💪Books & Biceps - Issue 191

Your 5-Minute Brain & Body Flex

Books & Biceps is the only weekly e-mail that combines reading recommendations, bestselling author interviews, legit workouts and powerful quotes.

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BOOKS

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this week’s exclusive Behind-the-Book interview. If you’ve been reading Books & Biceps for a while then you know I’m a lifelong swimmer and I have a soft spot for books on swimming, the ocean, surfing, lakes…anything that involves competing in water, really. One of my favorite books (and books I recommend the most) is The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory by Julie Checkoway. The book is a New York Times bestseller and if that doesn’t grab you here’s the official summary:

“In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They were the Three-Year Swim Club. This is their story.”

I was fortunate enough to connect with Julie on Twitter and she agreed to do this awesome interview about the book. The towering amount of research she did is impressive on its own, but the writing, characters, geography and social background that needed to be weaved together to make this work so well are why it’s such a special read.

INTERVIEW:

There's a line in the subtitle of your book "Sugar Ditch Kids" that stuck with me from before I started reading all the way through to the end. When did you first hear that term and can you explain what first drew you to their story?

I first encountered the term “Ditch Kids” when I was introduced back in maybe 2010 or 2011 to a fellow named Bill Brown. He was someone who had interest in developing a feature film about Sakamoto and the 3YSC. I never read his screenplay, but I do believe that this might have been the way that Brown referred to them in either his title or his pitch for the film. I then began to encounter the term from time to time in stories that sportswriters wrote during the late 1930s when they first encountered the team.

Frankly, I’ve never loved the term, because I think it’s reductive and even a little bit pejorative, but at the same time when I was trying to come up with a subtitle for my book, I found that “sugar ditch kids” was just about the only way I could concisely describe the children while at the same time getting in there that they were Olympians and national champs, etc. It’s already a really long subtitle. Perhaps, in the end, my use of it was to refer to the pejorative and then elevate them to who they really were: much more than children who swam in a ditch, but people who swam against the current of their circumstance and to a far greater and more noble destiny. And to a place of dignity.

As a lifelong swimmer, I've swum in pools, lakes, oceans and even water treadmills...but never in a filthy irrigation ditch - and I've certainly never trained in one. What exactly were the conditions like and how did you go about researching what they were like in the 1930s and '40s.

I did a ton of research in this area, in large part because the ditches today, or at the time at which I was researching the book, ran very clean and quite differently than they did in the old days.

First, I read the definitive book on the ditches by Carol Wilcox, called “Sugar Water.” That book looked at the politics of the building of the ditches, the economics of that, as well, and very microscopically at the land through which they traveled and the machinery involved in controlling their current.  

I also read Alexander and Baldwin company accounts of the maintenance of the ditches and the challenges involved with that. I looked at things like which pesticides were being used at the time, which were now considered poisoning, and which were likely washing downhill. I also looked at incidence of cancer related to those pesticides in folks who had lived on the plantations in those years. Then I talked to people about what it felt like to swim in the ditches.  

Bill Smith remembered vividly. So did an original swimmer named Charlie Oda. Charlie was the one who said that on some days the ditch ran as thick as chocolate milk. Many people denied what Charlie and Bill said—most of them who were at the present-day Alexander and Baldwin, but I took their denial for what it was—a position on behalf of a company concerned with liability.  There were also claims that the ditch right in front of the school, which is where the kids practiced, was the cleanest ditch of all, but based on Charlie’s story, that just wasn’t true.  

In 2012, I went there myself to look at that very ditch. That was before the plantation finally shut down for good. Much of the same machinery was still in place. The water ran reasonably clear, and the ditch did have a concrete bottom, but in the end I had to go with Charlie and Bill’s story. I mean, they actually swam there.

Soichi Sakamoto is such a major character and presence in the book. Why do you think he was able to accomplish all that he did with his swimmers having so little to work with?

I think Sakamoto is what I called him in the book—a "glorious amateur”—and someone who had no compunction about being one. He was brilliant—he had both a scientific and a creative mind, and it was the combination of those qualities that made him what was - essentially the first modern coach in the history of swimming. He was also Nisei, the child of Issei immigrants, and he had a tremendously strong work ethic (despite the fact that as a kid he was a bit of a slacker and a dreamer), and he believed he could do anything he set his mind to.  

He was stubborn of nature, and more, he had been afforded a view, as a middle class person, of what the world outside of Maui really looked like. He had been abroad—to Japan—when he was a young boy and traveled there as a Boy Scout. He saw the wider world and what was possible in it.

And he had lived in Honolulu, which was a very cosmopolitan place. He was also able to see Duke Kahanamoku and Buster Crabbe swim, and to his mind, even though he himself wasn’t a great swimmer, it occurred to him, that if he could figure out how to teach kids to swim swiftly—through scientific observation and practical advice—that they could become like Duke and Buster. More than anything, though, I think the news in 1932 that the Japanese swim team swept the US in the Olympics was the most motivating of all.  

To become great swimmers became, in some part, a measure of ethnic pride, but also a badge that Sakamoto could bestow on the swimmers of American citizenship. Combining their athletic prowess and their desire for literal and figurative citizenship, belonging and acceptance, Sakamoto had the perfect recipe for success.

BONUS: A major star who weaves in and out of the story is legendary waterman, Duke Kahanamoku... For those who don't know, can you share how big of a star he was in his era and what he accomplished? Who are the modern comparisons to him today?  

To answer this question, I can do no better than to refer you to David Davis’s fantastic and definitive biography of Duke, “Waterman.” Davis has done all the work here, and a documentary based on the book is premiering shortly at the Hawaii International Film and Book festival and should also appear on PBS soon. Check that out. As for modern analogues, that’s a no brainer: Phelps, Phelps, Phelps, Phelps.

BICEPS

I made up a simple workout one morning this week that I really enjoyed and you might too. All you need is a jump rope, a kettle bell and a slam ball.

I appropriately named the workout:

Jump, Swing, Slam

1 minute jump rope

30 KB Swings

30 Slam Ball Slams

1 minute REST

Beginner: Repeat for 30 minutes

Meathead: Repeat for 45 minutes

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“The best surfer out there is the one having the most fun.”

- Duke Kahanamoku (this quote is about more than surfing)

QUICK FLEXES

With GameStop and the reddit apes trending again, I wrote this really cool twitter thread on Ben Mezrich and the interview I did with him a few weeks ago.

My most popular post of the week was this shot of me dropping literary dimes wearing my Penny Hardaway jersey writing outside. I’m working on an incredibly awesome hoops project and I should be able to share more details in the coming weeks.

Also shared this picture from my book signing with Charlie Ward at Madison Square Garden during a Knicks game for throwback Thursday. And incredible career moment that I can’t believe is already almost 4 years old.

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