Louis Zamperini is 88 years old. His doctors at the VA say they’ve never met a man quite like him. “I’ve got 110/60 [blood pressure], a 60 pulse, 185 cholesterol,” he says, grinning as he rattles off the enviable stats. “I’m told I have the vitals of a 35-year-old. And with all I’ve been through, they thought I’d be dead by 55!

 

There’s good reason Zamperini’s life would not have lasted that long, given its hardscrabble start. “I was raised in a good Christian home by parents who really loved me, but I had a real knack for getting into trouble,” he explains. The son of Italian immigrants, he spoke no English when his family moved to Torrance, Calif., a trait that quickly attracted the attention of neighborhood bullies. His father taught him to box in self-defense and pretty soon “I was beating the tar out of every one of them,” he says chuckling. “But I was so good at it that I started relishing the idea of getting even. I was sort of addicted to it.”

 

With the encouragement of his older brother Pete, Zamperini eventually learned to channel his bad-boy energies into running. At Torrance High School he proved a gifted miler; as a junior in 1934, he was invited to run against Pacific Coast college champions in the Los Angeles Coliseum. Zamperini blew the competition away, setting a new interscholastic mile world record of 4:21:20, which stood for 20 years, and winning by 25 yards.

 

“I was presented with a gold watch by the actor Adolphe Menjou,” he crows.

 

When the “Torrance Torpedo” graduated, he was invited to train for the 1936 Olympic team at the University of Southern California track; he subsequently entered USC on a scholarship. Zamperini set a national collegiate mile mark of 4:08:3 that stood for 15 years, and in 1940 he ran an indoor mile in 4:07:6 at Madison Square Garden.

 

Too bad his luck didn’t hold in Berlin, where Zamperini threw away his once-in-a-lifetime chance at Olympic glory.

 

“Well, you have to understand what those time were like,” he says sheepishly. “I was a Depression-era kid who had never even been to a drugstore for a sandwich. Here I was, leaving Torrance, going on a train to New York City, going on a boat to Germany. This was more exciting to me than making the [Olympic] team. And all the food was free. I had not just one sweet roll, but about 7 every morning, with bacon and eggs. My eyes were like saucers.”

 

By the end of the trans-Atlantic voyage, the saucer-eyed Olympic hopeful had put on 12 pounds. With this extra cargo packed onto his kinetic frame, Zamperini finished the 5,000-meter in eighth place, with a time of 14:45.8. Even so, he managed to delight an arena full of spectators, including Adolf Hitler.

 

“It was quite a sight,” he recalls. “Though I’d been behind, I sprinted the whole last lap, running it in 56 seconds after three whole miles. The crowd was going nuts.”

 

Afterward, as photographers snapped Zamperini’s picture, Hitler’s chief propagandist invited the young American runner to come shake hands with the Nazi leader. “Aha! The boy with the fast finish!” Hitler said to Zamperini through an English interpreter.

 

Ask Zamperini what he thought of the dictator, and he pauses to reflect: “It wasn’t until many years later that I looked back and realized I’d shaken hands with the worst tyrant the world has ever known.” His impression at the time was of a man with “an annoying disposition, like a dangerous comedian.”

 

The young Olympian’s off-the-track exploits were equally sensational. One of his bunkmates was famed sprinter Jesse Owens. “He was a prince of a guy, a sweet, humble man,” Zamperini recalls. “Our coach told him to keep an eye on me because he knew I had a habit of getting into trouble, and they were letting us go out at night.”

 

Apparently, Owens wasn’t watchful enough one evening when Zamperini found himself in a German pub nursing steins of beer. Soon, the inebriated American decided to snatch a Third Reich souvenir—a Nazi flag flying from a pole in front of the Reichstag across the street from the pub.

 

“I shimmied up that pole to get a flag,” Zamperini said, “but what I didn’t notice was a group of soldiers standing there watching every move I made. Pretty soon they were yelling at me and firing shots in the air.”

 

“I came down from that flagpole, and I was going to explain what I was doing, but my German consisted up only word: bier,” he explained. “I decided that the best thing to do was to offer flattery: ‘I wanted to take it home to remember my wonderful time here,’ he told the guards in English. After conferring with their colonel, the soldiers decided to let the crazy athlete have his souvenir, which is today one of the many souvenirs in Zamperini’s home.

 

After the Olympics and graduation from USC, Zamperini had wanted to participate in the 1940 Games, but World War II intervened and Zamperini found himself training as an Army Air Corps bombardier.

 

In May 1943, during a search-and-rescue mission 800 miles south of Hawaii, Zamperini’s B-24 was shot down over the Pacific. He and two other survivors, the tail gunner and pilot, drifted nearly 2,000 miles in a life raft. Their only rations were several bottles of water and six chocolate bars. When those ran out, they subsisted on tiny fish, sharks, birds and rainwater. 

 

Zamperini and his fellow survivors passed the time on their raft by talking about their lives, crooning hymns and Bing Crosby tunes. The men also cooked imaginary meals—breakfast, lunch and dinner—complete with detailed instructions for how to make the dishes.

 

“There was never a dull moment on that raft,” he said. “We had some light moments, but we also prayed a lot, the typical foxhole prayers a guy prays when he is in a tough spot like: ‘If you’ll just get me out of here, I’ll be a better person.’”

 

Once during their ordeal, a Japanese bomber strafed other survivors, an attack they miraculously escaped without injury, although they spent the next eight days repairing their bullet-riddled, waterlogged rubber craft.

 

On the 33rd day, the tail gunner died. “We just slipped him overboard, a burial at sea,” Zamperini said. On the 47th day, they made landfall in the Marshall Islands and were promptly taken prisoner by the Japanese. Zamperini’s toned 165-pound frame had shrunk to a skeletal 70 pounds. His ordeal was far from finished.

 

Over the next 2 1/2 years, Zamperini was threatened with beheading, subjected to medical experiments, routinely beaten, starved, forced into slave labor and hidden in a secret interrogation facility. He was moved from one dungeon and concentration camp to the next, from Kurajahein Island to Truk Island, and on. “At Yokohama, I helped unload 10,000-ton ships, shoveling out coal and refuse from the latrine.

 

Sick with a high fever and falling behind, Zamperini recalls one camp guard screaming at him: “You lick your boots, or you die!” When Zamperini refused, the guard cracked him on the head with his belt buckle, then ordered him to hold a wooden beam over his head. Zamperini lasted 37 minutes before passing out.

 

Kept in a state of near starvation, he recalls being forced to eat rice off the floor, tossed there by Japanese officers “all dressed in white with gold braid, dining on delicious meals in front of us.”

 

During one memorable interrogation in Ofuna, a camp outside Yokahama, Zamperini’s USC days came flooding back when he looked up at his interrogator to see the face of former classmate James Sasaki, now the officer is command of 91 POW camps. “Hello, Louis,” he said. “It’s been a long time since USC.”

 

Sasaki had studied at Harvard, Princeton and Yale before attending USC. Despite their 10-year age difference, the two men had shared a love of sports and a large circle of Japanese-American friends in South Bay.

 

Now here he was again, questioning a beaten, starved Zamperini. “I remember thinking, That guy couldn’t have been a Trojan. He must have transferred from UCLA,” Zamperini jokes.

 

Zamperini later learned that Sasaki had been a Japanese spy in their student days, reporting back to his operatives on ship movements in the harbor at Long Beach. When the war came, Sasaki had fled to Japan.

 

Hoping to capitalize on Zamperini’s status as a former U.S. Olympian, Sasaki tried to recruit his old classmate to broadcast anti-American propaganda. Zamperini declined. To break his spirit, Sasaki forced him to run a relay race against well-fed Japanese runners. Despite his emaciated condition, he prevailed.

 

In September 1945, Zamperini was once again making headlines, this time as a newly liberated ex-POW. Unbeknownst to him, many of his old friends even knew him as having returned from the dead, since he had been reported killed after his crash two years earlier. Even the local airfield in Torrance had been named Zamperini Field to honor him posthumously.

 

Shortly after his return to the U.S., Zamperini went on a two-week R & R trip to Miami. “They put us up in a swank hotel, threw us a party and sent us deep-sea fishing.” One night during his visit, Zamperini and a friend crashed a private party where they met two beautiful debutantes. One of the beauties was Cynthia Applewhite, whom Zamperini married after a whirlwind romance. The couple was married for 55 years until her death almost three years ago. Together, the couple had two children, Cissy and Luke.

 

Zamperini settled into his post-war life with his characteristic energy and enthusiasm. At first, Zamperini went into business selling war surplus to the Hollywood studios. 

 

Later, he sold commercial real estate. He was even asked to join the state legislature, an offer he declined.

 

His post-war life boomed, but psychologically, Zamperini was a tortured man. He revisited emotional turmoil long thought abandoned and his nights were haunted by dreams of his captivity.

 

“I was a mess,” Zamperini confessed. “All I could think about was hate and revenge.” One night, while still half-asleep, Zamperini dreamed of strangling one of his Japanese guards. When he woke up, Zamperini had his hands wrapped around his terrified wife’s neck. “That scared us both,” Zamperini said, “so I turned to liquor, figuring if I got drunk enough the dreams would stop. That only made Cynthia leave me and move in with her mother.” Soon, Cynthia Zamperini started talking about a divorce, forcing Zamperini to realize something had to change.

 

Cynthia Zamperini soon heard a sermon by a then-still unknown evangelist named Billy Graham. Graham’s message had such an impact on her that soon she was trying to get her husband to attend as well.

 

At first Zamperini refused, rejecting “all that holy roller stuff,” but finally he acquiesced, finding Graham, “so handsome and clean-cut, not one of those wheezer- types.”

 

During the first Graham sermon he heard, Zamperini had an epiphany. “All the memories I had of my life on that raft in the Pacific came flooding back,” he said. “All of those prayers I said to God that if He saved me I would give my life to service and prayer, came flooding back. I realized that I had turned my back on God and forgotten my promises—all those promises you make in a jam and soon forget.”

 

Zamperini left the meeting tent a changed man. “I was done with smoking, drinking and most important, revenge. I haven’t had a nightmare since.”

 

Inspired by Graham and the Bible’s message of forgiveness, Zamperini started touring the country as a speaker. He even revisited Japan in 1950 where he spread the gospel.

 

At first it was a challenge for him to preach a message of forgiveness and reconciliation to people who had mistreated him, until at one gathering he spotted one of his former POW guards. Zamperini felt forgiveness flowing throughout his body and approached the man, trying to throw his arms around him. The man fled. Soon, Zamperini was actively seeking out his former captors. He found many in Sugamo Prison awaiting war crime trials.

 

One by one, Zamperini embraced as many of his former captors as he could find and taught them the gospel with some success. Zamperini even pleaded for clemency for many, including his classmate-turned-tormentor Sasaki, who was sentenced to 10 years. Sasaki was released in 1952 as part of a national amnesty. He died in 1979.

 

Today Zamperini is busy with Outward Bound style Victory Boys Camp. He travels frequently to Germany, Australia and England. Zamperini is also the recipient of many awards, including the 1999 Hero of forgiveness award, presented by the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance. He has also carried the Olympic torch three times, in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Nagano, the later taking him on a route past one of the POW camps where he was imprisoned during the war.

 

Zamperini is still an active skier. He spends most of his days working with writer Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit, on a film about his life. His part is to be played by Nicolas Cage. 

 

Zamperini only recently gave up skateboarding.