Right at that moment we had a lot on our plate, operating both Rising Stars Dance Academy and our chain of Dance With Me studios. We had entered into the world of promoting ballroom dancing to an older generation, a nostalgic generation, people who could benefit from a physical, therapeutic, and mental perspective. Treat yourself to a dance lesson! was our message.