I found Galen in the ready room. The meet’s organizers had commandeered a multipurpose room deep in the bowels of the Green Bay YMCA where they’d shoved the exercise mats and therapy balls into a corner and hauled in a dozen wooden benches, now arranged in parallel lines from the front of the room to the back. Each bench contained a heat of the Boys 8&U twenty-five-yard freestyle. The boys sat shoulder to shoulder in their Speedos and caps and goggles, their muscleless bodies small beneath the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, vying to see who could make the loudest fart noises. Their eyes bulged as they blew against their palms and biceps.
Galen sat stone-faced with his hands in his lap, his eyes hidden behind his goggles. I tried to take a picture, since this was his first meet, but he wouldn’t smile. I laid my hand on his shoulder and could feel it trembling. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What if I don’t win?”
A woman standing in the doorway hollered, “First heat, here we go!” The front row of boys stood up and exited single file, all of a sudden solemn and silent, as though marching to certain death on a battlefield. It was a walk I’d taken many times in my life, and it never got easier. The other boys in the room moved forward a bench.
“Swim as fast as you can,” I said. “Don’t worry about where you finish.”
Galen turned to me, his eyes bug-shaped behind his goggles. “Could I have some time alone, please?”
I felt the blood rise in my face. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. I never wanted anyone, especially not a parent, to talk to me when I was in the ready room. I shuffled backward. “I’ll go wait on the deck,” I said. I set my hand on his shoulder again, then quickly jerked it away. “Try to think of a song you like. That used to help me.”
He nodded absently, shooing me away. I ambled through the doorway and into the corridor, crowded with volunteers and coaches in team apparel. The doorway to the natatorium at the end of the hallway glowed with pink and yellow light. Crossing the threshold into the pool, a vast, tiled room two-stories tall with windows encircling the upper level and an observation balcony on the far side, I felt myself travel through space and time, from Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2012 to Houston, Texas, in 1982. Thirty years hence and fifteen-hundred miles north, the scene had hardly changed. The tiled deck was slicked and shiny with pool water; officials paced the lanes in white polos and matching trousers; coaches crowded the edges of the pool, whistling and cheering with their arms in the air. The chlorine was so thick it clung to my skin. I could taste it in the back of my throat, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. I still swam every morning and even raced now and again, but it had been many years since I’d walked the deck at a meet so resonant of my childhood, so full of children in racing suits with their event numbers inked in Magic Marker on their arms, so brimming with confusion and wonder and expectation. After a few obligatory seasons of rec-league soccer, my firstborn son had, of his volition, asked to join the aquatic fellowship to which I, as well as my father and sister, had belonged our entire lives. Dad had held several national age-group records in the early sixties and had been a serious competitor until he went to college; Devin and I had both competed for Division I university teams. Standing in the natatorium, taking it all in, waiting for my son to take his place on the blocks for his first-ever swimming race, as well as in the closest thing we had to a family heritage, I thought I might weep.
My boy can swim!
Right then, as I was lifting my hand to my eye to dam my welling tear, a woman shouted, “You!” She was broad-shouldered and boxy and wore a Green Bay YMCA T-shirt. Her sleeves were rolled into cuffs and the badge pinned across her ample breast said MEET VOLUNTEER. Jarred out of my reverie, it took me a moment to register that she was talking to me.
“Are you a coach?” she demanded, index finger pointed at my face.
My first thought: She needed my help. Someone who knew how to work a stopwatch. I’d coached and taught swimming on and off for twenty years. “Not today,” I said, smiling at her. As in, Lady, I could tell you stories. “I’m waiting for my son to swim.”
“Parents aren’t allowed on the pool deck.” Her flared nostrils and narrowed eyes conveyed an anger far exceeding my trespass. Nor did I think of myself as an ordinary swimming parent. I’d seen records broken, time barriers shattered. Galen’s godfather, my college roommate and oldest friend, had coached in three Olympics.
“This is his first meet,” I said. “I want to make sure he knows where to go.”
“You need to get off the deck,” she said. She pointed to the crowded viewing balcony upstairs where Katherine and Hayden had gone to stake out a spot. The bleachers were crowded, the air close with trapped chlorinated heat and two hundred parents in winter sweaters squeezed miserably close together.
“His race is up in a few minutes,” I said. “As soon as he swims, I’ll go.”
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Off the deck . . . Now!”
I managed to slow-walk my exit long enough to see Galen’s heat march from the ready room to the lanes. I lingered in the doorway until I saw him stand up on the blocks. When the starter told the boys to take their marks and he bent over, he disappeared behind the crowd. I waited a few seconds more, hoping to see him dive in, but from where I stood, I couldn’t see the water.
It’s a cliché of American life: Youth sports, intended to instill character and camaraderie in children, bring out the worst in adults. The stories are abundant and galling and perpetually renewing. A dad in Massachusetts beat a fellow parent to death at a pickup hockey game; a mom in Virginia slapped and knocked to the ground a teenage official at her nine-year-old’s soccer game; a Little League coach instructed his ten-year-old pitcher to take aim at an opposing player. My all-time favorite is Wanda Holloway, who tried to hire a hit man to rub out the mother of the girl who defeated her daughter for a spot on the junior high cheerleading squad. The story was big news for a while. I remembered her because the Holloways lived on the south side of Houston, about an hour from where I grew up.
My mother and the other parents on my swimming team speculated that Wanda Holloway was either mentally ill or utterly depraved. Yet on a deeper level, I understood that Mrs. Holloway was connected to and even in some respects produced by the same take-no-prisoners parental fury I’d seen on display at every event from Friday-night football games to peewee soccer to my own swimming meets. My mom had once cheered so hard for my sister during a race that she lost control of her pen and heat sheet and both ended up in the water. I’d also seen parents stab fingers at each other’s faces. Once, when the divisional champs were on the line, a trophy contested by a whopping six teams, I watched two grown men, dads of swimmers, fist-fight in the parking lot.
It all sounds a bit absurd, and it is. The English-American novelist and transatlantic sports fan Wilfrid Sheed explains, “When a politician says he hates something viscerally—whether it’s John Major on terrorism or Senator Windbag on flag-burning—one doubts his insides are much disturbed: as Dr. Johnson might say, he will eat his dinner tonight. But a sports fan who has seen a sure victory slip away in the bottom of the ninth, or the work of a whole season obliterated by a referee’s call in overtime, is disconsolate beyond the power of description, although Sophocles comes close.” I admit that I’ve walked away more calmly from debates about politics and religion than I walked away from the Nurse Ratched who yelled at me. I was so hot with rage that before I could return to Katherine and the boys, I had to step outside into the winter air to cool down.
The YMCA stood at the center of downtown Green Bay, two blocks east of the Fox River, which bisected the city as it flowed into Lake Michigan. Commissioned and built in the twenties, the building still proudly displayed its gabled dormers and pointed rooflines. Close one eye, and it looked a little like the Dakota building in New York where John Lennon and Yoko Ono chatted each other up while sitting on the toilet. The Green Bay Y was a testament to the optimism and prosperity that once streamed through the city—a busy port with access via the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean and the world, and home to several major paper, meatpacking, and manufacturing companies. These days, of course, Green Bay was most famous for its NFL team, which, given the city’s size and economy, it ought not to have had.
The parade of football team paraphernalia, from the standard-issue sweatshirts and iconic foam cheeseheads to the bumper stickers and toy flags affixed to car windows, was likely nowhere more ensconced in the local culture than in Wisconsin. Fire hydrants were painted green and gold, and on game days everyone from the supermarket baggers to clergy dressed in jerseys. When Katherine and I were looking at houses, we toured several proudly featuring wall-to-wall Packers carpet and displaying mantles crowded with annual family portraits, taken by professional photographers, in which everyone in the shot, including the infant, Grandma, and the dog, proudly showed off the Big G. But the garb was much more than a display of pride and love for the team; I often read it as performance of loyalty, as if Wisconsinites needed to prove that what they lacked in market size they made up for in zeal. As if they knew an awful truth: If tradition were to buckle to the colder logic of capitalism and the team were to relocate to a more populated city where it could jack up ticket prices, the city of Green Bay, as well as any remnant of the industrial prowess signified by Lambeau Field towering over the squat city skyline, would die.
Our city, Appleton, was only a half hour to the south. It shared Green Bay’s area code, congressional district, and local news channels. Visiting NFL teams stayed in Appleton whenever they came to town. The two cities were in many ways twin communities, rooted in the same German-Scandinavian culture, subject to the same weather, struggling against the same economic hardships. After six years in Wisconsin, I’d developed a sentimental affection for the Northwoods, the Great Lakes’ jigsawed shoreline, the opalescent summer light. But I also battled a misgiving roiling around in my gut whenever I drove past the empty downtown storefronts and the parade of chain restaurants crowded near the highway.
Standing in the icy mist, my breath steaming around my face, it occurred to me that I was all alone on the street. No cars drove past. No pedestrians strolled along the street. The downtown city center was as deserted on an ordinary Saturday in late January as Christmas morning. It was possible, I thought, to love a place and hope your children will leave it.
If the Packers symbolized Wisconsin’s enduring ability to compete in a rapidly changing world, it stood to reason that youth sports likewise symbolized a kid’s ability to compete in life. Parents learned, by the same cultural osmosis that taught boys to swear and girls to gossip, to go on the offensive for their children, to make sure the system worked in their favor, that they had the shot we’d dreamed of for them. It was natural for parents to want our kids to stand out, if for no other reason than because we feared they’d be left behind. Such an impulse seemed enhanced by living in a city that itself felt left behind.
I didn’t personally know any moms or dads who banked on their children becoming professional athletes, but almost every parent I knew whose kids played sports with any kind of intensity or talent talked about college. Some hoped their son’s or daughter’s athletic accomplishments would help pay the tuition; others only wanted sports to help them get in. In The Game of Life, sociologists James Shulman and William Bowen point out that college admissions have become increasingly competitive in the last several decades, especially as “career advancement in our knowledge-based economy has increased the premium that prospective employers, and consequently applicants, place on attending a school with an impressive reputation.” As application numbers climbed, Shulman and Bowen note, admissions offices became more interested in students with distinctive qualifications and specialized talents—like, say, music, or computers, or sports. And as sports culture grew in America, vastly outpacing both music and computers, athletics proved an ever-greater advantage when it came to getting a big envelope in the mail. Despite the perennial claim by a mildly acned but still well-rounded white student that a black or Latino kid “took his spot” at his first-choice school, the chances were much greater that the “spot” went to an athlete. And yet, though athletics might help with admissions, the chances of getting a scholarship remained tiny—by most estimates, only one to two percent.
I was a product of this very system and a member of that statistically exclusive fraternity that paid for my undergraduate education in muscle and sweat. Earning a scholarship did not seem particularly special when I was in high school largely because the opportunity was in no way unique to me. I swam for large club teams in Houston and Orange County, California, large urban metropolitan areas replete with large clubs, and nearly all the swimmers were recruited by some university somewhere. I was neither a star nor the fastest swimmer. But not receiving a scholarship offer would have felt like a failure, and when the offer finally came, I remember feeling, more than anything else, a great rush of relief.
In addition to the financial incentive, swimming in college afforded all the benefits one hears about: paid tutors, supplemental study tables, advocacy from the athletics department staff when my schedules conflicted, a haul of emblazoned apparel, and at least a dozen friends with whom I remained close after twenty years. Any one of them would get on a plane if I asked them to, and I’d do the same. Swimming allowed me to earn an undergraduate degree without accruing a nickel’s worth of debt, and for that I was grateful. But it wasn’t without its costs. For close to a decade, including all of high school and college, I swam four hours a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. I didn’t study abroad, for a semester away from the pool would have irrevocably disrupted my training; I didn’t pursue internships or join clubs or write for the campus newspaper because I didn’t have the time. I lived five miles from the beach, and yet went weeks and even months without seeing the ocean. Some days I swam for more hours than I slept, and God only knows how many wild nights and epic misadventures I missed, how many one-in-the-morning pizza runs or jaunts to Vegas or late-night bullshit sessions, how many love affairs I passed up because I had to wake up at five the next morning to swim.
Now Galen was on the cusp of this world, and I couldn’t help wondering whether it had all been worth it. Though swimming remained my daily habit and a major component of how I thought about myself, I didn’t come to really love the sport until my competitive days were finished. Throughout most of college, in fact, I dreaded the water, the constant fatigue I felt in my bones and joints, the twice-daily grind that lasted forever and granted too little reprieve in between, the long streak of races where I had my ass handed to me by everyone I went up against, my pride in my throat like an apple in the mouth of a luau pig. I used to dream of quitting and envied those who had the courage to tell our coach to his face what we all said behind his back before throwing their goggles on the deck and walking away. My dad even told me I should quit if I was so unhappy; we’d sort out the tuition another way. But I couldn’t let myself, and I could never quite say why. I was stubborn, I suppose, but more than that I was afraid of what quitting would say about me. I imagined all my coaches, my friends, my parents’ neighbors all shaking their heads when they heard I couldn’t cut it. The release I felt when I touched the wall at the end of my last race—tellingly, my last race was the mile, the longest and most grueling of the lineup—far surpassed the relief of landing the scholarship in the first place. I hugged my coach for the first and only time, and, still panting and radish-red from scalp to toes, I chugged two beers in the shower before I bothered to rub shampoo through my hair. The late afternoon light over the Pacific, a hundred yards beyond the natatorium, was stunningly bright. I felt like I was seeing it for the first time.
The freestyle had finished and the breaststroke was underway. A line of hairless bodies was frog-stroking down the pool, their mouths breaking the surface with each stroke for a gulp of air. Intent on seeing Galen swim at least one race, I slipped down a back flight of stairs and came through a door at the far end of the pool deck.
I found an empty rectangle of wall beside another dad. He wore an Australian outback hat, a team T-shirt, and a stopwatch around his neck. He wasn’t a coach, but he passed for one and no one bothered him (note to self). I asked to see his heat sheet so I could figure out Galen’s heat and lane. The folded sheet in his hand was heavily annotated with splits and finish times, for his three daughters as well as the other kids on the team. “You’re staying busy,” I said.
He shrugged. “What time is your boy going for?”
“It’s his first meet,” I said. “I just wanted him to get some experience.”
“The time he clocks here will set the standard for the season,” he said.
I tried to remember a single one of my swimming times from when I was eight and was grateful that I couldn’t.
He nodded and looked across the pool. “Looks like he’s up.”
I could see Galen’s blue cap and goggles, his lanky alabaster chest. The starter announced the race, and the boys mounted the metal step and balanced atop the blocks. The starter told the boys to take their marks, waited for them to bend forward and grip the rail, and then sounded the horn before any got the shakes that would inevitably result in a false start. Bend, grip, launch. For a few seconds, as the boys glided underwater, the water was glassy and still and the natatorium was cocooned inside a dome of chlorinated silence. Galen came up first, ahead of the field. His shoulders were down and his hips were low, but he glided like a twig on a string. I couldn’t help myself. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled his name. “Come on, Galen!” I yelled. “Go!” I waited for the other boys to catch him, but instead he pulled farther ahead, and watching him, I felt a flutter of the old, adrenaline-spiked thrill that racing produces, only now magnified by the incredible and contradictory fact that the swimmer in the water wasn’t a teammate but my son. The body in the water was the same body I’d held afloat in a basin an hour after his birth. I set my hands on my knees and whooped him all the way to the wall.
He won. No other boy even got close.
“Good swim,” the other dad said to me.
“He did all right,” I said, grinning. I stopped short of punching the guy in the arm.
Galen climbed out of the water, and the time runner handed him a blue heat winner’s ribbon, the same size and thickness as a bookmark, and a fun-sized pack of Famous Amos cookies, because nothing says you’re a winner like a pouch full of sugar. The boys in the heats to come would all post faster times, but for the moment he was the victor, alone under the lights. His mom and brother beamed down from the balcony. “Good job!” I said. I held up my hand for him to slap. “Way to go!”
Crocodile Dundee flipped the pages of his heat sheet and said, “You know, that time was a state cut. He just earned an invitation to the big dance.” He pursed his lips and nodded, delighted to convey this information.
I’d heard some of the other parents talking about the state championship, a three-day invitational in Milwaukee. A long way to go for a twenty-second race, though I had friends who’d flown across oceans for shorter swims.
“I did?” Galen said, all teeth and golly-gee. Apparently he’d heard about the state champs, too. He peeled off his cap and goggles and handed them to me. “Do I get to go, Dad?”
I could see my future. I wasn’t ready, and at the same time I was so tingly with pride I could hardly contain myself. The textbook definition of ambivalent. Galen’s excitement flowed like a mighty river. The gravity alone could have carved a hole in my chest.
“Of course,” I said. I set my hand on his wet head. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”