I was glad to help the ocean novice, but then I learnt her secret

She turned up one day out of nowhere. A slip of a lass, oozing anxiety from every hole in her wetsuit. A near-death experience had left her scared of the ocean, she said. But she was one of those people set on hunting down their fears. Could she swim with us, she asked.

Our swim group has more mental afflictions than a Trump rally. We didn’t need another. But my wife is a kind soul and said she’d chaperone the newcomer into the deep and back. Just stick with me, my wife assured her, and you’ll be OK.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

After the swim, the debutante was high on her own bravery and survival. To have gone out into that world where the monsters in her head lurked, and to have come back alive, was sheer thrill. She became a regular, and it did us all good to see her grow braver and more confident.

Up to a point. It’s simultaneously invigorating and traumatic for a mentor to witness their wry mentee become a manta ray, to blithely surpass them without a backward glance. The newcomer, we’ll call her Sal, got better, faster, calmer and became eel-like. We couldn’t keep up with her. We’d swim out into the ocean and find her at the horizon, waiting, floating, smiling, with the heart rate of a wintering weed-head.

At home, we stared at ourselves in full-length mirrors. What had gone so wrong with us? How had we slowed? Why did we wallow in this aquatic novice’s wake?

A long time later, I found out. Eavesdropping is an essential skill for a writer. And last week I overheard a conversation Sal was having behind the surf club. It turns out she’s been getting lessons on the sly. A household name has been whispering of bilateral breathing in her ear.

If this doesn’t seem underhanded to you, then you have never swum to the point of heart-burst, and break, while trying, and failing, to keep up with a woman to whom you routinely donated offhand advice.

“Keep your head down, Sal.” “Lengthen your stroke.” She never once let on she was the pet disciple of a 1970s super fish.

Secret coaching, secret lessons – there’s always someone working away behind the scenes to screw you. Many of the people you know are being covertly schooled in ways to be better than you at whatever it is you pride yourself on. I don’t call it cheating. I don’t. But it’s a form of cloaked elitism, a sinister arms race that gainsays our culture of natural, big-hearted amateurism – and it’s definitely un-Australian.

This dark game has been played on me before. Rod and I played tennis against Arty and Steve weekly for 20 years. Arty and Steve became like Somme survivors: mute, haunted, unable to tell of the horror. Beers after the match were wordless affairs. Our contempt for their tennis grew so profound that one day Rod and I turned up after a three-hour Chinese lunch. We admitted we were drunk and told them we didn’t think they could beat us drunk, sober or crammed with Peking duck. And they couldn’t. Our game style thrives on poultry and wine. We beat them while belching clouds of Hoisin.

But after the Peking duck massacre, their tennis began to slowly, mysteriously improve. They were having lessons with Peter McNamara on the quiet. Sneaking away at lunchtime and shelling out big bucks to a Supermac. And while tennis gave that man many days when he must have believed nothing was impossible – it also served up Arty and Steve, two ungainly hellhounds who Mr Bean could have aced while serving with a vibrator. Coaching has its limits, and McNamara had found his. We thrashed them even with a Wimbledon champ in their corner. The will to compete seemed to desert them after the Supermac debacle. It was as if some killjoy had told them Viagra was a placebo. They were irreversibly deflated.

Covert coaching, secret lessons, my mentee becoming a manta. Everywhere people are covertly, treacherously, improving themselves to do you in. Except me. Because anyone who was ever hired to coach me quit early when they realised I have an ineluctable predisposition to disbelieve 85 per cent of everything anybody tells me. It’s tough on a coach sharing hard-won knowledge with someone who already knows everything.

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