It’s only once every four years -- during the Olympics -- that the average person on the street has any interest in competitive swimming. Then their TV screens are filled with the multiple medal winning talents of a Michael Phelps or a Marc Spitz.
Swimming has been a very popular sport at every modern Summer Olympics and has been open to women athletes since 1912. Other significant Olympic swimming dates were the adoption of the standard 50 meter pool in 1924; the first use of diving (or starting) blocks in 1936; the development of the flip turn in the 1950s; and in 1976 the first use of swim goggles were allowed.
Watching the swimming trials got me to thinking back to my days as a competitive swimmer. While I was far from Olympic material, I could out swim everybody on the block and I collected my share of swimming award ribbons.
The population of southern California was exploding during the early ‘50s and the one status symbol that all of the transplanted easterners had to have was a swimming pool in the back yard.
With all these new pools being constructed, their new owners soon realized that they’d better teach their kids how to swim or there’d be a lot of little bodies accidentally floating in the backyard. Consequently, every suburb had at least one swim-school to teach the little dears how to stay alive in the water.
Swimland was the name of the swim-school that was just blocks from my house. While I’d learned to swim at the “Y” when I was living in Chicago, I went through two years of lessons at Swimland to perfect my elementary skills. Students who showed promise were asked to join the Swinland swim team.
“For this next meet,” my Swimland coach told his group of young swimmers shortly after I’d joined the team, “I want you all down at the high school pool by 9 a.m. — ready to swim — and don’t go eating any big breakfasts either.”
“What should we eat?” I asked innocently -- after all this was my first meet and I was only in the fifth grade and 12-years-old.
“Something with a lot of protein,” he answered, “steak-an’-eggs would be good.”
I was so excited that I was awake by 5:30 a.m. the Saturday morning of the meet and I made sure that no one else slept much past 7:00. My mom cooked the small steak I’d requested and eggs and toast. I wolfed it all down nervously — sure that somehow that might have been the magic elixir I needed to win my races.
My father drove me down to the high school with an hour to spare and I joined up with the rest of the Swimland team as we got our race and lane assignments. I was going to swim a 50-yard freestyle, a 100-yard freestyle, a 50-yard backstroke and the 100x4 freestyle relay.
A half-hour before my first race I went into the locker room and changed into my minuscule pair of Speedos and walked back out on the pool deck to nervously await my first race.
Because I hadn’t swum in any meets before, I was put in one of the outside lanes in each of my individual races.
A whole new experience for me was the raised starting block and I wondered if the flat racing dive you used to start a race was going to be painful from a foot higher altitude.
“Swimmers take your marks!” the starter called out before my first race.
I stepped up onto the block and looked down my lane the 25 yards to the other end of the pool. The water was glassy smooth between the floating strings of blue and white lane markers.
“Get set!”
I curled my toes over the edge of the block and bent down in my starting crouch as I focused my attention on the other end of the pool.
“GO!” and the starting pistol cracked as I threw my arms in front of me and dove towards the far side of the pool. The style of a perfect racing dive is to launch your body parallel to the water and hit flat and ideally your back shouldn’t even get wet. I wasn’t perfect, but I was close.
I churned to the far end — managed to do a competent flip-turn — and headed back to the other end.
I wished I could say I had finished in one of the top places but I hadn’t — it was more like a fourth or fifth in a six lane pool.
I swam in my three other races and did manage to take home a third place ribbon from the relay that I was a member of.
I continued to swim for Swimland for another couple of years and eventually collected a drawer full of ribbons and then I got interested in other things and dropped out.
I did belong to a Junior YMCA group when I was in junior high school and whenever they’d stage a swim meet my group would always look at me as their “ringer.”
When I got to high school I was on the swim team again and during the fall I played water polo — a sport that was virtually unknown, at the time, except in southern California and at Olympic time every four years. Now, I can sit back and watch the TV like the good couch-potato I’ve become and point to the screen and boast “I used to do that.”
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