How a group of Maui kids swam their way to the top

Julie Checkoway’s “The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory” made The New York Times best-seller list of sports books, but its appeal transcends genres. Checkoway’s in-depth portraits of the swimmers of Puunene plantation Camp 5 and the lofty ambitions their coach, Soichi Sakamoto, seeded in their hardscrabble existence make it as readable as a good novel.

It’s a story that made headlines, not just at the time (it begins in the mid-1930s) but for generations. Sakamoto, who died in 1997, was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame and some of his swimmers became legendary coaches in their own right. The names and events will be familiar to many Hawaii residents but not to a national audience outside the swimming community. Nor has the tale, with its many characters, been collected in one exhaustively researched, detailed volume until now.

The hero is, of course, Sakamoto, an elementary school science teacher and scoutmaster who, in 1932, started a swim program for the children of impoverished sugar plantation workers. The children didn’t have swimsuits, much less a pool to practice in. They swam in irrigation ditches.

The plantation, Checkoway writes, did have a “haole pool; its formal name was the Pu‘unene Club pool, and after the annual meet when they let the camp kids in, the haoles always drained the tank to clean it.” After Sakamoto’s kids won every freestyle event in the 1935 meet, the plantation owners built a public pool.

Sakamoto founded the Three-Year Swim Club in 1937, with the goal of having his swimmers qualify for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Although the games were canceled due to the war, Keo and Bunny Nakama, Halo Hirose, Fujiko Katsutani and others became national and world champion swimmers. Club member Bill Smith won gold in the 1948 London Olympics.

Medalists or not, all the young people benefited from their beloved coach’s work ethic. In Checkoway’s tale, swimming is a metaphor for life.

Checkoway, 52, a Massachusetts native who lives in Utah, spoke with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser by phone before the publication of her book last month.

Question: How did you discover this story?

Answer: Someone called me and said she ran across it, but it sounded more like a legend to her. I began doing Internet searches and found hawaiiswim.org run by Keith Arakaki, a swim coach who swam for Keo Nakama. He had this eclectic collection, some photographs, but more than anything little thumbnail sketches and articles that he had gathered over the years and republished. It was not complete, but so evocative.

Q: What challenges did you face at the outset?

A: I had to try to sort out, as an outsider, whether it was going to be possible to have access to enough material and to be granted the privilege of access to the swimmers and their stories. There’s an ethical and moral imperative in writing about a community that’s not your own.

Q: Were you familiar with Lee Tonouchi’s play, “Three Year Swim Club,” which was staged in Honolulu in 2010 and Los Angeles in 2012?

A: When I started, Lee had not produced his play; he and I didn’t connect until his play was put on in Honolulu. Lee’s play was very fictionalized, the characters were very much types. He said he was working very loosely to do it in a very legendary way. I (wanted) to tell the nitty-gritty detail of what they did every day, and the races.

Q: How did you contact the swimmers?

A: In 2008 I got in touch with Keith (Arakaki) by phone. He opened the door to a number of people, who then (connected me) to some of the original swimmers: Blossom Young Tyau, Yoshio Shibuya, Mitzi Higuchi, Charlie Oda and Bill Smith, who died in 2013.

Q: By then they were in their 90s. How did you approach them?

A: I got in touch first by phone. I asked them, how do you feel about my coming? I told them I was pre-interviewing but still not sure I was doing a book.

Q: And how were they when you met in person?

A: They were so kind to me, had me to their homes, to dinners; I hung out for hours in people’s backyards.

Q: You eventually asked for their permission?

A: I really did. It was something that became a natural extension of the conversation. But there was a moment when I said, “Why haven’t you written your stories, and are you going to? Because it’s not my story to tell.”

And they said, “Oh, my story isn’t important, I’m not so important, it really wasn’t a big deal.” (They were) incredibly self-effacing in a way that is distinctly Hawaiian, Japanese-American and swimmerlike.

Q: You also met some of their children.

A: Sono Hirose made the book possible in terms of being able to write about her father, Halo, honestly, because he was a complex figure. He believed that Sakamoto played favorites and that he wasn’t a favorite. When he himself became a coach he made it a point to be fair. (But) Fujiko Katsutani’s son grew up never knowing about her swim career. And the daughter of Bunny Nakama, Keo’s brother, told me, “I went to Keo’s funeral and I learned my father was a swimmer.”

Q: Why wouldn’t they tell their families?

A: I think there are so many different reasons. The swimmers didn’t achieve what they thought they should achieve. And Coach, which is what they all call Soichi Sakamoto, taught them to be super humble. And what I’ve heard them say is, the story is Coach’s story. He never sat down to write it, he was too busy.

Q: Why did they open up to you?

A: They decided that to tell the story of the team was OK because it would be Coach’s story, honoring him, and so long as it was about Soichi Sakamoto, it was OK.

Q: What were some of the things they told you about him?

A: That he never spoke about himself. Bill Smith lived with Coach for three years in high school. Coach would say, “The fish are running well up in the mountains.” So Bill knew he fished. Bill Woolsey, an Olympic swimmer in the 1950s, talked about growing up in the slums of Waikiki and being saved by Coach.

Soichi was married to Mary Kalaaupa Po‘o pa‘a, a Native Hawaiian; the swimmers, who called her “Missus,” told me that Coach was the most Hawaiian Japanese they had ever met. Ivanelle Hoe, another champion swimmer, would go picking seaweed with Mary. (After Mary died), she would visit Coach by jumping over the wall of his house in McCully — he was hard of hearing.

Q: How did you manage to write so convincingly in the point of view of Sakamoto?

A: There are vast interview transcripts that Chris Conybeare made with Sakamoto and all the swimmers for his 1984 documentary, “Coach.”

Q: How else did the swimmers contribute?

A: They helped with fact checking. I promised each person with whom I spent time, “I’m going to make mistakes. I ask you to correct me, but even in the final book (some things will be) wrong, so I also ask for your forgiveness.”