Wayne Brown, Contributor

Swimming relaxing and joyous. - File

"YOU KNOW," observed David Letterman recently, "you've got to give him credit because earlier in the week, President Bush quietly sneaked into Iraq. Well, here's an idea: why don't we quietly sneak out of Iraq?"

This has nothing whatever to do with our column, which has the misfortune to be beginning in The Gleaner amid the din of the World Cup: a sacred frenzy, since its elation is essentially aesthetic, but one which makes concentration on that garbage of the spirit, Mr Bush's imperial war, hard to sustain. But, I thought you'd appreciate it anyway. The Bush Administration sneaked into Iraq under a veritable shock 'n awe of lies. If only it could sneak back out!

Still ­ if not the World Cup, our topic today at least concerns a recreational sport. A couple weeks ago, a story in The New York Times caught my eye.

RACIAL GAP

"For at least one day a year," reported the NYT ('Everyone Into the Water', June 19), "the overwhelmingly white world of swimming gets turned on its ear in places like Asphalt Green ... Hundreds of children swarm the pool deck, goggled faces of every hue popping out of the water after triumphantly finishing a lap at the Big Swim, the culmination of a programme that fights doggedly to close the sport's racial gap. That divide, born of a slavery-era myth that blacks cannot swim, has created a world where black children drown at rates up to five times higher than white children."

And the NYT cited a 1969 study titled 'The Negro and Learning to Swim: The Buoyancy Problem Related to Reported Biological Difference', which, it said, fed the 'stereotype' that blacks can't swim.

As it happens, I remembered that study. It pointed to the longer limbs and shorter torsos of blacks relative to whites, and explained that the 'buoyancy-deficiency' deriving from these required black swimmers to use more energy to stay afloat, leaving them less energy for propulsion. As I also happened to be swimming competitively at the time here at Mona ­ and doing pretty well, if I say so immodestly ­ I doubted that study, but couldn't prove it wrong. It wasn't until recently, when black swimmers began excelling at the Olympics (in Sydney in 2000, e.g., a black American won gold in the 50m freestyle) that mere empiricism discredited it.

(My own performance as a black swimmer back in the '60s was obviously more memorable than I knew. Some eight years ago, when I made my way down to the same UWI swimming pool where I'd raced more than 30 years before, the pool's caretaker beckoned me over. First he stared at me suspiciously, so that I thought, What have I done now? But then his face opened and, wagging a finger, he said: "I know you; you are Wayne! You used to beat all dem white boys in swimming!")

The NYT also reported ­ and I didn't know this ­ that "studies have shown that many Africans were avid swimmers when they were brought over as slaves, [but] most slaves born in the United States were not allowed to learn to swim because it was a means of escape. That created generations of non-swimmers and spawned the myth that African-Americans could not swim."

Was that also the case here, I wonder.

The paper cites other factors militating against African-Americans learning to swim. It's interesting to compare them with the reasons why so many Jamaicans likewise can't swim.

The first was segregation, which kept American blacks out of many pools and beaches. Segregation was never a formal policy here, of course, yet to this day you'd search in vain to find an inner-city or rural black kid splashing around in the pool of one of Jamaica's clubs or at the North Coast's private tourist beaches.

The second was the cost of swimming lessons. They're nearly as expensive here; and the Jamaican working class, which just about gets by financially by depriving itself of certain things which the rest of Jamaica considers necessities, not luxuries ­ like glasses ­ isn't likely to splurge on swimming lessons for its kids. Nor on bus and taxi fares to get them to the beach on weekends. Nor on the canoe fare, currently $500, from Port Royal to Lime Cay.

ABIDING MYSTERY

(It's an abiding mystery to me that no one remarks that you never see a working class Jamaican wearing glasses. Then what, you think they're all gifted with 20-20 vision? Of course not. The bitter fact is that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans must be walking myopically about, having only a blurred apprehension of the great beauty of this, their native land. But 'the culture' has evidently deemed a visit to the oculist ­ like, to a lesser extent, the dentist ­ to be an unaffordable luxury. Even in the age of privatisation, I don't see that it would cost the Government that much to open free inner-city and rural eye-care centres and provide standard-framed glasses for those who need them.)

But to return to swimming.

The NYT piece was surely right in averring that when parents don't know how to swim, they tend to see no value in their children's learning, but instead warn them to stay away from the water, "thereby passing on the fear."

And the fear of non-swimmers in the sea is something I can testify to, from experience, many times over.

SAILING

Sailing is my passion; I spend many a Sunday sailing out to and anchoring off Lime Cay; and I'm continually surprised when friends or acquaintances, along for the sail, turn out to be unable to swim. (The girls I give piggyback rides to the beach ­ not necessarily a burdensome chore, though sometimes they lock your neck in a death grip. I guess I should hasten to add ­ this being Jamaica ­ that the men get lifejackets and are towed to shore.)

Invariably, I urge them to learn to swim ­ not so much for safety's sake as for the great gain in relaxation (it makes everything you have to do on Monday easy) and the vistas of pleasure that swimming opens up to us, living here with the many downsides of island life ­ 'cabin fever', for example.

But, I know that, nine out of ten, I'm spitting in the wind. The time to learn to swim is before one reaches puberty. Leave it later than that and, for some mysterious reason, you never lose your terror of the sea. A girl I knew in Trinidad learnt to swim at 26. She learnt so well, she could do several laps of a 50-metre pool without stopping. But the moment that, in the sea, she strayed out of her depth, her eyes would open big, and ­ not 10 feet from where she could stand, you understand - she'd start to splash and heave in genuine panic.

I don't know what can be done. But my guess is that perhaps 90 per cent of Jamaicans cannot swim. This has nothing to do with race (to hell with 'The Buoyancy Problem'!). And it seems to me a sad and unnecessary further impoverishment of people ­ many already impoverished ­ living amid some of the loveliest beaches in the world.