by Max Howell
As he came into his room the others were still up, two of them feeling none the worse for wear after celebrating their victory with a few beers. Murray Rose, a strict vegetarian and health addict, joined in the fun but left the beer alone.
“And where have you been to this late hour, my fine young lad, don’t you know you have broken training?” joked John Devitt, and they all laughed uproariously. Mark looked a bit sheepish, but soon got into the conviviality. “You beaut, Mark, you bloody beaut, we all did it! How do you like our gold medals?” said John, and they all dangled them for him to see.
“Each looks pretty good,” laughed Mark, “but they certainly do not look as good as two.”
“Well, maybe,” retorted Kevin, “but we better watch out for Murray. He is liable to get three.”
“I will not be able to if you blokes do not let me get to sleep,” said the blonde and handsome Murray, “some of you have finished, but I have a few other races to swim.”
“Yeah, let us hit the sack,” said John, “but you better have a look on your bed, Mark. You have gained quite a fan club.”
There were hundreds of telegrams and letter and telephone messages that had arrived since his 100m swim. He only opened a few because the others wanted to sleep, but one of them was special.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GOLD MEDAL PERFORMANCES. YOU HAVE SERVED YOUR NATION WELL AND SYMBOLISE THE STRENGTH OF OUR YOUTH. YOUR COUNTRY IS PROUD OF YOU.
ROBERT MENZIES
PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA.
He decided to leave the rest until the next day. Everything was like a fairy-tale. He undressed and went to bed, and they all said good-night. The lights were put out, and then he lay in bed. He brought his hand to his face, and he could still smell her on his fingers. He went to sleep with the love smell in his nostrils.
The next day he was up and met Faith for breakfast. He quickly kissed her, and hurriedly said, “Are you all right?”
She blushed and pressed his hand. “I have never felt so well, Mark, though I am still excited. Everything is fine. What happened we will always remember. It can never be the same as that again. I slept like an angel.”
“I forgot to tell you, Faith, that I have been given tickets to all of the other events after the swimming, for both of us. You will not be able to stay in the Village again, everyone broke the rules a little on that one, but we will be able to come back here and eat each day. It will just mean that you will have to get a taxi home at night. You will have to explain all this to your uncle and auntie, but they have been pretty good sports.”
“That is marvellous,” Faith exclaimed enthusiastically, “I love the swimming best of all, but I can hardly wait for the athletics, and I would not mind seeing some of the other sports that I do not know much about.”
“And we will do it all together, Faith. By the way, have a look at this.” He opened up his kit-bag, and showed her the hundreds of telegrams and letters that he had received. After breakfast, they started to open all of them up, and many were from people he had never met, from small Australian towns, from housewives, little children, and groups of men at pubs and clubs who had watched or read about his exploits.
There were some that stood out.
NOT A BAD EFFORT FOR A SYDNEY TECH BOY. HOW COME YOU DID NOT ASK ME TO HAVE A GO IN THE RELAY. JUST REMEMBER I TAUGHT YOU ALL YOU KNOW. ONE OF THE MUSKETEERS.
YOUR OWN CHINA PLATE
FRANK ROULSTON FIELDING.
“How about that,” laughed Mark, “remember when the three of us hooked up and we travelled to school together? I have not seen much of Frank lately, but he has always been my best mate. Through thick and thin, he has always stuck by me, and that is what mates are all about. He is a funny bugger, that is for certain. His father died when he was young, you know, and his mother brought him up. She ran a butcher shop all by herself. I love that silly idiot.”
“Yes,” responded Faith, “that first meeting really started something. I enjoy Frank too. He is always fun to be around, though some of his stories leave something to be desired.”
“He always was a good one with a yarn. I do not know where he gets them from, and he is always coming up with new ones. He has got a girl-friend himself these days that he is a bit serious about. Her name’s Noreen, and she seems the best thing in the world that has happened to him. She lets him have his way, but you always know that she is in charge. She handles him pretty well.”
There was another telegram that took him completely by surprise.
“YOUR MUM AND DAD ARE PROUD OF YOU. DAD HAS NEVER GOT SO MANY FREE BEERS AT THE COACH AND HORSES. CAN HARDLY WAIT TO SEE YOUR GOLD MEDALS. ALL THE FAMILY SEND THEIR LOVE.
MUM AND DAD.
In the days that followed there were some that brought tears to his eyes. One was from near the centre of Australia.
Alice Springs,
North West Territory.
Dear Mark,
I never thought I would be writing to somebody like you but I have followed your career ever since you said you had not touched the wall in the championships and disqualified yourself. I do not know too much about sport but that was about the most honest and sportsmanlike thing I had ever heard of. I am just a housewife at Alice Springs, and my husband’s a truck driver, and we have been wrapped about you ever since. We have three kids, two boys and a girl, and we hope they grow up like you.
There is no television here, but we listened to your race on the radio. The whole family cheered when you won. It was a big moment in our lives.
There is not much swimming round here, and it gets pretty hot at times. But we follow swimming because of you. My husband Joe asked me to write this, and my kids Billy, Harry and Jill send their best wishes. You are our Australian Olympic hero.
The Anderson family.
There were many other letters like this, and Mark and Faith were very moved by them.
“You know, Mark,” Faith said, “I have been secretly keeping a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and programmes ever since I knew you. You would be amazed at what I have. If you give me all of these I will arrange them all and put them in to it.”
“That would be nice, Faith. It is ridiculous, I know, but I have not kept a single thing.”
The next days were filled with watching others competing, and they both sat in the stands cheering for the Australian contingent. There was the mighty Dawn Fraser edging out Lorraine Crapp in the 100 metres, though Lorraine turned the table in the 400 metres. They had been tussling against each other all year, and it was good to see them both get gold medals.
What brought the house down was the women winning the 4 x 100 metres relay, and in so doing duplicated the feat of the men. Dawn Fraser, the gangly young Bendigo girl Faith Leech, Lorraine Crapp and 14 year-old Sandra Morgan outsprinted the teams of all other nations. It was truly the golden age of Australian swimming, as the brilliant Murray Rose won both the 400m and the 1500. His main rivals, the Japanese swimmer Tsuyoshi Yamanaka and the American George Breen, were left in his wake. Overnight, Murray Rose, like Dawn Fraser, had become Australian sporting super-stars. Like Mark, they had that extra magnetism and flair that attracted the public. And University of Queensland medical student David Theile won the backstroke event.
Then the athletics got underway, and Mark and Faith watched Betty Cuthbert get gold in the two sprints, the 100 metres and the 200 metres, and they were ecstatic as the women’s 4 x 100 metres relay team of Betty Cuthbert, Norma Croker, Fleur Mellor and Shirley Strickland won, duplicating the feat of the men’s and women’s swimming relay teams. These were indeed heady days for Australian sport.
Their pride increased as the brilliant Western Australian, Shirley Strickland, the “grandma” of the women’s athletic team at 31 years of age, won the 80 metres hurdles.
They were at the cycling when two underdogs, Ian Browne and Tony Marchant, came from nowhere to win the 2000 metres tandem race.
At night, they would eat in the Village and dance until about 10 pm, an
d then Faith would wend her way home. It was difficult for them to gain a measure of privacy, but they would go to their special place in the Village and explore one another’s emotions. Mark was continually surprised by the intensity of Faith’s feelings. He did not know what it was at first, as he was so inexperienced himself, but he started to understand that she was having climaxes or orgasms when he played with her. Whereas he had read that many women would have none or would only have them occasionally, Faith was experiencing multiple orgasms, and after a time he knew how to bring them on and to wait for her to gather herself before she had another, and another. He discovered her clitoris, and how to excite her further. It was a period of wonder to them both, each time taking them further on in the wonderment of it all.
He had not told Faith that he had applied for his passport before the Games, but it arrived during the Games. His application was more complicated than normal as he was not yet 21 years of age, and he required his parents’ approval to leave the country. When it did arrive in the Village, his nationalism was aroused as the official document stated: BRITISH PASSPORT. AUSTRALIAN CITIZEN. He was confused and angry, as he had been when they played GOD SAVE THE QUEEN at the award ceremony. Damn it all, he was Australian, not British. He competed against Britain in the Olympic Games, not with them. He had somehow never thought beforehand of the extent of Australia’s affiliation with England. Even as a child he had been miffed when English immigrants still called England ‘home’, and England was referred to as the ‘mother country.’ The mother country as far as he was concerned was Australia, and any person who came to live there had to change affiliation or go back to their ‘home.’
Terry had lined up interviews for him with American coaches and their representatives, and his choice was soon narrowed down to four: Yale, Indiana, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California. Faith came with him as each institution tried to convince Mark he should go there. Bob Kiphuth was the Yale coach, highly respected throughout the world, and Mark had followed the Kiphuth Exercise Plan in his build-up to the Games. He was a squat, mesomorphic individual with a kindly face and a direct manner, and Mark instantly liked him. Yale was a famous academic institution, highly sought after by Americans, with one of the highest University fees in the United States. One of his heroes, John Marshall, went to school there on an athletic scholarship, and there was bad publicity in Australia as it was reported his sole job was to turn off the lights in the swimming pool complex. One night he forgot, and reportedly they hired an assistant for him. Yale had an enviable reputation, with many famous professors. He had read about one in National Geographic, Hiram Bingham, who discovered the lost city of the Incas at Machu Pichu, Peru, in 1911. An anthropologist, he had trekked through the mountains of Peru and had been led to the ancient site by a peasant. It is now considered one of the great archaelogical finds in the world. So Yale had a certain attraction for him, but he quickly negated it because it was on the east coast of the United States and just that much further away from Australia, and the weather was not to his liking. He preferred the sun.
Indiana University had many attractions as well, and again he was influenced by the coach, ‘Doc’ Counsilman. A scholarly man, he was renowned for the way he approached the sport of swimming scientifically. His books and articles on swimming were widely read. He was perhaps the scientific guru of world coaches. Intelligent and enthusiastic, he had made Indiana University a power-house in the USA and for that matter world swimming. He himself had a doctorate degree in physiology of exercise, and in their meeting with him he stressed the academic potential of his University. Slowly, however, Indiana University was eliminated. The institution did not have the academic status of Yale and Berkeley, and the mid-west had little appeal to an Australian brought up near the sea. Though all his athletes loved the kindly ‘Doc’, a complaint was that he had now become so world famous that he was often absent from his campus for extended periods of time and the coaching was taken over by his assistants. But everyone loved the ‘Doc’, he was a genial, affable, scholarly man.
Then there was the University of Southern California (USC). There was a young and virile coach there, a hypertensive individual who somehow represented to Mark the typical American coach. He planned to be the dominant power in US swimming. As he said, “The Trojans have been the best in the United States in football, and have been a world power in track and field. We have had more Olympic champions on our campus than anywhere else in the world. Now the Trojans will be best in swimming if you sign up with us.” It took Mark a little time to figure out that the Trojan was the symbol of USC. He liked the enthusiasm of this young man. “And,” he added, “Murray Rose has agreed to come. He can study drama there, as he wants to be a movie actor. He had certainly the looks and the personality.” It was without doubt a big plus to have another Australian at the institution, and he had a great respect for Murray, who led a life-style similar to his own, though his family was more middle-class, and Mark did not have the same vegetarian leanings. You could not help but like Murray, Mark thought, he was a wonderful sportsman. “And you will like LA and Hollywood,” the coach said, “and we’ve got a few beaches that are as good as Manly or Bondi. You can get in as much surfing as you like.”
He had always secretly wanted to see Beverley Hills and Hollywood, as they had a particular attraction to an Australian brought up on stories of the movie stars and drawn to the picture theatres as a weekly ritual. The proximity of the surf in California was also appealing. What disturbed him slightly and swayed him away from being a Trojan was the fact that the coach had miscalculated as to Mark’s own personal values. While the coach wanted to make USC a swimming power and use Mark’s talents in the furtherance of that cause, Mark’s aim was primarily an educational one, and the coach had not stressed USC’s potential for his own intellectual growth. Though Mark understood that he was expected to earn his way through his swimming, it was his future he wanted to secure, and he was mature enough to evaluate the transient nature of athletic achievement.
Increasingly he found himself drawn to the University of California at Berkeley. The coach was a portly and friendly man called George Schroth. He was easy-going to the extreme, yet came quickly to the point. “If you think you are coming to Berkeley for an easy ride, forget it. We are only interested in athletes who are scholars. I have gone over your exam results in your Leaving Certificate, Mark, and I am very impressed with what you have done considering the time you obviously spent on your swimming. You appear to have a serious attitude with respect to your academic work, and I can tell you, you will not get through Berkeley without that. If you want to check the academic standards of the University, it rates with the best in the world, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. We have more Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Peace prize winners at Berkeley than anywhere else in the world. There are no frill or easy courses at Berkeley. We want athletes who are scholars. Our swimmers may not be the world’s best, but they are competitive, and when they graduate they will know they have got one of the most respected degrees in the world.
“The first two years at Berkeley are what is termed general education. All students have to take courses that expose them to the humanities and classics, the social as well as the natural sciences. The aim is to provide a well-rounded general education. It also allows a student to acclimatise to the University and get the feel of a specialisation, which you choose after those two years. By then you should know whether you want to major in the sciences, in history, business or what-have-you. You are the one who will make the choice, but it will be not until the end of your second year.
“We will provide you your fare to the U.S.A. an athletic scholarship of $1800, plus we will pay your fees and tuition. Now you have to work for that, you do not get it for doing nothing. We expect twenty hours a week of work. It may be washing the pool, or cleaning the stadium after games, or collecting tickets at football games, but if you avoid your responsibility
we will rescind your scholarship. Also, if you do not keep your marks up, or you miss classes, you will not get your scholarship renewed. It will be evaluated semester by semester. That evaluation will be solely academic and will have nothing to do with your swimming performance. We put our faith in you to do your best, that is why we select carefully, and pick the right kind of athlete. We think, Mark, that you are the Berkeley type. If you get injured or you do not make our squad, we are committed to that scholarship for four years. That is our obligation. Yours is to do the best at school you can and hopefully swim well too.
“But let me reinforce what I have been saying, and that is it is hard work. The $1800 will be barely enough for you to live on, but you can earn extra monies in the 3-month summer break. I will help you to get a good job in that period as well. We have quite a few alumni who are ex-swimmers and help us out in this regard.
“As for our swimming program, we are only allowed by the University to train from 4 pm to 6 pm daily, and meets are on Saturday only in the season. Sunday is free. I will not hold your hand, and I will treat you like an adult. We will work out an individual program for you together, and then I expect you as an adult to maintain your commitment. I will be there to give advice and help when it is wanted.
“Now there is something you may not like and it is the one thing I am not certain about with you. You and your coach Terry had a single-minded approach to winning the gold medal in the 100 metres, and apart from the relay you did not deviate from that aim. It was successful. We have a small team and we cannot afford the luxury of a specialist 100 metres swimmer. I may require you to swim three or four different events on the same day, a 50 metres, a 100 metres, a relay, and maybe a 400 metres if I think you can help the team and get a place.