Читать книгу Making Waves - Chris Epting - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

My First Adventure

Shortly after I turned fourteen, my coach, Flip, came over to me at practice one day and said, “Shirley, you’ve qualified again for the 1971 Short Course Nationals!” This one would be held that spring in Pullman, Washington.

I swam the 500-yard freestyle against the well-known swimmer Debbie Meyer, who was my hero back then. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, she was simply “the world’s greatest female swimmer,” according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. At the 1968 Olympic Games, Debbie was the first female swimmer to win three individual gold medals at a single Olympic Games. She did so by earning the top spot in the 200, 400, and 800 freestyle events. She was named “World Swimmer of the Year” three times, and was given the James E. Sullivan Award in 1968.

I didn’t know that Debbie would be retiring within just a year, at only eighteen years of age. I was a little freaked out that I was actually going to compete against her. After I did my flip turn during the 500-yard freestyle, I looked around and saw that I was actually ahead. How could this be? I was beating Debbie Meyer? That moment of realization may have cost me the race; Debbie overcame the lead and wound up winning the race. But it didn’t matter. I knew I was getting better overall.

Before we left Pullman, my mom and I were both sitting on the empty bleachers surrounding the pool. I noticed that she was upset, but I didn’t really understand how mad she was until she opened her mouth. “Maybe one day, you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you went to the Olympic Trials,” she said to me.

I was happy with how I had done, but she sure wasn’t. She was incredibly disappointed. She was suggesting that I would never get past the Olympic Trials (which would be held the following year in advance of the Munich Olympics). I knew right then and there that she really had no clue about what I was as a swimmer. My times were getting better every day. With every competition, I was growing stronger. I had done well and was proud of myself, but she didn’t get it. In her narrow-minded view of swimming, if you hadn’t won, you had failed. She had no concept of the growth curve that I was beginning to experience. I was swimming so well, but she couldn’t see any of it.

After swimming in Pullman, I started hearing about international trips that the best swimmers got to take as part of the American team. In the back of my head, I started to put together what I would have to do to be a part of such a thing.

That summer, I qualified for the Long Course Nationals, which were to be held in Houston. My mom and I flew down there together, and I was entered in all four distances in the freestyle races.

I swam very well in my first couple of races. The next day, there was a knock on our hotel room door. My mom opened it, and there was my coach, Flip. He came into our room and sat down in a chair by the desk.

“Okay, so here’s what’s happening,” he said, calm as usual. “Shirley can make the international team. All she needs to do tomorrow is get either first or second place in the 100 or, if she wins the 1,500, that will do it, too.”

He turned to me. “How do you want to do it, Shirley? What do you want to swim?”

In my head, the decision was easy. Swimming the 100, I would have two chances to make it onto the international team. I told this to Flip, and he agreed that it was the way to go.

There was just one problem. “I know Shirley doesn’t have a passport,” Flip said to my mother. “We’ll have to take care of that, because I really think she’s going to make this team. Their plane leaves for Europe the day after the race, so we have to get the passport today. We’ve got a plane ticket for her to fly over to New Orleans this afternoon with another swimmer. He needs a passport, too, and they’ll get that done and then fly right back to Texas.”

So that’s what we did. One of the coaches dropped us off at the airport and pushed our tickets into our hands, and we headed off to New Orleans—me, just fourteen years old, and this boy who was a few years older and didn’t seem too thrilled about having to take a plane ride with me. He wouldn’t talk to me or even look at me, while I followed him around like a little puppy.

The whole trip was such a blur. We landed in the Crescent City and took a taxi to the passport office. When I think about it today, it seems kind of crazy that they would just let us go get passports on our own. But that’s just how it was back then. Nobody made a big deal out of it at all. It was just like, go get your passports and get back as fast as possible. Someone had called ahead to the passport office to let them know we were coming, so at least they were waiting for us. The boy got his passport, no problem. But I didn’t have an ID, and it seemed like that was going to be an issue.

We were sitting in this hot, cramped office, waiting and waiting. The air was so incredibly thick down there, both outside and inside, and the two of us just sat there perspiring like a couple of animals. We watched the clock on the wall tick and tick and tick for more than an hour. Finally, the man who was helping us came back into the room with a smile on his face. He was holding a passport with my name and face on it.

“You’re a lucky little lady,” he said to me. “I didn’t think you were going to be leaving with this today. This required some really special help. You have no idea how far up the ladder we had to go to get your passport. This had to be approved by someone very important.”

“Who had to approve it?” I asked.

“The president,” he said.

“The president of what?” I asked.

“The United States,” he told me.

I had no idea if Nixon had in fact been consulted. I just knew that I finally had a passport, and now the glum teenage boy and I could head back to the airport.

We arrived safely back in Texas, and I went to bed dreaming about a chance at that international team. This was it, I thought. This was a chance to be a part of something really special and see places around the world that I’d only heard about in school. Before leaving for New Orleans, I had heard somebody say that the team was going to Russia. Just the word “Russia” seemed like another planet to me. Given my heritage, I was especially curious.

This kind of trip was beyond my wildest imagination. It was hard to fall asleep at night, just thinking about the possibilities. I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, though. I still had to make the team.

The next day, I couldn’t wait to get to the pool. I packed my bag before we left the hotel because, either way, I was headed someplace else after the races. It was either going to be home, or the other side of the world.

There was plenty of rain that day, including one monsoon cloud that parked itself right above our heads at the pool. It rained just about as hard as I’ve ever seen in my life. All of the swimmers and coaches were running around, freaking out over the sheets of water pouring down. But Flip said to me, “Shirley, just ignore the weather and focus on what you have to do. Just focus. You can do this.”

The storm ended after a while, but everybody was still talking about the rain. In my head I was thinking, how can they not be thinking about their races right now? Why are they getting so obsessed with a thunderstorm? I knew where my head was. I was thinking about water, but not the stuff coming down from the sky. All I was concerned about was the water in the swimming pool and how long it would take me to swim through it.

At one point, while Flip was giving me my rubdown, he noticed an overhanging tarp that had filled with water and looked about ready to give way. “Let’s move over a bit,” he said. Moments later, it crashed down, dumping gallons of water right where I had been standing. An omen?

When it was time for my race, I was on edge. There was so much at stake here, more than I had ever been swimming for. When the starting gun went off, I knew that I had made a decent start, but after that there was no way to know how I was doing. The 100 is so crazy and there is so much splashing that it’s hard to tell what’s happening. I had a sick feeling that I was not in the top two, and when I touched the wall at the end, I was all but sure that I had come in third. I was so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t even look at the scoreboard.

Oh well, I thought, there would be other times. At least, I hoped there would be.

When I saw Flip running over to me, I appreciated that he was smiling and that he was there to cheer me up. He was that kind of guy.

Flip knelt down by the edge of the pool and said, “You did it, Shirley. You got second place. You made the team.”

I had actually done it.

That night, my mom said goodbye to me and gave me twenty dollars of spending money. I’d never had that much money in my pocket. I think she was happy for me. I mean, I hoped that she was happy for me. The hard part was that I couldn’t tell her I was going to miss her, because I wasn’t. I was just so happy to be spreading my wings and getting away from my parents.

Still, I gave her a hug and a kiss goodbye, and then off I went the next morning on the bus with twenty-six other swimmers, three coaches, and two chaperones.

We would be visiting Russia, East Germany, West Germany, and Denmark, among other places. As the plane rumbled down the runway and we lifted off from Houston, my mind began dreaming about what it would be like. I knew we’d be swimming over there, but I was more intrigued with the idea of travel and exploration. What would it be like? What would the people sound like? This was going to be so exciting.

On the plane we also learned that we were all going to receive a “per diem.” I had no idea what that was. Gary Hall, who I swam with at the Huntington Beach Aquatic Club, explained it to me.

“It’s spending money, Shirley,” he said. “We are given spending money each day.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

To me, that was simply the coolest thing ever. Gary was such a doll and I really appreciated how he kind of looked after me on that trip. He was a few years older and had already won a silver medal at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City for his second place finish in the 400-meter individual medley. Two years after that, he broke the world record in the 200-meter butterfly. I was just so impressed by him.

Before getting to Russia, we stopped over at Shannon Airport in Ireland. I distinctly remember seeing all of the wonderful green colors of the country as our plane gently descended through the wispy clouds. Throughout the flight, most of the swimmers had been chatting and giggling and gossiping together. But I just sat by the window, quietly soaking in the trip.

We didn’t linger in Ireland. When we landed, I had my first taste of having to run through airport terminals in a crazy rush to make a connecting flight, which would happen a lot with the swim teams I traveled with. We found our connection, took off, and soon landed in Russia or, as it was called then, the USSR.

After disembarking in Moscow, we were whisked away into a debriefing room and a stern Russian official explained to us how we were to behave in Russia and any other communist country that we happened to be visiting. With a scowl on his face, he explained to all of us through his thick accent, “You are not to take anything from any of the hotels. Not a towel. Not an ashtray. Not a pen. Do you understand? Nothing. And you are never to say anything about communism, anywhere. You don’t talk about communism in your hotel room or on the elevator. There will be somebody listening to you at all times, and we will know if you break this rule.”

Finally, we were admonished to not wear any revealing clothing, including shorts. And with that, we checked in at the Rossiya Hotel.

The Rossiya was a massive, five-star international hotel that at the time was registered in The Guinness Book of World Records as the largest hotel in the world. (It would be surpassed by the Excalibur in Las Vegas in 1990, but it remained the largest hotel in Europe until it closed in 2006.) The place just went on forever. It was twenty-one stories high and had 3,200 rooms, 240 suites, a post office, a health club, a nightclub, a movie theater, a barbershop, and even a police station with jail cells behind unmarked black doors. It was massive, and we had a fun time exploring it. We couldn’t talk about communism, but at least we were free to wander a little bit and absorb some of the atmosphere.

I was pinching myself; I was so excited to be there. I just couldn’t believe that I was wandering around a giant hotel in Russia. Our first night there, we had dinner in the hotel’s main dining room, and I had my first taste of real European bread. It was one of the most wonderful things I had ever tasted. All crusty on the outside and so fresh, as if it had been taken from an oven only moments beforehand (I’m sure it had been).

Just about every one of us ordered steak. I remember thinking, wow, if the bread was that good, the meat is probably going to be out of this world. But we ended up getting what looked like a healthy slab of beef liver, and most of us went back to eating the bread.

I’ll never forget spending that first night in our spacious room. There were two swimmers in each room. The first thing I noticed were the blankets on the beds. They were just like the ones I had at home: comforters enveloped in comforter covers. Everyone else was saying how cool the blankets were, and I nonchalantly told them that I had the same thing at home. The other swimmers looked at me kind of funny, as if they didn’t believe me.

Within just a day or so, we were slated to swim against the USSR team in Minsk. We all piled into the bus and made the trip over to the pool. On the way there, I have to admit that I wasn’t too happy. Since I had qualified for the team by swimming the 100, I figured I would be swimming the 100-meter freestyle on this team. But the coaches thought it was a fluke that I’d made the team. They decided to put in another girl they thought had a better chance of winning. As for me, they were going to put me in an outside lane. I’d be swimming along in the race just for the experience; my lane wouldn’t count.

Our bus pulled up to the ancient-looking swimming facility, and we all piled off and got ready for the meet. When it came time for the 100, there was little doubt in my mind that I was going to win. In fact, I led the entire way. But of course, even though I came in first, none of it counted. The girl who swam in my place technically came in second after me, but officially, she was first.

There was a lavish ceremony that night to give out the awards. I watched the other girl receive her first-place Russian crystal bowl along with ornately carved Russian nesting dolls and a huge bouquet of red roses, and I grew irritated. I thought that it should’ve been me up there. Little did I know that this was, in a sense, preparing me for the future.

That night, I missed Flip terribly. He never would have let something like this happen. But that’s one thing I learned about the international teams: your coaches don’t go along with you. You’re automatically thrown into a new group of coaches that have their own style and strategy, and it doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.

I chalked it up to a learning experience, and got back to enjoying the trip. The good news was that the coaches were re-thinking things after seeing how I swam. “Okay, Shirley,” one of them said, almost begrudgingly, “you will now swim in the official races.” From then on, I never swam in a practice lane again.

After Minsk, we went back to Moscow, where we would have some free time. We saw the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral. We also saw a round, raised cement circle. When we asked what it was, our guide said, “It’s where they used to chop people’s heads off.” We saw the building that housed Lenin’s body, called Lenin’s Mausoleum, in Red Square. We also went into a huge and well-known department store called GUM, where I was elbowed out of way by aggressive Russian shoppers. Moscow was fascinating, and I loved visiting there.

Next, it was on to Denmark, and then Amsterdam.

The red light district in Amsterdam was unlike anything I had ever seen before. There were storefronts that stretched three to four blocks long, and in each window was a different girl that could be had for the evening. Behind the glass, they would be doing various things—knitting, reading, or even just sitting there watching television. There were strange aromas in the air and everyone on the team stared wide-eyed at all the various illicit trade taking place around us. Our chaperones didn’t let us linger there, though. We were just sightseers, stumbling upon new places to explore. It was all kind of vague and mysterious to me, and as wild as it was, it represented something that seemed so exotic. This is what people see when they travel, I remember thinking to myself.

While in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to swim against Enith Brigitha, who would become the first black athlete to win a swimming medal at the Olympics the following year. Swimming against her in a twenty-five-meter pool, I didn’t do very well. But it was okay. I was still adjusting to the travel and the different settings.

The European pools, in general, were very different than the American pools. They were very old and there was no smell of chlorine. It’s funny; I kind of missed the smell of chlorine because it reminded me of the pools back home.

I really loved West Germany. It was so beautiful, clean, and colorful. The smells that flowed through the air were all incredible. Restaurants, bakeries, cheese shops, flower shops, chocolate shops, coffee shops—I could live here, I thought to myself.

While West Germany reminded me of a Disneyland attraction, East Germany was something else altogether. We didn’t swim there—we just took a brief tour, entering through a place called Checkpoint Charlie. At age fourteen, I didn’t know what that was, but I’d heard my brother use the term while playing the card game War. Checkpoint Charlie was, in fact, just an unassuming guardhouse that was the main demarcation point between Allied-occupied West Berlin and Soviet-held East Berlin. It acted as a way station for officials (or visitors like us) traveling from one side of the Wall to the other. Soldiers came onto the bus and thoroughly looked through our passports. I wasn’t scared, but I had the feeling that they didn’t like the idea of us being there.

Entering the country was like watching The Wizard of Oz in reverse. Everything went from vivid colors to bleak black and white and gray. In East Berlin, the sky was gray. The buildings were gray. The people were gray huddled masses, all holding umbrellas in the drizzling rain. They walked with their heads pointed down at the ground and shoulders slumped. It was depressing and joyless. Luckily, we didn’t stay long. There was nothing to do and nothing to see. To be honest, I don’t even know why we went there, other than to say we visited.

Back in West Germany, we swam some practices at Baden-Baden, a spa town on the fringe of the Black Forest. The pools there, located in a forested park, seemed ancient and mysterious to me.

From there, it was on to West Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt, and, finally, Munich. I think Munich may have been the most special place of all the cities we visited. We were given a special tour at the construction site of the next Olympic Games, which would be taking place in just one year. It was remarkable what was being built there. The grounds were simply beautiful, and the facilities looked stunning.

Standing in the nearly empty Olympic Village, I wandered away from my teammates and took all of it in. I thought to myself, I will be back here next year. No matter what, I have to make it back here next year.