WHY YALE?
My decision to go to Yale, in 1989, was, in the swimming world, shocking. First, during my senior year in high school, Yale was the worst swim team in the Ivy League. Yale Men’s Swimming had only won a single swim meet that year against Ivy League and Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming League opponents. Why would I, a top-ranked high school swimmer, go to one of the worst swim teams in the country? Moreover, as an Ivy-League school, Yale did not offer athletic scholarships. Why would I turn down a full-ride scholarship to attend one of the worst swimming teams in the country?
In my book, From Yale to Rastafari: Letters to My Mom, 1995-1998, I wrote,
“I was one of the fastest and best all-around swimmers in the entire country. I was offered scholarships form small schools to big schools alike. . . . It was hard trying to decide which school to go to. My closest friends (two brothers) whose family I lived with from time to time both went to the University of Pennsylvania. I liked Columbia University the best, and my good friend and former Illinois High School State Champ Scott Kitzman went there and became their team captain. He showed me a really great time on my recruiting trip. My stepsisters went to Cornell, Grinnell, Spellman, and Harvard. . . . I only applied to seven schools: the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, Stanford and the University of Virginia. I was accepted at all seven. Not a single rejection letter. . . .
On my recruiting trip to Yale I had a mystical “out-of-body” experience in the Kiphuth Pool inside the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. The pool is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It is named after Robert J.H. Kiphuth, the collegiate coach with the greatest coaching record in the history of American athletics. (From 1917 through 1959, Kiphuth won 528 meets while losing just 12.) The only way I can describe this pool is to imagine a dark, dirty dungeon in a medieval castle. Imagine in this dungeon a gladiator pit where dungeon battles are fought. Except, where you’d expect to see a battlefield there is a glowing pool of the most brilliant turquoise.
In that Kiphuth pool, crowds witnessed 4 NCAA titles, 10 NCAA runner-up seasons, a 201 consecutive dual meet win streak, numerous All-Americans, Olympians, and Don Schollander who was once voted the world’s greatest athlete.
During my quest to reach the Olympic Trials, I set Yale pool records, team records and conference records. I won an Ivy-League title, was an Ivy-League champion and a member of the All-Ivy Team. I competed in the U.S. National Long and Short Course Championships and at the U.S. Open. Though I was not the first, I became, at 5’7” and 140 lbs., the greatest black swimmer to do battle in the Kiphuth pool.”
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH BALANTA SPIRITUALITY?
It is only from the perspective of Balanta spirituality that my decision to go to Yale makes sense. Let me explain.
According to the second principle of the 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors
“ [Balanta] behavior is centered in a single value: vital force. [The Balanta ancient ancestors] say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity.”
Principle 3 states,
“Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God, to the spirits and to the dead, as well as of all that is usually called magic, sorcery or magical remedies. . . . “
Principle 4 states,
“The spirits of the first ancestors, highly exalted in the superhuman world, possess extraordinary force inasmuch as they are the founders of the human race and propagators of the divine inheritance of vital human strength. The other dead are esteemed only to the extent to which they increase and perpetuate their vital force in their progeny.”
Principle 5 states,
“all beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man.”
Principle 11 states,
“One force will reinforce or weaken another. This causality is in no way supernatural in the sense of going beyond the proper attributes of created nature. It is, on the contrary, a metaphysical causal action which flows out of the very nature of a created being. General knowledge of these activities belongs to the realm of natural knowledge and constitutes philosophy properly so called. The observation of the action of these forces in their specific and concrete applications would constitute [Balanta] natural science.”
Principle 19 states,
“In the mind of the [Balanta], the dead also live; but theirs is a diminished life, with reduced vital energy. This seems to be the conception of the [Balanta] when they speak of the dead in general, superficially and in regard to the external things of life. When they consider the inner reality of being, they admit that deceased ancestors have not lost their superior reinforcing influence; and that the dead in general have acquired a greater knowledge of life and of vital or natural force. Such deeper knowledge as they have in fact been able to learn concerning vital and natural forces they use only to strengthen the life of man on earth. The same is true of their superior force by reason of primogeniture, which can be employed only to reinforce their living posterity. The dead forbear who can no longer maintain active relationships with those on earth is ‘completely dead’, as Africans say. They mean that this individual vital force, already diminished by decease, has reached a zero diminution of energy, which becomes completely static through lack of faculty to employ its vital influence on behalf of the living. This is held to be the worst of disasters for the dead themselves. The spirits of the dead (”manes’) seek to enter into contact with the living and to continue living function upon earth. “
Finally, Principle 21 states,
“. . . .the living being exercises a vital influence on everything that is subordinated to him and on all that belongs to him. . . . The fact that a thing has belonged to anyone, that it has been in strict relationship with a person, leads the Bantu to conclude that this thing shares the vital influence of its owner. It is what ethnologists like to call ‘contagious magic, sympathetic magic”; but it is neither contact nor ‘sympathy’ that are the active elements, but solely the vital force of the owner, which acts, as one knows, because it persists in the being of the thing possessed or used by him.”
Now we are ready to make sense of the “mystical experience” that caused me to choose Yale.
Since its inception in 1898, the Yale Bulldogs swimming and diving program has produced numerous champion athletes. The First Intercollegiate Swim Race was between Yale, Columbia and Pennsylvania in 1899 at Madison Square Garden in New York. Many Yale swimmers have gone on to earn All-American honors and even break world records. The team has won 4 NCAA championships, 30 EISL championships, and several AAU championships. Under legendary coach Robert J. H. Kiphuth, the Yale men swam to a record of 528 wins and 12 losses. The Payne Whitney Gymnasium is the gymnasium of Yale University. One of the largest athletic facilities ever built.. The building was donated to Yale by John Hay Whitney, of the Yale class of 1926, in honor of his father, Payne Whitney. Prior to my arrival in 1989, the Yale men’s swimming team had won 864 swim meets while losing only 147, producing 31 Olympic swimmers.
Thus, Yale Swimming is the original and oldest college swimming program in the United States. As such, according to Balanta Principle 4, Yale Men’s Swimming is the first “collegiate swimming ancestor” and thus, as an institution, possess extraordinary vital force.
By the time of my arrival, more Olympic swimmers had trained and competed in the Kiphuth pool than in any other pool in the United States.
According to Balanta Principle 5, achieving the status of an Olympian is the evidence of the extraordinary vital force of those swimmers.
By virtue of Balanta Principles 5, 11, and 21, the vital force of all these extraordinary Olympic swimmers influenced or strengthen the vital force of the Kiphuth Pool and the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.
Consider, for example, the vital force energy manifested in the finals of the 1961 AAU Championships in the Men’s 100 yard freestyle (which happened to be my best event). Announcers Bud Collier and Ohio State's coach Mike Pepe called it the fastest field in the history of swimming. Lane 1, Joe Alcar, 2 Frank Legacki, 3 Mike Austin, 4 Steve Clark, 5 Ray Padovin, 6 Dick Pound which was swimming in the Kiphuth pool which had absorbed the most amount of collegiate swimming vital force in the history of humanity. Not surprisingly, the extraordinary vital force energy propelled Steve Clark to set a new American record, becoming the first man in history to break :47 seconds.
Frank Keefe started coaching the Yale men’s swimming team in 1978. Coach Keefe, one of the most respected figures in American swimming, was head coach at the 1975 and 1979 Pan American Games, was an assistant coach at the 1978 World Championships and 1984 American Games, was an assistant coach at the 1978 World Championships and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He served as the head manager at the 1986 World Championships and the 1988 Olympics. Before coming to Yale, Frank had coached nine Olympic swimmers and later a gold and silver medalist. Though the Yale men’s swimming team was no longer the swimming powerhouse it used to be under Coach Kiphuth, Coach Keefe had a history of coaching Olympic teams and developing Olympic talent no matter if he had a winning team or a losing team.
According to Balanta Principles 4, 5 and 11, Frank Keefe was a senior Coach with extraordinary vital force energy at the time of my arrival.
Now it is time to consider Balanta Principle 19, The spirits of the dead (”manes’) that sought to enter into contact with the living (me) and to continue living function upon earth. “
Genealogy research revealed that my great, great, great, great, great grandfather lived in Nhacra near the mouth of the Cacheu River in the modern day country called Guinea Bissau. The Binham B’rassa (also known as Balanta) people in that area were called “Nchabra” which means crocodile because they were the strongest swimmers in the area.. They were the only ones that could swim across the river from one side to the other. Often times, spectators on the shore would lose sight of the swimmer, he being so far away that they would say that the swimmer turned into a crocodile and went under the water. The very first European account of Balanta people, written by Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s, the official royal chronicler of the King Don Affonso the Fifth of Portugal recounts a Portuguese attack against the Balanta:
“And with this design there put off six boats with thirty-five or forty of their company prepared like men who meant to fight; but when they were near, the felt a fear of coming up to the caravel, and so they stayed a little distance off without daring to make an attack. And when Alvaro Fernandez, perceived that they dared not come to him, he commanded his boat to be lowered and in it he ordered eight men to plane themselves, from among the readiest that he found for the duty; and he arranged that the boat should be on the further side of the caravel so that it might not be seen by the enemy, in the hope that they would approach nearer to the ship. And the Guineas stayed some way off until one of their boats took courage to move more forward and issued forth from the others towards the caravel, and in it were five brave and stout Guineas, distinguished in this respect among the others of the company. And as soon as Alvaro Fernandez perceived that this boat was already in position for him to be able to reach it before it could receive help from the others, he ordered his own to issue forth quickly and go against it. And by the great advantage of our men in their manner of rowing they were soon upon the enemy, who seeing themselves thus overtaken, and having no hope of defense, leapt into the water while the other boats fled towards the land. But our men had very great toil in the capture of those who were swimming, for they dived like cormorants, so that they could not get a hold of them;”
Sometime between 1760 and 1775, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was captured as a young boy at the mouth of the Cacheu River on the Atlantic coast, put in chains, and placed on a boat headed for Charleston, SC. Terrorized and traumatized as the boat began to depart from his homeland, the last thought and unfilled prayer of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was to escape his chains, jump overboard, and swim back to his homeland. That was the last time my family would see their homeland for the next 244 or so years until my return in January of 2020.
In 1975, at the age of 4, my family took a trip to Charleston, SC. My father, a former high school swimmer and diver (his father, my grandfather was a member of the US Coast Guard), was undoubtedly excited to bring his son to see the Atlantic ocean. However, when I was brought to the waters edge and touch the water where my great, great, great, great, great grandfather had arrived in America, I freaked out! I was deathly afraid of the water. So bizarre was my reaction that my father immediately resolved that I would start swimming lessons as soon as we returned home.
That was the moment when the spirit of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather entered me according to Balanta Principle 19.
What happened after that is described in the article A Swimmer’s Race.
Thus, the “mystical experience” experience that I had during my recruiting trip to Yale which I could only inadequately describe at the time, was another manifestation of Balanta Principle 19. When I walked alone onto the pool deck that day in early 1989, I had what I could only describe as an “out-of-body” experience (I knew nothing of my Balanta heritage or the secrets of their spirituality). I felt myself float out of my body and above the pool, hovering above it and watching a vision of myself swimming in the pool. I could hear crowds cheering. And something spoke to me. It wasn’t a “voice” per se, but it was as if an “understanding” was placed inside me: “if you want to reach your swimming goals, you must come here”. That was the message, clear as the water in the pool.
Now, thirty-two years later, I am able to better understand that experience. My ancestors who possessed “greater knowledge of life and of vital or natural force” made a calculation based on their “deeper knowledge as they have in fact been able to learn concerning vital and natural forces”. Such a calculation was at odds with conventional earthly thinking and swimming sensibility which dictated that I go to the best swimming school that would offer me a four-year scholarship. My ancestors used “their superior force by reason of primogeniture” to “strengthen the life of man (me) on earth” and “reinforce their living posterity (me)”. Without understanding the Balanta spirituality, without the narrative just described, my decision to swim for Yale University would have been relegated to another of the “strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason.” That decision resulted in Yale Swimming improving from last place to Ivy League champions in the four year’s of my career at Yale. It had been twenty years (1973) since the Yale men’s swim team had won an Ivy League Championship, and up to now they haven’t won another since. . . . .
In From Yale to Rastafari: Letters to My Mom, 1995-1998, I wrote,
“After the 1990-1991 season I was awarded the MacLeish Memorial Swimming trophy, established in 1936 by Halsted R. Vanderpoel ’35, in memory of Kenneth MacLeish, 1918, who was killed in World War I. The trophy is awarded to “that member of the Yale swimming team, who through his efforts and high ideals in sportsmanship and loyalty, best exemplifies the spirit of Kenneth MacLeish.. Because of this honor, and because Yale university had a chance to win the Ivy League title for the first time in 20 years, I felt obliged to do my part to claim such a victory. This last effort – to win an Ivy-League Championship for the team and for Frank – is the sole reason why I stayed in school as long as I did my senior year. . . . Four days after winning the Ivy-League Championship- and just three months shy of graduation, I left school, sold my possessions, [and] vowed not to cut my hair in order to consecrate and symbolize my new-found freedom . . . “
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