David Covey

Stamm graduated from Crawford High School, starred on the Indiana University swim team. After competing in the Olympics and several NCAA championships, he returned here in 1974.

The 1972 photograph shows three members of the U.S.Olympic swim team shortly after they received gold medals for the medley relay. Seated on the shoulders of his teammates is Mark Spitz, eyes cast downward, arms upraised in triumph, grinning happily but with restraint (this was the seventh of his record seven Olympic gold medals).

Tom Bruce, Mark Spitz, Mike Stamm, 1972 Olympics

Supporting Spitz's right leg is Tom Bruce, his short blond hair still wet but combed neatly to one side. Bruce's right arm is raised and he is staring off into the crowd with a wide grin, as if he sees people he knows and is sharing his victory with them. For some reason the fourth member of the relay team, Jerry Heidenreich, has been all but cut out of this picture; a portion of his sleeve is visible beyond Bruce’s upraised arm.

He was a sophomore in college when he competed in the Olympics, and any commercial endorsements would have left him ineligible for his remaining two years of college swimming.

David Covey

Supporting Spitz’s left leg is Mike Stamm. He is closest to the camera and half-turned towards it, and the Olympic rings on the front of his warm-up suit can be seen clearly. Neither of his arms is raised, but his mouth is open in an obvious expression of joy. Of the three swimmers in the picture, he is the only one whose hair is still uncombed after the race. Barely visible against his chest, behind Spitz’s leg (which is draped over Stamm’s shoulder), is the curving edge of his gold medal. In the race Stamm led off in the backstroke, Bruce swam second in the breast stroke. Spitz went third in the butterfly, and Heidenreich finished up in freestyle. There is no way to tell from the photograph, but the winning time set a world record.

Mike with grandfather, 1959

Stamm looks much the same today as he did in 1972. His face has lost its boyishness, but he has the same broad features and wide, winning smile. Eight years ago he graduated from San Diego’s Crawford High School and went on to star on the Indiana University swim team. After competing in the Olympics and several NCAA championships, he returned here in 1974.

Mike, far left, 1962

For years he worked at an assortment of jobs; then a few weeks ago, culminating what he describes as a long-dormant desire, he opened an art gallery in the penthouse suite of the Village Hotel of La Jolla. The Mike Stamm Gallery, as it is known, features the works of local artists; Stamm is its buyer, host, salesman, and bookkeeper, sleeping in a small bedroom off the main display room. He sells on a consignment basis, making a modest commission.

Mike, center, World Record Backstroke, 1970

Though he won two silver medals in addition to the gold at Munich in 1972, Stamm was never approached to do commercial endorsements the way some Olympic athletes are. And even if he had been asked, he would not have accepted the offers. He was a sophomore in college when he competed in the Olympics, and any commercial endorsements would have left him ineligible for his remaining two years of college swimming.

In the trials for the 1976 Olympics he finished a distant tenth in the 100-yard backstroke.

David Covey

The academic degree and the team were more important, he decided; he finished up his junior and senior years, then dropped out of swimming entirely. Two years later he approached the 1976 Olympic trials in Los Angeles with an eye to reestablishing his reputation. If financial offers came up. he was in a position to take advantage of them. But he hadn't trained hard enough, and he finished a distant tenth in the 100-yard backstroke. No one asked him to endorse their product; no one approached him at all. After eighteen years of developing his skills to the level of a world champion, Mike Stamm’s career was suddenly over. He was twenty-four years old.

Mike Stamm: “Right now my main interest is to make this gallery one of the best in Southern California."

David Covey

Stamm and I sit on the porch of the Village Hotel’s penthouse suite, overlooking La Jolla Cove. It is a gray, windy day, with a hint of rain in the air. As we talk about his career Stamm tries to avoid dramatizing it in any way; when he senses that the conversation is getting too sensitive to suit him, he steers it in some other direction with a quick joke or a shrug. From time to time he sips from a can of beer.

“I was born in San Pedro,” he begins. ‘‘My name was Kostich then. I never knew my real father; he took off before I was born.

‘‘My mother worked as a secretary in those days. She was pretty busy most of the time, so I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house. But I didn’t feel neglected; I had a good time in both environments.

‘‘When I was five years old my mother felt that it’d be a good idea if I learned how to swim. So I went to a swim school and I really enjoyed it. My grandparents had a pool in their back yard, and I spent so much time in it that they thought I should get involved with one of the city’s swim programs. I signed up with a small AAU club and went to the workouts, and I really enjoyed that, too.”

He entered his first competition when he was six, and within a few years was dominating his age group, particularly in the backstroke. His grandparents attended most of his competitions, sometimes driving him as far as San Diego or Las Vegas for AAU regional meets. ‘‘I practiced a lot in my grandparents’ pool, and my grandfather used to clock me. We got pretty involved; you know, very close. When he died a few years ago it was really quite a shock. ” Stamm pauses, gazing out towards La Jolla Cove. A moment later he continues, “One day when I was eight or nine he told me that someday I'd make the Olympic team. It was something that I never forgot. From then on, at every level, it was always in the back of my mind.” Competitive swimming demanded constant practice, and two-hour daily workouts with weekend meets are not every nine-year-old's ideal. Stamm, however, found that he liked the routine and the discipline. “My parents never really pushed me; I did most of it on my own. I think maybe kids are easier to condition, physically and mentally. You break it down to the competitive spirit and they understand; if they want to win they have to do the work. Still, I didn't learn to push myself until later. When you're young, you reach a certain pain level and you back off. Later on it's more a matter of defining that threshold and then going beyond it.” When he was nine his mother married again, this time Roland Stamm. Mike moved in permanently with the two of them, but kept his old name of Kostich. Six years later he approached his stepfather and asked if he could change his last name to Stamm. Soon after that he was legally adopted by Roland Stamm.

The family lived in Torrance for a couple of years, then in 1963 moved to the new suburb of San Carlos in San Diego. After trying out a few of the local swim clubs Stamm eventually settled on the Coronado-Navy Swim Association, coached by Mike Troy. Troy was a Navy man and had won two gold medals in swimming at the 1960 Olympics. He was an authoritarian who shouted at his pupils and held the longest, hardest swimming workouts in San Diego. ‘‘It was really quite an experience, ” Stamm recalls. “I’d never done such hard workouts in my life. I guess I really liked it, though, because I kept coming back.”

The workouts consisted of three hours of swimming in the morning and two more in the afternoon. The total distance covered every day was about 14,000 meters. “Troy had these aircraft landing tubes, fourteen inches in diameter,” Stamm chuckles. “You blow them up a little, twist them in a figure eight, and put them around your feet. So your feet are kind of, like, shackled. When you swim, the tube floats your feet. You can’t kick and the tube provides drag. The net result is that you strengthen your arms.” He laughs at the memory of it and takes a sip of beer.

Troy’s workouts were a turning point for Stamm. Spending five hours a day at swimming practice, he found he had little time or energy to do anything else on his own. “There were times I thought I was going to die, when I thought I just couldn't swim any faster or any farther. What kept me interested? Well, I still had that thought in the back of my mind that I was going to make the Olympics.”

He continued to swim with the Coronado-Navy Swim Association even after joining the swim team at Crawford High, and for the next three years was the outstanding prep swimmer in the county. At a high school with a traditionally strong swim team, Stamm at one point held every aquatic record except for diving. He set numerous regional records; his marks of fifty-two seconds flat in the 100-yard backstroke and 1:55:5 in the 200-yard individual medley still stand. He was a high school All-American his junior and senior years and won a full scholarship to Indiana University, where he came under the influence of coach James “Doc” Counselman. Stamm credits Mike Troy with teaching him the fine points of backstroking, but under Counselman he refined his technique even more.

In his freshman year at Indiana, Stamm broke the conference records for 100- and 200-yard backstroke and helped his team to its fourth consecutive NCAA championship. “We had an unbelievable team,” he remembers, shaking his head. “We had guys who would break American records, unofficially, at our evening workouts.” One of the standouts was Mark Spitz, who was a junior at Indiana when Stamm was a freshman. “I was pretty intrigued by Spitz,” Stamm says. “I knew he had been a good high school swimmer, so I was interested to see what he was like. As a freshman, though, I only saw him at workouts — he more or less associated with the older swimmers on the team.

“I got to know him a little better after the Olympic trials in 1972. Seven members of our varsity at Indiana made the Olympic team, and we lived and trained at West Point just before leaving for Munich. Mark had qualified for an unusual number of events, and I felt he had the ability to accomplish something at the Olympics that would make him great. At West Point we'd all get together in the evenings and he would sometimes ask us what we thought he could do. He seemed to be asking for moral support, and I gave it to him. But I knew I had my own race to think about, too.”

In terms of energy spent versus speed gained, backstroking is an inefficient exercise. It takes someone with a lanky body and long arms to do it well, and even then the swimmer’s stroke and body movement must be streamlined considerably in order to achieve a reasonable speed in the water. From an early age Stamm found he had the perfect build for a backstroker, but he spent years developing his style into the series of swift, machinelike motions that it eventually became. He can talk at length about how many strokes it took him to cross a fifty-meter pool, the exact part of the stroke at which he would hit the wall and make his turn, and what his kicking and breathing patterns were. When asked what competing in the Olympics was like, though, he clears his throat and says simply, “Well, it was pretty intense.”

At Munich he qualified third in his elimination heat for the 100-meter backstroke, then broke the American record in the semifinals. His stepfather told him later that when he came out for the finals he was pale as a sheet. Like most of the U.S. men’s team, he had shaved his body prior to the race, and the hair on his head was cut short. He hit the first and only turn in the race just behind East Germany’s Roland Matthes and chased him all the way down the final stretch. Matthes beat him by half a body-length, but they both broke the existing world record. The 200-meter was nearly identical: Matthes led the entire race, with Stamm closing in at the finish. Again, both of them broke the previous world record. The medley relay was held the next day and Stamm, leading off in the backstroke, won a gold medal to go with his two silvers.

“I was satisfied with my performance,” he says. “I was disappointed I didn’t win the backstroke, particularly the 200, but I figured I had given it my best. I never really thought about whether I would be famous or be approached to do commercials. We all knew Mark had been approached by Schick, but we didn’t talk about our own possibilities. Anyway, no one ever came up to me and asked me to appear in a picture with their product . . .

“After the Olympics I took a semester off from school. I rented a car in Munich with two of my teammates and went on a tour of Europe. I was extremely relieved that the Olympics were over, and I wanted to enjoy my accomplishment. I felt I deserved at least that much.”

Stamm returned to Indiana University for the 1973 spring semester and picked up his swimming where he had left off. The following year he bettered his own American records in the 100- and 200-yard backstroke, while leading Indiana to its sixth NCAA swimming championship in as many years. As a senior he had an off year, and the team finished second to USC in the NCAA Finals. A few months later he received his degree in biological sciences, then discovered his grades weren’t good enough to get him into a school of dentistry as he had planned.

When Stamm left Indiana in 1974, the next Olympics were just two years away, but he didn’t even want to think about it. “At that point I felt I was done with swimming. I stopped reading results in the newspaper — I just didn’t want to have anything to do with swimming. And it was very enjoyable at first. Suddenly my life wasn’t regimented; I had time to myself. All the pressure was off and I just kicked up my heels.”

The summer following his graduation he worked as aquatics director for the Hilton Head resort in South Carolina. When the job ended he moved back to San Diego and went to work as a cashier in a racquetball club. After a year of that he became a gardener, then spa director for the Cuyamaca Club. “I found that it was hard to direct myself,” he remembers. “Being away from the discipline of swimming seemed unnatural. Suddenly I had choices, and I didn’t know quite what to do.”

In late 1975 Stamm began thinking seriously about the 1976 Olympics. Most of all he wanted to prove himself, but he knew if he did well enough he might be approached for commercial endorsements. He had worked at swimming for eighteen years and felt he deserved to make some money at it. (In many European and Third World countries, Stamm’s achievements in the 1972 Olympics would have led to a lifetime of financial security. In the U.S. he was just another athlete in a sport with virtually no commercial possibilities.) The previous year he had gotten married; now he and his wife went to live with Mike Troy, who was to coach Stamm’s comeback. It was a generous offer from Troy, who had a pool in back of his Santee house. By living there Stamm could save both money and time while he practiced. He worked hard but admits he had the attitude that he was still in good shape and would easily make the team. A few months later the trials were over and he hadn’t even come close.

“I knew right away that that was it; that the trials were my last big meet. I was disappointed, but I realized I failed because I hadn’t trained hard enough. Once I knew that, I resolved to myself that I wouldn’t waste time speculating about what could have been. I had to find a way to merge back into society.”

The sun has set; the evening is growing cool. Stamm and I leave the Village Hotel and walk through the settling darkness to a nearby athletic club. We have in mind playing some racquetball, but it turns out Stamm is not a club member, and I am not, so we are refused entry at first. However, Stamm remains unruffled and congenial and soon the clerk gives in. A few minutes later, when he learns that Stamm was an Olympic swimmer, he becomes downright friendly. “How old are you now?” he asks.

“Twenty-six,” says Stamm.

“You’re still young, then! You could still swim!” the clerk says earnestly.

“Probably I could,” Stamm responds, “if someone would give me $25,000 a year to do it.”

After the ‘76 Olympic trials Stamm returned to San Diego and worked as a waiter and a lifeguard. He separated from his wife, became a loan officer with one mortgage company, then moved on to a second company. He was looking for something he could devote himself to with the same effort he had put into swimming.

He found that it wasn’t easy. And more and more he found himself thinking about art. He had sketched informally on his own for years; he remembered the art classes he had taken at Indiana and the galleries he had seen in Europe with their Picassos and Rembrandts. When he first saw the newly renovated penthouse suite at the Village Hotel, it struck him that it would be a perfect spot for an art gallery. He had met the owner of the hotel, Carl Ludlow, while working at the racquetball club a few years earlier, and now he found Ludlow receptive to the gallery concept. Once the idea looked like a definite possibility, Stamm says, he dropped everything to work on it.

When the Mike Stamm Gallery opened on a Saturday night a few weeks ago, about a hundred people showed up for the celebration. There was a table with cheese, wine, and bread in the middle of the room, and the walls were hung with paintings. One oil of a huge bumblebee in a field of blue stood out, and in a corner window gleamed mosaics of colored glass. Stamm himself stood near the door in a brown velvet coat and tan shirt, greeting nearly everyone as they came in.

“What do you think of the paintings?” he asked me in a spare moment. I told him I thought they were good, and he nodded and looked around the room. “I’m comfortable doing this,” he said. “At first I was worried about how structured I would have to be — opening every day, keeping the books, and so forth. But now I have no apprehensions; I’m going in with the attitude that I'll handle the problems as they , come up. I have a long-term dedication to it.”

“Mike!” called a voice behind us. Stamm tapped my arm, whispered, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and disappeared. When I caught up to him again a half hour later he was carrying a fresh plate of cheese from the kitchen. We found an uncrowded comer of the room and talked briefly about whether he felt any bitterness that Olympic heroes like Spitz and Bruce Jenner had made so much money from their athletic careers.

“Spitz deserved everything he got,” he said firmly. “He accomplished something that no one will ever accomplish again. With me it was a matter of bad timing; my career peaked before I could capitalize on it. Sure, things could’ve been easier for me ... I think I deserved to be compensated for my effort somewhere along the way. But on the other hand, I don't think I should be paid now for something I did six years ago.

“Right now my main interest is to make this gallery one of the best in Southern California. I want to find out how far I can take this thing, what my limits are. It’s something I’m really interested in and by God, I’m going to try and find out what those limits are. ”

He contemplated the wine glass in his hand for a moment, then threw me a sidelong glance with his clear, light-brown eyes. “I could get very corny and say, ‘Life is worth pushing; it’s a matter of living life to its fullest,’ ” he went on. “But that’s what it takes to be a champion. That’s what it takes to be foremost in anything, really. You have to push yourself and find your limit. It’s a good thing to know. It’s a good thing to know.”