A master at doing what he loves says it's time to leave it behind

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 1, 2001

Now and then, the slightly stooped man in the faded Ironman ball cap and the wraparound sunglasses gazes across the bay from the patio at the end of St. Petersburg's North Shore Pool. The man is George Bole, the coach of St. Petersburg's storied Masters Swim Team, and he is waiting for his own coaches to surface.

His coaches are the dolphins.

They can swim as fast as 40 mph, and George Bole wants to know what they know.

He is 84 years old. He has been coaching swimming for 50 years and still insists he doesn't know all that much about swimming. He says this even though he has coached record breaker after record breaker and has put his team and North Shore Pool on the map. It is known to fanatical swimmers across the country, and even in Europe and South America, as a mecca for the sport.

St. Petersburg's team is part of a national organization for competitive swimming for people past college. You don't have to be fast. It doesn't matter how old you are. You just have to be crazy about swimming.

People I know, friends even, who pride themselves on staying in shape, think swimming is boring. Back and forth, back and forth, you cross the pool, moving as predictably as a robot, they think. The scenery never changes.

These people don't know that water is much denser than air and that swimming is a cross between weight lifting and ballet practiced on a horizontal plane. They also don't know George Bole.

This is a coach fond of quoting the poet Robert Browning to his swimmers: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?"

Translated into the lingo of competition, this means, in Bole's words: "Even if they set a world record, that's not the ultimate. They can always go beyond."

This makes Bole sound driven. But persevering is more like it. You get better at swimming only by swimming, again and again and again.

"There is no easy way," he said. "If I knew an easy way, I'd be a millionaire and I'd be unhappy."

This is George Bole's hard way. He is at the pool before dawn to coach one group, a couple of hours in the afternoon for another group, and all of Sunday morning. He is his swimmers' patron saint of technique, fussing over the least details on how to breathe, turn, reach and slice through the water by rotating your hips. His swimmers love him so much they once raised thousands to pay for his heart surgery.

They love him so much they don't quite know what they will do without him.

This weekend, after 17 years at North Shore, George Bole coached his last Masters meet. Next month, he will go back home to England to live with his oldest daughter. He will miss his friends. But he is not sorry to be going. It's time. "I want to quit while I am still able," he said. "I don't want to be a figure of sympathy."

There is nothing steely in his blue eyes or stately in his loose and expressive old man's profile. His voice is soft, at least when he is not urging his swimmers on, and on.

Nothing about Bole's surface gives a clue to the heroic part of his nature, the part that quotes Browning and thinks that swimming is a metaphor for living -- this constant testing that a million little moments put a person through, the constant striving.

"Everybody is competitive in some way. Or else the whole world would stop, wouldn't it?"

His father was a swimming coach, and so George Bole became a swimming coach.

But he still longs to be a teacher, to sit at a desk in a classroom and explain the wonders of literature and the precision of mathematics, human achievements not of the physical sort, to ready minds. He said he is never unhappy, but he sounds wistful about this missed chance -- even though he did become a teacher, without books, without blackboards, but with so much passion.

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