Remarks
International Swimming Hall of Fame
May18th, 2010
Swimming Friends,
Good evening and thank you for this great honor.
This was the week that was for me!
It began on Monday as I picked up the Wall St. Journal and saw among other noted athletes at the top of the front page – one of our own. The title read, “Who is the coolest athlete in America?”
Oops, it was Calvin Borel! For those of you who may not know, he was the winning jockey in last week’s Kentucky Derby. But perhaps we can see a parallel here.
This wily athlete strategizes his race, often beginning far behind, then he winds his way through chaos at great peril, finally squeezing through impossible spaces to win by a photo finish!
Well? Examination tells us that behind that victory is a lifetime of cold wet mornings at the practice track and even a period of much shoveling in the barn! Coach Bowman can attest to that.
Likewise, a good swim coach (and swimmers and swim parents) train to squeeze through, at impossible odds, after cold wet mornings and we might surmise after having done a quite a bit of shoveling to achieve that success.
Today I participated on a panel which pondered the question – what makes a good swim coach, a good swimmer, a good culture?
One of my favorite poets, William Butler Yeats, posed this question implicitly in a poem, “Among School Children”,
“Is the tree, the leaf, the blossom, or the trunk (bole)? How can you tell the dancer from the dance?”
And our answer is you can’t -
Or again is it the swim coach, the swimmer, or the culture? It is ALL of that.
No one coach can singly impart his wisdom. He needs great support of peers, parents, and other swimmers. At best through this process – He can lead the swimmer to the “threshold of his own mind.”
The Aussies have a phrase – Fair Dinkum – they mean you can be trusted completely! A good trait for a swim coach! The Latin phrase is: Esse Quam Fideri – “To be rather than seem to be”
Or as we teach our swimmers and also our children. “Beware of the imposters in the world and strive not to become one.”
After a sports talk show interview this week, the host, a good friend, called me to chat further. He asked, “What was the most successful decade for you and NBAC?”
After some thought I replied 1987-1996.
He said, “Oh, yes, - you had Julie Gorman, Jill Johnson, Greg Burgess, Anita, Nall, Beth Botsford, the Phelps girls, Whitney Metzler and a young swimmer named Michael.”
Hmm! At that moment, I realized that this productive time was coincident with my marriage in 1986 to my wife Patricia and the subsequent birth of our 4 children.
So you see that if like Calvin Borel, you ride that horse long enough and hard enough, to quote Beth Botsford’s father, Kevin, “Good things can happen!”
Vince Bagli, Dean of Baltimore sports announcers (now deceased) always ended his shows with: “Thank you my friends, it has been a pleasure.” I am planning to remember forever what I am feeling at this moment. So thank you my friends, it has been a pleasure!