Fun at the Goal Meet - Omaha ~1973
Each year, our Wichita Swim Club team designated one of the summer's swim meets as the "Goal Meet". It was intended to be a fun trip; while we took the swimming competition seriously, the activities we experienced along the way were much more important. The Goal Meet was a bus trip, and each one featured at least one opportunity to do something entertaining. It also seemed that every goal meet featured some sort of impressive performance from one or more of our team members.
I only remember a few things about the Omaha Goal Meet. One was the opportunity we had to go off the 10-meter diving platform during a break in the swim meet. I climbed up the long ladder and was looking forward to a new and exciting diving experience.
The Olympic divers you see on television make it look so easy. They walk right up to the edge and do backwards handstands and stuff, right on the edge of this huge dropoff. Trust me, 10 meters is VERY high up there. From that height, the pool looks like a postage stamp.
I sorta scooted up to the edge of the platform and looked over, just like I would if I were at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I looked at the pool and thought, "Dang, if I don't jump completely straight, I could miss that little dot of water." I stayed up there for a while, just sort of looking around and trying to imagine working up the courage to jump off from such a great height. I did not want to be branded a chicken if I turned around and crawled back down the ladder.
Finally, though, I concluded that being a chicken was infinitely preferable to being a greasy spot on the concrete deck so many miles below. I turned around and headed for the ladder.
Glenn Nyberg had also climbed the ladder as a first time 10-m visitor, as I had. He had also looked over the edge and had seen how tiny the people looked, and how uninviting the drop appeared. Since it was obvious that no sane person would ever jump off, much less dive, I assumed that Glenn would be heading for the ladder as well.
Instead, though, he just ran up to the edge and dove off.
It was a pretty nice dive, considering that he'd never done anything like that before. I don't think he was hurt at all. (Or if he was, he never admitted it.) But Glenn's bravado didn't motivate me to try it -- the only affect it had on me was that my cowardly retreat went mostly unnoticed; everybody was watching him.
Sometime later, Glenn enhanced his reputation as a daredevil by diving from the top of the WSC pool's heater hut into the 4-foot water at the shallow end of the pool. The hut wasn't all that close to the edge of the pool, either, so he spent most of his flight soaring over solid concrete. Somehow, though, he managed to make it into the water without killing himself.
Funny, but now that I think about it, just about everything Glenn ever did was followed by someone saying, "It's amazing he didn't kill himself."
(Of course, the only role he played in the movies we shot with the swim team DID end with his character killing himself. Hmmm. Food for thought.)
Anyway, back to Omaha Goal Meet memories: I also remember seeing "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes", which wasn't a bad movie, except that I always thought the title should be "The Computer THAT Wore Tennis Shoes". I was hoping to make out with one of the girls during the movie, but for some reason, they all waited until I had chosen a seat, and then selected their spots in a section that was at the opposite end of the theatre.
(Hmm. The same thing happened on the bus ride, too. Once, though, I actually got to sit next to Beth Alley, who I liked a lot. I kept trying to figure out a way to put the "moves" on her, but when even the old "yawn and put your arm around her" ploy ended up with a major bruise on my arm, I gave up.)
Finally, there's the memory of watching Roger Neugent swimming the 400IM. It was the final event of the meet, and as Roger's heat was in the water, Coach Deardorf was calculating the team scores. Roger was loafing the race, and at the end of the backstroke was in last place in his heat.
Coach Deardorf finished his calculation, and immediately proceeded to the edge of the pool. "Roger", he yelled. Neugent continued swimming his leisurely breaststroke, still in dead last. "ROGER!", Deardorf yelled. Neugent stopped swimming and popped his head out of the water. Without his glasses, Roger had no chance of seeing who was yelling at him, but he squinted over toward the deck anyway. "Huh?" he said. "We need 4th place!" Deardorf yelled. "Huh?"
"WE NEED FOURTH PLACE!!" Roger nodded, said "OK", and went back to swimming.
What followed was one of the most impressive efforts I've ever seen. With half the race already over, Neugent cranked out an outstanding comeback. Before the breaststroke was even over, he had taken over the desired 4th place, but since he couldn't see very well, he kept cranking. His freestyle was churning the water like a speedboat.
When he finished the race, Roger squinted up at the results board. Couldn't see it. He squinted at the surrounding lanes. Couldn't tell who had finished in which position. He turned toward the coach and shrugged his shoulders and held his palms up in the universal "Well?" gesture.
As witnesses to his fabulous effort, our entire team was jumping up and down on the deck. When we saw that he had no clue whether he'd achieved his goal, we all yelled in unison, "Neugent...YOU WON!" He nodded and gave us his famous grin. Then he crawled out and laid himself down on the deck to recover.
Someone took a photo of the exhausted warrior in this flattened position. The caption that accompanied that photo in the team yearbook was wholely appropriate: "God is Love. Love is blind. Neugent is almost blind. Therefore, Neugent is almost God."
If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
How I Got the Nickname "Speed" ~1973
My high school swim coach had to bend the rules to get me a letter jacket. My college swim coach pleaded with me to "retire" so he wouldn't have to cut me. On the Wichita Swim Club, the four fastest boys in an age group were called the "A" relay -- I was usually on the "F" relay.
I was not a particularly fast young swimmer. Compared to my teammates, in fact, I totally sucked.
So how come I was the one who ended up with the nickname "Speed"?
A little background: The summer swim meet season had several important meets to train for. The first one was the "Air Capital Meet", which was held at our very own Wichita Swim Club pool at the Love Aquatic Center. [NOTE: Wichita is known as the Air Capital of the World, because so many big airplane companies have plants there -- Beechcraft, Boeing, Cessna, Lear, etc. The name has nothing to do with the quality of the atmosphere, which quite frankly smelled of stockyards and oil refineries.] Another was our team's "Goal Meet", which included a team bus trip to some exotic city, such as Omaha or San Antonio. (The Goal Meet was notable more for its opportunities for motel shenanigans and bus-ride romances than for the quality of its swim competition, but that's another story.) But the BIG MEET of the summer was the Region 8 Championships.
Don't ask me what Region 8 is, and don't ask me how many Regions there are. I've never seen a map with these mystical Regions listed on it. All I know is that the Region 8 Championships featured swimmers from Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas...and maybe some others. Who knows? But at least you knew there'd be swimmers there who, perhaps suffering some sort of visual disorder, couldn't distinguish between an individual and a group -- calling everyone "y'all". And it was an important meet for the Wichita Swim Club to win.
Since the Region 8 meet was the Big One for the summer, only the best swimmers could attend. There were qualifying times that you'd have to achieve within the summer in order to be allowed to sign up for the meet. And since I sucked, I was not able to hit those qualifying times.
So all the good swimmers shave down and head to some exotic place like Little Rock or Kansas City to compete for the honor of the team and the glory of the Championship Trophy, while the rest of us were left behind to wallow in our crumminess.
Or at least it could have been that way. But our leaders were too smart to let us do any wallowing. They allowed us to go to an alternate meet. Maybe we weren't good enough to go to Kansas City, but by golly, we could go to Manhattan instead. Whoopie!
(No, I'm not talking about the Manhattan where the Empire State Building is. I'm talking about the Manhattan where Kansas State University is. Smells like cows, it does, which may not sound too good, but is probably a better fragrance than the multi-faceted stench of the Air Capital.)
The Manhattan meet gave us an opportunity to compete and possibly achieve "A" times, which would allow us to go to a better class of meet the next year. And while it was certainly more prestigious to go to a championship meet, there were some benefits to swimming at Manhattan. 1) Since it was a "minor" meet, there were plenty of opportunities to goof off and create mischief, and 2) Becky Love was the coach who went with us. (Sigh. That, too, is another story.)
Because of the team's relaxed attitude about the meet, I decided to have some fun with it, right from the beginning. Normally, when you filled out event entry cards for the meet, you'd post your previous best time. Sometimes, if you were feeling frisky, you might even enter with a time slightly faster than you'd ever gone, just because you thought you might have improved since your last competition. But I took it several steps further. I entered each event with INCREDIBLY FAST times -- times that I not only had never gone, but that very few people anywhere had ever gone. They weren't quite Olympic-caliber entry times, but not that far off.
This would guarantee that at a meet like Manhattan, I'd been seeded as the favorite in every single event I entered. Such audacity in entry times required equivalent bravado in the box for "Name". I entered each event under the name "Speed" Heggy.
It was a joke. I honestly thought they toss out all my entries as being utterly ridiculous. I figured that I'd end up being shown on the heat sheet as a "No Time" entry, and would swim with the slowest entrants.
But just in case...
I went to a local T-Shirt Shop and had the word "SPEED" printed in big red letters on the front of the shirt. And once the meet started, I asked my teammates to loan me any medals they'd been awarded. Since I didn't swim the first few events while several of my quicker buddies did, I had almost a dozen medals in my possession before I stepped up to the blocks for the first time.
I pinned all of this hardware to the front of my "SPEED" shirt and walked up to the heating area as if I were God's Gift to Swimming. I tried to smile at my competitors with the type of condescension that showed utter contempt for their upcoming pitiful efforts to beat me. As I walked to the blocks, I noticied that there were more people with their eyes on the pool than there normally were for events such as this. I heard whispers from the spectators; "Look, there's that Speed guy. Do you think he's really that fast?" and "He doesn't look big enough or strong enough to do those times. I gotta watch this."
As the heat was called, I actually got up on the blocks still wearing the medal-covered T-shirt. I took my time removing it, making a great show of trying to flex my pitifully small muscles the way a bodybuilder would. I tossed the shirt back to my timer, smiled a big grin to the crowd, and gave all my new fans a little wave. Then I put on my competitor's game face. I tried to scowl and look like a guy who was about to pummel his competitors like the insignificant scum that they were. The starter spoke into the microphone. "Take your marks..."
Of course, I got my ass kicked. Badly. After all, I was swimming in the fastest heat, but I wasn't even close to being one of the fastest guys. Everyone else finished a loooonnnng time before I did.
When I finally reached the wall, the timer leaned over to me, obviously concerned. "You OK, Speed?" she asked. I took a deep breath and nodded. "It just hasn't been the same since I had that lung removed last week, so soon after my kidney operation" I said. She had no idea how to reply to that, so I grabbed my weighted T-shirt and headed back to the team tent.
By the end of the weekend, I had over 40 medals hung from my shirt. Thankfully, the spectators and citizens of Manhattan were willing to play along with my little joke. "Good luck, Speed," they'd say, and I'd salute them and wink. "Don't worry, Speed, you'll win the next one." They'd cheer every time I took the blocks.
The guys who actually did win the events weren't quite so thrilled with me, but I managed to escape the weekend without being beaten up, banned from the sport, or robbed of my T-shirt. And I ended up making some new friends, gaining a fun story to tell, and becoming something of a legend among the "F" relay crowd.
I eventually did give the medals back. But not the nickname.
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
My high school swim coach had to bend the rules to get me a letter jacket. My college swim coach pleaded with me to "retire" so he wouldn't have to cut me. On the Wichita Swim Club, the four fastest boys in an age group were called the "A" relay -- I was usually on the "F" relay.
I was not a particularly fast young swimmer. Compared to my teammates, in fact, I totally sucked.
So how come I was the one who ended up with the nickname "Speed"?
A little background: The summer swim meet season had several important meets to train for. The first one was the "Air Capital Meet", which was held at our very own Wichita Swim Club pool at the Love Aquatic Center. [NOTE: Wichita is known as the Air Capital of the World, because so many big airplane companies have plants there -- Beechcraft, Boeing, Cessna, Lear, etc. The name has nothing to do with the quality of the atmosphere, which quite frankly smelled of stockyards and oil refineries.] Another was our team's "Goal Meet", which included a team bus trip to some exotic city, such as Omaha or San Antonio. (The Goal Meet was notable more for its opportunities for motel shenanigans and bus-ride romances than for the quality of its swim competition, but that's another story.) But the BIG MEET of the summer was the Region 8 Championships.
Don't ask me what Region 8 is, and don't ask me how many Regions there are. I've never seen a map with these mystical Regions listed on it. All I know is that the Region 8 Championships featured swimmers from Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas...and maybe some others. Who knows? But at least you knew there'd be swimmers there who, perhaps suffering some sort of visual disorder, couldn't distinguish between an individual and a group -- calling everyone "y'all". And it was an important meet for the Wichita Swim Club to win.
Since the Region 8 meet was the Big One for the summer, only the best swimmers could attend. There were qualifying times that you'd have to achieve within the summer in order to be allowed to sign up for the meet. And since I sucked, I was not able to hit those qualifying times.
So all the good swimmers shave down and head to some exotic place like Little Rock or Kansas City to compete for the honor of the team and the glory of the Championship Trophy, while the rest of us were left behind to wallow in our crumminess.
Or at least it could have been that way. But our leaders were too smart to let us do any wallowing. They allowed us to go to an alternate meet. Maybe we weren't good enough to go to Kansas City, but by golly, we could go to Manhattan instead. Whoopie!
(No, I'm not talking about the Manhattan where the Empire State Building is. I'm talking about the Manhattan where Kansas State University is. Smells like cows, it does, which may not sound too good, but is probably a better fragrance than the multi-faceted stench of the Air Capital.)
The Manhattan meet gave us an opportunity to compete and possibly achieve "A" times, which would allow us to go to a better class of meet the next year. And while it was certainly more prestigious to go to a championship meet, there were some benefits to swimming at Manhattan. 1) Since it was a "minor" meet, there were plenty of opportunities to goof off and create mischief, and 2) Becky Love was the coach who went with us. (Sigh. That, too, is another story.)
Because of the team's relaxed attitude about the meet, I decided to have some fun with it, right from the beginning. Normally, when you filled out event entry cards for the meet, you'd post your previous best time. Sometimes, if you were feeling frisky, you might even enter with a time slightly faster than you'd ever gone, just because you thought you might have improved since your last competition. But I took it several steps further. I entered each event with INCREDIBLY FAST times -- times that I not only had never gone, but that very few people anywhere had ever gone. They weren't quite Olympic-caliber entry times, but not that far off.
This would guarantee that at a meet like Manhattan, I'd been seeded as the favorite in every single event I entered. Such audacity in entry times required equivalent bravado in the box for "Name". I entered each event under the name "Speed" Heggy.
It was a joke. I honestly thought they toss out all my entries as being utterly ridiculous. I figured that I'd end up being shown on the heat sheet as a "No Time" entry, and would swim with the slowest entrants.
But just in case...
I went to a local T-Shirt Shop and had the word "SPEED" printed in big red letters on the front of the shirt. And once the meet started, I asked my teammates to loan me any medals they'd been awarded. Since I didn't swim the first few events while several of my quicker buddies did, I had almost a dozen medals in my possession before I stepped up to the blocks for the first time.
I pinned all of this hardware to the front of my "SPEED" shirt and walked up to the heating area as if I were God's Gift to Swimming. I tried to smile at my competitors with the type of condescension that showed utter contempt for their upcoming pitiful efforts to beat me. As I walked to the blocks, I noticied that there were more people with their eyes on the pool than there normally were for events such as this. I heard whispers from the spectators; "Look, there's that Speed guy. Do you think he's really that fast?" and "He doesn't look big enough or strong enough to do those times. I gotta watch this."
As the heat was called, I actually got up on the blocks still wearing the medal-covered T-shirt. I took my time removing it, making a great show of trying to flex my pitifully small muscles the way a bodybuilder would. I tossed the shirt back to my timer, smiled a big grin to the crowd, and gave all my new fans a little wave. Then I put on my competitor's game face. I tried to scowl and look like a guy who was about to pummel his competitors like the insignificant scum that they were. The starter spoke into the microphone. "Take your marks..."
Of course, I got my ass kicked. Badly. After all, I was swimming in the fastest heat, but I wasn't even close to being one of the fastest guys. Everyone else finished a loooonnnng time before I did.
When I finally reached the wall, the timer leaned over to me, obviously concerned. "You OK, Speed?" she asked. I took a deep breath and nodded. "It just hasn't been the same since I had that lung removed last week, so soon after my kidney operation" I said. She had no idea how to reply to that, so I grabbed my weighted T-shirt and headed back to the team tent.
By the end of the weekend, I had over 40 medals hung from my shirt. Thankfully, the spectators and citizens of Manhattan were willing to play along with my little joke. "Good luck, Speed," they'd say, and I'd salute them and wink. "Don't worry, Speed, you'll win the next one." They'd cheer every time I took the blocks.
The guys who actually did win the events weren't quite so thrilled with me, but I managed to escape the weekend without being beaten up, banned from the sport, or robbed of my T-shirt. And I ended up making some new friends, gaining a fun story to tell, and becoming something of a legend among the "F" relay crowd.
I eventually did give the medals back. But not the nickname.
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
