My grandparents lived in a beautiful red brick ranch-style house on the south end of a small town called Tullahoma, Tennessee. Though my mother had been born in nearby Shelbyville, it was this house in Tullahoma that had provided me with whatever sense of normalcy I knew growing up. I’d spent summers there, fishing with my grandfather in his little aluminum fishing boat or just hanging around, especially before I started swimming seriously. I treasured those times because they gave me a place to that I understand as “home”.
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| My grandmother Rachel and her daughter Janice. |
My mother thought of herself as a Lady of the Old South because in many respects this was who she’d been raised to be. Her hometown of Shelbyville was the most uniquelySouthern place I’d ever been. The town was known internationally for breeding Tennessee Walking Horses9 and for its annual Walking Horse Show10, which drew well-heeled horse-people from all over the world. Shelbyville was a sleepy southern town almost all the time, but during Show Week it was not unusual to see Ferraris and Lamborghinis driving the streets, going about their business as if everyone in America ought to drive a uniquely expensive Italian muscle car.
My mother was the eldest daughter of a particular branch of Clan Gunn, a family of “gentlemen farmers” originally out of Scotland. Her particular piece of the clan immigrated to America in the early-1700s, establishing a plantation in what would eventually be Flat Creek, a hamlet-sized village on Shelbyville’s outskirts. Time, the Depression, and the eventual splintering of the family’s historic lands through generations of multiple inheritances diluted the family fortune, however, so that by the mid-20th Century, my mother’s family had little to separate it from a traditional upper-middle class existence save an old manor house on the nice side of town. Family legend had it that my great grandfather sold “swampland” in South Florida to keep the family solvent during the Depression, and that this eventually became Miami Beach. That sounded like a ghost story to me, but my mother believed it, and it gave the family a certain social gravitas in her mind that she never let lapse.
My mother’s mother was Rachel, and like my mother, she too was the eldest daughter of Clan Gunn, though at a time when the family’s social standing remained preeminent. My mother’s father had been an aerial reconnaissance photographer during World War II, but he was shot down by the Japanese and came home addicted to morphine. He was a stunningly beautiful and charismatic man, but his addictions proved too strong. A couple of years after my mother’s birth in 1946, her father set fire to the house where he, my grandmother Rachel, and their daughter Janice—my mother—all lived. Rachel quietly divorced her husband in the aftermath and moved back into the family manor. By a perhaps fortuitous coincidence, her now ex-husband died of a morphine overdose immediately thereafter, sparing his wife and infant daughter the scandal of his addictions and the stigma of a 1950s-era broken home. My grandmother would eventually remarry, but for the most part, she raised her daughter as a single mother--long before this was considered socially acceptable.
In light of the potential for scandal, my mother learned the need for dignity, respectability, and above all class starting from an early age. As the daughter of a single mother from a good family in small-town Tennessee, Mom was raised to care above all about her image and to pay particular attention to the way that others perceived her. She was beautiful, smart, and well-doted-upon, and with the way that she was raised, no one in town was a match for her socially. As an example of her prowess, Mom was cast as the lead in her high school play in her junior year, ahead of senior Sandra Locke, who would go on to a successful acting career in Hollywood and to marriage to actor Clint Eastwood.
But while my mother was born to privilege, my father had to make his own way. The Head brothers landed in Savannah, Georgia, on an Oglethorpe ship in the early 1700s, fresh out of an English debtors’ prison. They made their way northwest to the hills of East Tennessee and settled into farming, but they never saw the kind of gentrified success that characterized the Clan Gunn’s earliest years in America. My father claimed to have both one eighth Cherokee blood in his veins and an ancestor who’d fought in the Confederate cavalry as a full colonel during the Civil War. According to my dad, this man is depicted on the diorama of the Battle of Atlanta, fighting with his saber in one hand and the reins of his horse tied around the stump of his other arm.
Whatever the truth of these stories, my father grew up in an abusive, decidedly working class household just outside of Knoxville. He was the son an enlisted tank crewman trainer during World War II who, to my father’s unending shame, never deployed to fight in the war. Dad’s mother had been married to an Army officer when the war broke out, but—again, to my father’s shame—she had an affair while her husband was overseas and fell pregnant. Her officer husband returned from the war just long enough to divorce her, and she was left with little choice but to marry the object of her booze-addled mistake of an affair. In time, dad’s father revealed himself to be a depressive, degenerate alcoholic who was known to beat his wife and son relentlessly. My father’s father killed himself not long after my parents were married, striking a final blow struck against the son he’d never truly wanted. Dad escaped a life of grief, shame, and abuse based solely on his athletic gifts, his physical determination, and of all things, a scholarship to play trumpet in the University of Tennessee marching band.
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Summers with my grandparents had always been vacations when I was younger. Pa Pa Dan and I spent as much time as we could fishing out on the local lakes, and he and Granny took an enthusiastic interest in my boyhood fascination with caves. We went on road trips to every cave in the southeast, from Rock City in Chattanooga to Luray Caverns in Virginia to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and all points in between. A diehard Vols fan and former Volunteer Football season ticket holder, Pa Pa Dan also taught me the finer points of college football. He was a very different kind of man than was my father, being essentially a citizen-soldier who came home after the war and made his fortune as a civilian. But he was at least as successful as was my father and almost as much larger than life.
However, as I headed to Tullahoma that summer before high school, I had other things on my mind besides fishing and cave-exploring. We were moving to San Diego, the spiritual heartland of American swimming, and I wanted to be ready. In my heart, I knew that if I could reach the top of my sport in Southern California, I could reach it anywhere.
I wanted that. I wanted it badly.
Nobody in my family quite knew how to deal with my dedication to swimming, save that they were all keen to help as best they could. My dad wanted an athlete in the family. Mom wanted me to have a way to make friends, connect with my school, and establish myself as one of the Cool Kids at my high school. My grandparents wanted to prove that their little town of Tullahoma was as good as any place and that Tennessee could help my swimming career as much as California could. Everyone in the family start talking about getting me “ready for San Diego.”
Pa Pa Dan and Granny ultimately hired a private coach named Ken to work with me over the summer. Ken was a recent college graduate, and he’d done at least some swimming at the collegiate level. He’d swum somewhere in the Ivy League and, we hoped, had enough experience to coach me for a couple of weeks in Tennessee.
For the next few weeks, I got up early every morning, grabbed a quick snack, got in the car with Granny, and drove to meet Ken during Adult Swim at the local Tullahoma pool. My grandparents were slightly bemused by this, but they honored my dedication and did their best to make sure that I never missed a workout. I did a lot of individual medley work, which was unusual for me, and a lot of bulk yardage aerobic sets as well. We didn’t do the kinds of fast-paced interval-intensive stroke workouts that Coach Pete had sent me during my solo workouts back in New Bern, however, and over time, their lack created doubts in the back of my mind about my readiness. There was little I could do, however, beside work hard at what I was given and fret when no one was looking.
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