Published on SwimSwam courtesy of SwimSpray, a swimswam partner.
Senator John McCain is one elected representative who is undistracted by the looming government shutdown in less than two weeks. Instead Senator McCain is focussing on the important issues. And what could be more important than the LA Dodgers celebrating in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ pool? Here’s a video of the Diamondbacks celebrating in the pool:
LA Dodgers go Swimming to Celebrate Win.
In what is now being called “the splash heard ’round the world,” the LA Dodgers went for a swim in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ pool to celebrate clinching the NL West title.
The pool party has received mixed reviews by the press and high ranking politicians. On the one hand, “[t]he Dodgers did not deface, destroy or damage anything. They did not plant their flag on Arizona’s field. They jumped into a pool, to which the Diamondbacks sell tickets for fans to enter every day.” The only damage resulting from the celebration was “a few drops of water on a pool deck, and a few wounded egos in their clubhouse.”
On the other side of the issue, the pool party potentially showed poor sportsmanship. As Jerry Green of the Detroit News reported, the “Dodgers rub chlorine in the wound by celebrating in Diamondbacks’ pool.” This comment isn’t entirely correct because the Dodgers went swimming. So, only the Dodgers exposed themselves to the chlorinated pool water. They did not chlorinate the Diamondbacks. (As an aside, SwimSpray will reach out to the Dodgers to see if they need any help eliminating lingering chlorine from their hair and skin).
Senator John McCain took a much stronger stance through his Twitter account, leaving no question as to where he stands on the issue of celebrating in the pool:
“No-class act by a bunch of overpaid, immature, arrogant, spoiled brats!”
The tweet included a link to an Arizona Republic column with this headline: “The Dodgers are idiots.”
McCain’s comment led other Twitter users to respond in kind. Here was one particularly noteworthy tweet by Dodgers reliever Brian Wilson: “Senator McComplain knows a thing or two about coming in second and watching someone take a plunge in the pool (I mean poll).” Nice.
Take a lesson from swimmers: Celebrating in the pool is good clean fun
Princeton Tigers celebrating a conference victory in Harvard’s pool (courtesy of SwimSrpay)
Swimmers should recognize that celebrating a victory in the pool is pretty common. After a big meet, like a conference championship, NCAA championship (or even an important duel meet), swimmers like to jump into the pool to celebrate. In these situations, the celebrating swimmers look for the closest pool available—usually the one at the site of the victory. (For example, see the Princeton Tigers celebrating a conference victory in Harvard’s pool in the photo to the left). Sometimes swimmers also throw the coach in the pool. Sometimes they jump off blocks or cheer. This behavior seems to be the swimming community’s answer to the Gatorade bucket dunk.
Below is one video example of this (normal) behavior. The video shows the University of Michigan Wolverines after they won NCAAs. In view of this display, it’s a bit surprising that the Dodgers celebration became a matter of such concern for Senator McCain. Objectively speaking, it seems that the Dodgers had a pretty tame in-pool celebration. No jumping. No diving. No real flare at all. They plopped into the pool and expressed joy and pride in their hard earned victory. Not bad for a bunch of baseball players – but really nothing new or noteworthy in the swimming community.
SwimSpray was invented by Dr. Andrew Chadeayne, a former Princeton University swimmer and chemistry Ph.D. from Cornell University. Tired of smelling like chlorine after his swimming workouts, Andrew set out remove chlorine from hair and skin ( SwimSpray works where so many other chlorine removal products (e.g., swimmers’ shampoos) have failed previously because SwimSpray’s all-natural vitamin C based formula breaks this bond, neutralizing the chlorine, and allowing it to be washed away with your favorite soap or shampoo. Follow him on Twitter @swimspray and fan him Facebook.
As long as they didn’t pee …. we can overlook the fact that they obvi did not shower before entering the pool.
This article seems like quite a stretch for a swimming website. If you want to talk about celebrations in the pool then just do it. Kind of irrelevant to bring baseball and politics into it.
I live in L.A. and I’m a Dodgers fan, but I have to admit it was a slightly low-class move for them. It’s nothing like jumping into the pool after a meet; they were asked not to come out on the field to celebrate and they did anyway, and then had to scale a wall to do so. They should have at least invited the D-Backs to swim and gotten buy-in from them. But compared with swimming there’s a lot more hate in baseball so the answer would have been “no”.
But I think it got way too much coverage and made the D-Backs just look like sore losers more than the Dodgers looking like bad winners. And McCain… Read more »
No, he does not have important things to do. I consider acting as Obama’s right hand man in budget negotiations to NOT be an important thing to do.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/M1we09N730qQ2jGU9GJf14a8Zta7GgC-sIzT6jdPc4Aj=w316-h209-p-no