ACAPULCO, MEXICO
I distinctly remember my very first glimpse of Mexico. It would have been during my early teens on a Saturday afternoon propped in front of ABC's Wide World of Sports, watching wide-eyed as lithe young men dove from rocky cliffs in Acapulco into what seemed just a spit of blue Pacific.
In the years since I've been to various parts of Mexico, but never until now Acapulco. Heavily influenced by those long-ago television memories, as soon as I'm on land, on a sun-drenched afternoon in October, I head straight to the Hotel El Mirador where the sons and grandsons of those divers I watched still attract big crowds. (Though it was sunny when I arrived, following a mini-trend just the day before Hurricane Odile had raced through, dumping ten inches of rain in a day and flooding the poorer parts of the city; the trend is that while filming in Southern Louisiana in August we were literally chased out of town by Hurricane Gustav.)
ACAPULCO, at nearly 2 million people the largest city in the state, was built on a narrow strip of low ground, scarcely half a mile wide, squeezed between the shoreline and mountains that encircle the bay to the north and east. Long before it was an international tourist mecca, made even more famous by Sammy Kahn's "Fly Me to the Moon," it was populated since before 3000 BC. The name "Acapulco" comes from the NAHUATL language, and means "place of big reeds."
 The Mirador was built in 1933, on the cliffs of La Quebrada, and the divers began there the very next year. Even as the city boomed and then weathered a variety of downturns (including years when the beautiful waters of the curved beach on which the tourist meccas was built were declared off-limits, too polluted for swimming) young men dove from the cliffs, three times a day, four times on Sunday.
The best view of the divers is from the deck of La Perla, the restaurant adjoining the hotel, which opened in 1949. Permanent floodlights mounted on the rocks enhance the high drama of the night dives. A 40-year-resident, Teddy, points out a pair of well-worn steps in the rocks where the divers take off from, as well as a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a small shrine which every diver prays to before taking his plunge.
"No one has ever died diving off these cliffs," says Teddy, which I find hard to believe as I look over the edge, straight down 150-feet to a tiny wash of blue and white foaming ocean swirling around sharp rocks. "Of course timing is everything. It is only 15 feet deep and they are falling at 50 miles an hour. Over all the years there have been broken legs, heads, and arms, that kind of thing. But no one has died.
"The most common injury? The best divers, the ones that have been doing it for years, begin to lose their hearing. Even though they know to keep their heads straight when they hit the water, the natural instinct is to turn the head. The result is they land hard on their ears, breaking their eardrums. You can always tell longtime divers because they often don't respond when you're talking to them. It's not ego, they simply can't hear you anymore."
Teddy has been in town long enough to remember when it was a haunt of Sinatra and Johnny Weissmuller. Today he points out a cream-colored house on the hills owned by Sylvester Stallone. "Fourteen bedrooms and two swimming pools, can you believe it? More importantly, can you believe that guy still makes movies?"
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