Friend and Lover – "Reach Out of the Darkness" (1968)

Reach out in the darkness

And you may find a friend

On Father’s Day, the Washington Post ran a story about Annie Lazor, a swimmer who had qualified for the U.S. Olympic team two days earlier – some seven weeks after the death of her father, Dave Lazor, who was only 61.  (You can click here to read his obituary.)

The late Dave Lazor

Lazor was his daughter’s biggest fan.  It’s probably redundant to say that – I don’t know any female athlete whose father isn’t her biggest fan.

My late father was certainly my sister’s biggest fan.  She was a star basketball and softball player – she was inducted into her college’s athletic hall of fame based on her prowess in both sports – but he would have been just as big a fan if she had been just average.

And I was my twin daughters’ biggest fan – I saw hundreds of their soccer and basketball games over the years, and bitterly regretted the few that I did miss.  (It so pissed me off whenever one of their games was cancelled due to rain or snow – I took it as a personal affront when the weather prevented me from seeing them play.)

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From the Post article:

Dave Lazor wasn’t like the other swim dads you may have come across, the ones with their marked-up heat sheets in one hand and a running list of their kid’s best times in the Notes app of their phone. Half the time, he left one of Annie’s meets not even remembering her times or what place she finished. . . .

He was, however, the first to raise his hand to accompany Annie to meets, especially the many in Indianapolis, 4½ hours from his house in Beverly Hills, Michigan. . . .

“He wasn’t a times guy,” Annie Lazor said Saturday. “He was an experience guy.  ‘I get to spend four days with my daughter in one of my favorite cities?   Hell yes, I’m going.’  That’s what it was about for him.  Because he was just so invested in being there with me.  He just didn’t care about how well I swam.  Not that he didn’t care about me having good results.  Of course he cared because I cared.  But that’s not why he was there.”

That’s exactly the way I felt about seeing my daughters’ games.  Of course, I wanted to see them make goals and score baskets.  But mostly I just wanted to see them playing hard and enjoying being part of a team – win or lose.

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Annie Lazor did so badly at the 2016 Olympic trials that she decided to retire from competitive swimming.  But she changed her mind two years later and started training again, hoping to make the U.S. team for the 2020 Olympics – which were delayed a year due to covid-19.

Last Friday, she earned a trip to Tokyo by winning the 200-meter breaststroke finals at the Olympic trials in Omaha.

From the Post:

That would have been the moment when an athlete in Lazor’s position might be expected to dedicate her performance to her late father, to look into a camera and say she wanted to win it for him.  But it was the one thought, she said, that never crossed her mind.

That surprised me.  I was expecting a feel-good Father’s Day story along those lines, but that’s not what I got.  

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Annie Lazor’s mother said she was praying that no one would come up to Annie and tell her to win it for her dad.  “I didn’t want her to come into this meet thinking, ‘I have to do this for my dad,’ ” Annie’s mother told the Post reporter.  “As if swimming well — or even if she swam badly — would be some sort of reflection about how much she loved her dad.”

I guarantee you that if her father had been alive to see her swim last week, he would have been just as proud of her even if she hadn’t qualified.  

Of course, he would have been overjoyed by her victory – as Annie said above, he cared about how well she did because she cared.  

But win or lose, he would have been immensely proud to see his daughter competing at the very highest level of her sport.  

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Annie may not have been swimming for her father, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t swimming for someone other than herself.  

She told the reporter that she wanted to win in part to give her mother and her two brothers something to be happy about after all the sadness that resulted from her father’s death:

“The thing I thought about the most this week was that I just really want to give them something to be happy about,” Annie Lazor said, tears streaming down her face . . . . “They’ve been through so much these last couple months. I just really wanted to give them something to be excited about.  That doesn’t mean it overrides the grief we’re feeling, that it makes everything okay.  It definitely doesn’t.  But I just wanted to do this for them, more than anything.”

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In her post-event news conference, Lazor described eloquently the difficulty of “trying to achieve the greatest thing that's ever happened to me while going through the worst thing that's ever happened to me.”

She was able to do so thanks in part to the help she received from her teammate, Lilly King, who won two gold medals in the breaststroke in the 2016 Olympics.

Lilly King and Annie Lazor celebrate

When Lazor decided to come out of retirement, she asked King if she could join her training group.  To her surprise, King agreed to Lazor's request.

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Lilly,” Lazor said in 2019.  “I was pretty surprised.  I would think if it were my competitor and she had this program that’s working really well for her, why would you want to share that with her other competitors?”

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For the next three years, the two women trained together, becoming fast friends.  

But they also competed against each other in a number of international swimming competitions.

After the death of Dave Lazor, Lilly King told Annie Lazor and her mother that she would do everything she could to help Annie earn a spot on the Olympic team.  

That didn’t include letting up and allowing Annie to beat her in the trials – I want to be perfectly clear about that.  In fact, Lilly King won the 100-meter breaststroke finals last Tuesday, helping to prevent Annie from qualifying for the Olympics in that event.

And she pushed Lazor hard in the 200-meter finals, finishing less than three-quarters of a second behind her friend.  (Lazor’s time was 2:21.o7, while King’s was 2:21.75.)

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I’m sure that Lilly King – like most other U.S. Olympians – doesn’t just want to do well individually, but wants her team to do as well as possible.

But swimming isn’t like soccer or basketball or other team sports, where every team member wins a medal if the team wins.  Most Olympic swimming events are individual events.  Only one woman can win gold in the 200-meter breaststroke in Tokyo. 

By agreeing to allow Lazor to join her training group, King not only helped a potential American teammate, but also someone who could very well take an Olympic medal away from her.   

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Lilly King lived up to her promises to do everything she could to help Annie Lazor make the Olympic team.  

Last Tuesday night, when King won the 100-meter breaststroke finals and Lazor was half a second too slow to earn an opportunity to compete in that event in Tokyo, King “tempered her own celebration out of concern for her friend and teammate,” according to the Post.

And on Friday, when the two swimmers were assigned adjacent lanes for the finals of the 200-meter event – which represented Lazor’s last chance to qualify for the Olympic team – King caught her eye and mouthed two sentences: “I love you,” and “We’ve got this.”

Lazor and King finished one-two in the qualifying finals, so both will get to swim that event – and maybe win a medal – in Tokyo.  But it didn’t have to turn out that way.

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It comes as no surprise to read a story about a father putting his child first – that comes naturally for most fathers.  

But no one expects an athlete to bend over backwards to help one of her primary competitors be successful.  

Lilly King’s unselfishness seems truly remarkable to me.  I usually don’t pay much attention to the Olympics, but I’ll make sure I’m in front of the television when she and Annie Lazor are swimming in Tokyo later this summer.

It would be perfect if King wins gold in the 100-meter event and Lazor finishes first in the 200-meter race.

But even if neither of them wins a medal, they deserve as much respect and applause as any athlete at this year’s Olympics.

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Today’s featured song, “Reach Out of the Darkness,” first appeared on the Billboard “Hot 100” on June 1, 1968 – just a few days before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.  

Maybe that’s why the song was played during an episode of Mad Men that depicted people watching television when news of the Kennedy assassination was breaking.

Click here to listen to “Reach Out of the Darkness.”  (Did you notice that the song title is “Reach Out of the Darkness” but the singer sings “Reach out in the darkness”?)

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: