May 12th, 1930 – March 7th, 2023
Long time Seal Beach resident and Olympic gold medalist Pat McCormick passed away yesterday at age 92.
There will be finer tributes and fuller accounts of her lifetime of accomplishments in the days to come than I can offer here. What I would like to share is the earliest profile of Pat McCormick I could find. This was printed in the July 15th, 1951 San Francisco Examiner when 21 year-old Pat McCormick was preparing to compete in the national swimming championships the year before she won the gold in the 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform diving events at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games.
Her name had been mentioned in earlier sports coverage, but the editors of the paper and writer Gus Steiger choose this time to focus an entire story on McCormick and the commitment required for her to obtain her level of athletic excellence.
Patricia McCormick Eyes New Swimming Laurels
By Gus Steiger
DETROIT, July 14
“What beauty’ What grace! What form!” the appreciative spectator murmur as the young lady zooms off the high dive board, cuts a figure in a flowing continuity of motion and plummets into the water like a perpendicular arrow. Diving, as it concerns the agile female, is the most graceful of sports competition — its participants the most beautiful.
It is assured, there will be the usual quantity of “O-o-o-hs” and “Ah-h-h-hs” emanating from the onlookers when little Patricia Keller McCormick and rivals for her titles display their diving skill at the national swimming championships in Detroit beginning July 25.
But few there will be among the spectators who will possess an awareness of the long years and the many, many hours of practice, the determination in the face of recurrent, and sometime serious, injury and the courage demanded of a diving champion.
It’s something in which you start young and keep everlastingly at it. That is true of Mrs. McCormick and the foes she will encounter in Detroit. Pat presently is a grand slam champion, something never before achieved in her field. She won all three outdoor diving titles — one meter, three meter and platform — at High Point, N. C, last August and followed with victories in the one meter and three-meter Indoor tests at Houston, Tex., more than two months ago.
WON TITLE AT 14
Such eminence was not attained overnight. She was born at Seal Beach, near Santa Monica in California, displayed an affinity for the water as a babe and later on took to diving, showing marked skill for this form of endeavor by the time she was 10 years old.
At 14 she won the women’s one meter diving cup and from mat point on concentrated on her diving career.
Pat McCormick and those of her ilk go leaping off diving boards from 20,000 to 23,000 times a year. A day’s workout means from 70 to 100 dives and it is quite easy to see how this soon runs into thousands, and into hundreds of thousands the enumerating encompasses a career.
Assuming the young lady operates on a six-day diving week, it has been estimated that in a ten year span, she will have made 200,000 dives, floated through more than 350 miles of ozone and made another 625 miles under water.
When preparing for an event of the importance of the forthcoming nationals in Detroit, Mrs. McCormick puts in a six and one-half hour day at the Olympic Stadium pool in Los Angeles. Five of these hours, split into morning and early evening sessions, are devoted to work on the tower, about thirty dives in each period. A ninety-minute post luncheon drill is on the springboards, involving about twenty-five dives.
The late Georgia Coleman, vivacious 1932 fancy diving Olympic champion, was typical of this attitude. “You like to dive, don’t you?” she was asked once by an admirer.
“I just love it,” Georgia responded. “When I am on the high board before taking off, it’s like being on top of the world. Then when I’m in my dive I have the feeling of a bird sailing through the air.”
There are exercises that also are part of the diver’s training program and a girl like Mrs. McCormick must watch her weight continually.
SPECIAL TRAINING
There is torture too to be encountered. At one time Pat’s coach, Rusty Smith of the Los Angeles AC thought she was losing points because she wasn’t pointing her toes sufficiently. He had a board rigged up with two rungs on it.
“Keep your feet in this thing,” he admonished her, “while you sleep through the night it will stretch your feet into shape.” So Pat slept in that unnatural and uncomfortable way just to give her tootsies the proper angle.
Besides torture, this aquatic specie is susceptible to injury. Pat has suffered chipped teeth and a broken rib by hitting the heavy board as she failed to clear on a dive. On one such occasion she almost unhinged her jaw. Other girls have sustained broken noses and have had fractured skulls. The current champion has absorbed welts and bruises on the chest and shoulders by not hitting the water properly when dunking herself at a mile-a-minute speed.
In addition to her own accomplishments, Patricia McCormick was also our one living degree of historical separation from the early heyday of Seal Beach’s joy zone entertainment as detailed in this post covering July 30th, 1916 in Seal Beach history.
– -Michael Dobkins
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