Been Swimming So Long, He’s Wrinkled

He is not quite as old as Michael Jordan and won’t quit one moment too soon. They will have to drag him away in a wet Speedo, with all of his many Olympic gold medals clanking from his neck like chimes. And yet nobody need translate to Tom Jager what someone of Jordan’s stature will miss least about baseball.

“I couldn’t swim in the minor leagues,” he says.

Once you bail out of your sport of choice, getting back in can be murder. No one was as decorated an athlete as Mark Spitz, whose fame in the 1970s was not unlike Jordan’s now. But when an itch returned to Spitz to swim competitively again after a long absence, it was Jager who defeated him soundly in Spitz’s first comeback race.

Stepping into the sunlight on the Boulevard Maritimo and immediately drawing stares, a head taller than most of the gawking pedestrians and a hairline seriously thinning on top, Jager, 30, could easily be mistaken for a pro basketball player . . . or a coach.

He never worries about overstaying his welcome. To some, he might be an old man of the sea, but next summer Jager could become the oldest swimmer since Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii to win an Olympic gold medal. So why quit now?

You don’t get burnout if you stay wet.

“You miss that level,” Jager says, still thinking of Jordan. “And changing sports in midstream, that must be next to impossible. Danny Ainge was able to, but who else? Not very many.”

So, he’ll be rooting for Jordan, then?

“Not on your life. Laker fan, all the way, baby.”

Lakers, swimmers, they stick together.

The Hawaiian legend Kahanamoku--”Wasn’t he the guy who invented surfing?” Jager asks--won swimming Olympic golds in 1912 and 1920 and was back again trying four years later, at 34. He placed second to Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller.

More than 70 years later, Jager goes on and on like a Timex, which conveniently is a product that sponsors him. Practically everybody else from his youth is out of the pool. He even outlasted the UCLA swim program, which was unceremoniously dumped not long after Jager had won his five NCAA individual championships. He’s sorry they pulled the plug.

Not so long ago, the University of Illinois also dropped men’s swimming. Maybe you had to be there to appreciate what choosing swimming over basketball was like for an old Collinsville Kahok such as Tom Jager.

Around the time he was born, basketball had his little hometown across the border from St. Louis in a fever pitch. Led by a great player named Bogie Redmon, the team from Collinsville with the unusual Native American nickname made it to the state high school championship game at the state university’s gym, the Kahoks mixing it up with the big-city kids from up north.

“My dad was a basketball player, played a little at Illinois State,” Jager says. “And I think he understood what it was like, being from a small town, from a farm community. They don’t want to let you start. They look at you and say, ‘Just some farm boy.’ ”

It shocked his friends and family when young Tom began hanging out at the East St. Louis YMCA, swimming laps instead of shooting hoops. He was the only one. There was an outdoor club called Gaslight Bath & Tennis where he also put in a lot of work after school. He was defeating swimmers competitively by the time he was 8.

Funny to be the old-timer now.

“I never thought about age before,” he says. “My wife tells me all the time, ‘Remember, you’re not a kid anymore.’ But I look at it this way: This could be my fourth Olympics and I would really like to make Olympic history as the oldest guy ever. But my own career has been in the shadow of Matt Biondi’s. So, awkwardly enough, at 30 you could say this is my coming-out party.”

All those kids in his dorm at the athletes’ village here doesn’t bug him a bit.

“Not even their music?”

“Nahhh,” Jager answers. “The music isn’t even different because we’re in a cycle where the old stuff’s in again. They were listening to AC/DC last night.”

Jager has been around so long that these are his first Pan American Games since 1983. The crystal-blue pool and the adequate lodging were lovely sights to him, having been in Caracas, Venezuela, that year when the Pan Am athletes found their housing lacking a few of the basic necessities--like bathrooms and doors.

Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is water, and Tom has swum in much of it. He was in Russia for the last Goodwill Games when the swimmers took one look at the pool and observed that their favorite color for water wasn’t Everglades green. They called it the black lagoon, but Jager just laughed it off. He says, “Except for the fact that swimmers are like race cars and we had our motors ready to run, it really wasn’t that big a deal. At least I had a story to tell when I got home.

“Caracas was probably the worst in facilities for the athletes and Los Angeles was without a doubt the best, but that’s all part of the grand adventure.”

Some athletes tire of the travel. That happened to Jordan, for instance. But the peripatetic Jager and his wife are traveling from here to Tierra del Fuego, in search of further adventure. He tried inactivity after the ’92 Olympics and decided he couldn’t standit.

“I tried to get up to 200 pounds, but I couldn’t,” says Jager, who goes 6 feet 3 and 180. “I can’t sit still. I have to go hiking, or play basketball, or something. Maybe that’s why I’m still trying to keep up with all these younger guys. Our Olympic team is the hardest team in the world to make.

“Every once in a while, someone will still suggest, ‘You should let someone else have a chance and move on.’ But that’s not how I feel. I feel somebody should beat me out. Somebody should earn it. I don’t see a lot of guys work out the way I do. I put the hours in. I’ll gladly step aside for these younger guys, soon as they can beat me.”

That day Duke Kahanamoku won a silver medal at 34, the bronze in his event went to Sam, his younger brother. Sam was 19.