A Real Monarchy

The guys chatting by the pool spot the dapper silver-haired man walking to the back of the house through a side entrance and rush to meet him.

“You look great,” someone tells Mike Wiley. “Except for the hair, you haven’t changed that much.”

Wiley has not seen most of the men for 32 years, not since he was coaching men’s swimming at Valley College and they formed the team he considers the best in school history.

On a sizzling summer afternoon, Wiley and about 15 of his former swimmers are together again rekindling old memories. They’ve come to reminisce about their lives crossing paths and being joined by a common interest.

They’ve come not just because Kurt Krueger, who organized the reunion, convinced them it would be fun, but because they wanted to visit with a coach they admire and respect.

“He was a fabulous guy, very understanding,” Krueger says about Wiley. “He listened to the athletes and treated us like he wanted people to treat him.”

Those Were the Days

It has been 17 years since Wiley coached swimming. But his recollection of the powerful Valley teams he assembled in the 1960s remains fresh.

Wiley, 69, became Valley’s coach in 1958 and the Monarchs soon were a dynasty. They won Metropolitan Conference titles from 1962-69 and the state title in 1970.

“At the time, we didn’t have [recruiting] competition from the universities because they were not giving out a lot of scholarships,” Wiley said. “The kids would come to a JC to get added experience.”

Wiley coached at East Los Angeles College from 1973-79 and returned to Valley in 1980-81, winning the conference championship one last time before retiring from coaching. He lives in Camarillo with his wife, Jean.

To Wiley, the 1966 squad that placed second at the state championships at Foothill College in Los Altos was Valley’s finest.

“That team was, in every sense, the best,” Wiley said. “It was a group of people who bonded together. The guys really liked each other and we had some very strong athletes. We were really deep.”

Wiley procured most of his swimmers from San Fernando Valley high schools. Among the first swimmers from outside the region to join the Monarchs was backstroke and medley specialist Alan Nitake, from Dorsey High. A Japanese American on a predominantly Anglo team, Nitake at first commuted to Valley with trepidation.

“All these guys kind of grew up together,” said Nitake, a physical therapist in Torrance. “I knew Valley had a great team, that’s why I went there. For me, it was a new environment. Dorsey was about one-third white, one-third black and one-third Asian. [Valley] ended up being a great experience for me.”

In 1966, the Monarchs had a 7-3 dual-meet record and finished 5-0 in the Metro, their second consecutive undefeated conference season. They arrived in Los Altos with 22 athletes, including 10 junior college All-Americans--but without breaststroke specialist Don McKenzie.

A former Grant High standout who went on to win gold medals in the 100-meter breaststroke and as a member of the U.S. 400-meter medley relay team at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, McKenzie broke a leg skiing just before the state meet.

“I was downhill racing in Mammoth,” said McKenzie, a computer consultant in Reno, Nev., who displayed the Olympic medals at the reunion. “The injury actually improved my desire and improved my upper-arm strength because I was going across campus every day on crutches.”

Losing McKenzie cost Valley a shot at the state title.

“He had made a big breakthrough that year in the breaststroke and I had high hopes for him,” Wiley said of McKenzie. “When I got a call from his father [about the skiing accident] I thought he was kidding. That was one of the biggest disappointments I had in coaching.”

The Monarchs, behind Steve Danielsen and George Horton, scored 266 1/2 points and finished behind Foothill, which had 368 1/2.

Danielsen, a Taft High product, established junior college national records with a 4:44.7 clocking to win the 500-yard freestyle and a 16:52.6 time in the 1,650-yard free to claim another state title. He helped Valley win the 880 free relay.

Horton, among several former Birmingham swimmers on the Valley squad, placed third in the 500 and the 1,650 free, and anchored the 880 relay foursome.

“That was probably one of the closest teams I’ve ever been on,” said Danielsen, a commercial airline pilot living in Winston-Salem, N.C. “I enjoyed swimming at Valley much more than at USC.”

The Monarchs were jubilant on the flight home.

“I remember Danielsen’s dad was a pilot for TWA and had made arrangements to fly the plane from San Francisco to LAX,” Wiley said. “It was a fun trip.”

Fun and Games

The Monarchs were a team committed to winning--and fun. They were a cornucopia of personalities, some with a penchant for practical jokes.

“We were trying to freak [Wiley] out one time,” said Danielsen, a former Navy pilot. “Someone told him I had been skateboarding and broke my arm. [A teammate’s] dad was a doctor and he put a real cast on my arm. Wiley’s jaw dropped to the floor.”

Others sometimes tried Wiley’s patience with lax training sessions at the Van Nuys swimming school where the team worked out. The Monarchs competed mostly on the road, using Cal State Northridge’s pool for infrequent home meets, until a pool was built at Valley in 1978.

“The pool we [trained] in was only 25 yards long and very, very shallow, probably about three feet in the shallow end,” said Tom Webb, 1965 City champion in the 100-yard breaststroke while at Birmingham and later an All-American in water polo at USC. He lives in La Crescenta and is a bank executive.

“We used to do jump turns off the bottom of the pool. By the time you finished the turn, you were swimming maybe 15 yards. It used to drive Wiley nuts. . . . But we also worked hard. There were a lot of teams that tried to show off against us and we would just beat them in the pool. We were very mentally tough.”

Method to His Madness

Wiley’s training contributed to that toughness.

One of his main techniques was pulse-rate training, which most of his swimmers had never done.

Some, such as Webb, Horton and Chris Kaufman, dealt with the peculiarity of swimming in a Birmingham pool that was 33 1/3 yards long. But not with Wiley’s approach.

“After intervals, you had to check your pulse and write it down on a board,” Webb said. “If it got down too low, it meant you weren’t working hard enough and you had to start all over again.”

Wiley said only he and a coach in another state, both unaware of each other, were using the system at the time.

“It put the swimmers in control of their own workouts and you got a level of concentration you might not have gotten if you were doing just repeats,” Wiley said.

Kaufman, a distance specialist, was skeptical when he joined the Monarchs.

“I thought some of the stuff was Mickey Mouse,” said Kaufman, a former co-athletic director and swimming coach at Hoover. He also coached at Glendale and Crescenta Valley and teaches at a Glendale continuation school. “When I improved, I realized he knew exactly what he was doing. He was very avant-garde.

“I wound up coaching for 25 years and did a lot of the same stuff Mike had us do.”

Krueger, a Van Nuys resident and founder of the Institute of Sports Psychology, reflected on his former coach.

“I think he was a bit ahead of his time,” Krueger said.

As it did for many other Valley swimmers, Wiley’s tutelage paid dividends for Kaufman.

“Mike Wiley got me a scholarship to the University of Colorado,” said Kaufman, who roomed with Krueger at the school. “That was my goal, to go to a major university. The swim team wasn’t so hot but it sure was fun going there.”

Still in the Swim

Krueger, McKenzie and some of the others still swim competitively in Masters meets. Krueger, who with his twin Ken once formed the entire Alemany swimming team, has won several Senior Olympics medals. McKenzie owns four world records in the over-50 age group.

McKenzie, 51, teamed with former U.S. Olympians John Naber, Jim Montgomery and Gary Hall Sr. to defeat a team of current women’s champions in a 800 medley relay race tabbed Battle of the Sexes in May at the U.S. Grand Prix in Phoenix.

The women’s team included Penny Heyns of South Africa, the 1996 Olympics 100- and 200-meter breaststroke champion.

“She asked me before the meet who was going against her,” McKenzie said. “I said I was. She said I was older than her father.

“I started a second behind her and finished a second ahead of her. It was kind of a shock to her.”

Horton, who lives in North Ranch and owns a promotional products company, gets a kick of his former teammates still competing but he is not about to join them.

“One interesting thing here is how many guys continue to swim,” Horton said. “For me, swimming was, ‘How much pain can you take?’ When I stopped swimming, I said never again.”

Horton scanned the gathering and made another observation.

“It’s a little frightening that time can go by that fast,” he said.