of our Plymouth station wagon, trying to get out of her reach. But there wasn’t enough room for me to get away from her. She was angry that I had not swum better times. It was crazy. These were practices, not races. But she didn’t care.
Day after day, the same thing would happen. “How do you think you did today?” she’d ask. “Fine,” I’d say. And the beating would start.
One day, as my mother was hitting me in the front seat, Jack, sitting with Bill in the back seat, asked, “Why do you only care about her?” Driving wildly down the freeway and steering with her left hand, she reached back and started hitting him with her right fist. “Is this what you want?” she asked. He never posed the question again.
This began a new pattern of abuse in my life. No matter how I answered my mother’s question about my performance, she would start hitting me. This went on for months. My mother would beat me in the car after practice, and then my father would molest me at night.
One day, we actually went to the Reeds’ house in Palos Verdes. It was beautiful. While our mothers were having coffee inside, Pam and I sat outside together.
“Does your mom hit you?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”
“Well, my mom beats me, too,” she said. “I think she told your mom that it was a good way to make you swim faster.”
Thanks a lot, I thought.
I really did enjoy swimming back then, because the pool had become my sanctuary. No matter what took place in the car after swim practice or in my bedroom at night, when I was in the water, I was safe. It was a haven where I could have fun and make friends and get stronger. That was one thing about me—I enjoyed becoming a better swimmer, and I was very competitive. It was all I had in my young life. Besides playing the flute in school, it was really the only other activity that I took part in. So I made the most of it.
The coaches may not have wanted me in the beginning and my parents may have been abusing me, but while I was in the water, I was safe and free to become what I wanted to be: a strong swimmer. That was my plan. But plans change, of course, and for my family, things were about to be altered in a very serious way.
We moved around from pool to pool and I swam on lots of teams. I also began competing and had great success early on.
When I was thirteen, I started swimming on a team at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. It was called Phillips 66, and it was sponsored by the Texas energy company of the same name.
This team was significant for me on two levels. First, it got me out of El Monte and away from Loretta Reed, which meant my mom’s beatings would stop soon after our arrival in Huntington Beach. Second, and more importantly, this was where I would meet one of the two most influential coaches I’d ever have.
His name was Ralph Darr but he went by “Flip,” and he was one of the most amazing men I have ever met. First of all, he just seemed really cool. He drove a Jaguar and smoked a pipe and there was something very low-key, yet nurturing, about him.
Flip was also an incredibly innovative and successful coach. He eventually coached swimmers that would go on to earn sixteen world records, eight gold medals, nine World Championship medals, the three Pan American Games medals, and thirty-one U.S. national swimming titles. He placed swimmers on the U.S. team in the 1968, ’72, ’76, and ’84 Olympics, and he would go on to serve as the U.S. coach of the 1975 World Championship women’s team, the 1991 World Championship open water team, and many others. Flip was also known as one of the first coaches to bring hand paddles into mainstream swimming during practices, which was revolutionary. He also utilized surgical tubes for resistance training—another breakthrough.
But beyond all of that, he was just a really solid guy who took his swimming very seriously and looked after me—at least it seemed that way to me, anyway. He was decent and kind and thoughtful, which I think may have helped save me back then and may have even given me the strength to change my situation.
When I got to Huntington Beach, Susie Whitaker was the girl to beat. And not long after joining the club, I did beat her. But it cost me. She had a big makeup party and I was the only girl not invited simply because I had bested her in the pool. It didn’t really bother me, though; I wasn’t used to being one of the gang and usually kept to myself anyway. And I didn’t care about makeup, or about being popular. I was just there to beat them all.
These victories of mine over the “best” kids gave me kind of an inner strength. Even to this day, I tell young people: “Don’t ever give up hope. Wherever you go in life, there’s always going to be somebody who’s identified as the best. And if you set your sights on it, there’s no reason you can’t be the one who, one day, everybody will look at as the best.”
Again, a lot of this came from an inner sense of competition that I think I was born with. I was also very focused because I blocked out other things happening in my life. That combination really helped me develop into someone who was not only unintimidated by the so-called best on the block, but who also relished the challenge of trying to beat them.
At thirteen years old, I took my first plane trip to Cincinnati for the 1970 Short Course Nationals, which I had qualified for. Getting to the Nationals required hitting a certain time standard in each event. Basically, you had to swim at a sanctioned event and turn in a faster time than the standard in order to be invited to the Nationals. Then, once you were there, you would get seeded based on your times.
The Nationals are held twice each year. They’re what you’re really training for. Flip was excited the day he told me at practice that I was going.
“Good news, Shirley,” he said, his ever-present pipe in hand. “You’ve qualified. This is a big first step for you. Don’t be nervous. Just go have fun. This is how you learn to compete, so don’t put any real pressure on yourself.”
For our trip, one of the girls’ moms, Mrs. Hanson, made matching outfits for all the girls on the swim team: white polyester tops with sweetheart necklines and red skirts.
It felt so great to be on my own for the first time. I didn’t do that well in the one race I swam, but it was okay; as Flip had said, I was learning how to compete. I was having a blast, too. It was exciting to fly on a plane and compete at a big event like the Nationals.
I think my first real brush with the media took place when I got back from Cincinnati. Once I was back in junior high, a boy who wrote for the school paper came over to me in the cafeteria. “Do you think I could interview you for an article that I want to write?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. “Why not?” So we met after school, and he conducted his interview.
“Did you have fun in Cincinnati?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Is it true that this was your first plane ride?”
“Yes.”
“Is it tough to swim in those races?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to continue as a swimmer?”
“Yes.”
“Was it fun coming back to school?”
“No.”
A few days later, the school paper came out. When I got home that afternoon, my mom was waiting with a copy in her hand. She was not happy. “You really gave these answers to him?” she asked, pointing at the paper in disgust. “This is your idea of how to give an interview?”
“Yes,” I answered, without any kind of irony.
My mother explained that, whenever somebody asked me questions, I was not to give yes or no answers. “You have to make a conversation,” she said. “You can’t just say yes or no. If you want people to learn about you, then you