WASHINGTON — My first gaucherie committed in our nation’s
capital came in 1970. I was traveling with Vice President Spiro
Agnew, the acerbic pol who for obvious reasons was trying to coax
me away from The American Spectator to become one of his
speech writers. He was an easy-going fellow, and he remarked to me
and young staffers seated with him that he found signing autographs
to be a pleasant task. I told him I did too, and then heard the
groans of the young men around me. Agnew asked when I started
signing autographs. When I was a teenager, I replied. I had been a
swimmer for Doc Counsilman, and every swimmer around Doc was
thought to be a world record holder. Agnew knew about sports and
understood. Possibly he also understood that my autograph was not
quite world class. The other day Doc died.
Simply stated Doc was the greatest swim coach of all time, and
among history’s greatest coaches in any sport. From 1957 to 1990 as
coach at Indiana University his teams won 23 Big Ten Titles, six
consecutive NCAA titles, and seven AAU Outdoor national
championships. In the early 1960s, though allowed to compete in the
AAUs, his IU teams were barred from NCAA championships owing to
recruiting violations committed by other IU teams. Were he free to
compete in the NCAAs in those years he almost certainly would have
accounted for three more NCAA titles. Doc coached two Olympic
teams. He trained 48 Olympians from ten nations who won 46 medals,
26 of them gold. How many world record holders holding how many
world records I can only estimate, but I can say that in the early
1960s my teammates broke world records during practice and held
anywhere between two-thirds to four-fifths of all men’s world
records. In the AAUs we beat the best national teams in the world
and might well have been able to win a dual meet against the best
non-IU swimmers in the world.
Because I came from that athletic milieu, you will understand,
perhaps, why I say that of all the virtues I have always found
humility the most mystifying. God knows, Doc was not a humble man.
Yet he was not arrogant either. He was a creature of the
Enlightenment. Raised on the other side of the tracks in St. Louis
in the 1930s — his father being a carnival worker, his mother what
we now call a single-parent mom — he graduated 113th from a high
school class of 116. But his boyhood hero was Lawrence Tibbett, the
great baritone, and when in he left Ohio State University for the
Army Air Corps he scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the
Army’s IQ test.
During the War he piloted a B-24 on 32 missions during one of
which he successfully crash-landed into Yugoslavia. A notorious
problem with crash-landing those heavy bombers was that their noses
would catch the ground causing the plane to flip. On this fated
flight enemy fire destroyed Doc’s landing gear and hit a
compartment, leaving the crew one parachute short. Doc ordered his
crew to leap, leaving him at the controls. They refused to do so.
Of a sudden, the man his swimmers would one day call the Great
White Ph.D. got an idea. If the crew ran to the back of the plane
at the last minute, its weight distribution would be sufficient to
keep the nose from catching and the plane from cart-wheeling. As
his disabled bomber approached the Yugoslav fields Doc rang a bell.
The crew scurried to the tail. And all were soon being escorted by
partisans from harm’s way. He received the Distinguished Flying
Cross.
I would like to have been with him on that flight. Surely Doc
would have had a wry remark as he gave his orders. Swimming under
him was demanding to the utmost — “hurt, pain, agony,” he would
sing. And along with the agony there was always humor — “Reach
down in the bread basket and come up with the cookies,” was another
of his exhortations, and from Shakespeare, “Screw your courage to
the sticking point.”
Most of my adult life has been spent in the company of
intellectuals of greater or lesser voltage, and it was Doc, an
intellectual of the highest voltage that sent me out of the
swimming pool and into the reading room. His house was filled with
the books of a truly literate man and the appurtenances of a man of
science: technical papers, scientific instruments, tanks filled
with fish and reptiles. When we trained at the indoor pool, opera
and concert music lilted from the public address system. When we
traveled he would have a museum to direct us to. We kidded him
about keeping his art books in his bedroom and out of the public
eye, for Doc never made a display of his artistic interests.
Science was a different matter. He often brought conversations back
to science. By suggesting I read Robert Ardery’s books such as
The Territorial Imperative and Desmond Morris’s The
Naked Ape, I suspect he thought he might lure me to science;
but I remained obtuse.
ANOTHER OF DOC’S BEQUESTS to his swimmers has been a life-long
respect for fitness. He himself had become a national champion
breaststroker at Ohio State after the War and before that a
national YMCA handball champion. His interest in sports for health
endured. In 1979 he became the oldest man to swim the English
Channel, and the nation’s vast master’s swimming program for adults
owes much to his encouragement. I have remained fit for four
decades thanks to him, lifting weights, running, playing handball,
and defying the crank Puritans who confuse vitality with
crapulence.
The dominance his swimmers had over the sport will never again
be duplicated. There are all the titles I cited above. In the early
1960s he revolutionized stroke mechanics in every stroke. In the
1964 Olympic Trials seven IU swimmers stood on the eight starting
blocks in the breaststroke. Incidentally that being my stroke you
might properly deduce that I was the team’s eighth stringer. He
also insisted on strict amateurism. His IU teams had none of the
wealth that so-called amateur sport has today, and the showmanship
was strictly that of quiet American. At the 1962 summer nationals
where his swimmers took practically every title, I recall the
frustration of ABC’s Jim McKay asking each champion as the cameras
whirred, “To what do you attribute your victory?” Our world record
holder in the backstroke set the undemonstrative tone: Wearing a
threadbare nondescript warm-up jacket, Tommy Stock replied,
“Superior coaching.” It became the IU champions’ signature response
and McKay’s despair.
The professionalization of amateur sports became one of Doc
Counsilman’s last challenges. Though usually phlegmatic he was
surprisingly ardent in his derision of the cataracts of money
washing into amateur sport. In fact any contaminant that threatened
fair-play and what we might term sport for sport’s sake angered
him. He had numerous complaints with the drift of college sports
into gaudy show biz and away from the ancients’ ideal of a healthy
mind in a healthy body.
Doc was an idealist disciplined by objective fact and ethics. In
his youth he had been an ardent New Dealer. In his last days he
remained faithful to the memory of FDR but he had come to admire
another former New Dealer, Ronald Reagan. As with Reagan, so it was
with Doc; he never left the Liberals. They left him — and Doc, a
man devoted to fact and principle, found himself voting with me and
with Agnew.
