For years now, we’ve been inundated with images of athletic rigor: “Just Do It.” It might seem hard to believe, but not so long ago conventional wisdom held that elite athletes were most effective when pampering themselves, not submitting to grueling workouts. As recently as the 1930s, Ivy League swimmers were known to end their leisurely practices with “a vigorous rubdown and a fine cigar.”
So writes Newburyport native Julie Checkoway in her new book, “The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory.” The unlikely heroes of her remarkable real-life account, a Japanese-American teacher and the impoverished children from Hawaii’s sugar cane fields he turned into record-setting swimmers, played a huge role in changing the belief that athletes have a finite amount of energy that must be conserved.
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When she first heard of the Three-Year Swim Club, so called because of Soichi Sakamoto’s determination to get his ragtag band of athletes to the 1940 Olympics in just three years, Checkoway was amazed to learn that their achievements had been nearly lost to history. Under Coach Sakamoto, swimmers such as Keo Nakama and Halo Hirose were hailed as a new kind of aquatic competitor, earning world renown at a time when anti-Japanese sentiment was high. The outbreak of World War II stalled their Olympic dream, but in 1948 they finally got to the sport’s biggest stage.
The Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum
Coach Soichi Sakamoto at the Camp 5 pool, circa 1939.
“They were on the front sports page of every major newspaper in the world,” said Checkoway, a Harvard-Radcliffe graduate who studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on the phone recently from her home in Utah.
But their journey to that point was about as underdog as it gets. Their first practices took place in the filthy irrigation ditches of their field-labor community. Sakamoto, a science teacher, was not a swimmer himself. But after volunteering to monitor the children’s playtime in the ditches, he visualized a way out of their grinding circumstances. Obsessively detail-oriented, he was often thwarted by school authorities who disagreed with his methods.
“It sounds like a made-up story,” said Checkoway, whose book is being marketed to the same readers who made bestsellers of similar period pieces about improbable triumph, including “Seabiscuit” and “The Boys in the Boat.”
By tailoring his coaching to the specific body types and biomechanics of each of his top swimmers, Sakamoto maximized their potential in unprecedented ways, Checkoway explains. “He was a glorious amateur in the American style,” she writes.
He set the Olympics as the goal of his club even before most of the children were remotely competitive in the pool. He taught his young athletes to swim upstream, “like salmon.” He incorporated resistance training, fast-slow progressions, dry-land exercises, and the use of kickboards, all of which were either unheard-of or widely dismissed techniques at the time. Virtually all of Sakamoto’s innovations have become commonplace practices in modern swimming.
Halo Hirose (left, off block 3) and others diving into the pool in the club’s early years.
The Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum
Halo Hirose (left, off block 3) and others diving into the pool in the club’s early years.
Abe Rogers is the current head coach at Cambridge Masters Swim Club. Like most of his contemporaries, he’d never heard of the Three-Year Swim Club until he was told the story last week. It seems clear that Sakamoto was ahead of his time, he said.
“In decades past, the technique might have been driven by a ‘one size fits all’ philosophy,” said Rogers, a former varsity swimmer at Colby College. “Today, you want to find the best style that will fit the strengths and limitations of each individual.” And the science has advanced tremendously since the Hawaiians’ heyday. “Every college athletic department has trainers to help coaches integrate sports science into the training regimen,” he said. “I can only guess that resistance training was probably not that popular decades ago.”
Like Sakamoto, who died in 1997 after a long career, Checkoway, the author of a memoir about China and director of the documentary “Waiting for Hockney,” is not a swimmer herself.
Bill Smith (left) trained with Sakamoto and won a gold medal on the US men’s 800-meter relay at the 1948 London Olympics.
Moana Smith
Bill Smith (left) trained with Sakamoto and won a gold medal on the US men’s 800-meter relay at the 1948 London Olympics.
“I could’ve gotten into the pool,” she said. “But my justification was, I wanted to be able to describe all this stuff from a non-swimmer’s perspective to a non-swimmer. I’m not an athlete in any way. I just really love highly detailed, technical things.”
While she was spending time in Hawaii for her research on “The Three-Year Swim Club,” a film crew was working on a potential feature film on the historic swimmers. From what she could tell, their version would be considerably fictionalized.
“It was so far from the reality that I’m learning,” she says.
That reality was pieced together from years of deep archival research and extensive interviews with the surviving members of Sakamoto’s swim club, many in their 90s. She notes that these teammates were never particularly boastful of their own accomplishments. In later life, none of the athletes wanted to be the one to step up and tell the story, which is one reason it was almost forgotten, she says.
As a self-described “white woman from New England,” she was prepared to take some time to earn the trust of the islanders. About a year after her first visit to Hawaii for the book, she sat down to transcribe her interviews. At one point, she realized she’d left the recorder running when she excused herself to go to the bathroom. To her surprise, she heard the voice of Blossom Young, a onetime member of the Swim Club, by then grown old.
Unaware she was still being recorded, Blossom confided in a friend while the writer was out of the room. “I think she’s sincere,” she whispered loudly. “What do you think?”
When Checkoway heard that, she cried.
On a recent weekday, there were stacks of envelopes in the author’s front foyer, each containing a copy of her new book, ready to be mailed to the surviving swimmers and the children of the others.
“I know I don’t own the story,” she said. “It’s theirs. I’m just opening up the door.”
Halo Hirose was 5 when he first swam in a Maui sugar-plantation camp irrigation ditch.
Janet Ogawa
Halo Hirose was 5 when he first swam in a Maui sugar-plantation camp irrigation ditch.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.