Making Waves. Chris Epting

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СКАЧАТЬ Monte. There, the girl to beat was Cozette Wheeler. She was untouchable, all of the adults said. She was the one that intimidated all of the other kids. Soon after getting there, I beat Cozette.

      But that’s not what I remember most about swimming in El Monte. What I remember most were two other girls, Jill Sterkel and Sandy Neilson, who were also on the team. Little did I know what the future held for all of us—especially for me and Jill. Thinking back, the coach at that club, Don LaMont, must have been really good to develop swimmers of that caliber—including me and my brothers, Jack and Bill.

      With the three of us swimming, my family’s weekends were filled with swim meets. In California, where the sun shines almost all year long, we could find a meet practically anywhere. We went to meets in San Diego, Redlands, Los Angeles, Apple Valley, Lakewood, Buena Park, and many other cities.

      I loved going to those swim meets. There were hundreds of kids at them. I saw my friends from my own team and made new friends from other teams. I got to see my competition from a wider group of girls—not just from my own club, but from other clubs that were the ones to beat.

      Sometimes the meets were far away and we would have to wake up early in the morning to travel there. Other families would stay at a hotel or motel for the weekend, but we would always come home after our meets; we couldn’t afford to pay for an overnight stay. Gas was much cheaper then, so after driving home at the end of the day, we would get up early the next day and just drive back to the meet again. My mom always packed food for us, because we needed to eat constantly and we couldn’t afford to buy our meals at the meet. She packed hamburgers, bananas, oranges—foods to fill us up.

      Our meets started at 9:00 AM, with warm-ups at 8:00 AM. At the warm-ups, you could get a feel for the pool—the walls, the lane markings on the bottom of the pool, and the backstroke flags, which hung above the water at the end of the pool so backstrokers would know the wall was coming. You could count how many strokes until you hit the wall so you wouldn’t conk your head.

      At those meets, I swam three or four events each day. When I was nine and ten years old, I really liked the breaststroke and freestyle. I never really fell in love with the butterfly, and to be honest, I don’t think I really got the hang of it until I was seventeen or eighteen. I knew all the other strokes, though, and that made me a pretty good individual medley swimmer.

      There was such a communal feel at those meets. Part of it had to do with the snacks we ate: Jell-O powder right out of the package, pixie sticks, rainbow pops. Sugar everywhere. That’s part of what held us together. Then there were the things we did to kill time between the races. I remember everyone playing with Clackers, those hard plastic balls you’d clack together on a string that were eventually taken off the market because they would shatter. It didn’t matter, though. We still had plenty of yo-yos, Frisbees, another popular toys to help wile away the time. But the thing I liked best was playing cards. Poker, Twenty-One, War, Go Fish—it was my favorite way to pass the time at the meets.

      When I was eleven, my mom became very interested in a woman named Loretta Reed. The Reeds had some money and lived in Rancho Palos Verdes. Mrs. Reed would sit on the pool deck in El Monte, watching her daughter (and my friend) Pam swim alongside me. My mother was quite transfixed with her, impressed with her lifestyle and fancy car. I would always see them talking on the deck of the pool while we swam. I’d never seen my mother so interested in another person. She would sit there, looking at Mrs. Reed’s stopwatch, and soon she had a stopwatch of her own that she would use to time my laps.

      One day, as we were driving home from one of our club practices, my mother asked me how I did that day and what my times were. I told her I thought I had done well. All of the sudden, she began beating me with her fist. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. I pushed myself against the passenger door of our Plymouth station wagon, trying to get out of her reach. But there wasn’t enough room for me to get away from her. She was angry that I had not swum better times. It was crazy. These were practices, not races. But she didn’t care.

      Day after day, the same thing would happen. “How do you think you did today?” she’d ask. “Fine,” I’d say. And the beating would start.

      One day, as my mother was hitting me in the front seat, Jack, sitting with Bill in the back seat, asked, “Why do you only care about her?” Driving wildly down the freeway and steering with her left hand, she reached back and started hitting him with her right fist. “Is this what you want?” she asked. He never posed the question again.

      This began a new pattern of abuse in my life. No matter how I answered my mother’s question about my performance, she would start hitting me. This went on for months. My mother would beat me in the car after practice, and then my father would molest me at night.

      One day, we actually went to the Reeds’ house in Palos Verdes. It was beautiful. While our mothers were having coffee inside, Pam and I sat outside together.

      “Does your mom hit you?” she asked me.

      “Yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”

      “Well, my mom beats me, too,” she said. “I think she told your mom that it was a good way to make you swim faster.”

      Thanks a lot, I thought.

      I really did enjoy swimming back then, because the pool had become my sanctuary. No matter what took place in the car after swim practice or in my bedroom at night, when I was in the water, I was safe. It was a haven where I could have fun and make friends and get stronger. That was one thing about me—I enjoyed becoming a better swimmer, and I was very competitive. It was all I had in my young life. Besides playing the flute in school, it was really the only other activity that I took part in. So I made the most of it.

      The coaches may not have wanted me in the beginning and my parents may have been abusing me, but while I was in the water, I was safe and free to become what I wanted to be: a strong swimmer. That was my plan. But plans change, of course, and for my family, things were about to be altered in a very serious way.

      

      We moved around from pool to pool and I swam on lots of teams. I also began competing and had great success early on.

      When I was thirteen, I started swimming on a team at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. It was called Phillips 66, and it was sponsored by the Texas energy company of the same name.

      This team was significant for me on two levels. First, it got me out of El Monte and away from Loretta Reed, which meant my mom’s beatings would stop soon after our arrival in Huntington Beach. Second, and more importantly, this was where I would meet one of the two most influential coaches I’d ever have.

      His name was Ralph Darr but he went by “Flip,” and he was one of the most amazing men I have ever met. First of all, he just seemed really cool. He drove a Jaguar and smoked a pipe and there was something very low-key, yet nurturing, about him.

      Flip was also an incredibly innovative and successful coach. He eventually coached swimmers that would go on to earn sixteen world records, eight gold medals, nine World Championship medals, the three Pan American Games medals, and thirty-one U.S. national swimming titles. He placed swimmers on the U.S. team in the 1968, ’72, ’76, and ’84 Olympics, and he would go on to serve as the U.S. coach of the 1975 World Championship women’s team, the 1991 World Championship open water team, and many others. Flip was also known as one of the first coaches to bring hand paddles into mainstream swimming during practices, which was revolutionary. He also utilized surgical tubes for resistance training—another СКАЧАТЬ