In Praise of Bobby Hackett

Robert Sullivan covered nine Olympics for Sports Illustrated, LIFE and Time between 1980 and 2000.

This is not one of those somebody-came-back-around-years-later stories because, really, the guy never came around the first time. And I also hasten to say, this is no Fred Exley and Frank Gifford thing. This is more a, hey, this happened to happen, and how ’bout that? I barely know the guy in question, I may have seen him swim in the Olympics, but I’m not even sure of that. I think I did, but the 1,500 free?—who sits through those prelims?

I’m getting ahead of myself, or behind.

I was taught how to swim in little Lake Nabnasset by a woman named Jessie who I think (my mom later mentioned?) was also a volunteer assistant coach at Harvard, because a place like Harvard would be sufficiently liberal in the earliest 1960s to employ women to help with the men’s swim team. I wasn’t exceptionally good at any sport—I could play tennis and ski—but I was definitively bad at swimming fast. Even today, swimming laps for the heart health and that stuff, I am as slow as molasses, and if you take molasses into a further liquid mixture, the metaphor becomes vivid. Back then, I swam in summertime, and am today remembered by my sister and brother for having blown a club-team meet with my relay leg, and remembered by me for having ruined a summer vacation for myself by false-starting in a race at Rye, New Hampshire, and, arms flailing, falling straight down into the pool and smashing my head on the concrete, thus injuring my neck which stayed sore during the family vacation in North Hampton, where we had rented a small cottage, thus preventing me from body-surfing the fine and cold Atlantic waves (I wasn’t a bad body surfer, I will say). I’m sure I suffered a concussion, too, but this was back in a day when everything wasn’t a concussion.

I’m sure you will agree: Enough about me.

I was a big sports fan and stayed one; Sawks, Pats, C’s and Broons, and also, as it developed, the myriad Olympic sports (skiing, swimming, even biathlon). So it’s 1976, and yes, I knew who Bobby Hackett was. I was working that summer in Franconia, New Hampshire, at a country club; I was their tennis pro, though you can take “pro” euphemistically. My friend at the club was Ron, the short order cook, and we had a couple of off days coming, so we got in Ron’s beater and headed north for Montreal, where the Olympics were happening. We threw down sleeping bags atop Mont Royale and bought some tickets from scalpers and had a whale of a time, and were back at work on Thursday.

I know I saw Dwight Stones jump at the track in an afternoon preliminary, and I knew who Klaus Dibiasi was, so made sure to see him dive, and caught a kid named Greg Louganis in the bargain. Ron and I watched some swimming. I might have seen Bobby Hackett swim, but regardless, back in Franconia, I was thrilled when he won the silver in the 1,500. He was 16, I knew that, and a legendary animal in the pool; he and his coach invented the 100 by 100s’; Bobby Hackett, a Yonkers boy, held world records; he was an earlier day Ledecky at distance. A sports fan, I followed his progress to Harvard, where he starred, and then lamented for him when the Olympic boycott of 1980 cost him a Games. By the time I was poolside for Sports Illustrated in 1984, watching Louganis be near perfect, Bobby wasn’t in the picture. I had heard he had an anemia thing, but had fought through it and continued to compete wonderfully – but anyway, I had lost track.

So it’s many years later and two of our kids are swimming for the local Boys and Girls Club team, the Marlins—out of the Mount Kisco. New York, Club. At the end of each season the Marlins decamp to St. Petersburg, Florida, for the B&GC nationals: a nice fruity dessert at the tail end of a sweaty season at beyond-humid pools in Westchester County and environs. Our kids Caroline and Jack are off with friends, and I’m at the bar with Eric, my own friend and a fellow Marlins Dad, and Eric introduces me to this other Dad, Bobby Hackett. I did not have an “oh wow” moment but rather a “where have I heard that name?” moment.

He was a wonderful fellow, amiable and with a ready, earnest smile: all the good stuff. After I had placed him in my mind, the conversation was about old days as well as recent. “I think I may have seen you swim in Montreal,” I said at one point.

I learned from Caroline and Jack that “Bobby” was Liam Hackett’s dad and that Dennis and Dave had added him as a Marlins coach. He was volunteering. Drawn to the pool, and to swimmers, and to athletes, and to kids.

I was timing the prelims one afternoon that weekend in St. Pete, maybe Lane Four. Sunny. Hot. I noticed during one of the distance events there was this old guy making strong, loping turns in Lane Three. Bobby and the Marlins had finagled his way into a heat to swim against his son. Don’t get me wrong: This was not the Griffeys co-homering. This was a Boys and Girls Club prelim. It was nonetheless wonderful, if you knew what was going on—and I’m not sure anyone else did.

Bobby climbed out of the pool, wiped the water from his thinning hair, and said to no one—said to the air—“Whoa. That took it out of me.” He hadn’t finished ahead of anyone fast; he hadn’t denied anyone a place in that evening’s finals. His kid had beaten him. I’ve never asked Bobby about any of that.
He’s still Bobby—not Bob or Robert. I know him by sight and we nod. Liam went off to Harvard last year; he was as fine a cross-country runner in high school as he was a swimmer, and I think he’s concentrating on the sneakers rather than the jammers in college. Bobby, strangely, has continued to coach with the Marlins. He’s become a little notorious on the team for his workouts; some kids program their week around “Bobbies”; if they know he’ll be there, they choose to skip. He’s not throwing 100 by 100s at them, but he’s throwing something.

Jack got in the car one night this spring at the club. He was pumped up. “How was practice?” I asked him, as I always do.

“It was great,” he said as we worked our way through Kisco. Jack rarely says that. “He showed me . . .” And there was this and that and the other, all this swim stuff I can’t fathom. “Who’d you have?” Dave and Dennis and Claire – they’re all great, it doesn’t matter – but he said, “It was Bobby.”

“Was it tough?”
“Tough enough,” Jack said.
“Well,” I said, “Listen to what he says.”

Not long after that practice, I went to see Jack’s high school team in the divisionals. Of course I saw lots of familiar faces among the parents. Bobby and his wife’s son is off to college. There is not an obvious reason for him to be coaching anymore. There was zero evident reason at all for them to be at the pool. But there the Hacketts were, supporting the new kids. I nodded hello. No one else knew who he was.