In my last post about my athletic bio I stopped in high school right when I started having thoughts of being a really good swimmer. See I only swam part time. In high school I also ran cross country, ran track, played soccer and played volleyball. One year I got in trouble by ripping a page from a library book so I got suspended from all the sports teams for a month. What a bummer. That really sucked. It seemed like one of the reasons I liked sports was because it was hard for me to just even participate. My mother was not really supportive. Not that she had to since I was in a boarding school and all I had to do is walk to practice but the support I needed was to be able to swim with a private club to become a really good swimmer.
I lived with my mother during the Christmas and summer break so I somehow found out that there was a swim club that I could train with during those months. The club was called the Caribe Hilton Swim Club. Yes the same as Paris Hilton! The big hotel sponsored the team somehow. We swam some at a 50 yard pool at a nearby military base and some at the hotel 25 yard pool. That pool had the coldest water you can imagine. Getting in was always an ordeal. The coach was Carlos Salas. He was a great guy and loved freestyle and long sets. If I was to become real good at the sport I needed to swim with these guys year round but there was no way. My boarding school prevented that. I could only swim with them during the breaks. So I always showed up relatively out of shape and playing catch up. These guys swam twice a day and it was very hard for me to get fit and catch up but I did a fairly good job and managed some good results. I am actually a breaststroker and at the state meet I qualified for some finals in the 100 or 200 a few times. I can not quite remember which ones. But I scored some points for the team and we managed some great relays were teams score a lot of points.
The Caribe Hilton swim club was definitely stacked; I could never swim in the fast lane. The summer brought some kids from the states that were super fast. Summer training was a lot of fun. We trained twice a day many times. I sometimes hung with some of the kid’s families after the morning session. See I had to take the bus to practice. Instead of going back home I hung with some of them and they drove me to the afternoon practice. We smelled like chlorine the entire time. How did we do that? Weekends brought swim meets and again I always had to depend on someone to take me to the meet. So other parents would come to my condo and pick me up. Thanks for that. I always remember this personal experience so when I coached kids I was always offering to drive them around if for some reason the parents could not make it happen.
Some people want to be like Mike or want to be like Tiger or whoever the superstar is. When I was 13 and started having thoughts of being a great swimmer I wanted to be like Tim. Who is Tim? As a kid I loved sports and I actually had a subscription to Sports Illustrated. I read the magazine cover to cover. I was a sports trivia buff then. One week the magazine arrived and a swimmer was on the cover. Oh my God! His name was Tim Shaw. Tim held the World record in every freestyle event but the 100 free. He was going to be the next big superstar after Mark Spits. The buzz about him 30 years ago was similar to what we have now with Michael Phelps. Tim went to the Swimming World Championships in Cali Colombia and won the 200, 400 and 1500 freestyle. That was unheard off. Not even Phelps can do that today. The Olympics was going to be his defining moment. Well that never happened as he got sick with anemia and only managed to make the Olympic 4x200 relay which won him an Olympic medal. Tim eventually retired from swimming and later made the Olympic water polo team and got another Olympic medal. That is an interesting feat also. Tim was my only hero as a kid. His Sports Illustrated article said he ate the McDonalds diet. A Big Mac, coke, fries and an apple pie. Guess what I started eating then. We can overcome anything as kids eh?
Back to my story; I always felt that my swimming was being held back. I tried swimming year round by swimming by myself at boarding school. The school people actually gave me keys to the pool and I swam by myself to try to stay in swim shape. But that was never the same. I decided to skip my senior year of high school by taking some additional summer classes and got my diploma. I was sick of high school. I got accepted to the best Puerto Rico University for engineering but I wanted to swim and that was only going to happen in the states. I looked for a school that had a swim team, an engineering program and a good guy to girl ratio. I applied for the University of Miami and got in. Not that hard to get in there at the time. I needed help as my SAT scores were very mediocre. I had a good GPA so that must have helped. I can not remember the exact SAT numbers but I think it was 500 math and 350 verbal. I never had classes entirely in English, we had some textbooks in English which helped but it is not the same. Reading Sports Illustrated helped eh? Oh yes graduating early thus skipping some key math classes was not helping either. But off the the UofM I went. They call it “The U” now.
I showed up and asked if I could try out for the swim team. They said sure just show up at practice and we will go from there. I showed up as fit as possible and was getting fitter by the minute, there were a few of us trying out, Frank DaSilva, Doug Porto and others. This was not going to be easy. This team was a Division I team and had many All Americans. Guess who the star diver for the team was. Greg Louganis. He was also living on my dorm floor. He stayed very much to himself and did not say much. He had just won the Silver medal at the Olympics. But swimmers and divers did not mix anyway. It is a different breed. We just competed at the same meets that was all.
Well they never cut anyone from the team. If you made in practice and showed up you were in. But I was definitely a second class citizen. The coach Bill Diaz was nice enough to let o couple of us walk-ons on the team but told me “Luis you are our slowest Breaststroker”. He was right. Our fastest breaststroker was Helmut Levi who was born in Colombia and born in the same town of Ibague as I was. Bill Diaz recruited him out of Colombia. We were good friends. He was amazing. He could go a 55 sec 100 yard breast in dual meets. I was checking out the Ibague Hall of Fame web site last month and he is in it.
I swam in a couple of dual meets and that was fun but being treated like a second potato was not fun at all. Bill Diaz had a job to do. That was to place at Division I Nationals and I was not going to help him with that. So for him to keep his job he had to recruit and recruit some more. He was not even the coach giving out sets on the pool deck. Charlie Hodgson did that. I liked him but talk about a man of few words. In any case developing me as a swimmer was not in the team agenda. One day Helmut Levi quit the team and went back to Colombia. Bill Diaz flew to Colombia to bring him back. Helmut was a very important swimmer for the team. Bill needed him. College sports is not about the sport, it is about keeping the job and getting recognition for the school and for the coach. Well I should not be so critical eh? They at least let me in the team. I really should have gone to a Division III school if I wanted to feel more part of the team. At least there was the experience, the good looking girls and enginnering.
The winter after my freshman fall semester I went back to Puerto Rico and swam with the Caribe Hilton team. I was crushing every body in training. Carlos the coach could not believe it. I think he was happy for me but a little bummed as how could I go away for 5 months and get so fast. That did not make him look very good. Well I was now swimming year round, that is how.
For my sophomore year I had to decide if I wanted to swim again. My grades were not great, being a second banana on the swim team was not that much fun and I was not in great shape after a long summer to try out. In the end I decided to quit. This was a tough thing for me. I put on a lot of weight on after I quit but my grades eventually improved. But I had to avoid going by the student union were the pool was for a while. I could not look at it. My sophomore year was a very difficult year for me for sure. I’ll write as to what happened with my athletics after swimming was over in my next post.