#SBRLLR: Choosing a Life (Part 1)

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler...“

― Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Harvard turned out to be an ancient collection of brick buildings and concrete pathways that wound through grassy park-like open areas and underneath occasional stone and wrought iron archways.  The teeming heart of Cambridge lay just beyond the campus border, making the college feel very much a part of the city in which it lived.  For all that this was the Ivy League, I saw very little actual ivy, though this may have been because my visit occurred in early March.  It was spring in Tampa, Florida, but the bite of winter still hung heavy in the air in Boston.

A senior picture.

The coaching staff picked me up alongside a pair of fellow recruits and dropped us with a few of Harvard’s swimmers, who then served as escorts.  I took in a freshman biology course in an auditorium but was disappointed to see the same basic material we’d been learning in AP Biology back at Chamberlain.  Happily, the class neither lasted particularly long nor appeared to have engaged any of the students’ undivided attention.  Even the adjunct teaching it looked like he didn’t actually need to be there.

We went on a walking tour of campus after class, and it quickly became a blur of sensory impressions.  The campus itself was organized around neighborhood-like dormitory buildings, each filled with apartment-style rooms in a variety of layouts.  Grass-filled city square parks lay between the dorms, giving space and a shared sense of community to the college as a whole.  People were everywhere outside, even in March.  These weren’t high school students; they were the serious men and women of Harvard, going about the business of building their future lives.  We stepped into one guy’s apartment, and I flipped through a copy of Playboy magazine that he had left lying out on his coffee table, marveling that it just sat there out in the open.  At length, I realized that there weren’t any parents around, that these guys had the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted.  This was as true at Harvard as it would have been at Florida State.

We went to swim practice.  Harvard had a substantial natatorium, painted off-white with the Crimson logo facing the bleachers.  Though the swimming facility wasn’t nearly the size of the dual-pool fifty-meter competition cathedral I’d see back at the University of Tennessee, it was plenty big enough to host a team, even a big collegiate team with world-class talent.  Back in the early 1990s, Harvard was in and out of the NCAA’s top twenty-five.  Olympic gold medalist David Berkoff had swum at Harvard on his way to glory in Seoul in 1988, just a few years prior to my visit.  This was very much in my mind as we sat down to meet the coach and watch the guys swim.  Then, in the middle of practice, a ten-foot wooden sign fell from where it hung above one of the offices, crashing bodily onto the pool deck.  Without missing a beat, one of the sprinters climbed from the water, grabbed a gorgeous, fully-stocked leather carpenter’s belt that he apparently kept with him at all times, climbed halfway up the bleachers, and proceeded to effect makeshift repairs right there on the spot.

This was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.  I marveled that a would-be collegiate swimming champion could also be an accomplished amateur carpenter.

But this was Harvard.  These guys were all incredibly versatile.

We left the pool and walked to the weight room, and that’s where we met Berkoff himself.  David Berkoff had won gold in the Olympics as a backstroker by maximizing his blastoffs, dolphin kicking for forty or more yards at a stretch on his back underwater.  His innovation changed swimming forever.  Nearly every swimming race since has made at least some use of the techniques that he himself pioneered.  And there I was, no shit, standing slack-jawed while a literal legend of my sport described training for glory.  I asked him how he did it, and he said that he trained in the weight room holding his breath.

He laughed, saying, “It makes your quads burn.”

One of the other guys asked how he kept from getting water up his nose while kicking on his back underwater, and he just smiled.  “I don’t.  I suck it up because that’s what it takes.”

I was awed, and he caught me staring.  “Dude!  Why are you looking so star-struck?”

“Are you kidding?” I said.  “You’re David Berkoff.  You’re an Olympic champion!”  

To be fair, I’d met Janet Evans out at Western Zones back in 1988, but this was different.  Not only had Berkoff changed the face of swimming, here he was trying to recruit me to his alma mater.

“Listen man,” he said seriously, “this is Harvard.  This is the best there is, and you’re not here hat-in-hand.  They want you.  You must have realized by now that anything anybody else can do, you can do it, too?  Right?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I guess that’s true.”

“It is true.  You know it’s true.  This is as good as it gets, and you’ve made it.  Whether you meet an Olympic champion or the Queen of England, stand with your head high and realize that they’re no better than you are.  Always deal with those people as equals.”

Good piece of advice.

I wandered out of there in a daze, and the rest of the afternoon went by in a rush of images.  Dinner at a dining hall, improv theater at something like the student union, and a party at one the school’s infamous Eating Clubs, part of our nation’s original fraternity system.  I had five beers from the keg and got drunk for the first time in my life.  I was on a recruiting trip to Harvard.  Whatever else happened, it didn’t seem likely that a little alcohol was going to ruin my life.  We stumbled back arm-in-arm towards the dorm where we were staying.  I felt warm and accepted.

This would be a good life, I thought.  It’s maybe not the life I had planned, but it would certainly be a life worth living.

We got up the next morning and went back to the pool.  Of the three recruits on that trip, I was the only one who hadn’t formally committed.  When the coach pulled me aside, I knew what was coming.

“Where else are you looking?” he asked.

Whatever I say, I thought, he’s about to tell me why Harvard is better.  I sat up straight, mindful of what Berkoff had told me only the day prior.  “The only other place is West Point, coach.  It’s either here or there.”

A funny look ran across the coach’s face, and then he shook his head.  “Well, I can’t say anything bad about West Point.  If you were interested in anyplace else in the world, anywhere at all, I would tell you that Harvard is better.  But West Point…  If that’s what you want to do with your life, you won’t do any better than that.  You’ll certainly get a fine education.”

And there it is, I realized.  It’s not about which school is better.  These are the two best schools.  What I have to decide is what kind of man I want to be.