Aaah-eeee-aaah...umgawa

"What's the highest you ever dived, Johnny?" one boy asked. He wore braces and appeared to be about 10.

"Seventy-six feet off a cliff, in a Jungle Jim movie," Weissmuller replied precisely. "It's harder off a cliff, because you can't see the water so good."

"Then why don't you jump off that high board for us?" The youngster pointed toward the 10-meter board in the adjacent diving pool.

"I'm older now," Weissmuller said. "I'd break my ass."

"That's nice talk," the boy scolded.

After an hour or so Weissmuller climbed out of the pool, and a delivery boy came forward and handed him a small leather pouch. The delivery boy had asked for Weissmuller at the Hall of Fame, and Buck Dawson, back now from Cincinnati, had directed him to the pool. As the crowd of children reappeared, Weissmuller opened the pouch and removed a small object. It was one of his gold medals from the 1928 Olympics, which he had sent out a couple of weeks before to have photographed for the gold-medal exhibit in the massage-chair booth in Chattanooga.

"I think I got this one for the 100 meters," said Weissmuller, displaying the medal in his wet palm. The younger children stood on their tiptoes, the better to see. "I worked four years for this. It takes a lot of hard work to do something like that." He paused, then added dramatically, "Try and duplicate it."

Weissmuller returned the medal to the pouch.

"Umgawa," he said, then he turned and headed for the dressing room to change into his street clothes. He was in a good mood. As he walked, refreshed by his swim, his feet made wet prints on the pavement, which formed a kind of trail between himself and the group of children for whom he had just set a good example.