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November 29, 2002
| BY
RICK
TELANDER
SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST |
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The NCAA Division I freshman swimmer called her home Monday, sobbing.
She desperately needed to talk to her parents and tell them the news: Men's and women's swimming and diving at her school, Dartmouth, had been cut.
No preparation, no warning, no hello, no thank-you, no nothing.
Just adios, don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out, kids.
The campuswide e-mail from the administration had come only 55 minutes before the memo went out to the public: To save $212,000--a year of operating expense--53 male and female student-athletes and three coaches had been told the 70-year-old Dartmouth program was as needed as pinkeye.
Forget the integrity of the team, the tradition, the high GPAs, the discipline, the spirit, the intangible, unquantifiable bonding of the swimmers and swimming alums and the bonding to the ideals of fair play, hard work, brotherhood and, yes, the very spirit of education of body and mind. The message from the suits, which was swathed in the fluff of academese, was, at its core, simple, cold and irreducible.
Beat it.
The dad only recently had told friends how proud he was of his daughter.
The 5:45 a.m. practices, the double sessions, the running, the weightlifting, the focusing, the studying--if that didn't make a better citizen, what did?
The daughter was nearly inconsolable, the dad would tell friends later.
"They did it right before we're leaving for break,'' she said.
And the dad knew, but didn't say, that was no accident.
Who wants brokenhearted kids around campus, making your holiday messy?
Thirteen of her 19 years on this planet had been spent swimming, the daughter said. Dartmouth wanted her to come there. To swim. She didn't even visit other schools.
And what about her friend Kristin Simunovich, a terrific freestyler? They called her Kiki Simmons, her teammates did, for fun, to lighten the fact she had traveled more than 5,000 miles--from the north side of Oahu to Hanover, N.H.--without so much as a winter jacket.
The dad had talked to the tough Hawaiian swimmer at a recent meet, felt compassion for her being so far from home, for her competing through a severe bronchial infection, for the fact she knew nothing about snow, that her one-way trip from near the Banzai Pipeline to the White Mountains took more than 27 hours.
"It was just at the end of the bus ride from Boston to Hanover that it got hard,'' Simunovich had told the dad with a smile.
Two hundred twelve thousand dollars, the dad would say to friends in disbelief. He would say it over and over.
The dad would find out Dartmouth's budget is more than a half-billion dollars. The cut would save .0004 percent of that.
The strident athletic director, JoAnn Harper, and the yes-man dean, James A. Larimore, would blame the cut on the downturn of the stock market. If the Dow Jones went up, however, that was too bad, they said. Too late.
Hell, money was not the real issue.
Nobody had been asked for money at all. Nobody had been informed about anything.
This was about face-saving, appearances, hypocrisy, ignorance, looking good to superiors, shortsightedness and who knew what else.
The dad knew.
The swim teams at Dartmouth are not the best in the country. But they, like so many non-revenue college sports, embody the essence of what amateur athletics purport to be.
In this young season, the women's team had been smoked by Harvard, had lost to Cornell because of injured divers, had crushed Vermont and had Brown cancel because of an ice storm.
That's college.
A friend would say to the dad later, "It's business, isn't it?''
If that were the case, the dad wondered, where were the contracts, the unions, the paychecks?
Soon, at Internet speed, all swimming officials throughout the United States and, no doubt, the world knew about the Dartmouth cuts.
You have to keep up with this stuff, the dad knew. It's the trend. Cut 'em all. Let God sort 'em out. Wrestling, track, swimming, cross-country. If they ain't football in the Big House with the Big Belly Boosters, who needs 'em?
Chuck Wielgus, the executive director of U.S. Swimming, would be on the case instantly.
Hey, where exactly is our Olympic team supposed to come from?
Every school in the Ivy League has a swimming and diving team? Not anymore.
The dad had been gone, out of town, he told a friend, and had just read his daughter's e-mail from a few days before.
"Hi! I called you guys and no one was home. Anyway, our coach had us do a 3,000 for time this morning. I went 34:13, which I think is pretty good, since I do breaststroke and IM, as you know. My first 1,000 was actually 11:24, my personal best, considering I've never swum it before!! I was third fastest on the team, behind Julie and Nicole--I'm hoping coach doesn't get any great ideas about putting me in the 1,000, though! Call if you get this. Love ya, C.''
The daughter had gotten two firsts against Vermont during the weekend, was fired up, hoping to bench-press 135 pounds, be a swimming fool. But now she was just crying.
The dad was thinking he couldn't swim 3,000 yards at all, unless it was downhill.
"It's OK, sweetie,'' the dad said to the young woman.
But then he couldn't think of why it was OK.
"I love you,'' he said, anger rising in him like bile.
Then I told my daughter, Cary, the former swimmer, I had to go.