Fathers & Sons & Sports (13 page)

ate summer, 1995. My father and I were lounging, fittingly enough, poolside at my parents’ home in Los Angeles. He had recently revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and his powers of recollection had begun to falter—imperceptibly perhaps to strangers but more obviously to those who knew him best. Across formerly clear skies, scraps of mist had begun to drift. Sometimes they were blank patches, sometimes visitors from years past. Familiar
names went missing. Different decades tumbled together, producing odd juxtapositions. A couple of minutes earlier, having ventured a few laps, I had climbed out of the pool to join my father under a large umbrella. He had looked me up and down, then suggested, straight-faced, that I try out for the Olympic swim team. I was thirty-seven years old. But in his eyes, who knew? Some memories, though, are remarkably resilient. Old athletes—and I count my father in this category—frequently reach back to long-ago moments of mastery or narrow defeat. I knew where Dad was headed: down a well-worn path, back about twenty-five years to one in a long series of good-natured physical contests we had engaged in as I grew up, back to the moment of my first real triumph, a swimming race both of us had assumed he would win.

“You know what the difference was?”

Rhetorical question. I nodded. I knew.

The race had taken place in our backyard pool in Sacramento the summer I turned twelve. My father had reached the brink of sixty that year, so we were both at an age fraught with danger. I had only just realized that childhood as I had known it was coming to an end; Dad, though I couldn’t have appreciated it at the time, must have been hearing the first whispers of mortality.

The pool itself was a rectangle maybe twenty-five yards long—roughly regulation short-course size—rimmed with decorative blue-green tile and coated with fiberglass, which made your skin itch if you spent a lot of time rolling around on the bottom
of the deep end reenacting episodes of
Sea Hunt
. There’s no telling who challenged whom, but as was our custom, Dad and I lined up in the shallow end on opposite sides of a crescent of steps leading down into the water. My mother was enlisted as a starter’s pistol: “On your marks. Get set. Go!”

I had never beaten my father in a swimming race or any athletic contest, as I recall. His philosophy regarding such matters he had made clear a few years before. Once past the age of sentience—seven or so in his reckoning—I would surely know if he was letting me win. This would, in turn, undermine any confidence I might have in a genuine victory achieved at a later date. How much later he never speculated, but I would guess he pictured a strapping college jock finally getting the best of his gray-haired old man. A skinny preadolescent was certainly not part of the plan. As we pushed off for our down-and-back race, I was under no particular pressure to perform, and after a few strokes, upon glancing over to his side of the pool, felt mildly surprised to discover we were dead even.

Now, your average smart-ass twelve-year-old might be undaunted by matching up with a man near hailing distance to a Social Security check, but my father was not your average almost-sixty-year-old. Born before World War I, he grew up long before gyms had sound systems and fancy machines. Weight training was a foreign idea. Yoga would have baffled him. Spandex was out of the question. Real men—men healthily invested in their physical prowess—simply led “vigorous”
lives. To that end, Dad rode horses, chopped wood, pounded fence posts, and swam—swam fearlessly in ocean breakers and, at home, back and forth in our pool. These were not casual endeavors squeezed in occasionally between office hours. They occupied a more fundamental, if unforced, place in his life. He had an actor’s concern for his appearance and an athlete’s pride in the smooth grace of his body’s mechanics. At nearly six two and 180 pounds, he was an admirable physical specimen. Though he was older than the other dads I knew by ten, fifteen, even twenty years (he was forty-seven when I was born), I could comfortably assume that he was more than a match for any of them. Gentle by nature, he was nevertheless the kind of man other men instinctively knew to let be. Well into his seventies, after years of relative inactivity behind a desk in the White House, he would retain the power to impress. Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada, reminiscing recently with my mother, recalled visiting him in the Oval Office. Upon leaving, he remembered, he had clasped my father’s arm above the elbow. “My God,” he said. “It felt like he was made of iron!”

Down the pool we went. Dad never claimed afterward to have been easing up that first lap, and as far as I could tell, we were both swimming as hard as we could. Incredibly to me, as we approached the end where we would turn and head back, the race was still neck and neck.

A year earlier, as a scrawny eleven-year-old, I had joined the local community swim team and performed without distinction.

I mostly remember the overpowering reek of chlorine, the stinging eyes, and the embarrassing pink paisley Speedos we were made to wear. I never won a race, partly because I was competing at the bottom of my age group, but also because the public nature of the swim meets—crowds of shouting parents, the PA announcer—threw me. Swimming well requires relaxation. That’s why you always see Olympic swimmers gyrating their arms and waggling their legs before a race. They’re not pumping up; they’re getting loose. Tighten up and you’ll enjoy all the hydrodynamic efficiency of a cinder block. At the only meet my father attended, I stood on the block, heard my name announced, and watched a hundred pairs of eyes swivel from Dad to me and back again as a murmur passed through the crowd. The gun went off and I hit the water like a bucketful of hammers.

But now I found myself in familiar waters. I had spent the whole long summer in our pool, practicing somersaults from the diving board, racing friends up and down, back and forth, for hours on end, skin gradually wrinkling, till I was called to dinner. I could swim three lengths of the pool underwater without coming up for air, ignoring the throbbing in my head and the tightness in my chest until it seemed my lungs would burst. Now there was no crowd of strangers with an unnatural (to me) interest in my performance. Just my own mother and father. And, frustrating as that previous summer’s interlude had been, I had learned a few useful tricks, chief among them the flip turn.

Most people, when swimming back and forth across a pool will, upon making the far side, reach out with one hand, grab on, and then pull their legs underneath them, the better to push off for the return trip. It’s an easy, virtually instinctive action, but terribly inefficient if you’re in a hurry. Competitive swimmers, as anyone who follows Olympic swimming events knows, somersault as they reach the wall, allowing them to turn and kick off in one fluid motion.

I had adopted this technique out of necessity and practiced it religiously. And so, as my father and I reached the far end of the pool, I had a secret weapon.

About four feet from the end, I ducked my head and rolled into my turn. This was not yet a foolproof maneuver, but something I could perform reasonably well about seventy-five percent of the time. The odds and perhaps a bit of luck were with me. As I felt both feet plant firmly on the wall, I stole a look in Dad’s direction and saw him just reaching for the edge of the pool. Kicking off, I held my body as straight as a nail and arrowed under the water until my momentum began to ebb, then rose to the surface and pulled hard with my right arm, allowing myself a deep drag of air. With my face back in the water, I could see my father complete his turn. I was now a full body length ahead.

Dad could, of course, see me, too. He must have been surprised to find himself falling behind, and I can imagine the tingle of adrenaline as it pulsed through his arms and legs. This could not be happening. Not in a swimming contest.

My father came of age in a river town—Dixon, Illinois. From the ages of fifteen to twenty-one, he worked summers as a lifeguard at the town’s beach on the Rock River, Lowell Park. It was a job he was grateful for in those early years of the Depression. An old photograph shows a tall, slim young man, deeply tanned, hair bleached halfway to blond, with long, smooth muscles beneath his singlet. He is not wearing his thick glasses. Extreme nearsightedness had always kept him off the baseball diamond and had limited his utility as a basketball and football player. But nobody sees well underwater. The river was a great equalizer, allowing his natural athletic gifts to find full expression. He was once, he told me, approached by an Olympic scout who invited him to work out with the team preparing for the ′32 Games. He turned down the chance to match strokes with Buster Crabbe because he couldn’t afford to pass up his summer pay. As far as I know, he still holds the record for swimming from the park to the river’s far bank and back. During those seven summers, he saved seventy-seven people from drowning, marking each victory over the deceptively swift current by carving a notch on a beached log. He was a small-town hero. Water was his element.

It was not all suntans and hooking up behind the changing stalls, this lifeguarding job. Rivers are dangerous. Mix in people determined to drown themselves and the dangers increase exponentially. I’d heard the stories, often couched as lessons. A river may look placid and smooth on its surface as it meanders slowly between its banks, but beneath the skin it hides whirls and
undertows, powerful currents that will sap the strength of the strongest swimmer. Water was, my father stressed, an element to be respected. He had learned early that the shortest route from bank to bank was never a straight line but a swooping upstream arc. Work with water, he advised all his children, never against it; water will always be stronger than you are.

People posed a different challenge. Women, he recalled, were always grateful to be rescued, and some, he knew, would deliberately stray too far toward the middle of the river for the opportunity to be rescued by him. Men, on the other hand, would generally offer thanks only at the urging of their girlfriends, and even then grudgingly. Would’ve been fine. Not really in trouble, but thanks anyway. As he told it, Dad would never really acknowledge these dissemblings but just nod and keep whittling a fresh notch in his log.

Toward the end of summer, brawny farm boys finished with the harvest would begin arriving at the park. Most rarely encountered water deeper than an irrigation ditch and would invariably underestimate the river’s power. In the grip of the current, exhausted, they would go vertical and begin to struggle. Their frantic clawing would on occasion need to be subdued with a right cross to the jaw in order to effect a safe rescue. Then there was the blind man. He was a towering hulk of a fellow, and Dad had spotted him the moment he entered the park. How, he wondered, would he ever manage to pull such a man to safety once he started fighting for his life? Sure enough, away from the
beach the man paddled and within minutes was swept into the middle of the river. A noise went up from the assembled bathers as his big arms began slapping ineffectually at the surface, but my father was already in the water. Swimming out, following the bobbing head downstream, he wondered whether this might be his last rescue attempt. Drowning people will literally grasp at straws, anything for a last breath of air. Sightless, confused, and fearing for his life, this man would lock the first thing that came to hand in a death grip. That first thing would be his rescuer. Dad imagined them in a grotesque embrace, rolling along the river bottom toward the next town downstream. But to his immense relief, when he finally reached the man and put a hand on his shoulder, the reaction was immediate and total compliance. Accustomed his whole life to being led by others, he associated human touch with safety and instantly relaxed.

Ten yards out and the white blur at my father’s heels told me he was kicking furiously. But despite an early surge, he had not closed the gap. I felt a rush of pure exhilaration: I was going to win! You have to swim slow to swim fast. This is not the answer to a Zen koan, merely one of the paradoxes involved in propelling yourself through an alien medium. In past years, other races, I might have shortened my stroke, chopping at the water in an effort to reach the finish a bit quicker—a beginner’s mistake. Now I did the opposite, reaching farther, pulling longer, and as a result sped up. Five yards; three feet; touch. Raising my head out of the water, I looked over just in time to see my father glide to the wall.

My mother had been standing at the side of the pool since we set off, rehearsing in her mind, I suppose, the little speech she would give me to soothe the sting of defeat: You nearly did it; you’ve really improved; maybe next year. Now, sucking air through a victorious grin, I looked at her face and saw something new, an expression I didn’t recognize. There was happiness on my behalf, no doubt, but mixed with something else, something very much like sadness. She turned to my father, and he saw it, too. He didn’t have to ask.

“Huh. Well, whattaya know?” When he looked in my direction, I was still wearing my thrill-of-victory smile. “Congratulations,” he said. “That was a good swim.”