COACH RON “THE ROCK” JOHNSON

“Our sport is a performance art. When done well, it is infused with emotion, willingness to break personal barriers, and inspiration to go where no one has gone before.”

This quote by Coach Ron Johnson is from his book Romancing the Water and gives us just a small glimpse into how his mind worked. Ron was the Arizona State University head swim coach during my years beginning in August 1977 to graduation in May 1980. They were some of the most wonderful and tumultuous years of my life.

Ron was known as “the Rock” because he was a tall, muscular man who kept in supreme physical and mental condition, and was a phenomenal athlete his whole life. He was quick to smile, laugh, and make a joke of his quirkiness, putting everyone else around him at ease. Some of Ron’s eccentricities arose from his brilliant and creative mind. I had never been around a coach who was as fun, smart, imaginative, inspirational, and disciplined. Swim practices were a joy to look forward to, even knowing they were going to be extremely challenging.

On the first day of practice Ron already had prepared a notebook with every workout for the entire season completed. He would spend his summer in preparation for the year ahead. Each training group would be different—sprinters, middle distance, backstroke, butterfly, and breaststroke specialist, and my group, the distance swimmers. If I wanted to see how tough the Christmas break workouts were going to be, I could flip forward to late December or early January and there the grueling sessions would be waiting. I never looked forward; today’s tough workout was enough to be concerned about. In all of my years of swimming, I’ve never known a coach with as much brilliance as Ron.

Each afternoon workout would start the same on the swimming pool deck. A group of forty young men and women, with tanned skin from training in the Arizona sun and strong muscles from the miles of laps and hours of lifting weights, would loosen up, stretching their muscles to Ron’s routine. “Swing right arm forward” and we would all windmill our arms in big circles like a plane propeller. “Left arm forward, left arm back…” We were an eclectic group, just like our coach, and acted like a big loving family that supported and watched out for each other.

Not all personality types worked well with Ron’s style of personal accountability and creativity. If you came to college to party and missed practice, your time line was going to be short on the ASU swim team. As the saying in coaching circles goes, “You can’t hoot with the owls if you want to soar with the eagles.” In other words, you better get to bed early if you want to be up and ready for 6 a.m. morning practices.

After my year with Mark Schubert in Mission Viejo, where we swam more than 60 miles a week, I knew that training at ASU was not going to be as hard. However, what I encountered was a coach who required more of me by helping to open up my mental capabilities for success. This was hard work, too, and required discipline to achieve.

Ron was an early pioneer of meditation and visualization. We would lay on the locker room floor before practice and listen to meditations Ron had prerecorded for us. We would hear his soothing voice tell us to “slow down your breathing,” “allow the healing blue light to enter your body,” “experience the emotions and feelings as you touch the wall, winning the race.” These meditations helped train our minds for success and were just as important as our physical preparations.

Ron was also on the cutting edge of medicinal health ideas, or at least he thought so, and we were a good group to test on. Whenever we were sick he had us drink a noxious-smelling tea from the creosote bush that grew in the Arizona desert near campus. The tea tasted like the smell of a wooden telephone pole dipped in tar, and left a light-green tinge on our teeth and tongues. He also had us eat raw garlic for the natural antibiotic capabilities in the clove. Wow, did we smell bad sometimes with the odor of garlic oozing out of our pores. If we couldn’t outswim our competitors, we could knock them back a bit with our breath. At least we had that going for us.

Prior to becoming the ASU head coach, Ron had lived in Mexico City and was the Mexican national team’s head coach from 1966 to 1973, including the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. During this time, he coached Guillermo Echevarria to a world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle. This was my best event and the most probable way to qualify for the USA Olympic team in 1980. Ron knew how to coach distance swimmers; all of our focus during my years at ASU was geared toward my Olympic dream.

Under Ron’s guidance, and the tremendous training background I had from Coaches Troy and Schubert, I rapidly progressed at ASU from not scoring any points at a national championship to becoming a three-time NCAA All-American, finishing fourth place at the NCAA championships in my last two years of college. With the top three finishers qualifying for an Olympic berth at the upcoming trials, I knew that with a great swim I could make the team. Ron felt so, too.

1980 NCAA Swimming Championships with Ron, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Photo courtesy of ASU teammate Sam Jones

Growing up in Fort Myers, Florida, I was always outdoors—swimming, camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, waterskiing, at the beach, and many other outdoor activities that the southwest coast of Florida invites. Indoor activities were primarily limited to Miami Dolphin football games on Sunday afternoon TV. When it came time to decide what my career path was going to be in college I chose wildlife management, both for my love of the natural sciences as well as believing that a majority of the job would be focused outdoors. There was one career I definitely knew I didn’t want to ever have, and that was accounting.

In Fort Myers, the Highway 41 bridge that crosses the Caloosahatchee River is about 70 feet above the water to allow large boats to pass beneath. This is the same highway that the Allman Brothers Band sings about in “Ramblin’ Man,” being born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus that is rolling down Highway 41. One of my best friends in high school was Cliff Betts; his cousin Dickey Betts was part of the Allman Brothers Band. We loved that Southern rock music.

Before I could drive, I rode my bike everywhere, on most days more than 20 miles. Riding gave me the independence that I longed for at a young age. The Highway 41 bridge was for cars only; pedestrians and bicyclists were prohibited. Seeing myself as a real speed demon on my Schwinn 10-speed bike, and with no hills around in the flatness of the Florida Gulf Coast, I may have decided to cross the bridge a time or two. Not saying for sure, but the bike speeds achieved on the downhill slopes were exhilarating, practically keeping up with the cars.

The bridge is right next to the city’s “financial district” (not much at the time), and when you reach the bridge’s apex it is easy to see into the downtown buildings. At this time there was only one tall office structure. In the predawn hours on our way to early morning swim practice or on our way home after nightfall, there was usually only one office whose lights regularly pierced the darkness. I would ask my mom or dad when we drove by, “Whose office is that with the lights on all the time?”

And they would say, “That’s our friend Charlie Taylor. He’s a CPA.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A certified public accountant. He takes care of people’s finances and taxes.”

That’s all I needed to hear. From then on I knew if there was one profession I would never want to pursue it was to become an accountant. Be indoors hours and hours every day? That was not for me.

ASU had a great wildlife management major and was a key reason that attracted me to the university. I loved the major and everything that I was learning, and then reality hit. Three semesters before graduation I had to take 15 hours of classroom time each week and 15 hours of laboratory time each week. Class time was no issue, the big problem was all of the lab hours were during afternoon swim practice and missing training time wouldn’t work for Olympic preparation. Plus, I needed my swimming scholarship to stay in school. Now what? Almost done with school and I needed to find a new career? Wow. I was bummed out.

My other career interest had been in law enforcement, to become either a game warden or possibly join the FBI. For many years my dad had been chaplain for the Fort Myers Police Department and wrote about these experiences in his book, Preacher with a Billy Club. In this capacity he had gotten to know the two Lee County FBI Agents well. Dad set up a lunch for the four of us and the two agents did a great job of encouraging me to pursue a career path for the bureau. In addition, they let me know most crimes were now accomplished by “white collar” types of criminals, and the best pathway for me would either be a law or accounting degree. Accounting? Wow, this was the last thing I wanted to do, but going to law school would be worse. I knew I was good at math; I switched majors to accounting. Unbelievable.

ASU has the renowned W. P. Carey School of Business, which has an excellent accounting program. I had only three semesters until graduation and now had to work extra hard to “catch up” in a new major. Summer school would be required, too. Just when I was looking forward to a light class load gearing up to the 1980 Olympic trials.

While no longer learning about my passions for the environment and studying ecosystems, the accounting major went well while learning about debits and credits, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. At least I was on track to graduate in May of my last year and the FBI was an exciting career option.

As part of my extracurricular activities, I had joined a campus accounting association that met monthly. There were industry speakers who would come and talk with our group, mostly about the career path of becoming a CPA (something I knew wasn’t for me, I was going into the FBI). In my last semester, a young FBI agent was invited to speak with our accounting group and for the first time I was very excited to hear what one of our speakers had to say. He was clean cut with a very smart suit, just like the FBI agents on the TV show. All was well. Then he started talking about his career over the last seven years and that he had lived in five major cities during this time—Dallas, Washington D.C., Miami, Los Angeles, and now Phoenix. WHAT? Alarm bells were going off in my head.

The two agents I met in Fort Myers had been there for many years and never mentioned having to relocate several times during their careers. One thing that I knew about myself is that moving from city to city was not for me, and the FBI path was over. Graduation was only months away, and now I had to start interviewing for a job in the last career that I ever wanted to pursue. I was devastated.

Shortly after this discouraging episode, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would be boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. WHAT? Another crushing blow. Was my swimming career now over and my vocation accounting? Unbelievable. What a mess. The band Third Day has a song, “Keep on Shinin’,” which sums up how I was feeling in that moment. They sing about the challenge of having faith in the long run, after we’ve been bruised and battered, and our dreams shattered, and our best-laid plans are now scattered all over the place. Exactly how I was feeling right now because my dreams were lying in a big heap on the floor. No Olympics, no wildlife management, and I was going to be an accountant.

I was definitely having a tough time being able to see how God’s hand was directing all of what I thought was a complete mess. At this point, my dreams were shattered and it was so difficult for me to see that God’s plans were much bigger than I could have ever thought possible. It’s not that I wasn’t capable of dreaming big, I was. The problem was my life was shifting so quickly and I thought my plan was a good one, which included big goals. Little did I know, God’s path was going to be so much better. God was asking me to grow in my faith and trust Him, right now.

Psalm 139 verses 13–16 assure us that God has a plan for our lives:

“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – and how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in the utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed” (NLT).

So easy to forget God when “our plans” aren’t going the way we hoped.

Looking back over a marathon swimming career that lasted thirteen summers after college, it is now easy to see how public accounting was the perfect career for me. Very few other professions would have allowed me to take two to three months off each summer to train and race around the world, competing in the sport that I loved.

Had everything gone perfectly in “my plan,” I would have retired from swimming after the Olympics. At the time, I had fallen away from God and forgotten how much He truly loved me and was directing my life, even while my back was turned away from Him.

Ron and I would remain close friends until his passing in 2009. He was a Renaissance man of true inspiration; he continued to compete into his eighties and learned classical Spanish guitar in his seventies. He brought out my athletic potential in ways that other coaches may not have been able to do. I love this quote from his book:

“The real environment of greatness in sport is one of wondrous awareness, of exciting new challenges, constant new motivational techniques and the discipline to do things you only imagined would be possible. You might say the catalyst for super-achievement is knowing that you are doing something that only very few—if any—other human beings have ever tried before. Paradoxically, this environment is built out of daring risks and adventure. Talk about the supreme paradox. Thomas Edison had a sign in his lab, visible for all to see, ‘There aren’t any rules around here; we are trying to accomplish something.”

Thank you, Ron, for the amazing gift you were to countless athletes and everyone who was fortunate enough to know you. Your book is a fine legacy, inspiring generations to come. Because of you, your teachings, and friendships, we all achieved more than we ever thought possible, and had a blast doing it together. I miss you, Ron.

Ron “the Rock” Johnson at age sixty-nine!

Photo courtesy of Swimming World magazine