By Jim Coffman
I love swimming. Competitive swimming that is. And bear with me here because a little personal history will eventually dovetail satisfactorily with recent sporting events, I promise. It all started with the fact that my dad was particularly fond of the sport and he cruised through the pools at impressive speeds all through college. My parents signed my brother and I up when we were little for the swim team at the Jane Addams Center Hull House in Lakeview, the community center located just north of Belmont on the west side of Broadway. Incidentally, Hull House closed a decade or so ago and now has been converted into a giant gym. It’s just what the neighborhood needed of course – there’s at least one other gym on that block of Broadway, let alone the dozen or so more located within the surrounding half-square mile.
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Nat and I learned to swim in the warm, 20-yard pool in the basement. And we competed in age-group meets, ones that managed to last only a couple hours, as opposed to the nightmare youth-swimming competitions they put on now, which often last entire weekends. Later, one of the best things to happen to me at St. Ignatius was being cut from the basketball team my freshman year. I then went out for swimming and avoided four years of not just sitting on the bench but sitting at the very end of the bench. The competitions were great but the training . . . let’s just say I was thoroughly sick of it by the end of my senior season.
After I went to Haverford College in small part because it didn’t even have a pool (they can’t hold a practice if there isn’t a pool), I continued to follow swimming first through my brother, who was a better swimmer than I (and a water polo star), and then through our slightly younger first cousins, who moved to the western suburbs when they were in high school and who won state championships at Hinsdale Central. And of course we all followed USA Swimming whenever the occasion warranted.
Shortly after I came back to Chicago, I started covering sports, first as a stringer for area dailies and eventually as a full-timer for Pioneer Press based in Glenview. Fortunately there were always a few swimmers at the high schools I covered who were good enough to make it to the state finals. So for 10 years in a row I had a front-row vantage point for the best swimming in Illinois.
It is safe to say, I’ve watched a great deal of swimming. And when I say Sunday night’s Olympic 400 free relay final was the best race I’ve ever seen, I do not do so lightly.
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Of course the details have already been covered in the many, many media outlets featuring wall-to-wall coverage. But they bear repeating, relentlessly. Going into the overblown, overwrought, overdone Olympics (which are also often utterly compelling), the by-far best individual story line was Michael Phelps’ quest for eight gold medals (one more than Mark Spitz’s record-setting haul way back in the 70s. It was an individual story line but it would also hinge not only on Phelps’ individual brilliance, which he again proved immediately with a dominating, world-record setting performance in the 400 individual medley the night before, but also on three sets of teammates (his teammates in the relays).
And the first test of those teammates came in the 400 free relay. So not only was Phelps’ quest completely on the line but so was USA swimming pride. The 400 freestyle and medley relays are the most prestigious events at any big swim meet. It means a ton to a team to pull them out. The U.S. dominated the 400 free relay for the first 40 years of Olympic swimming competition but faltered in 2000 and again in 2004.
And then there was the trash-talking. Frenchman Alain Bernard, the world-record holder in the 100 freestyle going into the Olympics, said in an interview published on the eve of the relay in question that his team, which was a sizable favorite, would “smash” the Americans.
The Americans set a new world record in preliminary competition but virtually everyone agreed that the French were still the favorites to win. And nothing that happened in the first three legs of the race did anything to change that. The Americans needed to build up a lead in the first three 100-meter legs big enough for anchor man Jason Lezak to hold off the speedier Bernard. Phelps swam the first and established a small lead but teammates Garrett Weber-Gale and Cullen Jones couldn’t hold it. So Lezak faced the seemingly impossible task of swimming down the guy who had been the fastest 100-meter man going into the Games.
Lezak, a veteran and the captain of the overall US swim team this year, had been a part of the disappointing relay efforts in 2000 and 2004. He hadn’t been at his best at the Olympic Trials last month. He had a shot at redemption but it could hardly have been longer. He dove in almost a full body-length behind.
I have heard swimming analysts speak about trying to swim in the wake of other swimmers with small leads by moving over to the edge of the lane and “riding the wave” that comes off of them, but I really don’t ever remember a swimmer even coming close to executing the strategy as well as Lezak did against Bernard. He pulled up to three-quarters of a body-length behind early in the final leg and then held on into the turn and then out of it. In the final 30 meters or so he pulled within half a body-length and then a quarter but with 10 meters to go it seemed certain he wouldn’t make it the rest of the way. Then with one, final, unbelievable surge he shot past Bernard, beating him by less than .1 of a second for the gold.
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This column can’t be all happy, happy, joy, joy. There is nothing to be said about Jerry Angelo’s drafting of left tackle Chris Williams other than, What a debacle. The news was out there on draft day last spring. Williams was falling down draft boards because of concerns about potential back and neck issues. One of the reporters on the NFL Network took to the airwaves, for goodness sake, and reported the news for all to absorb.
But Angelo and the Bears decided to ignore the intelligence that was right there for them. They took Williams with their first-round pick and not only pronounced him absolutely and completely healthy, they also made it clear that he would be the linchpin in the remaking of their offensive line, a line that had faltered badly during last year’s disappointing season. Left tackle, after all, is usually the most important position on the line. He protects the right-handed quarterback’s blind side.
The Bears also drafted Williams despite the fact that five, count ’em, five other tackles were deemed good enough by their NFL brethren to be drafted later in the first round. And sure enough, in the first hour of training camp, Williams aggravated his back. After blathering on about a muscle strain for double-digit days, the Bears finally acknowledged on the eve of their first exhibition game last Thursday that Williams needed back surgery on a herniated disc. No matter what Jerry and his minions say about their left tackle’s immediate future, he almost certainly is out for the season. And the Bears offensive line, the foundation for everything on that side of the ball, is in complete disarray.
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Jim Coffman appears in this space every Monday with the best sports wrap-up in the city. Except on occasion when he appears on Tuesday. You can write to him personally! Please include a real name if you would like your comments to be considered for publication.
Posted on August 12, 2008