Swimmer’s Ear

Posted: December 17th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 12 Comments »

This is a companion piece to the interview my wife did with Olympic Champion Swimmer (and my old friend) Mel Stewart. Definitely check it out. The interview, I mean.

Melvin Stewart and I are about the same age, and we first met each other when we both had big dreams. His dream was to become an Olympic Champion swimmer and, thus, world famous. My dream was to be a sportswriter who could afford an apartment with a minimum number of roaches. These dreams were not precisely the same size, but we both felt them pretty strongly.

The first time we met was also the first swim meet I ever covered. Here’s what I knew about swimming: When someone said “Marco” you had to say “Polo.” Oh yeah, you can imagine some of the incisive questions I asked that day. Stuff like, “So, uh, swimming huh? Like, how fast can you swim? Could you like outswim a crocodile? Or an alligator? Is there a difference?”

Somehow, despite those painful early interviews, we connected. Mel Stewart, probably more than any athlete I’ve covered, could really tell you what it felt like to be a World Class athlete. It’s a rare gift, being able to really explain what it’s like. Funny — the ultimate sportswriting cliche is a reporter rushing to a player after the game-winning home run, touchdown, jump shot, putt, and saying, “How did it feel?” And yet, we almost NEVER get anything out of the question. Never. It’s a stupid question, almost unanswerable.

Scene from “Arthur”
Flower guy (and one of my all-time favorite character actors Lou Jacobi): “How does it feel to have all that money?”
Arthur: “It feels great.”
Flower guy: “Dumb question.”

But Mel loved to try and explain what he felt. We would talk for hours about what it was that drove him, why in the hell he would spend all that time in a pool, staring at the line on the bottom, swimming until his body just ached beyond imagination. He would talk about the goofy stuff he thought about while swimming. He would talk about how he wanted to win for America (I remember that he always wanted a gigantic American flag in his room).

He would talk about what it meant to him to be the best in the world at something — to know that he could walk into a bar anywhere on planet earth and feel 100 percent certain that nobody in there could beat him at the 200-meter butterfly.

“But,” I would say, “chances are nobody in the bar even CARES about the 200-meter butterfly,”

“Yeah,” he would say, “but is there anything that you feel sure you could do better than anyone else in the entire world?”

Over time, Mel and I became friends. I have been working on a long and rambling blog post about a discussion Bill James and I have been having concerning the state of sportswriting in America. Sportswriting here is much more about being impartial and distant than it is in other countries across the world. I don’t know if I’ll ever post this thing — I don’t know if anyone cares — but I think about this quite a lot, think about how American sportswriting is affected because some of our higher ideals are to be “impartial,” which leads to “detached” which leads to “distant” which leads to “really, really far away.”

So, there are rules about getting too close to someone you cover, I guess. We probably broke those rules (though as Mel always said — hey, I’m just a swimmer, who cares anyway?). We were the kind of friends who would talk about all sorts of stuff and ask each other dating advice (generally our dating questions — much like our dreams — were not similar. He would ask me about some fashion model and whether or not they could work things out with their schedules; I would ask him if he thought the photographer at work liked me despite her insistence that she did not. Basically, he was Vince Vaughn and I was like a very poor-man’s Jon Favreau). Every so often the phone would ring, and it would just be Mel wanting to talk. Every so often, I needed a story, so I would call him, and he always provided.

“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t care. Whatever.”
“How about I say that swimming would have better ratings if we would all swim in the nude?”
“Come on, man.”
“I’d do it. I would. I’d have no problem doing that.”
“Come on, I’m not writing that.”
“How about you write that I want to date Summer Sanders. She’s awesome.”
“She is awesome.”
“She’d go out with me. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Of course, we lived different lives. The guy was always jetting off to exotic sounding places — Oslo or Moscow or Brisbane or whatever. He went off to one of those places and set the world record in the 200-meter butterfly. He then won two gold medals in Barcelona. He was 23 year old, and he did it — he made his dream happen. Around that time, I was writing local cycling features for a paper called “The York Observer.” That would be York County, South Carolina. Then I was writing columns for the Augusta Chronicle. My apartment did have roaches.

So, you could say that at that point in our friendship, he had a slight upper hand. But that didn’t matter. I never bought into the Morrissey song, hating it when our friends become successful and all that. You become friends with someone like Mel Stewart, and you live vicariously through them. I was thrilled for him.

Four years later, I was a columnist in Cincinnati. Mel and I hadn’t talked much the previous couple of years — our lives just took us different ways. But then, it was the 1996 Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. I had not been following swimming much, of course, but I knew Mel’s world record had been broken. I knew some other young American swimmers were emerging. I still expected that he would make the team. I didn’t fully get the concept of time gone by. I was there for the race. Mel finished third. He did not make the team.

And I remember this so clearly — he was in the warm-down pool after the race, and he looked up and saw me. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. He had this odd look and he just sort of shrugged. For once, there really wasn’t anything else to say. We both knew. His swimming career was over. And, oddly, my sportswriting career had only begun. I found myself writing a column about my friend that day. And then I went on to write about other winners.

Mel and I have talked a few times since then, exchanged emails and such. We went to lunch at the Olympics, and I’ve called and written a couple of columns about him — he’s a Hollywood screen writer now. Funny thing. He can really write well too, which sucks for me because I sort of always believed that I could at least do THAT better than him.

Then, the other day my wife calls me over. She says that someone commented on her blog — always a happy event here at the house. I looked and saw the tagline: “Mel the Swimmer.” I can’t even describe how that made me feel. I was happy. Nostalgic. Old friends.

One of the constant themes of this blog is about the oddity and agony of growing old. Mel Stewart is 39 now. That makes me … older.

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