Excerpted from THE THREE-YEAR SWIM CLUB by Julie Checkoway

T here was — and arguably still is — no greater icon in the sport of swimming than Duke Paoa Kahanamoku. He was the most successful athlete of his time and the harbinger of Hawaii’s Golden Age of Swimming. While the precise number of Olympiads in which he participated is in some dispute — some say three and others four — he competed as an amateur for longer than any other swimmer before or after him — twenty-​one years in all — and even today, in the company of latter-​day saints such as Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps, Kahanamoku looms larger than they for his pioneering technique and his enduring influence upon the sport.

Historians mistakenly remember Kahanamoku only as the father of twentieth-century surfing — no small accomplishment itself — but Kahanamoku made his greatest contributions in the swimming pool, and it has famously been said of him that he was to swimming “what Babe Ruth was to baseball, Joe Louis to boxing, Bill Tilden to tennis, Red Grange to football, and Bobby Jones to golf.” For centuries before him, people had mucked about in the water in all sorts of ways, but when Kahanamoku came along in 1911 and whizzed past the stunned spectators at Honolulu’s barnacled Alakea Slip, he changed the way that human bodies moved through H2O.

Kahanamoku was a speed demon and an innovator.

He transformed what was previously known as the Australian crawl — a low‑in‑the-​water technique derided by critics as a keep-​your-​head‑in‑the-​sand stroke — into something faster and definitively American. He introduced the world to an efficient flutter called the Kahanamoku Kick, a six-​beat sequence that coordinated the arms and legs, created less drag, and even today is considered the gold standard for freestylers. Equally, if not more, impressive as a person of color, Kahanamoku — who was variously described as “copper-​hued” or “velvet-​bronze” — broke down racial barriers in pools across the globe, competing in the same Olympic Games in which Jim Thorpe courageously crossed the color line in track and field.

Kahanamoku was born in Waikiki on August 24, 1890, to a Hawaiian family of eight other children: David, Bernice, Bill, Sam, Kapiolani, Mari, Louis, and the baby Sargent. His own given name, “Duke,” had nothing at all to do with blue bloodlines; his father was a Waikiki policeman who had become enamored with the Duke of Edinburgh after the nobleman’s visit to the Sandwich Islands in 1869. Kahanamoku preferred to be called Paoa, his middle name, because it connected him more directly to his family’s Hawaiian past.

In Waikiki and beyond, though, Duke Kahanamoku became de facto royalty. His athleticism and charm made him the islands’ best-​loved son. People invited him to civic events and elected him to office because his quiet charisma and good looks made everything that much better, and they prominently pictured him on postcards and memorialized him in as many ways as was humanly possible. By 1927, Kahanamoku was as close to godliness as a human being could be in the Territory of Hawaii, where missionaries had long frowned upon the gods.

Kahanamoku was, at the very least, a demigod: sportswriters struggled with the ways in which he was, at once, divine, human, a piece of art, or an animal.

At 6 feet 2, he seemed to have descended from the heavens or to be in the act of ascending to them. Those inclined to view humankind through the lens of eugenics found Kahanamoku’s forehead to be noble, his body symmetrical, his limbs chiseled; he was as finely sculpted as Michelangelo’s David. Still, as a dark-​skinned Pacific Islander, he was, for some, of a baser, wilder origin: a species lower than human. His size 13 feet were large as a tropical jacana’s; his eyes were dark as a sable’s; his hair was a thick black mane. Abroad in the 1920s, in the streets of Paris, where the color line was fundamentally different than it was in both Hawaii and on the American Mainland — in Europe it was a time of greater freedom for an African-​American expatriate community that included Langston Hughes, for example — Kahanamoku was fetishized by women and overtaken by mobs of flappers so large that gendarmes had to clear the way for him to walk. At home in Hawaii, the combination of the things that made Duke Kahanamoku attractive everywhere else made him a symbol of the new Hawaiian brand — familiar, exotic, and beckoning.

One generation after the arrival of New England missionaries, mid- nineteenth-​century Hawaii’s economy was built on pineapple and sugar, but by the time Kahanamoku came on the scene, kamaainas — whites who had lived in Hawaii for a generation or so — realized that the islands had plenty of other assets: tourism was ultimately the most enduring source of revenue.

The early form of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce advertised Hawaii as a heaven on earth, and when Kahanamoku was at his peak as an athlete and even beyond, his image embodied the place.

But Duke Kahanamoku was a mere mortal, and by the end of his career the Olympic great had not produced a literal or figurative heir to take his place on the starting block or in fresh copy. Back in 1920, a Hawaiian by the name of Pua Kealoha swam behind Kahanamoku in Antwerp, winning silver in the 100-​meter freestyle. Another Hawaiian, Warren Kealoha, no relation, won back‑to‑back gold medals in the backstroke in 1920 and 1924. Buster Crabbe, who was not a native Hawaiian but who lived in the Territory, won Olympic gold in the 400-​meter freestyle in Los Angeles in 1932, and two island brothers named Maiola and Manuela Kalili grabbed silvers at the same Games in the 4x200-​meter relay.

But after Los Angeles, though, history just wasn’t on Hawaii’s side. That year, swimmers from the Japanese Empire surprised the world by arriving on the West Coast fit, formidable, and rigorously trained, and they promptly established an empire in the swimming pool. That was bad news for all American mermen, as they were called, but it was also the start of a complete shutout for Hawaiians: while, once, the US Olympic men’s swim team had carried no fewer than eight Hawaiian swimmers, by the time of Hitler’s carnival in Berlin in 1936, not one islander was on the US roster.

When Kahanamoku officially retired from amateur swimming, he tried his hand at lots of things. He’d given the movies and Hollywood a shot. But where it was easy for Caucasian swim stars like Buster Crabbe to become heroic spacemen like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon or Johnny Weissmuller to became Tarzan, King of the Jungle, Kahanamoku’s roles were of a lesser sort; mostly directors had cast him as a cigar-​store Indian or a native tribesman.

In the late ’30s, he had most recently run for the office of sheriff in Waikiki, and he’d won, although some people wondered how real the job was and how titular. He was Waikiki’s unofficial greeter, too: when cruise ships docked at the Aloha pier, he met dignitaries and celebrities and showered them with leis. He was much loved and would be all his life. Not long before, a musician had composed a ditty in his honor; a new hula had been dedicated to him; a line of aloha wear now had his name on it; local sports promoters had commissioned a sculptor to immortalize him in a statue said to cost some $15,000. And the swimming competition that August night of 1937 was named especially for him. It was the first annual Duke Kahanamoku Outdoor Swimming Meet, an event the Honolulu Junior Chamber of Commerce had invented with the intention of reviving the sport of swimming as it had been in Kahanamoku’s youth.

Friday was the second and final night of the competition, although on Wednesday, the visiting team had thoroughly swamped the local talent, and as for the prospect of a new Kahanamoku, there was nothing and no one yet on the horizon. What Kahanamoku thought of the sorry state of affairs was only revealed years later in an interview he gave to columnist Dick Hyland of the Los Angeles Times. Kahanamoku had once famously said that out of the water, he was nothing. In the Hyland interview he said he saw no one like him in the water. Despondent, he had taken to sitting alone tossing pebbles into the surf at a beach once known as Sans Souci; in French the term meant, loosely, “without care.” The new generation had become soft and lazy, he said. He didn’t see a chance for a revival.

If there wasn’t a chance of the restoration of Hawaiian swimming in the islands, then there was equally as little a chance for it in the literal pool in which the night’s competition was to take place. The War Memorial Natatorium had once been a gleaming place, the precious pearl of Waikiki. Some ten years before, in 1927, on an evening similar to this one, Kahanamoku himself had christened the tank. That auspicious night, madmen raced through the city’s narrow alleyways honking their horns and parking pell-​mell on the nearby polo grounds just to be in time to see Kahanamoku perform a ceremonial swim and to emerge from the new tank to pronounce it a living dream.

There was, in fact, no other pool in history like the Nat. The tank was gargantuan, double the size of an Olympic venue — 100 meters long and 40 feet wide, and it had cleverly been equipped with adjustable pontoons, so it was in that sense also the most ambitious swimming pool ever constructed: it could accommodate both American-​style meets, which were measured in yards, and also European and Olympic ones, marked in meters. It was meant to become a draw for swimmers around the world who would compete with the generation of Hawaiian swim champions who were certain, from that vantage point in time, to come.

Its use was to be in the glorious future, but its purpose was also to serve as a permanent remembrance of the past. It was dedicated not to swimming heroes but to heroes who had devoted themselves to the American and European cause, a kind of living memorial to any Hawaiian who had risked life and limb in the Great War.

The planning of the place had been the likes of a drawing room farce. It had taken its steering committee — a motley assemblage of local politicians, Daughters of the American Revolution, and sundry other interest groups and concerned citizens — years to agree on its design. First it was to be nothing more than a carved stone on hallowed ground; then it grew into something monstrously disproportionate. In the end, it was built in theBeaux Arts style, with three low concrete walls and a fourth wall — a facade adorned with urns and eagles — echoing the greatness of the Roman Colosseum, and it was hailed as an architectural triumph nonpareil. From a passing steamship, tourists looked out on the Waikiki shore and easily mistook the Nat for a gleaming white, half-​submerged football stadium, and locals prized the place, because it was the first public swimming pool available to them for play; social reformers saw the pool as a great advancement in what had been Hawaii’s particular form of segregation: most actual pools, until that time, had been connected either to exclusive white social clubs or to the fancy hotels.

Few knew it from the beginning, but the Nat, though always grand from the stands or the vantage of an arriving steamer, and a pleasure for locals to swim in, was an engineering disaster. Its San Francisco architects had never before drawn up blueprints for a pool, and while the public adored it and people swam in it for leisure, aside from its adjustability, it was wholly unsuited to sanctioned competition. It was the first ever pool to be built directly along a shoreline, and it jutted out to sea and was fed directly by the ocean. The blueprints of the place had been romantic, but when built, it was manifestly impractical. Open to the ocean, it was only as good a place to swim as the ocean was: a rough-​water venue even at its best.

Furthermore, the tank’s construction had first been long delayed and then rushed and shoddy. Within less than a year from when Duke christened it, the Nat became what one later critic called “a pockmark on the countenance of paradise.” Its hazards were famous, countless, and almost too far-​fetched to be real. Tides buckled its walls. Seaweed clogged its state‑of‑the-​art filtration system.

For divers it was horrible. Most notably, in 1929, one of Admiral Byrd’s most intrepid companions to the North Pole thought, during a brief sojourn in Honolulu, that it was not too great a risk to dive headfirst into the tank from the pool’s 30‑foot-​high board, but he was rewarded for his stunt with a shattered shoulder — an injury more serious than any he had experienced during his adventures on terra firma.

Swimmers had it worse than divers, though. The tide sucked them off course, waves rendering lane markers useless. Competitors raced illegally in one another’s lanes and, hence, risked disqualification for tangling hopelessly in the ropes. A bed of coral with pieces sharp enough to bloody up the knuckles and toes lined even the shallow end, and the water circulated so rarely in the tank as a whole that it became a viscous stew, in which a range of creatures made their habitat and through which one had to brace oneself in competition just to reach the wall.

Schools of fish, slithery eels, and even octopuses took up residence there. So did slimy blowfish. Bales of hard-​shelled sea turtles popped up when least expected. On the other hand, like clockwork, exactly nine days after the waxing of a full moon, the tank filled with blooms of stinging jellyfish, and “blue rock,” the poison that was used to kill them off, was a swimmer’s toxic swallow. Most discomforting of all was a sharp-​toothed barracuda with the charming habit not only of following swimmers during practice laps but turning simultaneously, and menacingly, with them as they pushed off at the wall. Swimmers have famously said that they achieved their best paces and broke world records in the Nat because their sole aim while in it was to get out of it as quickly as they possibly could.

One would have supposed, then, that the locals, who knew the tank’s idiosyncrasies far more intimately than its visitors, would have had an advantage in the August competition, but in fact, the San Francisco swim team had proved to be easily victorious. Wednesday night’s opener had been a total bust for the Hawaiians, and Thursday had been a day of rue and reckoning. The papers offered little solace: island hopefuls merely looked like hopeless slowpokes. The only bright spots, sports reporters pointed out, were a couple of scruffy kids from Maui who’d shown some moxie, but in the novice realm. It might be years before they’d peak, and even then, anyone who knew anything about swimming and Hawaii knew those kids weren’t going anywhere. They were Japanese-American, Nisei — and at the bottom of Hawaii’s heap of immigrants. They were the children of sugar plantation workers, and their future was in the cane fields, not in the swimming pool. Why the sorry lot had even bothered to spend what little money they could scrounge for interisland steamer fare was no little source of curiosity.

For the San Francisco “Flying O’s” Club — the “O” was for “Olympian” — money was no problem. They’d been paid a fortune for the junket, because they were the first solid competition from the Mainland that Hawaiian kids had seen in years. Two thousand dollars in Junior Chamber of Commerce money had filled the O’s club’s coffers, buying first-​class steamer tickets from the California coast not only for the swimmers but for the team’s manager, a retired diver, who had enough moola left over to bring the missus along for a second honeymoon.

Upon arriving, the O’s coach made it more than clear that the team intended to spend little time in the water challenging the local competition. Any swimming that they’d agreed to do was, he said, “incidental.” It had been “ten long, lean years” since he and the boys had tasted the “papai and poi” of the Pacific, and they intended to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Indeed, by Friday night, they had. Their races on Wednesday had been, almost without exception, cinches, and they had returned two days later looking well-​fed and tanned, the first-​place trophy awaiting them at the judges’ stand.

The aquacade reached its climax when a professional hula dancer by the name of Girlie McShane shook her ample hips awhile, and a local wrestler named Al Karasick, a former Pavlovan ballerino, demonstrated that he was as tough as he was delicate when he pinned an opponent pronto on the deck. Then, only one competition event remained, but that last race was meaningless on the whole, a fait accompli. The event was a middle-​distance one — the 400-​meter freestyle — and so, confident of themselves, the Flying O’s had put in a sprinter and long-​distance swimmer instead of anybody with middle-​distance expertise.

The San Franciscans were Dick Keating and Ralph Gilman. Keating, a reigning Pacific Coast distance champion from Stanford, had broken his own record in both the furlong and the quarter on Wednesday night; and Gilman, a collegiate star and alum of the 1936 US men’s Olympic relay team with a silver medal to his name, had raced against Duke Kahanamoku’s younger brother Sam in the 100-​yard freestyle. Sam Kahanamoku had attempted an ill-​advised middle-​aged comeback and Gilman outswam him by several body lengths. In the 4x200 team relay, the same race in which he’d medaled in Berlin, Gilman had been lightning in the water, leaving the other Hawaiians in his wide, white wake.

Dick Keating was dark-​haired, towering, trim, and sinewy; and Gilman was blond, a 6‑foot‑2‑inch mountain of muscle with shoulders as big as drumsticks. He looked amiable enough when on the deck — he had warm, dark eyes and a smile that seemed to be authentic — but in the water no competitor was to be taken as a friend.

There was only one other swimmer of note against whom the Californians were set to swim the final race, and he was notable for the fact that he was a most pathetic challenger. He was a boy from Maui, fifteen or sixteen at the most, and, like others on his sorry squad, he was at least a hundred pounds lighter than either Keating or Gilman, and had a face so thin that it made his ears, which weren’t in truth that large, appear as floppy as the flaps on an aviator’s cap.

He wore an old-​fashioned, full-​bodied black woolen swimsuit, one he had either cheaply acquired or obtained as a hand‑me‑down from an older kid, and even dry, the suit had clearly been waterlogged so many times that its narrow shoulder straps sagged down to reveal the concave chest not of an athlete but of an invalid. The boy’s fragility was tragic to a depressing degree: the curve of his spine suggested that he suffered from scoliosis, and he was as bowlegged as a weaning colt, his feet disproportionately wide, the arches flat, the spaces between his toes gaping and spread out like a geisha’s fan: he had clearly spent his life to date entirely barefoot.

When he proceeded slowly to the starting block, bystanders, who over the course of the long evening had breached pool etiquette and crowded the deck and taken over the blocks as seats, parted like a wave — in sympathy — to let him through. He stood alone among the crowd and looked as though he might be better off, rather than pulling himself up onto the block, if he were to stand still and collapse instead into a pile of unremembered bones.

Practically no one at the Natatorium knew much about the kid beyond his name and that he was a nobody. He was Kiyoshi Nakama, a schoolboy from a sugar plantation, and almost all the training he had done was in an 8‑foot-​wide and 4‑foot-​deep filthy irrigation ditch that snaked through the camps in which he and his teammates lived. He and the rest of the ragged island squad didn’t even have a single towel to share between them, and their coach was a fifth-​grade schoolteacher who didn’t know how to swim.

The story only got worse the more you knew of it.

Just a few months before, the coach had set Nakama and all the Maui kids up for failure by filling them with nonsense about the future. Back home, both he and the swimmers had paid the price: they were a laughingstock to many, and now, as if he wished to court even more derision and disaster, the coach had the hubris to put his runt swimmer in a men’s event.

The boy was smaller, weaker, and lived a life more deprived than any of his teammates. The story went that his father drank the family’s money up; his mother beat both the father and the kid; and when the mother was tired of doing that, she beat the family’s skinny pig until, one time, the thing collapsed right where it stood, dead, still tied up to a ragged rope. Sometimes the boy was so hungry he sucked on sugarcane for strength.

In his hand the Maui coach held a shiny stopwatch with which he planned to take the measure of his swimmer’s pace and, in so doing, take possessed not long before of an idea of grand and possibly ridiculous proportion, and the race this night would be a test of whether he’d been right or whether he’d become a laughingstock back home.

His swimmer had no experience in a pool like the Natatorium or with men who were poised beside him now, world record holders, national champions, collegiate stars, Olympians. The boy’s stiffest competition had been in local races with his own teammates and minor competitions with swimmers of his age back home on Maui. Recently, the boy had acquitted himself in a 440-​yard event against a Honolulu college boy, and after he had done so, a few people, including the teacher, had sat up and noticed. Whether the boy’s previous success had been a sign of talent or an accident of fate was what the teacher also wished to know this night, standing on the deck, listening for the pop of the starting gun, his finger poised upon the button on his stopwatch.

Now, on their blocks, Keating and Gilman shook out their enormous arms and legs, and in imitation Nakama did the same. Keating and Gilman leaned down, and Nakama did, too, curling his toes over the edge of the block and locking his arms behind him as they did, in the pose that in those years was customary for swimmers to take before the starting gun. Across the pool, the boy’s coach was watching carefully. No matter what the crowd thought of the boy now, no matter what the boy thought or doubted deeply in himself — the kid had come tonight to race with giants.

The race was over from the plunge.

All the coach could do was watch the tragedy unfold, a dark disturbance in the pool. The salty water offered nearly zero visibility, and swimming without goggles, the boy might as well have been swimming blind between the primitive wooden lane lines. In the first lap, he was far behind, trailing Gilman and Keating by four body lengths, at least. He thrashed in the water with crazy kicks, with arms spinning like wheels gone off their axle, and for every stroke that Gilman and Keating took, the kid was taking two or three in an effort that was clearly unsustainable.

Ralph Gilman reached the wall after the first 100-​meter lap, and Keating was right behind. Each pushed off the pads and started up again.the measure of a plan he’d hatched. A dreamer, the teacher had become

Gilman tore ahead, and Keating kept up with him. Nakama arrived at the wall — eons later, it seemed — and turned awkwardly, finding when he did that the Flying O’s were a quarter-​lap ahead and that it might as well just be a race between the California teammates now: Keating starting to struggle a bit to keep up, but Gilman carving effortlessly through the mucky tank.

There are worse things in life than watching an athlete fail miserably, but in the world of sport it’s an ugly thing that dulls the edge of fandom. Everyone knows it’s no good for the soul to stay with intention to witness another person’s ruin, but at the same time, like a train wreck one sees coming, it’s also a sickening spectacle from which it’s hard to tear oneself away. Around the coach, the crowd was preternaturally silent, and what he heard inside his head was the deafening sound of a voice declaring him a failure.

On deck stood Duke Kahanamoku, serving as a judge, and he looked on attentively, his job to find irregularities of any sort in the proceedings, though the most glaring irregularity of all was the unfortunate matchup of a boy with men to whom the first was unequal. At the third lap, though, Duke Kahanamoku watched as the skinny boy pushed off at the wall and turned, somehow lurching forward, thrashing, then miraculously pulling up behind Dick Keating. Keating, who by the 200-​meter mark had become unable to sustain his pace, fell back, and bit by bit and then by a body length, the boy had pushed the Californian out of the competition.

Gilman also struggled with the pace. As Nakama advanced on him, from high up in the bleacher seats the boy’s teammates called his name out. In the water Nakama inched up farther, propelled by some force it seemed impossible he could have within him. He was a skeleton, a thing of emptiness, but now he sped along the surface of the water as if inside the shell of him he secretly possessed a powerful beating heart.

At the start of the fourth lap, with 100 meters to go, the very tone of the race changed. Then, with about 45 meters to go, the top of Nakama’s head was even with Gilman’s heels; at 40 to go, he’d advanced to Gilman’s knee; and after the 35‑meter mark, when he and Gilman were head‑to‑head in what looked to be a dead heat in the final stretch, the kid flew forward, most improbably.

Behind him in the water, Gilman lost momentum, rubbering up. On deck, the reporters dropped their cigarettes. In the stands, the spectators rose to their feet. Nearby, the coach leaned forward, and he shouted to the boy — the boy’s name, syllables of now-​revived belief. And from there it was — no overstatement — just the way things happen only in storybooks and in children’s dreams. Giant Ralph Gilman fell behind the boy, and the Maui kid, though coughing up water and choking on air, reached across the longest stretch of water he had ever known, and he touched the wall.

Ralph Gilman came in from behind, far enough for the win to feel decisive but near enough to witness the Maui kid begin to sink below the briny surface of the Nat, at which point Gilman leaped over and with able hands fished the kid out of the drink, holding him tightly to his chest until he could deposit him safely once again upon the deck. The kid was wrung clean of life, but his concave chest rose and fell and rose and fell, and he was smiling as his teammates, as raggedy as he, stumbled down the concrete bleachers and slid toward him across the deck, nearly falling into the pool. From the cheap seats to the grandstands the crowd whistled and hooted, and Gilman, a gent, then backed away and let the kid have his moment.

The rest of Gilman’s teammates rushed to the judges’ table, appearing as though they might be lunging for their prize, but instead, they grabbed the enormous trophy, carried it over to the Maui kid, and tried to give it to him. He had earned it, they said. The kid, as much a gent as Gilman was, said thanks, but no: the O’s had won the whole meet fair and square. His had been just a single race of many races.

Reporters gathered all around. How do you feel, Kiyoshi? How do you feel, kid? What a race!

This kid was still trying to catch his breath, and beside him his coach looked on. The coach knew better, but he didn’t say a word: it wasn’t just a race; it was the first of many challenges still to come, and it was the first proof of what was coming. Inside the boy beat a hummingbird’s heart, but the kid could use it to push himself beyond the bounds of the bony cage that he inhabited, and he could lead the other children on the team to do the same: to swim upstream and toward the future. All of this the coach now knew to be true: the signs were good.

In the gallery and on the deck, the crowd whistled, hollered, and cried out: Holy smokes! and Didja see that? Now, that was something else.

The coach was a man named Soichi Sakamoto, and, silently, he agreed. What had just happened was something else, all right. Something no one had ever seen. It was something else, Soichi Sakamoto knew. Something else. Entirely.

Excerpted from THE THREE-YEAR SWIM CLUB by Julie Checkoway, published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2015 Julie Checkoway.

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