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Diving Into an Unlikely Sport
Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday , October 5, 2000 ; Page B01
The game combines the roughhousing of rugby with the puck-skimming smoothness of shuffleboard. And it's all played at the bottom of the pool. The air, of course, is at the top of the pool--four to eight feet above the playing field. Therein lies the challenge of underwater hockey. As Tom Treakle, the founder of the Washington region's first team, likes to say: "The only thing between you and scoring . . . is the need to breathe." Every Sunday and Wednesday night, at pools in Severna Park and Rockville, about 15 devotees show up to play 60 minutes of the strangest-looking, most physically grueling game most of them have ever encountered. "Ninety percent of people think this is pretty weird," admits Pat Harris, who helped start an underwater hockey team in Charleston, S.C. "But it's no weirder than trying to throw a round ball through a rim 10 feet in the air. Underwater hockey is as stupid as any other sport." In fact, the unusual sport has taken hold around the world in places as diverse as Australia, South Africa and Serbia. Among the local players are scientists, architects, ship designers, biologists and computer programmers. One is a former synchronized swimmer. Several are scuba divers. They come from all over the region--from Fairfax and Georgetown, from Annapolis and Chesapeake Beach. One guy regularly drives down from Pennsylvania for the bizarre pleasure of dipping up and down in the water, flicking a foot-long stick at a three-pound, lead-coated puck and trying to push it across the floor of the pool toward the goal. These are fervid aficionados who classify "normal sports" as boring. They concede that, as viewed from the surface, "the game looks like a shark feeding frenzy," although they also bemoan the lousy jokes they regularly hear: "Underwater hockey! Is that like underwater basket weaving? Is that like NASCAR golf? Is that like hackysack volleyball?" Ha, ha, ha, says David Sun, a 29-year-old computer guru who lives in Potomac and works in Falls Church. Those violently splashing fins and the desperate gasping through snorkels just prove that "this is the stuff the X-Games are made out of. If this were a better spectator sport, we might have a chance of being on ESPN!" The weirdest truth of the game, though, is that despite the churn on top of the pool, "it's really peaceful" under the water, says player Elin Westrick, 26, an architect who lives and works in the District. In fact, if you peer more closely, you'll notice the rippling grace of players who have learned to shiver their bodies like sea creatures. "There's a whole world under there that no one can see," Westrick says. "This is the only sport I've played where no one is shouting." No one shouts, because shouting uses up valuable air. Indeed, the sheer act of moving hockey into the pool also, strangely, moves it into the realm of Zen. Kendall Banks is one America's premier underwater hockey athletes. He has an astonishing lung capacity--honed by swimming laps without taking breaths and by free-diving for abalone off the Monterey and North Sonoma coasts of California--and he has played underwater hockey since he was 19. He is now 43 and plays in San Jose. He advises players to "control everything you can control. Every muscle you're not using, you have to relax, so you don't use up oxygen. A lot of actions--like gritting your teeth--are just wasting air." He adds: "I'm not saying this game isn't played intensely. But there's a balance between getting fired up and staying relaxed." It's one more paradox in an already paradoxical sport. As Treakle once said: "You have to slow your heartbeat down, and you have to slow your breathing down. It's like yoga." Except that it's hockey. The other odd twist to the sport--a twist that rankles Sun and Treakle--is that here in the nation's capital, an area overflowing with creative and overachieving personalities, underwater hockey is still in the fledgling stage. Recently at the Severna Park pool, Sun tried to lure some students from a scuba class into a game, which officially calls for six players per team. "Hey!" he said. "None of you guys wants to play underwater hockey with us, do you?" No one looked at him. "C'mon!" he continued. "You're already wet." Still no response. "It's not as hard as it sounds." He waited expectantly for another minute, then sighed and said quietly, "See what we have to confront?" Treakle dreams of someday attracting legions of underwater hockey players to the Washington region for a tournament, but for now, that's just a hope. Yet smaller cities such as Gainesville, Fla., and Charleston have programs so famous that their annual tournaments attract participants from across the country. In fact, the Charleston team's co-founders are planning their sixth annual Veterans Day tournament. Charleston, though, came equipped with one advantage other cities haven't enjoyed. The team's co-founders, Pat and Lynn Harris, grew up in South Africa, where every public school has one or two swimming pools, and everyone plays underwater hockey, they say. For the couple, establishing a way to play underwater sports has been nonnegotiable. Both are such extreme water lovers that they came to the United States on a 36-foot sailboat and endured three months of the rocky, enormous swells in the South Atlantic seas. "Americans are generally unfamiliar with non-mainstream sports," Pat Harris said. Underwater hockey is, in fact, much better established around the world. In the small Australian state of Tasmania, he added, "more than 30 clubs play. In America, there are only 30 clubs." Last summer, an exchange student from Belgrade showed up at Denver's underwater hockey practices and told the team "that during the war, they didn't go to high school, but they always got together to play underwater hockey," said the Denver team's co-founder, Agnes Debrunner. "Once you get hooked," Debrunner added, "you're addicted." The trick is getting people hooked.
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