He Can’t Live Without the Competition : Swimming: At 36, Tim Harvey felt he was missing something. He found it at the Masters level.

It always comes down to one question for Tim Harvey, a question he asks himself before every race he swims.

Why?

Why push yourself when, at 36, your best times are behind you? Why train when most of your high school and college teammates gave up the sport years ago? Why not kick back, relax and settle into life’s easy chair.

The answer is obvious, at least it is to Harvey, a former swimming and water polo standout at Sunny Hills High School, Fullerton College and California.

Harvey loves to compete.

This was no secret in his younger years. His reputation as a fierce competitor was legendary, former coaches and teammates say. He was as tenacious as they come.

He still is, though you’d never know it by talking to him. A modest fellow with a warm smile, Harvey, a professional photographer and Corona del Mar resident, has to be pressed to reveal his accomplishments. Family and friends say this is the way he has always been. He was never looking for glory or fame, just personal satisfaction.

If you wanted to know how well he was swimming, you had better be there to witness the event. Most often, you’d be duly impressed.

In May, at the U.S. Masters Swimming national short course championships at Nashville, Tenn., Harvey broke the national record (ages 35 to 39) in the 1,650-yard race. His time of 16 minutes 34 seconds bettered the former record by nine seconds.

The time was just over a minute slower than his lifetime best--15:33 as an All-American at Cal in 1976--and especially impressive considering he didn’t start training seriously for the race until early this year.

Saturday, Harvey will compete in the Newport Pier-to-Pier Swim, a two-mile rough water race starting from the Balboa Pier. The race, which begins at 10 a.m., is expected to draw 150 to 175 entrants. All must meet U.S. Masters Swimming age requirements--19 and older.

Pier-to-Pier organizer Jim Turner says USC’s Greg Larsen and Coleman Hundeby of Irvine are the top entrants, though he said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Harvey challenge the younger swimmers.

“Tim has a reputation as an awesome competitor,” Turner said.

Turner knows from experience. As a freshman at Orange Coast College, he and his teammates watched Harvey swim in a preliminary race at the State championships in 1973. Harvey was only three laps into the 1,650-yard race, Turner said, when he misjudged his flip turn and crashed his heels against the edge of the pool.

“He cut both heels open, right where it’s really tender,” Turner said. “We all knew he was going through a great deal of pain. Mere mortals would’ve just gotten out. He just kept going.”

Ernie Polte, who retired after 28 years as Fullerton’s swimming and water polo coach, says Harvey was the best all-around swimmer in the school’s history. He set several school records, and his 1,650 record of 15:54 still stands.

“No one’s gone under 16 minutes on the community college level in 10 years,” Polte said.

Harvey also helped Fullerton to the State water polo championship in 1973. In 1971, his senior year in high school, he scored the winning goal in Sunny Hills’ 8-7 double overtime victory over Newport Harbor for the Southern Section championship.

It was Sunny Hills’ first section water polo title, and an upset over traditional powerhouse Newport Harbor.

Harvey, who was a defensive specialist and had scored only one goal before the winner, wasn’t the go-to man on the play, former Sunny Hills Coach Jim Sprague said. In fact, with four seconds remaining, Harvey and teammate Mark Newton scrapped the intended play and instead, stole the ball and scored.

“Everyone said we were master strategists after the game,” Sprague said, dryly. “We said, ‘Oh, thanks very much.’ ”

At Cal, Harvey set school records in the 500, 1,000 and 1,650. He finished sixth in the 1,650 at the 1976 NCAA finals. He also played water polo even though most of his peers chose one sport or the other. In addition, instead of spending the summers at Berkeley training, Harvey would return to Orange County to lifeguard. This did not always please Cal Coach Nort Thorton.

“Tim was a free spirit, I guess,” Thorton said. “I don’t know any other athlete who accomplished as much as he did with as little training. Most of the others swam three times as much. But Tim knew himself very well. And when he came back, he was as fit as anyone else.”

When his college career ended, Harvey competed in lifesaving competitions, which combine ocean swimming, paddleboard and surf ski paddling. In 1979, he won the U.S. Iron Man title--a race that combines all three events.

He competed in the Iron Man world championships in Australia twice, placing fifth and sixth. No American has finished higher in the Australian event, which attracts more than a million spectators.

Harvey continued to compete in ocean swims, but it wasn’t until recently that his interest in masters competition was piqued. Last fall, for the first time in his competitive life, he didn’t do any type of exercise for two months.

He hated it.

“I was just working really hard,” Harvey said, “and I suddenly realized, ‘My God, this is really happening to me. Old age! Next thing I know, I’ll be melted into my boots. I’m dead.’ I could see how people work themselves into a tizzy, 20 years go by and, boom, it’s over.”

So he hit the pool.

Within a few days he was ready . . . to call it quits.

“I figured I’d just train, get in the water, do that interval thing, get right back into it,” he said. “But talk about problems! You get home and look at yourself and say ‘Oh God! I’m an old man!’ Here I am in this little kids’ sport trying to accomplish something . . . What am I, some frustrated old man? What am I doing?

“But then I figured, let’s just stick with it, see what happens.”

Now that he’s fit, he has plenty of competitions on his summer schedule. On July 20, he will be part of a six-man team to race 14 miles across Lake Tahoe. Asked why he wants to enter such a thing, Harvey smiles.

“When you’re not an athlete anymore, you miss that edge,” he said. “I think it’s real healthy to get back and compete again. That’s not to say you just shut off the rest of your life, but there’s that competitive nature you still have to deal with. That’s the essence of masters swimming--or masters anything. I think a lot of athletes want to feel that edge again.”

Not that he enjoys every minute of it. Fifteen minutes before every race, Harvey says, he’s just as nervous as he was as a high school kid. He says, to him, that is the epitome of competition.

“You’re sitting there thinking, I could be sitting at home right now with a big cup of coffee, maybe a nice omelet, the paper . . . But no. I’m sitting here in my Speedos, scared half to death, and there is an absolute monster next to me just waiting to waste me.

“But you know, if you weren’t out there, those are the moments you’d miss more than anything.”