Meyer Feldberg - No Finish Line: lessons on life and career

I t was seven oclock PM, the floodlights were on, the grandstand was packed, and the crowd roared. On your mark, get set, and bang sounded the starters gun as eight swimmers dived into the pool for the hundred-meter butterfly championship in Johannesburg, South Africa. The year was 1959. One of those eight swimmers was me at age sixteen. I dived in, skimmed across the water. I felt like I was flying on top of it. I had never swum like this before. Toward the end of the first lap I saw that I was three lengths ahead of all the other swimmers. I turned at the wall and started swimming back ten meters, then twenty meters, then twenty-five meters. I was in a state of bliss. I was unstoppable, a record breaker in the making.

Meyer Feldberg, sixteen years old

Then suddenly I felt a sharp pain. My legs and my arms didnt work. I dragged myself through the water with every muscle in my body aching, making it to the end of the pool barely two-tenths of a second ahead of the man who came in second. The whistle blew and I climbed from the pool and walked around to where my swim coach and the rest of the team were waiting. My teammates were uncomfortable and avoided eye contact, my coach angered and upset. He broke the tension and began shouting, What happened? What did you do? What happened? I shrugged and looked sheepishly at the floor. I didnt know what had happened. When you made the turn, you were a second ahead of world record time, he continued, and then in the middle of the second lap you slowed down. In the last quarter of the lap you simply collapsed! What happened?! What happened?! Defeated in victory, I shook my head and walked away.

This race has haunted me for the last sixty-one years. In the end I failed. Sure, I won the race, but I was reckless and arrogant, too caught up in the feeling of success before I had earned it. My coach knew that, my teammates knew that, and years later I would come to know it, too.

At the age of fourteen I was an excellent swimmer, disciplined and determined. Every afternoon at four PM I went to the pool to train with a squad of a dozen young swimmers. I left home daily at five-thirty AM to train from six to eight, swimming a total of six thousand meters. Then I was off to school, and when school let out, I was back in the pool at four PM for another two hours and another six thousand meters, then home, dinner, and sleep, then wake up and do it all over again. There was only one indoor pool in the whole of Johannesburg back then, and it was thirty minutes away from home. It was not an option, so I swam in a 33.3-meter outdoor pool most of the year, seven days a week, even in the winter.

South African news clipping

When I was fifteen I won the South African two-hundred-meter butterfly championship. South Africa in the 1950s was a small place, and the swim race was headline news: 15 Year Old School Boy Wins the 200 Meters Butterfly Event. I took swimming very seriously. It was my ticket to a wider world, and it paid off. Overnight, I became a visible athlete in a country that was and remains a fanatically sports-oriented nation. I was one of the youngest male Springboks in swimming history, representing South Africa at international eventsall sports in South Africa are awarded a Springbok (deer) as a symbol of the national team. I wore a Springbok badge and a Springbok blazer, which were invitations to autograph seekers. During my teen years, it was a big deal, a very big deal. The visibility was extraordinary, and in retrospect, it was more than I knew how to handle.