Editorials/Conservative Cooglers/The Diver
Tyrrell, R Emmett Jr.
THE DIVER Your introduction to Sam Hall probably came on Monday, December 15, when it was reported that the Dayton, Ohio furniture salesman had been arrested in Nicaragua on spy charges. My...
...Politics is indeed phony, but it is not pure fantasy...
...To a particularly exacting sport he brought extraordinary talent, perseverance, and execution under pressure...
...Billingsley has coached over 100 national champions and two American Olympic teams...
...As the athlete gets older, and if he has any capacity for philosophical reflection whatsoever, he realizes the excitement is the dearest pleasure of sport...
...He was not very political...
...Hall claims he has traveled the world as a soldier of fortune for the good of the United States...
...He was rated 44th in the nation in the late 1950s but rose to the top in one year...
...Now he had become an anti-Communist mercenary or anti-terrorist or some such fantastico...
...The customs and values laid down for the all-American boy of 1960 had changed many by the time Sam Hall reemerged from the shuffle at Punta Huete on December 15...
...Before thousands of people rapt in silent attention one rises from the board, elegantly contorts the body, and drops it into a pool, leaving the surface a sheet of glass...
...To this day former teammates and coaches remember him as being unusually personable...
...The story is toldabout how during the 1959 Pan American Games he eagerly awaited the results of his recently married wife's pregnancy tests...
...In 1965 he gave up (continued on page 50) (continued from page 11) a not unsuccessful career in Ohio politics, having found politics "too phony...
...Unable to find satisfaction in the hurly-burly of the changing American scene, he thought he might at least savor the excitements of his youth...
...Hall had competed for Ohio State University, but upon graduation he joined Indiana's summer program...
...And so he went to Nicaragua...
...It keeps one's mind off life's little puzzles, suchas "what the hell am I doing on this remorseless orb...
...To his rigid way of thinking it was reckless of his wife to compete in athletics while pregnant...
...He knows about athletes lost in the shuffle...
...So perhaps the likable Sam Hall was more complicated than he seemed...
...There were some Cold Warriors on that team but Hall was not one of them...
...He was elated when the tests showed positive...
...But most of all there is the excitement...
...The excitement of sport ended for Hall in the early 1960s...
...The life of the accomplished athlete has its many pleasures: victories, travel, fame...
...My introduction came many years before, on a pool deck in the early 1960s...
...A month or so later, when his wife had a miscarriage after participating in a baseball game, he divorced her...
...My guess is that his search was for excitement...
...He is straight, and Hall was very straight...
...Silver medals were not to his liking...
...Hall was then one of the greatest competitive divers in the world, and after winning silver medals in the Pan American Games and the Rome Olympics he had come to dive with the same 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 team that I swam on, Doc Counsilman and Hobie Billingsley's Indiana University team, probably the best swimming team of all time...
...Diving is part sport, part showmanship...
...As an athlete he had been incomparable...
...He claims to have been in Nicaragua as a member of some gimcrack outfit called "the Phoenix Battalion...
...In the 1960 Olympics a Soviet flag was stolen by members of the American team after an admirable show of fisticuffs...
...He has been interviewed on "60 Minutes...
...He did not seem to be complicated or disagreeable...
...The all-American boy, then as now, eschews politics...
...He was a keen competitor, and in search of the best coaching he moved to Indiana...
...He got lost in the shuffle," his old coach Hobie Billingsley reports...
...And I am reminded of the ancient ballad whose lines include: "My name it is Sam Hall, and I hate you one and all . . . damn your eyes...
...In those days the Indiana team—competing as the Indianapolis Athletic Club in summers and Indiana University in winters—beat the best Olympic teams in the world...
...He was not the kind of vaguely repulsive fellow so many star athletesturn out to be...
...Hall was a stupendous showman...
...He was the all-American boy, energetic, amusing, vivacious...
...E veryone hangs on his own cross, as the poet says...
...Then he sought other excitement...
...You have my solemn testimony that Hall was not a party to this derring-do...
...Hall has wandered through two of the most chaotic decades in American history...
...What brought him to Nicaragua is more complicated...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
