Heroes 20

Continuing on the positive influencers, Sam, Ray and Maggi, on the Berkeley Barracudas, played an outsized role in my early theatrical life.  

Sam was five-years older so we did not cross on the HS team when he set the BHS record in the 50 yard freestyle (21.04) which remained for over 20 years. Sam was tall, handsome and Larger Than Life, dating the older sister of a friend, and treated me like an insider even while I was a non-classmen, which felt pretty cool as a 95lb eighth-grader without much to say to girls (or anyone).

Ray, a ferocious breast stroker, saved the BHS swim team when the program was to be cut for budgetary reasons. Ray testified at a city commission that swimming kept him from the streets and had profoundly impacted his life. Without Ray, no BHS aquatics. He is now an artist and I have one of his paintings in our house.

Then there was Maggi, a backstroker, and we all - and I mean all of us - had a crush on her.  Coach asked her to marry him but that is for another story (and era).  Maggi, like Biondi, was a world class water polo player and a member of the US National team for ten-years. She competed in four World Championships, was named USA Water Polo Female Athlete of the Year in 1992, and inducted in the US Water Polo Hall of Fame in 2004. Maggi would have gone to the Olympics were women's water polo a sport in the 1980s and 90s (it became one in Sydney in 2000). Maggi contends for the greatest athlete I have known in my lifetime. She is now a professor at UC Berkeley.

Sam, Ray and Maggi live in Berkeley. Phot of Maggi from the Berkeley High Year Book.