That Summer at Boomerang

by Phil Jarratt

  ‘Two things wrong with that plan,’ said Lew Henderson. ‘We don’t have enough time to go to Los Angeles and you can’t get used to a Pittsburgh winter in California. I think we have enough money to buy you a coat so you don’t freeze.’

  The Hawaiian team back East, 1912. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

  From San Francisco the Hawaiians caught the Overland Limited to Chicago, making a ferry transfer across the bay to Oakland. Exhausted on arrival, they had to go on a shopping expedition to Marshall Field on North Michigan Avenue to outfit Duke before checking into a hotel for some much-needed rest. The following evening Duke made his mainland debut in front of a sellout crowd at the university tank in a 100-yards exhibition race. Not having trained for almost three weeks, he plunged into the cold water and led all the way, finishing in 57 seconds flat. This was an unofficial ‘warm-up’ swim of no real consequence, but the swimming officials present looked at each other in astonishment.

  Although Duke’s Chicago swim had been widely reported, the Pittsburgh press seemed more interested in the Hawaiians as exotic specimens than as true athletes. When they arrived on 21 February, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran the headline, ‘Hawaiian Swimmers Here from Honolulu: Surf Riders from Sandwich Islands to Compete in Aquatic Meet’, while the Pittsburgh Press described them as ‘dark-skinned native Kanakas’. (Zen Genoves was in fact a rather dark-skinned hapa-haole, or half-Hawaiian.) Both newspapers suggested that the Hawaiians would struggle at the AAU meet at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, having to adapt to swimming in a tank and making racing turns for the first time.

  In the first race he swam, Duke led the field out to the first turn in the 220-yards swim, not his favoured distance, when he suddenly developed cramps and had to be ‘dragged out of the pool almost unconscious’, according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article headlined, ‘Hawaiians in the Rear: Kahanamoku Collapses in the Water, While Teammate Finishes Fifth’.

  In fact, Duke had cramped up in icy water, much colder than Chicago, and was out of sorts after days and nights of train travel and virtually no preparation time. He should not have swum, but typically did not want to disappoint the big first-night crowd. The next morning he trained for hours in the tank, then returned the following two nights to set new world records in the 50- and 100-yards events. But the Pittsburgh Press sports editor, Ralph Davis, was unimpressed: ‘Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian, has discovered that there’s all the difference in the world between surf riding and a 75-foot tank.’

  Duke would get used to this type of dismissive reporting, often driven by racism. Even when he had unquestionably proven himself the greatest swimmer in the world, the Pittsburgh cramp would come back to haunt him.

  ‘When Kahanamoku first went east it certainly looked as though the AAU’s refusal to recognise the Kanaka’s records were [sic] to be verified’, said the San Francisco Call.

  On the first night he appeared in a tank in the national championships at Pittsburgh, he was the butt of all the athletic jesters of the country for 24 hours. He was entered in the 220 yard championship. He had not travelled half the distance when he had to be pulled out of the tank, strangling and half-drowned. It was certainly a joke for a claimant to championship honors to almost drown in a tank, but that is what actually happened to Kahanamoku.

  Despite scepticism in the media, after Pittsburgh Duke could not be denied. He was given the right to swim for a place on the US Olympic squad for the Stockholm Games at the first stage of the selection trials in New York City. Zen was out of the running after failing in Pittsburgh, but the whole team went to New York to help Duke in his training program and be there poolside for a ‘brudda’. In early March he repeated his Pittsburgh times in the 50 and 100 yards and qualified for the final selection trials in Philadelphia, so it was back on the train in his heavy winter coat.

  Philadelphia was just a formality now. Duke made the team with seconds to spare and was immediately installed as America’s ‘great colored hope’ for Stockholm, alongside the Carlisle Indian decathlete, Jim Thorpe. The four Hawaiians stayed with Lew Henderson’s parents in Germantown, Pennsylvania during the trials, giving Duke some relief from his growing homesickness, but once his place was won, his teammates began the long journey home. Dude Miller told him to focus on winning a gold medal for Hawaii, for Hui Nalu and for his family back in Kalia, but it was Zen Genoves’s parting words that stayed with him.

  ‘When you had it up to here, bra,’ he said, holding his gloved hand across his eyebrows, ‘picture yourself riding a wave all da way in from Outside Castle’s. Then it don’t matter where you are or how you feel, brudda. You home.’

  Chapter 5

  Our Cecil

  Cecil Patrick Healy, born in inner Sydney in 1881, signalled greatness as a swimmer from a young age, winning handicap races at the old Sydney Natatorium on Pitt Street near Central Railway Station from the age of fourteen. But he matured at a time when the sport in Australia was dominated by a group of world-class swimmers that included the six Cavill brothers, Freddie Lane (Australia’s first Olympic swimmer in Paris in 1900), Alick Wickham, Barney Keiran and, a short time later, Frank Beaurepaire. Time and again Healy was narrowly beaten into the minor placings, most often by Dick Cavill, but all his opponents were greats of the baths, and all had their day.

  Because competition was so intense, much emphasis was placed on technique, and at the turn of the century the new ‘crawl’ stroke was gaining favour over the standard one-sided ‘trudgen’, particularly in the blue-ribboned sprints over 100 yards and 100 metres. Dick Cavill, the fastest son of Englishman Fred Cavill, claimed to have developed the crawl stroke after watching the young Solomon Islander, Alick Wickham, in action in 1898. He had considerable success with it, winning several Australian championships, but Healy later described Cavill’s crawl as ‘a crude arrangement consisting largely of splash. It was unattractive in every way.’

  Although he was regarded by most who knew him as a fair and honourable man, there may have been just a touch of sour grapes in Healy’s assessment of his rival, but the Cavills had the knack of polarising the Sydney swimming community and were regarded by some as loud braggarts who were forever chasing headlines.

  Fred Cavill had migrated to Australia in 1879, shortly after failing to swim the English Channel when his support boat skipper refused to go closer to the rocky coast of France in bad weather. Cavill claimed he was just 50 yards from shore when forced to abort the attempt. In Sydney he opened a swimming academy at Lavender Bay and began training some of his sons to become speed swimmers and others to become endurance machines who might succeed where he had failed. (In this ‘Professor’ Cavill had mixed results: Charles Cavill became the first person to swim the length of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, while Arthur ‘Tums’ Cavill froze to death while attempting to swim across Seattle’s harbour.)

  While still at boarding school in Bowral, Cecil Healy joined the East Sydney Swimming Club and swam in inter-club meets at the natatorium whenever his studies allowed. He enjoyed considerable success at this level but had to wait until 1904 to take his first NSW championship event, beating Alick Wickham in the 100 yards. By this time Healy had developed his own variation on the crawl, keeping his head lower in the water and kicking a precise two beats with his legs for every rotation of his arms. He began to swim some remarkable times, and even rival Frank Beaurepaire conceded that ‘the Healy stroke was distinguished from the Cavill splash stroke by rhythmic movements of arms and legs’.

  In 1905 he won the Australian title for the 100 yards, equalling the world record of 58 seconds flat, and from that point he was regarded as Australia’s best sprinter, and the ‘Australian crawl’ had become the accepted style of champions. Half a century after Healy’s peak as a swimmer, the legendary coach, Forbes Carlile, wrote:

  Cecil Healy both swam and preached ‘law and order’ in the leg kick. I am inclined to believe it was Healy, and not
Cavill or Wickham, who first swam the Australian crawl with the well-defined two-leg beats to each cycle of the arms.

  Although he dabbled in several careers, working at different times as an articled clerk, a commercial traveller and finally as a journalist, Healy had his heart set on representing Australia as a swimmer at the Olympics. But the international swimming competition and the Olympic movement were both in their infancy, there was little standardisation (with races held in fresh and salt water, and in anything from a 25-yard-long tank to an open harbour) so even if you swam world-class times at home, there was no guarantee you would match them abroad. This is what Healy found when he won selection as Australia’s lone swimmer (and only the second Olympic swimming representative in history) at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, held to try to save the Olympic ideal after the disastrous St Louis Games of 1904. (These had been spread out over more than six months as part of a world exhibition, thereby alienating both the public and the media.)

  In Athens he finished a distant third in the 100 metres behind the great American sprint swimmer, Charles Daniels, and Hungary’s Zoltan Halmay, who had also finished first and second in St Louis. A few weeks later at the British championships in London, however, swimming in a short tank that required two turns, Healy finished brilliantly, cruising past Halmay and appearing to dead-heat with Daniels, but the decision went to the American.

  Continuing his European tour, Healy picked up seven national titles, and in Hamburg established a new world record for the 100 metres, despite starting in the pool, rather than diving, in line with German race regulations. Word spread rapidly across the continent about his superb times and his revolutionary technique, but typically, Healy was just as interested in teaching the crawl as he was in using it to win championships. Among his European students, Meyboom of Belgium, Andersen of Sweden, Haynes of Scotland and Bretting of Germany all went on to excel in competition using the stroke.

  Back home in Sydney in 1907, Healy, who as a Manly resident had been one of the first protagonists in the fight for the rights of surf bathers, became a founding member of Manly Surf Club and was soon one of its star athletes and most reliable patrolmen. Healy’s work commitments in the city made him a weekend warrior in the surf, but he maintained his fitness and his swimming form by training at the Domain baths four days out of five (Fridays were always reserved for lunch at the Sportsmen’s Club). Healy encouraged his work associates to join him, and soon had more than a dozen businessmen swimming laps with him, winter and summer, unheard of in those days.

  Despite his continued good form, regaining the 100-yards freestyle title at the Australasian championships in the record time of 57 1⁄5 seconds, Healy declared himself unavailable for selection in the combined Australia and New Zealand team for the 1908 London Olympics (at which his rival, Beaurepaire, won two minor medals), opting instead to further his journalistic career and pick up some extra cash by working with Daily Telegraph reporter George Wynne to help promote entrepreneur Hugh McIntosh’s boxing world-title fights at the new Sydney Stadium. The flamboyant McIntosh, whose wife, May, was a leading light in women’s swimming, befriended Healy, telling him that Mac would ensure that Healy did not miss the next Olympics. Healy just smiled. He would be past 30 by then, his best years behind him, but if Mac’s burgeoning empire was backing him, who knew what was possible?

  Meanwhile Healy continued to work on his swimming technique, particularly in adapting the crawl for longer distances. In 1908 he won the 300-, 440-, and 500-yards championships of New South Wales, and the 220-yards Australian championship using the trudgen stroke, but by 1911, when he lowered Frank Beaurepaire’s three-quarter-mile Australian record, he had decided to use the crawl at all distances. As a result of that swim, a Healy and Beaurepaire match-up over the three-quarter mile drew the biggest-ever crowd for a swimming carnival at the Domain Baths, but both Healy and Beaurepaire were overshadowed by the virtually unknown Sydney swimmer, Billy Longworth, who won the Australian championship by 20 yards. Healy, however, kept his fans happy and the rivalry alive by beating Beaurepaire for second by a half-head.

  Healy further cemented his hero status in Sydney by being awarded the Royal Humane Society’s silver medal for rescuing a man and a boy at Manly. Healy, now captain of the Manly club, swam out into a treacherous surf and held 26-year-old P.A. Hannelly and thirteen-year-old W.B. Bradley aloft for 25 minutes while the line was run out three times, having snapped on the first two attempts. Bradley had to be revived on the beach but both were unharmed. ‘Cecil Healy was greatly exhausted,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

  When Healy opted out of the London Olympics in 1908, many of the pundits had been quick to write him off as a future Olympian, but it came as no surprise to the swimming community when in autumn 1912 he was named captain of the Australasian swimming team for the Stockholm Olympics. The 26-strong Australasia team, which included three New Zealanders, would represent in four sports, but by far the strongest contingent was the swim team, with Billy Longworth, Les Boardman, Harold Hardwick, Theodore Tartakover and New Zealand’s Malcolm Champion joining Healy. However, when the team was announced many were shocked to find that no women were named, despite the fact that the Olympic movement had finally bowed to pressure and allowed women to compete in two swimming races and in diving, and that Australasia had two women with world-record times. It seemed that even if the Olympic Federation was prepared to accept that the world had become mature enough to deem women in bathing suits suitable for mixed audiences, Australia had not.

  Cecil Healy (second from right) with the Australasian relay team, Stockholm, 1912. Photo courtesy National Library of Australia.

  The 1912 Olympics were modelled as the ‘modern’ Games, with the ever-efficient Swedes introducing electronic timing devices for the track events and public address systems at most events, as well as the first dedicated Olympic press office, with facilities to cater for more than 250 foreign journalists, including a pool of ‘lady typewriters’ who could produce typewritten start lists and results around the clock. The Swedes also barred the ‘barbaric’ sport of boxing (a move that would cause the Olympic Federation to rethink the rights of host countries in the future), and enthusiastically welcomed the controversial inclusion of women’s swimming and diving events for the first time.

  The Stockholm Games also coincided with the First International Congress of Eugenics, a Darwin-inspired social theory that humankind could direct its destiny through genetic selection and action. Gaining popularity in the first decade of the century, Eugenics would later inform Hitler’s social theories, and provide a rationale for Australia’s efforts to absorb its indigenous people through assimilation and to keep ‘Australia for the Australians’ through the White Australia policy. Such was the social underbelly of the first ‘modern’ Games.

  At the revival of the Olympics in 1896, the Olympic Federation had followed the ancient Greek tradition of male competitors only. Although the Federation’s president and the driving force behind the revival, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, saw the games as a celebration of male athleticism and racial purity, he relented on the first point and allowed women to compete in croquet in Paris in 1900. By 1904, at St Louis, eight female archers were allowed to compete, wearing long skirts and blouses with long sleeves and high necks. Hands were visible, but apart from them there was not a glimpse of female flesh below the chin. In 1908 female gymnastics, figure skating and tennis were introduced. The women who competed were required to be demure, graceful and chaperoned. Swimming was still not accepted, chiefly because of the problem of attire and the ‘unfeminine’ exertion required. The genie was out of the bottle, but it would still take another four years for women in swimsuits to be considered acceptable participants, and only then in the face of an international outcry.

  In Australia the Olympic swimming prohibition on women was responsible for creating a phenomenon that must have been the direct opposite of what the decenc
y leagues had hoped for. Annette Kellerman, swimmer, aquatic performer, film star and occasional vaudeville mermaid, was born in 1886 at Marrickville in inner Sydney with legs so frail she could walk only with the assistance of steel braces. On the advice of doctors, at age six Kellerman began swimming lessons. By the time she was thirteen her leg braces were gone, she had mastered all the swimming strokes of the period and was contemplating life as a swimmer and ‘performer’, encouraged by her drama-teacher mother. As a swimmer she knew no peer. In 1902, aged just sixteen, she won the NSW ladies’ 100 yards and the mile, both in record times.

  When the family moved to Melbourne in 1903, her father, a violinist, had trouble getting employment, so Kellerman sought work to supplement her mother’s teaching income. A natural performer and actress in school productions, she gave exhibitions of swimming and diving at the Melbourne Baths, performed a mermaid act at the Prince’s Court entertainment centre and did two shows a day swimming among fish in a glass tank at the Exhibition Aquarium. An attractive young woman in a swimsuit, she was never short of an audience.

  By 1905 Kellerman was the holder of several world records but unable to swim at the Olympics. Instead she looked for professional swimming opportunities. Her reputation as an aquatic performer drew invitations from Europe, and in June 1905 she swam the Thames River from Putney Bridge to Blackwall Pier, almost 13 miles, in 3 hours 54 minutes. She then made an unsuccessful attempt to swim the English Channel before heading to Paris for a three-mile race down the Seine. The only woman in the race, she came third. The following summer, a match race was set up between Kellerman and Baroness Isa Cescu, the most famous Austrian swimmer of her time. They raced over 22 miles on the Danube River with Kellerman winning easily.