the most emotional swim of my life.

4th place. I led for almost 20,000meters but couldn't hang on in the last
5,000. Wind speed 25 knots, water temp 64.

thanks for all your supportive e-mails over the past week.

mdw

On Sunday, March 18, 2007, I received the following email from Melbourne, Australia. It is by Mark Warkentin, a Santa Barbara native, who married my older brother’s youngest daughter Diana. That makes him my nephew by marriage, an open water swimmer by choice, and an insider about what it’s like to sport among sharks and jellyfish.

It's hard to tell how violent a 5K race is when you watch it from the sidelines. You just see distant splashing and bobbing heads. As with water polo, you don’t catch the roller derby underneath the water.

I was told, just like every other swimmer in Saturday’s race, to get to the second spot and pull the draft off of the first swimmer. This is a great idea if there are only four or five legitimate contenders in the race as there were at the U.S. Nationals last year. But there are 40 top contestants at St. Kilda Beach for the World Open Water Championships this week to determine who gets to go the Olympics next year. If every single one of them is trying to get to the second position at the same time, someone will succeed. That leaves 39 others to engage in a killing spree.

I was one of those 39.

The race started on a floating dock. I was positioned next to Germany’s defending World Champion, Thomas Lurz. Seeing the fortune of this position, I decided to follow Lurz around for most of the race and try to make a move at the end. Hence when the gun went off, I held my position next to Lurz and then gradually let him move slightly ahead so that I was in his slipstream. As we approached the first turn, I realized that this was a very, very, very stupid idea.

Lurz was not in first place. A Greek had taken the race out quickly, and Lurz was in the coveted second spot. That put me in about 5th to 8th position.

I say 5th to 8th because I was right on Lurz’s heels. But then, so was everyone else. As we neared the turn buoy, the pack crowded more tightly, everyone trying to get as close to the buoy as possible. To swing out wide around the buoy and avoid the melee would mean a longer distance to swim. Longer in swimming is like a group of 40 people trying to crowd into an elevator. Whoever doesn’t make it has to run up 80 flights of stairs.

I made the elevator. So did a whole lot more than its official carrying capacity. Your first inclination might be to retaliate against someone who accidentally hits you or elbows you or kicks you to the floor. But you figure, Well, we are all part of the human family; we’re all headed in the same direction; we all have to breathe. Then you realize there are at least six people who are hitting you.

Simultaneously. Malevolently. And everyone else in that elevator would love to be doing the same.

There were so many targets of opportunity, it was hard to pick just one for some concentrated pain. I got punched in the mouth with an elbow, and for a moment thought that I might lose my front teeth again. A forearm smacked into my back while at the same time my arms were tangled and my legs were being pulled back to the floating dock. I’m not sure yanking on other people’s arms is technically swimming, but that how others and I made it around the buoy.

And that’s when it struck me that we had been kids playing in a backyard wadding pool compared to what was coming up. The second turn buoy floated 50 meters ahead, and bodies boxed me in on all sides. There was no draft to take advantage of. We were in a drag of conflicting forces, and there was nothing to do but to endure another slugfest as we closed on the buoy ahead.

And another and another.

The race unfolded with the first three guys swimming in a line, a mass
of humanity trying to catch them. The Greek struggled to stay first; Lurz was pulling in his draft; and a Russian was in third.

Lurz eventually won while I stayed with the pack and closed with a whimper. From the second to the third lap of the four-lap race, I sustained enough bodily harm to drop from 5th or 8th position to a definite 17th place at the finish.

As I turned the last buoy, a Canadian landed a forearm to my lower back. Knowing that I had no hope of medaling, I lost all sense of Christian charity, and let my anger and frustration have their way with him. Unfortunately I’m not very skilled or assertive with my punches and ended up just bumping into him quite a few times, never landing a direct hit.

After we finished, the Canadian took off his goggles, looked at me, smiled and said, “Well, it was it a bit rough out there, eh?” as if he were Dudley Doright of the Mounties just back from a brisk walk.

I woke Sunday morning with an eye socket that felt like Cyclops after a run in with Ulysses. You have to wear your goggles tight to keep the salt water out. Also, the tighter they are, the less likely they’ll come off when you decide to damage someone’s fist with your face.

My plan for the 10K on Tuesday is to take it out faster. The first turn
isn’t as close to the start as before (probably about 800 meters), and the second turn is 400 meters after the first, so it shouldn’t be quite as rough as the first lap of the 5K. The problem with taking it out fast is that people will draft off of you and thus conserve energy, energy that is needed to either win the race or survive all the fights.

As of Tuesday morning, Pacific Daylight Savings Time in the U.S., the 10K race is over, but I haven't heard from Mark or gotten any news results of the outcome, except that swimmers came out of the water covered in welts from stinging jellyfish. Mark's strongest race is the upcoming 25K. If they ever make torture an Olympic event, he is a sure bet for the Gold.

Robert Ito is a Canadian-born former ballet dancer who became an actor in the 1960s. Not just any old actor but the first to play a ninja on American television. In a 1973 Kung Fu episode called “The Assassin,” Ito’s character is a crippled blacksmith who doubles as a Japanese master in the art of suddenly becoming very limber, dressing in black, throwing shurikins around in a menacing manner, disappearing in a puff of smoke and leaving David Carradine to take the blame.

That marital arts trivia came to me as gospel from one of the two writers of the episode. The writer in question...Something Spooner (hey, cut me some slack: it was 34 years ago)...offered to get a spec treatment I had written for Kung Fu to the Warner Brothers brass because, as Mr. SS put it, “I’ve been promised a favor, and if your treatment grabs ’em, we’re co-writers. Deal?”

My new partner and I submitted the treatment a month or so before the middle of the second season. In the third and last season we had heard nothing in response when I caught a bit of an episode in which Caine is trapped in a cave where he has hallucinations of Aztec demons. The scenes I saw generally looked and sounded like they came from the treatment SS and I had turned in.

There was the usual water-downed Zen that was supposed to infuse new thematic blood into the Western. At best those Shaolin Temple imitations were reworked Love Generation slogans from the ’Sixties.

“Just as war hurts flowers and children and other living things, so too, Grasshopper, does the Colt .45 single-action Frontier revolver.”

“But Master Poo, is it not also called Peacemaker because it kills tyrants?”

Sometimes the series wove in Carradine’s input that his character shouldn’t wear shoes or ride a horse because.... I have no idea. But Aztec hoodoo in a cave couldn’t have been spontaneously conjured by someone else.

SS could care less. His name was on the treatment, but he was so used to producers saying they owed him a favor but never coming through, he ate humble pie as if were cherry ala mode. I think he went on to be an unaccredited script doctor whereas I, young as I was, sought justice.

I was acquainted with a lawyer who had been agent but was now back plying his wiles in the Legal Affairs Department of Warners. I telephoned him, and told him what was in the treatment and what I had seen on TV. I offered a tentative verdict.

“Probably,” he said. “Yes, you probably were ripped off. But we’ll fight you. Even if you win, it will take years to settle. So, we end up paying court costs and your lawyer’s fees, and you end up with what? The going rate for TV episodic. I say you move on to something else.”

Pausing to think about that, I remembered having a few after work scotches with Warren Bush, the Executive in Charge of Production for the David L. Wolper Organization. Warren had hired me for a staff position in the Research & Development Department. Although we had our ups and downs, he was as much of a mentor as I ever had in the entertainment industry, as well as something of a father figure. I enjoyed hearing him talk about his experiences as a B-29 navigator in World War II. After doing his bit to fire bomb flowers and children and a lot of murderous thugs, Warren got a job in the CBS News Division in New York. He talked amusingly of his California exploits, taking up gliding and acrobatic flying, and of some recent craziness regarding the Jacques Cousteau specials.

In the editing wing of our building, a cutter had pasted a sign to his door. The sign played off the title of the movie about Depression Era marathon dancers, starring Traitor Jane and Gig Young. The sign expressed sentiment about what it was like to make the happy crew of The Calypso appear so sober, so scientific, so proto Al Gore.

“They shoot Frogs, don’t they?”

Warren claimed that when he first met Jacques Cousteau, the former French Navy captain was fixated on using television only to sell tickets to his Queen Mary museum. It took some talking to convince the inventor of the aqua lung to get behind the environmental impact of Warren’s hype, “The poet of the sea.”

Alex, who worked with me in R & D, used to do a great faux French accent, which I can’t come close to recreating, so imagine Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau saying, “Suddenly, I had to leave pressing concerns in Tahiti and helicopter to The Calypso anchored off the Aleutians. In my year long absence the poor, motherless seal pup had mysteriously died.”

On this evening, however, the talk was not about Captain Cousteau and the merry crew of The Calypso. It was about me! To me that’s always a headliner. Number One on the charts with a bullet. Yo, my main man. Primo, know what I mean? Anyway, Warren drew on his cigar, having given up Merits, and said philosophically:

“In this business you can’t worry about having your ideas stolen. You can count on it. But you have to get them out there, and if you’re any good, you’ll always have more.”

Suddenly, I left the Papua, New Guinea, of my memories and choppered in to the sordid Calypso of the present. “Yeah, you’re right,” I grudgingly said to the lawyer. After we hung up, I muttered what Dean Goodwin, another cohort from the Wolper days, always said before he killed himself, “F___ it if you can’t take a joke.”

Years later I channel surfed into a rerun of the Kung Fu episode in contention. I could hardly believe my eyes it was so awful! I didn’t remember anything in the treatment about some snotty Imperial Prince poisoning young Caine. I thought the prince was supposed to be a rattlesnake. I vaguely recalled an Indian maid taking care of Caine as he suffered from severe flashback. Finally, I concluded that all that junk clinging to the plot had to be SS’ work. He deserved to be ripped off.

I still had plenty of good ideas left waiting to be stolen.