Graduation Week: Swimming In Socks

Day 2 of Elizabeth Graduation Week, and we go back to when she was 11 and swimming “competitively.” I have to put “competitively” in quotations because competition was not her thing, certainly not when she was young. Elizabeth seemed to instinctively understand that swmming was supposed to be fun, and that she wasn’t going to be the next Janet Evans or Katie Ledecky. Alas, I can’t say the same for all the parents watching their own kids.

When the winter season began, Elizabeth and I cut a deal. It goes like so: Elizabeth, who is 11 years old now, continues to be on her recreational swim team — she will go to practice three times a week and try really hard and have a lot fun. That was her part of the deal.

My part of the deal is that I will not make her compete at the swim meets.

Elizabeth does not like swim meets. At all. She worries about them incessantly. She gets horribly nervous — I mean a body-shaking kind of nervous. And here's the strange part: She isn't nervous because she wants to win. She doesn't want to win. She doesn't expect to win. She doesn't care if she wins. Elizabeth is probably the least competitive person I've ever met.

When she was little, she was in a dance class, and at the end, the teacher would hand out some sort of candy. Elizabeth never raced for the candy. She always let everyone else go first. She gets much more joy out of her friends winning than when she wins.

No, her nerves about swim meets involve the possibility that she will do some horribly wrong and let everyone in the world down. At first, I thought she would get over the swim-meet nervousness ... she never really did.

Every time out, it was exactly the same — she would be scared all day. She'd grow more scared as the meet began. She'd be scared throughout the meet. And afterward when we asked, "Did you have a good time?" she would say, bluntly, no, she did not.

Elizabeth started to talk about how she wanted to quit swimming, which about broke my heart. Elizabeth loves swimming.

So I came up with the deal: Would you keep swimming if you could skip the meets? She happily agreed.

Before I get to Thursday night, I should say that although I've been writing sports for more than 25 years now and was a fanatical fan and an inadequate but enthusiastic athlete before that, Elizabeth has taught me something about sports I did not know. The lesson came slowly. I'm the one who takes Elizabeth to practice most days. I would notice that going into practices, her moods were unpredictable.

Sometimes, on the car ride over, she was preposterously chatty and bubbly.

Other times, she was silent and sullen.

Sometimes, she was worried about something that happened at school. Other times, she was excited about an upcoming event (like getting her ears pierced — a whole other story). It was like the ending to Sixth Sense every time.

After swim practice, though, she was always happy. Always. No exceptions. She was tired and cold and hungry… and happy. I'm not entirely sure when I noticed the transformation, but once I did, there was no mistaking it.

Elizabeth has never won a race. She has never come close to winning a race. But she's better today than she was yesterday, better yesterday than she was the day before, and lately she has started to talk about how much stronger swimming has made her. She will make this little muscle pose, it's priceless.

I don't know how it is for little boys because I haven't been one in a very long time. But as parents of two daughters, we are constantly looking for ways to infuse confidence and conviction and assurance into our little girls. It's difficult. Swimming has been magical that way for Elizabeth.

Thursday night, Elizabeth's team had a special swim night — everybody 11 and over swam a timed 50 meters in all four strokes. Then: pizza. It wasn't exactly a meet because it only involved members of the team. Anyway, that was my view.

That, however, was not Elizabeth’s view. She decided that it absolutely was a meet because there were races and timers, and so on. We needed a good contract lawyer, but none was available, none is ever available for fathers and daughters, so I told Elizabeth I really wanted her to go.

Elizabeth fought back with some fury.

Finally, though, she agreed to go.

On the car ride over, she was exceedingly nervous. When we got there, however, she, well, no, she grew even more nervous. She was, more or less, the youngest person there. Most of the kids seemed at least a foot taller than her. None of her swim-team friends were there — they are all a little bit younger and so not eligible. She was in full panic mode.

I was saddled with becoming a time-keeper (don't ask) and Elizabeth pretty much spent all her time by my side, nervously shivering.

Her first race was the 50-meter freestyle. It was a good-news, bad-news kind of race. The good news was that for the first time in competition, she used a swim turn. That was really cool to watch, and she flipped very well. The bad news was that, yeah, she kind of missed the wall. She had to go back and touch the wall (well, I suppose she did not HAVE to do that since nobody was really watching her, but she did because she's scrupulously honest), so that kind of hurt her time.

She swam her backstroke and breaststroke without incident. It wasn't fun for her; I could see that. The older kids were not noticing her. She didn't have any chance to win a medal. Her nerves, well, you always hear in sports that the butterflies go away after a while. That was my experience in sports. Not Elizabeth. Her butterflies bought a permanent residence in her stomach and and they flapped wildly.

Then came the T-shirt relay.

The T-shirt relay works like this: There are four relay teams. Each team gets one T-shirt, a pair of socks, and a single swim cap. The first person puts on all that stuff and swims 50 meters. They get out of the pool, take off the clothes, and put the T-shirt, cap, and socks on the next person, who swims 50 meters. This goes on until the teams full 200 meters are done.

Well, for whatever reason, the relay team picked Elizabeth to swim the anchor leg of the T-shirt relay. Well, I know the reason since I was standing there — it wasn’t exactly strategic. She's so small and had been so nervous about being noticed that they missed her until everyone else had lined up.

Elizabeth's team was pretty good. They worked out some kind of convoluted Cirque du Soleil move to get the T-shirt off one swimmer and onto another — it rarely worked as planned, but it was endlessly entertaining. The team had built up a moderate lead going into Elizabeth's anchor leg.

It was quite hilarious watching the team try and dress Elizabeth in those socks and the T-shirt. By that point, all tactics were out the window, and the clothes were soaked, and everyone was just pulling and yanking at Elizabeth to get her inside the shirt and to get those socks on. At one point, they just about knocked her into the water.

Elizabeth loved it.

And then she was off. She was in the lead, and she was pulling away. It seemed to me she was swimming faster in the T-shirt and socks than she had in her own freestyle. She was almost floating.

And then, just as she was closing in on 25 meters, someone on the team noticed a rather important point: One of Elizabeth's socks had fallen off and was floating in the pool."

She has to get that sock on before the end of the race," a swimming official (or maybe it was just some guy) told the team, "or else you will be disqualified."

Yeah. There were apparently disqualification rules for this thing.

So everybody on the team started screaming "Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Stop! Get the sock! Elizabeth!" But she could not hear them. Then one of her teammates jumped in the water, grabbed the sock, and threw it at Elizabeth. The sock almost hit Elizabeth.

She still did not notice. She was in the zone.

She made the turn and started for her last 25 meters."ELIZABETH! ELIZABETH!" She still didn't hear. As her father, I could relate.

Meanwhile, there was now a girl in lane 2 who was gaining. It was time for desperate measures. A girl on the team jumped in the pool, grabbed the sock, and started swimming after Elizabeth. It took her a little while even though she was a better swimmer and wasn't hindered by a T-shirt. She grabbed Elizabeth's foot.

"You have to put the sock in," the girl screamed. Elizabeth treaded water while the teammate put the sock on. By now, the girl in Lane 2 had just about caught up with Elizabeth and seemed ready to pass her. But the sock was on. The race was on.

Elizabeth swam her heart out the last 15 meters. It was not unlike the Michael Phelps-Milorad Cavic finish at the Beijing Olympics. Well, OK, yeah, it was quite unlike that. But the finish was so close.

And Elizabeth out-touched the other girl at the wall. They won!

There was much joy and celebration at that point. It might not have been final scene of the Sylvester Stallone-Pele movie “Victory,” but there was real happiness. Hugs. High-fives. Cheers. All that.

And, for a few seconds, Elizabeth was the hero. It was completely unexpected and completely ridiculous and completely pointless and completely wonderful. She was the hero.

She swam her final butterfly race the best she could, and then on the ride home she relived her moment of glory again and again and again. She talked about how scared she was when someone grabbed her foot, and how funny it was when she was sloshing to the finish, and how great the night was. She told me that if the T-shirt relay was an Olympic event — and she is quite sure it SHOULD be an Olympic event — her team would win the gold medal.

I told her that in my professional opinion, she's absolutely right.