I didn’t know that Debbie would be retiring within just a year, at only eighteen years of age. I was a little freaked out that I was actually going to compete against her. After I did my flip turn during the 500-yard freestyle, I looked around and saw that I was actually ahead. How could this be? I was beating Debbie Meyer? That moment of realization may have cost me the race; Debbie overcame the lead and wound up winning the race. But it didn’t matter. I knew I was getting better overall.
Before we left Pullman, my mom and I were both sitting on the empty bleachers surrounding the pool. I noticed that she was upset, but I didn’t really understand how mad she was until she opened her mouth. “Maybe one day, you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you went to the Olympic Trials,” she said to me.
I was happy with how I had done, but she sure wasn’t. She was incredibly disappointed. She was suggesting that I would never get past the Olympic Trials (which would be held the following year in advance of the Munich Olympics). I knew right then and there that she really had no clue about what I was as a swimmer. My times were getting better every day. With every competition, I was growing stronger. I had done well and was proud of myself, but she didn’t get it. In her narrow-minded view of swimming, if you hadn’t won, you had failed. She had no concept of the growth curve that I was beginning to experience. I was swimming so well, but she couldn’t see any of it.
After swimming in Pullman, I started hearing about international trips that the best swimmers got to take as part of the American team. In the back of my head, I started to put together what I would have to do to be a part of such a thing.
That summer, I qualified for the Long Course Nationals, which were to be held in Houston. My mom and I flew down there together, and I was entered in all four distances in the freestyle races.
I swam very well in my first couple of races. The next day, there was a knock on our hotel room door. My mom opened it, and there was my coach, Flip. He came into our room and sat down in a chair by the desk.
“Okay, so here’s what’s happening,” he said, calm as usual. “Shirley can make the international team. All she needs to do tomorrow is get either first or second place in the 100 or, if she wins the 1,500, that will do it, too.”
He turned to me. “How do you want to do it, Shirley? What do you want to swim?”
In my head, the decision was easy. Swimming the 100, I would have two chances to make it onto the international team. I told this to Flip, and he agreed that it was the way to go.
There was just one problem. “I know Shirley doesn’t have a passport,” Flip said to my mother. “We’ll have to take care of that, because I really think she’s going to make this team. Their plane leaves for Europe the day after the race, so we have to get the passport today. We’ve got a plane ticket for her to fly over to New Orleans this afternoon with another swimmer. He needs a passport, too, and they’ll get that done and then fly right back to Texas.”
So that’s what we did. One of the coaches dropped us off at the airport and pushed our tickets into our hands, and we headed off to New Orleans—me, just fourteen years old, and this boy who was a few years older and didn’t seem too thrilled about having to take a plane ride with me. He wouldn’t talk to me or even look at me, while I followed him around like a little puppy.
The whole trip was such a blur. We landed in the Crescent City and took a taxi to the passport office. When I think about it today, it seems kind of crazy that they would just let us go get passports on our own. But that’s just how it was back then. Nobody made a big deal out of it at all. It was just like, go get your passports and get back as fast as possible. Someone had called ahead to the passport office to let them know we were coming, so at least they were waiting for us. The boy got his passport, no problem. But I didn’t have an ID, and it seemed like that was going to be an issue.
We were sitting in this hot, cramped office, waiting and waiting. The air was so incredibly thick down there, both outside and inside, and the two of us just sat there perspiring like a couple of animals. We watched the clock on the wall tick and tick and tick for more than an hour. Finally, the man who was helping us came back into the room with a smile on his face. He was holding a passport with my name and face on it.
“You’re a lucky little lady,” he said to me. “I didn’t think you were going to be leaving with this today. This required some really special help. You have no idea how far up the ladder we had to go to get your passport. This had to be approved by someone very important.”
“Who had to approve it?” I asked.
“The president,” he said.
“The president of what?” I asked.
“The United States,” he told me.
I had no idea if Nixon had in fact been consulted. I just knew that I finally had a passport, and now the glum teenage boy and I could head back to the airport.
We arrived safely back in Texas, and I went to bed dreaming about a chance at that international team. This was it, I thought. This was a chance to be a part of something really special and see places around the world that I’d only heard about in school. Before leaving for New Orleans, I had heard somebody say that the team was going to Russia. Just the word “Russia” seemed like another planet to me. Given my heritage, I was especially curious.
This kind of trip was beyond my wildest imagination. It was hard to fall asleep at night, just thinking about the possibilities. I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, though. I still had to make the team.
The next day, I couldn’t wait to get to the pool. I packed my bag before we left the hotel because, either way, I was headed someplace else after the races. It was either going to be home, or the other side of the world.
There was plenty of rain that day, including one monsoon cloud that parked itself right above our heads at the pool. It rained just about as hard as I’ve ever seen in my life. All of the swimmers and coaches were running around, freaking out over the sheets of water pouring down. But Flip said to me, “Shirley, just ignore the weather and focus on what you have to do. Just focus. You can do this.”
The storm ended after a while, but everybody was still talking about the rain. In my head I was thinking, how can they not be thinking about their races right now? Why are they getting so obsessed with a thunderstorm? I knew where my head was. I was thinking about water, but not the stuff coming down from the sky. All I was concerned about was the water in the swimming pool and how long it would take me to swim through it.
At one point, while Flip was giving me my rubdown, he noticed an overhanging tarp that had filled with water and looked about ready to give way. “Let’s move over a bit,” he said. Moments later, it crashed down, dumping gallons of water right where I had been standing. An omen?
When it was time for my race, I was on edge. There was so much at stake here, more than I had ever been swimming for. When the starting gun went off, I knew that I had made a decent start, but after that there was no way to know how I was doing. The 100 is so crazy and there is so much splashing that it’s hard to tell what’s happening. I had a sick feeling that I was not in the top two, and when I touched the wall at the end, I was all but sure that I had come in third. I was so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t even look at the scoreboard.
Oh well, I thought, there would be other times. At least, I hoped there would be.
When I saw Flip running over to me, I appreciated that he was smiling and that he was there to cheer me up. He was that kind of guy.
Flip knelt down by the edge of the pool and said, “You did it, Shirley. You got second