January 21, 2015 Article

The Old Coot says 97 yards isn’t the same as 100 yards.

By Merlin Lessler

I was swimming laps in the Owego High school pool the other morning, paddling around like a turtle on sedatives, when I noticed that the girls state record for the 100-yard freestyle is something like 52 seconds. That’s down and back the length of the pool twice. I can’t go down and back once in that short amount of time. But, I’m an old coot, so what can I expect? Yet, even when I swam the 100 yard butterfly in high school, a stroke that is just as efficient as the free style, I never came anywhere near the one-minute mark, much less 8 seconds below it. But, I had an excuse. Two, actually. #1 - I smoked Marlboros, about a pack a week, and #2 - there were (and still are) different rules for butterfly swimmers than for freestyle swimmers. Butterflyers have to square their shoulders and touch the end of the pool with their hands before heading back the other way. Free style swimmers, or what we called the Australian crawl back then, don’t. They do a half summersault, three feet before they get there. It’s called a flip turn. I call it a shortcut. Oh sure, their feet touch the wall at the end of their flip, but still, they cut a yard off the length at each turn. It’s OK with me if that’s what they do, but it should be called what it is, the 97-yard freestyle. 

It’s not just swimming, most sports “fudge” a little these days. Golf is one of the most notorious. Take today’s clubs, the drivers for example, versus the drivers of just a few decades back. The club head is the size of a cantaloupe; it used to be the size of an apple. Mine still is. And, the shaft is different too; it flexes more than a politician running for office. The ball is made from high tech materials and the dimples are highly engineered to increase the distance it will travel.

Then there’s track and field. The old cinder track has been replaced with a bouncy, rubberized surface and the runner’s hard soled cleats have been replaced with high-tech, expensive, springy foot enclosures. The rigid pole used in pole vaulting has been put out to pasture and replaced with a highly flexible one made with space age materials. It’s not a vault any more; it’s a sling. The pole bends into a u-shape and fires the vaulter into the air as though shot from a cannon.

Basketball is unrecognizable when you compare it to the game that was played by some of the greats: Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and John Havlicek. A player couldn’t elbow, slug, push and bash the other players as though in a prize fight when those guys ruled the court. I can’t figure out what the foul criteria is today. It seems a player has to commit assault and battery before the refs blow their whistles. And, what about the height of the basket? It’s still stuck at ten feet, though many of the players are one to two feet taller than those who started the game way back in 1891. The only dunking done in those days was with a donut and a cup of coffee.

So sure, today’s athletes are highly accomplished physical specimens who’ve pushed their sport to new levels. But still, I think the rules and the equipment have been bent when you compare them to those of the good old days. We would have had a different name for them back then, “Cheaters!”