A story to share with you. The Olympics I walked into the locker room after having registered with someone whose name I instantly forgot. It was quiet, very, very quiet. The always present sounds of shouting, joking, making rat tails from towels and the dire threats that came after the predicted assault were not there. No one was tying a best friend’s underwear into knots. But we did all share one thought, God please let me make the team. When I put on the suit, a United States Olympic team suit I could hardly breath. I thought that if I didn’t make the team at least I had this memory - this single moment where I was ready to represent my country. It was likely the only time in my life where I would become the United States of America like some ancient religious transformation ceremony. We filed out into the pool, did our stretching exercises, started to loosen up and you could even hear a few weak jokes. The fastest swimmers, assured of a place on the team unless they missed a flip turn were relaxing first. The rest of us, well, it would take some time. I remember looking around the pool. I turned my head very slowly wanting to memorize very window, every plaque. I needed to remember the temperature of the pool and the color of the water, the earth tones off the bricks, the height of the impossible platform for diving and the sounds. I had to have those sounds in my head so I could call them back any time. The one thing I cannot recall, and I have tried many times over the years, is the faces of the other swimmers. I can see their bodies and hear their voices. I can see them laugh and cover themselves with towels less cold than afraid. But I can’t see them. I wish I could but that memory is not there. I don’t wonder about it either. For some reason it seems fitting that the one thing I can’t remember would have changed with time anyway. Im sure the pool is the same, the walls, the bricks, all of it frozen in time forever. But the faces have faded away. I was teaching a seminar at Wells Fargo Bank a few years ago and there was an attendee that I thought I recognized and he felt the same way. Although we tried for the better part of two days, we could not come up with the connection. Toward the end of the session I was talking about the difference between skill and talent. Skills can be learned but talent can not. Talent is the result of a happy accident of genes and chromosomes. The point was that salespeople, even bankers, can learn to sell successfully. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have much natural talent, they can learn how to execute properly. I then used myself as an example comparing myself against Mark Spitz. We are the same age, same height, even the same religion but he could swim circles around me. The difference is that he is a member of the lucky sperm and egg club. The fellow from Wells started to laugh and interrupted the class to announce, “I know now where I know you from. I was the Olympic water polo team.” That was why we knew each other but not well enough to instantly identify it. We were in the same locker room but at different times in the pool. We must have seen each other pass in the halls 50 times over the course of three months. Now reunited, we went to dinner together and laughed over old stories about the coach, the swimmers and sufficient egos to float a battleship. We both admitted missing the golden days of the Olympic Trials and although he went on to compete and I didn’t, we were both U.S. Olympians. When I left at the end of the trials I had a U.S. Olympic Swim Team warm-up and two Olympic swim suits. The warm-up was stolen at the very next swim meet and I never saw it again. At that time you could not buy a U.S. warm-up at K-mart, there was only one source. You had to have been on the team. One of the suits disappeared not long after but I still have one tucked away in a drawer with other memories. Before the evening with the banker was over we toasted our old friends and he looked at me with kind of a wistful frown and said, “You know Larry, try as I might, I can’t remember their faces. Isn’t that funny?”
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 18:01:42 +0000
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