At home in Alabama

Olympian and Auburn swimming great on the joys of southern hospitality

By Rowdy Gaines

Rowdy Gaines AP Photo

In 1977, I left my native Florida on a recruiting trip to Auburn that would change my life. The entire Tigers swim team was there to greet me at Municipal Airport. I was no star -- I had only started swimming competitively a year earlier, in my junior year of high school -- but my future teammates swallowed me up in their arms, wanting to bring me into their family. One of the first people I spotted was Billy Forrester, who had won a bronze medal at the Montreal Olympics a year earlier. That was like Bo Jackson saying, “Welcome to our football team.” How could you say no?

I remember my week on campus, eating in the athletic dorm at Sewell Hall, which was the Taj Mahal of dining. If you finished an ice tea and raised your pitcher, you’d have a refill in seconds. Ann Graves ran the hall and she was like a second mother to many of us. Ours was the only team that had a morning practice, so we always missed breakfast. After one of our first sessions, Ann invited us back to kitchen, gave us the run of the grills and refrigerators and told us from then on that we could help ourselves. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that Auburn felt like home.

Over the next four years I fell in love with more than just the university. I treasured the small-town feel of Auburn and the state’s abundance of forests, rivers, lakes and hiking trails. Most of all, I fell in love with the people. I’ve traveled all over the world and met some wonderful folks, but somehow the feeling of southern hospitality stays with me wherever I go.

The university was also building a tradition of swimming excellence. Today, both the men’s and women’s teams are defending NCAA team champions. Auburn has placed 28 swimmers on Olympic teams, and 42 different Tigers have won individual NCAA titles. The program and the place certainly brought the best out of me.

In April 1980, I broke my first world record, swimming the 200-meter freestyle in Austin, Texas. The next day, we heard the devastating announcement that the U.S. would be boycotting the Moscow Olympics. The community rallied around the two Tigers who qualified for the Games that year: Forrester and me. A large group met us at the airport and held a reception for us. I really can’t tell you much about my swim, but I remember the reception as though it happened yesterday. I didn’t realize people there cared about us that much.

After my senior year in 1981, I spent six months as a retired swimmer who figured it was better to get on with life than scrape out a living for four years trying to live out a dream nobody would understand. But people in Alabama did understand, and many convinced me that I would regret it if I didn’t keep going for three more years. I worked as a night clerk in a hotel to earn money, subsisted largely on macaroni and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches, and spent as much time as possible training. I won three gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, but I might never have been in the pool without the urging of friends from Alabama.

I moved to Hawaii three years after the Games, began raising a family and competing in masters swim events. In 1991, I contracted a bad case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease that shreds the protective coating around the nerves and left me temporarily paralyzed. Of the roughly 1,500 letters I received during my recovery, about a thousand came from Alabama. One woman from Dothan, Ala., wrote to tell me how she and her husband, who had since passed from the disease, always admired my career. That letter still sits in my drawer at work.

In the next few years, I had job offers from all corners of the country as an assistant athletic director, a swim coach and a TV sports anchor, but in 1997, I accepted a job with the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham. We had been three blocks from the beach in Hawaii, but to me it was like going from one paradise to another. It came down to finding the most comfortable place to raise my four daughters.

During my second stint in Alabama, I owned a restaurant with Charles Barkley and Joe Ciampi, the Auburn women's basketball coach, called Hogan’s; entertained thoughts of running for public office; and grew to appreciate the state’s amazing sports heritage. When ESPN named its 100 greatest North American athletes of the last century, five of the top 15 were born in the state, although not one of the five -- Hank Aaron, Carl Lewis, Joe Louis, Willie Mays and Jesse Owens -- was a football player. Alabama also boasts the first African-American women to win gold medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Alice Coachman Davis, who attended the Tuskegee Institute, won the high jump at the 1948 Olympics in London, and Vonetta Flowers, from Birmingham, took gold in the women’s bobsled in Salt Lake City last year.

Perhaps the most inspirational story is the one about Charlie Boswell, a star at Alabama in both football and baseball. During the Battle of the Bulge, Charlie was in a tank heading to the front line when it came under attack. He got out just in time, but his comrade got stuck in the tank as it burst into flames. Charlie went back and pulled his buddy from the tank shortly before it exploded, leaving him sightless for life. Charlie came home to Birmingham and became the world’s greatest blind golfer, recording three holes-in-one along the way.

A few months ago, I accepted as a new job in Colorado Springs as the chief fundraising and alumni development officer for USA Swimming, trying to support the sport I love. Out here I am never asked about my football allegiance (Colorado vs. Colorado State) the way I always was back home (Auburn or Alabama?). To me, it really is Sweet Home Alabama, a place of sporting passion, and as I have known since my first recruiting trip, a land of open arms.