When Johnny Williams and I first sat down to talk about his pursuit of the 100-yard butterfly state record, he needed to clarify an important point.
This wasn’t going to be about the Perthes, right?
No, I told him, there’d been enoughwritten aboutthat.
His shoulders, the fulcrums of Williams’ powerful butterfly stroke motion, relaxed. He let out a relieved sigh.
Nothing remained to write on that topic. He was done talking about it.
I don’t blame him. Who wants to be defined by a disease?
So I decided before I even started planning the story that I wouldn’t ask Williams about Perthes. Where he’d been wasn’t as interested as where he was going. He chased history in the early months of 2016.
Williams tied the state record unofficially in a Jan. 15 dual meet against Belchertown, touching the wall in 49.14 seconds, exactly as fast as South Hadley’s Bob Hagberg in 1976. The result was unofficial because it was timed on a stopwatch after Northampton’s timing system malfunctioned during the meet.
After that it became apparent that Williams breaking the record was only a matter of time. I wanted to know how he would do it. What were the finer points of his stroke? His training? Those seemed much more interesting than rehashing the same overcoming the adversity of a disease story.
We focused on his mental and physical approaches to traversing 100 yards using the butterfly stroke. He spends most of the race underwater. The motion appears graceful from the pool deck but expends violent energy beneath the waves. He keeps his focus through meditation. Williams is a pretty chill dude.
His first chance to break the record was at the sectional championships.
He didn’t break 50 seconds but still finished first. He wasn’t thrilled with the time but accepted the result and focused on the state meet. Williams and his coach, Molly McLoughlin, decided that he wouldn’t swim the 50-yard freestyle at states to focus on the butterfly.
I drove to Boston University to cover the state meet, but, really, I was there to watch one race. As a competitive endeavor featuring multiple possible victors, the event functionally ended as soon as Williams broke out off the first wall. The rest of the field may as well have swam through syrup. By the time he hit the second wall at the 50-yard mark, Williams was only racing Hagberg.
Every member of the crowd stood for the final 25 yards, one eye on Williams and the other on the clock.
He touched the wall in 49.03 seconds to raucous ovation and the public address announcer yelling “it’s a new state record for Johnny Williams, who will attend the University of Massachusetts.”
Williams grabbed the backstroke starting handles with his right arm and raised a two-fingered rock and roll gesture with his left hand, pointing at his coach and teammates the whole time.
It was 60 degrees in Boston that day.
I still got chills.
Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com.