{"id":152362,"date":"2015-08-27T09:50:37","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=152362"},"modified":"2015-08-27T09:50:37","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:50:37","slug":"haunts-of-the-black-masseur-the-swimmer-as-hero-a-book-that-changed-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/haunts-of-the-black-masseur-the-swimmer-as-hero-a-book-that-changed-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer As Hero&#8221; &#8212; A Book That Changed My Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Commentary by Casey Barrett, reposted by permission from <a href=http:\/\/www.capandgoggles.com\/ target=_blank>CapAndGoggles.com<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<p>I picked up <strong>Charles Sprawson&#8217;s<\/strong> book <em>Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer As Hero<\/em> while wandering a used bookstore outside of Dallas in 1998. The title made no sense to me, but the subtitle certainly did. Especially at the ego-drenched age of 23, before careers began and humility gets forced upon you when you realize that no one cares about your pool-bound exploits. The swimmer as hero, indeed. I could relate to that. Swimmers, particularly those who\u2019ve stood atop podiums, are not lacking in self-regard.<\/p>\n<p>I took it home and opened it up and waited for it to confirm all my heroic impulses. It didn\u2019t. Instead, I found a deep scholarly look at the true character of swimmers \u2013 isolated souls that somehow find fulfillment in a lonely sensory-deprived act. In his introduction, the author writes that, at a young age, he formed \u201ca vague conception of the swimmer as someone rather remote and divorced from everyday life, devoted to a mode of exercise where most of the body remains submerged and self-absorbed. It seemed to me that it appealed to the introverted and eccentric, individualists involved in a mental world of their own.\u201d OK, guilty as charged, I thought.<\/p>\n<p>The author, Charles Sprawson, is an Englishman raised in India, educated at Trinity College in Ireland, and by profession, an art dealer with a focus in 19th century paintings. On the book jacket he also calls himself \u201can obsessional swimmer and diver who has swum the Hellespont.\u201d The Hellespont? For those Americans, from the newer side of the Atlantic pond, you\u2019re forgiven if this doesn\u2019t resonate. It does for the Euros. If the English Channel remains the most iconic of all open water swims, the Hellespont must be the swim most steeped in literary significance.<\/p>\n<p>On May 3, 1810, the poet <strong>Lord Byron<\/strong> swam the four-mile strait in Turkey that connects Europe to Asia. Byron was 22 at the time, a struggling poet traveling Europe. His swim was done in honor of the Greek legend, Leander, a romantic swimmer soul who, according to mythology, would swim across the stretch each night to visit his lover, Hero. The fair Hero would light a lamp in her tower to guide him, until one stormy night when the winds blew out her light and Leander lost his way and drowned in the waves. When Hero learned his fate, she tossed herself from her tower into the sea to be with him in death. Call it Romeo &#038; Juliet, Swimmer Edition. In any case, Lord Byron loved that legend enough to emulate the doomed Leander. And the poems it inspired helped sweep Byron to literary immortality.<\/p>\n<p>If your knowledge of swimming history only goes back to 1896, or 1996 for that matter, this book will pull you a lot further back into the currents of our sport. You\u2019ll learn that, for the Romans, the definition of ignorance was a man that \u201cneither knows how to read or swim.\u201d You\u2019ll also learn that while the Romans were big on swimming and their Bathhouses, \u201cthe more degenerate the emperor, the more sumptuous tended to be his Baths.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sprawson travels the world of pools, rivers, lakes, and oceans, searching for \u201cthat peculiar psychology of the swimmer, and his \u2018feel for the water.&#8217;\u201d He\u2019s English, so his focus remains rooted in the UK tradition, but the book\u2019s finest section is the one called, rather ambitiously, &#8220;The American Dream.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The book was first released in 1992, so you\u2019ll find no passages on <strong>Michael Phelps<\/strong> or any athlete from our &#8220;modern times.&#8221; You won\u2019t even find anything on <strong>Mark Spitz<\/strong>. There\u2019s a bit on the incomparable <strong>Duke Kahanamoku<\/strong> and <strong>Johnny Weissmuller<\/strong>, along with America\u2019s original swimming siren <strong>Eleanor Holm<\/strong> \u2013 the hard-partying backstroke badass who was thrown off the U.S. team on the way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin because she was tipping back the champagne on the Games-bound boat across the Atlantic alongside the assembled sporting press. Holm was the 1932 Olympic champ in the 100 back and the world record holder, but instead of defending her gold she spent the Berlin Games flirting with Nazis and partying like a Weimar flapper.<\/p>\n<p>Olympic exploits and scandals aside, Sprawson is more interested in how our sport has filtered into our creative, literary consciousness. There\u2019s <strong>John Cheever\u2019s<\/strong> \u201cThe Swimmer,\u201d a sort of suburban angst update of the legend of Rip Van Winkle. There\u2019s <strong>F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/strong> and his gin-soaked observation that \u201call good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.\u201d There\u2019s <strong>Tennessee Williams<\/strong> and the Southern gothic tradition where \u201cthose attracted to water tend to be dreamers, outcasts, the \u2018fugitive kind\u2019 who by temperament, character, or birth are fated to be anachronisms trapped in a world \u2018lit by lightning.&#8217;\u201d And there\u2019s the observation that Hollywood has captured time and again that \u201cThese sapphire pools, liquid emanations of the American Dream, sought-after status symbols, emblems of material success, became for some a means of escape from the contamination of a corrupt society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But best of all, there\u2019s this piece of dark wisdom from Baltimore\u2019s most immortal citizen, <strong>Edgar Allan Poe<\/strong>. In an essay called \u201cThe Imp of the Perverse,\u201d the sharp and cynical-eyed Poe summed up a base instinct in all of us. He wrote: \u201cThere is no passion in nature so demonically impatient as that of him who, shuddering on the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been dwelling on that line for 17 years, recalling countless workouts, staring at the still water before warm-up. And the countless times since, when the only way to move forward is to plunge ahead.<\/p>\n<p><i><strong>Haunts of the Black Masseur<\/strong> is <a href=http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Haunts-Black-Masseur-Swimmer-Hero\/dp\/0816635390 target=_blank>available on Amazon.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commentary by Casey Barrett, reposted by permission from CapAndGoggles.com I picked up Charles Sprawson&#8217;s book Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer As Hero while wandering a used bookstore outside<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":152364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[54231,3381,54232,21429,166,54230,1666,54229,616,142],"class_list":["post-152362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-commentary","tag-charles-sprawson","tag-duke-kahanamoku","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-eleanor-holm","tag-english-channel","tag-hero-and-leander","tag-johnny-weissmuller","tag-lord-byron","tag-mark-spitz","tag-swimming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\r\n<title>&quot;Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer As Hero&quot; 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