Word: sakamoto
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Best team last week was Soichi Sakamoto's Hawaii University Swim Club (TIME, July 29), which picked up right where it left off in 1941. Led by sprint champ Bill Smith, it swept the meet easily...
That ambition first hit Soichi Sakamoto a decade ago, when he was teaching grade school on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He knew nothing about swimming except what he had learned as a scoutmaster, teaching lifesaving. "I read some books on swimming but it didn't do any good," he says, "so I started just using common sense." Common sense consisted of rounding up the best young prospects on an island where kids are naturally amphibious, then straightening out their faults. His first pupils, who could not afford to use private pools, swam their time trials in irrigation ditches...
...Sakamoto's ditch-wrigglers did all right. Led by the Nisei NaKama brothers, they won the A.A.U. outdoor team championships in 1939 and 1940. Sakamoto was gunning for the 1940 Olympics, but they were called off. In 1941, before war dispersed them, Sakamoto's protégés won their third outdoor A.A.U. title; and one of them, Bill Smith, son of a Honolulu cop, broke most of the world's records from 200 to 800 meters...
...Sakamoto is pointing for the 1948 Olympics. Among the members of his postwar club, again a strong contender for the A.A.U. outdoor meet in San Diego next month, are: ex-Navy man Smith, who last week beat Johnny Weismuller's U.S. 100-meter long course record with a 57.7; Ralph Wright, ex-marine who bettered the Olympic 200-meter long course breast stroke mark with a 2:42.3; and Harry Holiday, ex-Michigan star, who beat the U.S. 300-meter individual medley record with...
...basis of such showings, some of Soichi Sakamoto's boys looked like sure shots for the Olympics. But for the coaching job Sakamoto himself probably had little chance against Yale's four-time Olympic Coach Bob Kiphuth...