Handy Footwork

When Jamison Handy was 20, he helped develop the American crawl. Reading a Sydney newspaper's fuzzy description of the Australian crawl, with which Down Under swimmers were then smashing records, young Handy tried to imitate the stroke he had never seen. The Australian crawl was such a sensational step forward that some kind of American imitation was inevitable; other Americans besides Jam Handy tried their own adaptations. The U.S. style that finally emerged combined the double over-arm stroke with a loose-leg kick from the hips instead of the knees. Using it, Handy won three national free-style championships.

Last week, at 62, Jam Handy, now a wealthy Detroit producer of industrial films, had a radical amendment to offer. The present continuous kick, said Handy, is too tiring: it gives the legs no chance to "relax, rest and breathe." What Jam Handy proposed was a new stroke that seemed to some swimmers like asking a track man to hop three steps on his right foot, then three steps on his left.

At Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at an annual clinic of 250 college swimming coaches, hale and hardy Handy jumped into a pool to demonstrate his new "twintail" crawl. Instead of kicking his legs alternately and steadily, he gave them turns. While the left leg took three kicks to one arm stroke, the right leg dragged with only a slight relaxed flutter; then the left one dragged while the right one kicked three times. The crowd cheered Handy's demonstration, but most coaches were a little skeptical. Handy was sure that time would vindicate him. Said he: "When I was younger and got a new idea, I'd get out and break a record. That would show 'em. I'm too old to do that now."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.