ABSTRACT
Section Prize. The article has enjoyed a good run in reprints and readers, and lots of undergraduate students still read it 20 years after its publication. It grew out of that “Freud moment.” The swimming research emerged when professional necessity joined hands
with personal passion. The necessity was to find a new research project. I’d just completed a doctoral dissertation on moral problems in hospital nursing, and was emotionally exhausted from long months of observation in newborn intensive care units, cancer wards, operating rooms and emergency rooms, watching a big slice of the world’s misery. Personal tragedy was routine to the people working in hospitals (“How was your day?” I once asked a nurse I was taking out to dinner. “Some guy fell dead in front of me,” she replied), but the nurses’ world was not mine, and I was looking for something a little more fun. Besides, as an untenured college professor, keeping my job required doing more research. That was the driving necessity. The passion was for competitive swimming, which since my early teens
offered everything I desired: excitement, sun, water, bodily and aesthetic beauty, girls, speed, raucous socializing, the thrill of victory, and-for a 120pound kid with no muscle but lots of self-discipline-the prospect of justice achieved. After all, nothing satisfies an undersized teenaged boy quite so much as defeating 6ft 2in, 200-lb jocks in something athletic. Through competitive swimming, I became a skinny 15-year-old strolling around my high school wrapped in a big leather letter jacket. Pretty nice; lots of benefits. Swimming was physically challenging and sensually pleasurable; it was intensely competitive but not dangerous, either physically or socially; and it demanded, if one really took it seriously (which I did), a greater commitment of all one’s resources-physical, emotional, moral and intellectual-than anything I’d ever seen before or since. By my senior year in 1970, I made it to the finals of the Tennessee State Championships: not great, considering the work I put in, but quite satisfying overall. I loved the sport. So in 1983, looking around for a new sociological topic to study, and seeing that the 1984 Olympic Games were to be held here in the United States, in Los Angeles, my decision was really pretty easy. I’d study swimmers training for the Olympics, and find out what made them so good. Initially I had no “theory” or hypotheses, only an inchoate, almost
unconscious collection of assumptions-lots of them, as it happens-about elite swimmers, gathered from seeing them on television and in magazines. I imagined them, for instance, to be personally attractive yet modest; full of interesting ideas about swimming; and the center of attention wherever they went. I thought they’d be cool. I also expected them to be celebrities, which I discovered they weren’t, except for during one Olympic week out of every four years. (It turns out most of them were ordinary teenagers, although exceptionally athletic ones.) My sociological footing was a thick mixture of symbolic interactionism, Randall Collins’ version of Durkheim’s ritual solidarity theory, and the basics of organizational social psychology. The
sociology of sport literature I rejected as too thin and politically tendentious, but I voraciously read what was called “New Journalism,” practiced by writers such as David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese. These journalists did what I wanted to do: they wrote true stories as if they were fiction, from a third-person omniscient point of view. I wanted to see, and know, and describe, the swimming world from the inside, as the swimmers lived it. The basic research method was total immersion (an apt metaphor!) in
Southern California swimming. I spent many months, over a four-year period, with a group of Olympic-class swimmers, living with their coaches for part of that span. During the same period, I took up coaching myself, beginning rather badly (bottom of the local league for two years) and ending four years later rather well, with several swimmers in the “Top 20 in the U.S.” in their age groups, and one national collegiate champion. Once in a while, I even got back in the water myself, to remember what it was like; it’s much harder than it looks. Mainly, though, I watched swimmers swim and talked with them and their coaches about swimming, or anything else. And all those implicit beliefs I had held about great swimmers proved, mostly, to have been wrong. One day in at the pool I literally sat down with a lined pad of paper and wrote, one item per line, all of the things I felt I’d learned in the research, with no self-censorship: “They’re kids.” “Everyone calls them kids, too.” “The coaches never yell.” “They laugh a lot.” “Some of these people have nothing to say.” “I’m frequently bored.” “Turns and pushoffs matter a lot.” “The divers on this team are narcissists.” “Coaches make sure the deck area is clean.” “Everyone works very hard, but some swimmers are called lazy by the others.” “Coaches exist to eliminate excuses.” The list ran to several pages. Reviewing the list later, I realized that my childhood images of great swimmers had been fantasies, and my adult notions had been myths, variations on what I had heard through magazines and television. About almost all of it, I had been wrong. Each little surprise-each thing I learned-emerged from some characteristic
of the research. Some insights came from doing observation-actually watching my subjects live their lives. Others came from observing over several years, doing longitudinal research. And a third group of ideas emerged as I actually tried to use what I had learned, testing the developing theory with practical application, as a coach, to my own swimmers and their careers.
