Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
Sydney Olympic Games with Gary Hall Jr. and then has had, to put it mil—” he stopped himself, “some difficulties, let’s just put it that way, and has come back to swimming.”
“You know why I love this story, and this is a tremendous story,” interjected the other commentator, three-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines. “This guy now can retire from swimming in a good way. He’s going to be happy about it. And he wasn’t happy when it happened the first time.”
It was odd to hear talk about Ervin retiring again. There wasn’t really anything to retire from yet. Except for some halfhearted, abortive attempts to work out, he had only returned to serious training the previous year after eight wayward years. During that time he had purged swimming from his life, including his Olympic gold medal, which he auctioned off on eBay in 2005, donating the $17,100 proceeds to the UNICEF tsunami relief fund. His return to the pool was motivated more out of a need for psychic rehab than any desire for a comeback. But by the end of that sunny January day in Austin, the thirty-year-old found himself in the unlikely position of being the second fastest American sprinter.
* * *
When I first met Anthony Ervin, he was sitting in the bleachers of a Brooklyn pool, reading The Professor and the Madman. He had a gaunt-English-major-turned-tattooed-indie-hipster vibe going. The kind of guy you might find behind the counter in a record store or tattoo parlor on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. Not the type you expect to encounter in a swim school, except maybe in New York City.
In short, I thought I had him all figured out. It was early 2009 and I’d just moved to New York from London. A former college swimming teammate had hooked me up as a part-time swim instructor with Imagine Swimming, a thriving swim school that boasted a hip roster of instructors with elite swim pedigrees or—in keeping with the program’s ethos—artistic/creative backgrounds. It was my first day on the job, so when I arrived and saw him reading on the pool bleacher, sporting a bushy goatee, I figured he fell under Imagine’s creative camp.
I went over to him. “Good book. Have you got to the penis part yet?”
He looked at me askance, as if appraising whether or not he should respond. “There’s a penis part?” he said finally.
“You’ll know when you get to it. Hard to forget.”
He shrugged. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or being dismissive.
“I’m Constantine, by the way.”
He paused. “Tony,” he finally said, and returned to the reading.
As I was getting my cap and goggles, the shift supervisor approached me. “So, I see you met Tony,” he said. “You’ll be coaching with him after lessons.” This was unexpected. Not all Imagine instructors have competitive experience, but the coaches do, and often at the sport’s highest echelons. With him? I scoffed to myself. Perhaps he had the ideal creative spirit for working with three-year-olds, but was he qualified to coach? He probably swam freestyle with the earnest low-elbowed chicken-wing stroke one finds at YMCA lap swims.
“Really?” I said, trying to keep the smugness out of my voice. “Did that dude ever swim?”
There was a pause. “Yeah, you could say that. He was the fastest swimmer on the planet for two years.”
* * *
Over the next few months, we got to know each other. He had the engaged, nervy presence of someone who’s had too many cups of coffee, as well as a caustic wit, sharp tongue, and lack of any self-censoring mechanism, which made him come across as more New Yorker than California native. We rarely talked about swimming, but sharing an aquatic history no doubt buttressed our friendship. Though I had dropped out of competitive swimming much earlier than he (sophomore year in college), and though I had been a big fish only in the smallest of puddles (high school state champ in Maine, a state where, with rare exceptions, the only swimmers famed beyond its borders are crustaceans), we had both left the pool to front life on our own terms, taking divergent paths that led into literary territories. As a writer who, for better or worse, had always felt uncomfortable within writer communities and rebelled against its circles and programs, I could relate, at least inversely, to Ervin’s rejection of hypermasculine sports culture. I had spent more time among lobstermen and carpenters than around writers, so it was only natural for Anthony’s unconventional merging of physicality with analytic bookishness to resonate with me. He was intrigued by my compulsion to write and I was intrigued by his rebuff of the golden platter. And what a golden platter it was.
* * *
The 50-meter freestyle sprint—one length down an Olympic-sized pool—is swimming’s glory event, the aquatic equivalent of the 100-meter dash. The world champion can boast, as could the Jamaican runner Usain Bolt after the Beijing Olympics, of being the fastest human on earth. The compound word freestyle is meant literally: any technique is permitted, even doggy paddle, corkscrew, or double-armed backstroke. Freestyle is synonymous with front crawl, the default stroke in any freestyle race, only because it’s the fastest way to swim across the water’s surface.
Though Michael Phelps is heralded as the most dominant swimmer in the history of the sport, he isn’t the fastest sprinter in history, or even of his era. If he were, he wouldn’t dominate as many events as he does. The 50-meter sprinter is a different species of creature, more cheetah than antelope, built and bred for stupendous but short-lived speed. Genetic marvels of nerves and fast-twitch muscle fibers, few can maintain their top speeds for much more than the twenty-something seconds that the event lasts. The current men’s world record, held by Brazilian César Cielo, is 20.91 seconds. He swam this Herculean time in 2009 during the two-year stretch when “tech suits” were foolishly allowed in competition, thus leading to the subsequent shattering of practically every world record.1 While purebred sprinters also often reign at the 100-meter sprint—the distance where one first starts to cross into the vast estate of Phelps’s watery kingdom—their high-RPM engines seize up when revved over longer distances.
Ervin belongs unambiguously to the cheetah camp of swimmers. USA Swimming and FINA announcer Michael Poropat once called him “possibly the most naturally gifted sprinter in swimming history.” But when Ervin was nineteen and stepped up to the blocks in the Sydney Olympics, the buzz wasn’t about his speed. It was about his race. With a Jewish mother and black father, he found himself branded as “the first African American swimmer to make the Olympic team.” It was a confusing label as he’d never viewed himself through the lens of race.
Ervin’s gifts, like his heritage, are unconventional: less physical than abstract, less about power than finesse, as much about cognizance as natural ability. After so many years of shunning competition, his return to swimming had reignited his competitive streak. But he was wary of this renewed impulse to win. To even express hesitation over one’s competitive drive is a rarity among athletes. Even the most easygoing tend to be fiercely competitive. Some would even say that competition is to athletes what creativity is to artists: without it they’re stagnant. Competition, after all, invigorates. Though often viewed with disdain or skepticism by the intelligentsia, athletic fervor is more than a predictable by-product of cutthroat capitalism or team spirit jingoism. The absurd particularity of any sport—whether it involves running around and slapping a hollow yellow rubber ball back and forth over a net, or running around and kicking a bigger ball into a bigger net, or even just running around—is simply the incidental stage upon which the passion and physical artistry play out, a clash of wills that rejuvenates both participants and spectators.
But at the same time, competition also favors antagonism over cooperation and necessarily entails winners and losers. Reconciling his zeal to win with his ambivalence over the nature of competition itself is one of the many ways Ervin resists the stereotype of the one-track-minded athlete. He brings to his swimming the analysis and hyper-self-consciousness of the modern intellectual, a self-awareness that facilitates his speed in water, even if it may undermine him on the starting block. Again and again, Ervin deconstructs the socially defined binaries: thinker vs. jock, black vs. white, rebel vs. role model. If there were such