Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (11 page)

He would teach, she would learn, and in time Trudy Ederle would be a swimmer.

Like Henry Ederle, Louis de Breda Handley's first glimpse of America had probably been that of the Twin Lights of the Highlands. He was born in 1874 in Rome, his mother was Italian, and his name on his birth certificate was Luigi de Breda. His American-born father, Francis Montague Handley, was a sculptor, specializing in marble, capable of producing exquisite figures in the classical style. The elder Handley, whose family was already prominent, became attached to the Vatican as a palace official, serving as a Privy Chamberlain of Sword and Cape to both Popes Pius X and Leo XII—their private butler—and becoming the first American to be made a commander in the Order of Saint Gregory. Of the five pontifical orders of knighthood in the Catholic Church, to be appointed to that group is the highest honor that a layman can attain, an honor given in recognition of extraordinary service to the church.

One of three children, Louis de Breda Handley's two sisters later became nuns. Educated by the Christian Brothers in Rome, Handley received a classical education in the most formal sense, learning Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, and earned a reputation as a persuasive and elegant writer. But for all his academic prowess, he adhered to the classical notion of "healthy mind, healthy body" and took physical training as seriously as he took his studies. He learned to swim in the Tiber River.

In 1896, at the age of twenty-two, Handley, who adopted the anglicized version of his name, left Rome to live in the United States. Upon his arrival he went into the importing business. A gentleman, he spent most of his time pursuing pastimes appropriate to his status.

He joined the prestigious Knickerbocker Athletic Club, for whom he competed in sweeps and sculls, swimming, and water polo, but he also trained and bred dogs, raced sailboats, hunted, rode, and played football. When the club disbanded after the notorious Molineaux murder case, a scandal in which one club member tried to poison the club's athletic director and accidentally killed the director's aunt instead, Handley quietly changed allegiances and joined the New York Athletic Club.

Despite his mannered appearance and upbringing, Handley was one of the finest all-around athletes of the era, recognized as the world champion in an event known as the "medley race," a event popular at the turn of the century, which combined aspects of both the decathlon and the modern triathlon. Racers competed against one another in a series of consecutive, quarter-mile races, walking, running, cycling, riding, swimming, and rowing in sequence, a feat Handley accomplished in a remarkable sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

Handley, however, made his greatest mark as an athlete in the water. Like Trudy Ederle, swimming fulfilled him like nothing else and served his life the same way the church had once served his father. His reverence for the sport of swimming bordered on the spiritual, and he once wrote, "There is no better form of physical culture. Swimming brings into action the entire system, giving every part of the body its proportionate share of work; it develops thoroughly and symmetrically, producing supple, resilient, well rounded muscles; it makes for grace of carriage and ease of movement; it activates and strengthens the functional organs, it ensures robust good health and good spirits." When teaching, either in print or in person, he often proceeded in the manner of the Catholic catechism, asking questions and then providing the answer himself, all the while cautioning that while the desire to win was natural, that was never the sole goal of sport. "If undue importance is attached to them so that victory becomes the paramount consideration and defeat leaves a feeling of disappointment and humiliation," wrote Handley, "then the zest goes out of the game and it no longer represents pastime and recreation, as it should."

This did not mean that Handley was any kind of milquetoast, for to do anything but one's best was not only unacceptable, but essentially immoral, a betrayal of one's physical gifts as delivered by God, and Handley himself played to win, an attitude he fostered in Trudy and every other swimmer under his direction. During an era in which the sport of water polo was considerably more violent than it is today, Handley was considered the greatest player of his era. He served as captain of both the swimming and water polo teams for first the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and then the New York Athletic Club and led the American water polo team to victory at the 1904 Olympics. In over a decade of competitive water polo, teams captained by Handley lost exactly twice.

He constantly strove to be better, and he studied swimming as if it were a subject taught to him by the Christian Brothers. When word of a new stroke known as the Australian crawl made its way to the United States in 1903, Handley sought not only to understand and learn the new stroke, but to improve upon it.

Like the trudgen, the new stroke had its beginnings in the style of native people, although the specific circumstances are still debated by swimming historians. Some trace the origination to a ten-year-old boy, Alick Wickham, who had been reared in the Solomon Islands by his English father and native mother, where he learned to swim. When he was then sent to boarding school in Australia he inadvertently imported an entirely new stroke, one that combined the arm action of the trudgen with an up-and-down leg kick used by Solomon Island natives. A swimming coach named George Farmer saw the boy swimming in a race at Sydney and allegedly called out, "Look at that boy crawling over the water!" thus giving the stroke its name.

But at about the same time, three brothers by the name of Cavill also began using the stroke, which their father, Frederick Cavill, later claimed to have learned from a Samoan woman while traveling through the Samoan Islands. The Cavills refined the stroke somewhat, so that as one arm came over and pulled down, the opposite leg kicked downward. However the stroke originated, male swimmers using the so-called Australian crawl began winning races in Australia in times never seen before. The days of the trudgen were just about over.

Handley first learned of the stroke through written descriptions and diagrams in newspapers and magazines and tried to teach himself in the indoor pool of the New York Athletic Club, at the time one of only a few indoor pools in New York. Yet no matter how fast he stroked with his arms and kicked with his feet, Handley, already one of the best swimmers in America, equally proficient in the backstroke, the trudgen, and the breaststroke, could not manage the Australian crawl. In fact, after only a few strokes his legs kept sinking under the water, bringing him to almost a complete stop. Other club members who tried the stroke were no more successful and after only a few tries returned to the more familiar trudgen, dismissing the Australian crawl as some unexplained foreign novelty, leaving Handley to learn the stroke on his own.

He studied the problem as if it were an issue of science, which, in effect, it was. He concluded that the problem he was having stemmed not from the arm stroke, which was almost identical to that used in the trudgen, but from the unique kick. In the Australian crawl, the swimmer kicked at the knee, as Handley himself once described it, "lifting the feet high above the water and beating them down just once to every arm stroke." Over and over and over again Handley tried to master the kick, only to falter as if he had never been in the water before. It was embarrassing and the cause of no small amount of amusement to other club members, for Handley had rarely experienced failure of any kind.

He was nearly ready to give up, concluding that either the Cavill brothers were freaks of nature or that the descriptions of the stroke were simply wrong.

Then it came to him. In Australia, competitive swimming events took place in so-called ocean pools—outdoor swimming pools filled with water from tidal tanks or even from the tide itself simply spilling over the sides of the pool. Competitive swimming was done in seawater. But the indoor pool at the New York Athletic Club was filled with fresh water, which Handley knew provided far less buoyancy than the salt water of the sea.

Out of the sea, in fresh water, the kick used in the Australian crawl was not sufficient to keep Handley's lower body above the water. When one leg left the water to begin the kick down, the other leg—and the rest of the swimmer's body below the waist—sank. Each subsequent kick only made the problem worse, for as the leg raised up to kick back down, it drove the swimmer farther under water. In only a few strokes all forward progress stopped.

Now that he knew what the problem was, Handley puzzled over the solution. In seawater the Australian crawl kick had already proven superior to any other kind used at the time, such as the frog kick used by the breaststroke and the scissor kick of the trudgen, so Handley knew he had to develop a kick that would prove equally superior in fresh water. One day while he was in the pool experimenting, he discussed the issue with Gus Sundstrom, the club's veteran swimming instructor. Sundstrom instructed Handley to watch him closely and then demonstrated what he referred to as the "swordfish kick," a kick he used in training demonstrations with novice swimmers to convince them of the importance of using their legs while swimming. Stretching his arms forward in front of him, Sundstrom locked his thumbs so that he was unable to either stroke or paddle with his arms. He then stretched out in the water and began kicking furiously, not from the knee, using the lower leg as in the Australian crawl, but from the hip, keeping his legs straight and using his feet as if they were flippers. In this way he was able to propel himself across the width of the pool without using his arms at all.

For Handley, it was a "Eureka!" moment. In an instant, he combined the overhand arm stroke with Sundstrom's swordfish kick. That changed everything. His lower body stayed buoyant and Handley moved through the water with a speed that he had never thought was possible. It wasn't easy, but it worked.

Over the next few months and years, Handley and another club member, Austrian-born Otto Wahle, spent hours perfecting the new stroke, over time adding several other adaptations, and timing the stroke with breathing. Handley discovered that since the swordfish kick, which he preferred to refer to as the "thrash," provided the swimmer with more forward momentum, it was possible to reach out farther with the arms than was standard in the trudgen stroke, and that the swimmer need not stroke quite as quickly to maintain speed. Although Handley and Wahle initially tried to time the thrash precisely with the arm action, they discovered that was of absolutely no benefit. For consistency, all the swimmer needed to do was make sure that he or she kept kicking at a regular pace, usually four or six times for each stroke of the arms, but it didn't matter a wit whether the downward leg kick matched the downward motion of the arm, or if the kick of the left leg took place simultaneously with the stroke of either arm. All that mattered was that both the arms and the legs remained in motion the entire time. The result was the first swimming stroke in history in which the arms and legs were in motion independent of one another. The "American crawl" was born, and Louis de Breda Handley became its evangelist.

Over the next few years, with help from Sundstrom, Wahle, and Handley, a younger member of the club, Charles Daniels, became the first swimmer to perfect this new stroke. In 1904 he won three gold medals at the Olympic Games, easily defeating swimmers using versions of both the trudgen and the Australian crawl, and in one four-day stretch in 1905, he set a remarkable fourteen world records.

Yet despite Daniels's success, the new stroke had a hard time catching on. Swimmers already trained in the breaststroke and trudgen found it difficult to break old habits and learn new ones, and many instructors, unable to break old habits themselves, considered it a gimmick that might be fine for world-class swimmers but was of little benefit to those who swam less frequently. Others simply did not know how to teach it or else refused to abandon the notion that the leg kick must somehow be directly tied to the arm stroke, unnecessarily complicating the procedure, while many Australians stubbornly stuck with their own version of the stroke.

Nevertheless, Daniels's success secured Handley's reputation as an innovative teacher, and as his own competitive athletic career began to wind down as he reached his midthirties, Handley began to spend more and more time teaching others. When American water polo enthusiasts chose to abandon the rougher American version of the game in favor of the tamer European model in 1911, Handley retired from the sport and began devoting more of his time to swimming. Over the next decade Yale, Princeton, New York University, and the New York Athletic Club all asked for his help and expertise. Handley said yes to them all, refusing to take a salary from any of them. He still viewed athletics as a higher calling, and taking a salary to teach swimming would have violated his commitment to amateurism. At the same time, however, he began writing about swimming, penning short articles and instructionals for newspapers and magazines. In a short time be became the best—and best-known—swimming coach in the entire country.

In 1917, shortly after she created the WSA, Charlotte Epstein asked Handley if he would serve as head coach for the group. In the context of the day, it was like asking the New York Giants legendary manager John McGraw to teach women how to play baseball. But Handley was completely unfettered by prejudice or, by all accounts, sexism. He thought everybody, everywhere, should learn to swim, and quickly agreed.

He may not have realized it at the time, but the opportunity to teach under the auspices of the WSA was an ideal situation. Few members of the association knew how to swim before joining the group, and many were youngsters not even in their teens, with no bad habits to break or preconceived notions to dissuade. The WSA provided Handley with a perfect laboratory in which to perfect his training methods, and an unending stream of subjects of every athletic ability and type upon which to try them out.