Roles Model At The Sound

Soon after midnight the official Bob Club pizza (topped with Canadian bacon and pineapple) has been consumed, the alarm has been set, the lights have been turned out and the club's two founders and co-chairmen are finally nestled snug in their beds. But now a head bobs out from the bottom bunk.

"Hey, Bob," whispers Bob Moore, a butterflyer for the University of Puget Sound, a school in Tacoma, Wash. with 2,700 students.

"Yeah, Bob," replies Bob Jackson, Puget Sound's All-America breaststroker, from the top bunk.

"What are you doing tomorrow morning at six?"

"Nothing."

"Great. Want to come down to the pool and train?"

"Sure. I've got nothing better to do."

Most of the athletes Jackson spends his afternoons with would disagree. That's because they're members of the Puget Sound football team, on which Jackson the breaststroker is a Little All-America nose guard.

"Swimmers are weird," says UPS Defensive Line Coach Paul Wallrof. "Those guys march to the beat of a different drummer. It takes mental toughness to work out twice a day, year around. Can you imagine getting up at 5:45 in the morning? Gosh. It's still dark then."

Jackson, who's a senior, is used to living his life in the dark. It's dark when he gets up for swim practice, and it's dark by the time he finishes football practice. Even his swim coach, Don Duncan, admits he doesn't fully comprehend how Jackson can keep up with the demands of his sports. "It's like the guy who's married to two women, but neither woman knows about the other," says Duncan. "He has two separate families, two distinct life-styles, yet he is very emotionally involved with each. Most athletes wouldn't understand that type of feeling. Only Bob Jackson knows how it feels to be involved in two such different sports."