PUBLIC NUISANCES: Remembering Doc Counsilman
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC r UISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. -",,:..membering Doc Counsilman WASHINGTON Y FIRST GAUCHERIE COMMITTED in our nation's capital came in 1970. I was traveling with Vice President Spiro...
...He received the Distinguished Flying Cross...
...Swimming under him was demanding to the utmost?hurt, pain, agony," he would sing...
...In the AAUs we beat the best national teams in the world and might well have been able to win a dual meet against the best non-IU swimmers in the world...
...Agnew knew about sports and understood...
...His interest in sports for health endured...
...cv "Reach down in the bread basket and come up with the cookies," was another of his exhortations...
...When I was a teenager, I replied...
...Doc was an idealist disciplined by objective fact and ethics...
...In the early 1960s he revolutionized stroke mechanics in every stroke...
...His house was filled with the books of a truly literate man and the appurtenances of a man of science: technical papers, scientific instruments, tanks filled with fish and reptiles...
...He often brought conversations back to science...
...In his last days he remained faithful to the memory of FDR but he had come to admire another former New Dealer, Ronald Reagan...
...I have remained fit for four decades thanks to him, lifting weights, running, playing handball, and defying the crank Puritans who confuse vitality with crapulence...
...Possibly he also understood that my autograph was not quite world class...
...The professionalization of amateur sports became one of Doc Counsilman's last challenges...
...From 1957 to 1990, when he was coach at Indiana University, his teams won 23 Big Ten Titles, six consecutive NCAA titles, and seven AAU Outdoor national championships...
...Had he 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 been free to compete in the NCAAs in those years he almost certainly would have accounted for three more NCAA titles...
...During the war he piloted a B-24 on 32 missions during one of which he successfully crash-landed into Yugoslavia...
...They left him—and Doc, a man devoted to fact and principle, found himself voting with me and with Agnew...
...I would like to have been with him on that flight...
...On this January 4 Doc died...
...NOTHER OF DOC'S BEQUESTS to his swimmers has been a lifelong respect for fitness...
...In the 1964 Olympic Trials seven IU swimmers stood on the eight starting blocks in the breaststroke...
...If the crew ran to the back of the plane at the last minute, its weight distribution would be sufficient to keep the nose from catching and the plane from cart-wheeling...
...I was traveling with Vice President Spiro Agnew, the acerbic pol who for obvious reasons was trying to coax me away from The American Spectator to become one of his speech writers...
...As with Reagan, so it was with Doc...
...He also insisted on strict amateurism...
...As his disabled bomber approached the Yugoslav fields Doc rang a bell...
...Our world record holder in the backstroke set the undemonstrative tone: Wearing a threadbare nondescript warm-up jacket, Tommy Stock replied, "Superior coaching...
...He had numerous complaints with the drift of college sports into gaudy show biz and away from the ancients' ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body...
...How many world record holders holding how many world records I can only estimate, but I can say that in the early 1960s my teammates broke world records during practice and held anywhere between two-thirds to four-fifths of all men's world records...
...At the 1962 summer nationals where his swimmers took practically every title, I recall the frustration of ABC's Jim McKay asking each champion as the cameras whirred, "To what do you attribute your victory...
...Raised on the other side of the tracks in St...
...And all were soon being escorted by partisans from harm's way...
...he never left the Liberals...
...I had been a swimmer for Doc Counsilman, and every swimmer around Doc was thought to be a world record holder...
...Of a sudden, the man his swimmers would one day call the Great White Ph.D...
...Because I came from that athletic milieu, you will understand, perhaps, why I say that of all the virtues I have always found humility the most mystifying...
...And along with the agony there was always humor?Reach down in the bread basket and come up with the cookies," was another of his exhortations, and from Shakespeare, "Screw your courage to the sticking point...
...He himself ad become a national champion breaststroker at Ohio State after the war and before that a national YMCA handball champion...
...Louis in the 1930s—his father being a carnival worker, his mother what we now call a single-parent mom—he graduated 113th from a high school class of 116...
...When we traveled he would have a museum to direct us to...
...But his boyhood hero was Lawrence Tibbett, the great baritone, and when in he left Ohio State University for the Army Air Corps he scored in the 99th percentile on the army's IQ test...
...In fact any contaminant that threatened fair-play and what we might term sport for sport's sake angered him...
...Doc coached two Olympic teams...
...When we trained at the indoor pool, opera and concert music lilted from the public address system...
...His IU teams had none of the wealth that so-called amateur sport has today, and the showmanship was strictly that of a quiet American...
...got an idea...
...He was an easy-going fellow, to me and young staffers seated with him that he found signing autographs to be a pleasant task...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...Doc ordered his crew to leap, leaving him at the controls...
...Most of my adult life has been spent in the company of intellectuals of greater or lesser voltage, and it was Doc, an intellectual of the highest voltage that sent me out of the swimming pool and into the reading room...
...but I remained obtuse...
...The dominance his swimmers had over the sport will never again be duplicated...
...We kidded him about keeping his art books in his bedroom and out of the public eye, for Doc never made a display of his artistic interests...
...Surely Doc would have had a wry remark as he gave his orders...
...Yet he was not arrogant either...
...A notorious problem with crash-landing those heavy bombers was that their noses would catch the ground causing the plane to flip...
...He was a creature of the Enlightenment...
...Simply stated Doc was the greatest swim coach of all time, and among history's greatest coaches in any sport...
...Incidentally, that being my stroke you might properly deduce that I was the team's eighth stringer...
...By suggesting I read Robert Ardery's books such as The Territorial Imperative and Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, I suspect he thought he might lure me to science...
...God knows, Doc was not a humble man...
...They refused to do so...
...I told him I did too, and then heard the groans of the young men around me...
...It became the IU champions' signature response and McKay's despair...
...In 1979 he became the oldest man to swim the English Channel, and the nation's vast master's swimming program for adults owes much to his encouragement...
...The crew scurried to the tail...
...In the early 1960s, though allowed to compete in the AAUs, his IU teams were barred from NCAA championships owing to recruiting violations committed by other IU teams...
...In his youth he had been an ardent New Dealer...
...There are all the titles I cited above...
...He trained 48 Olympians from ten nations who won 46 medals, 26 of them gold...
...On this PHOTO COURTESY OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS and he remarked EMMETT TYRRELL, JR fated flight enemy fire destroyed Doc's landing gear and hit a compartment, leaving the crew one parachute short...
...Though usually phlegmatic he was surprisingly ardent in his derision of the cataracts of money washing into amateur sport...
...Science was a different matter...
...Agnew asked when I started signing autographs...
Vol. 37 • March 2004 • No. 2
