By Patrick Moser
Water polo was a relatively new sport when George Freeth arrived in Los Angeles from Honolulu in the summer of 1907. Various cities had attempted to organize a league as early as 1903, but the idea didn't take hold until the fall of 1907. Leslie Henry, a manager at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, organized water polo games against Bimini Baths in January 1908. Scrimmages continued into February and March, with teams from Redondo and Venice joining play. Once the four teams had a chance to take each other's measure, representatives met in downtown Los Angeles and agreed on by-laws and a schedule of games.
The sport was extremely quick by today's standards: seven-minute halves, with a five-minute break in between. It was also brazenly physical. One paper referred to water polo as "submarine football." At this time players had to touch the goal with the ball in their hand to score—they couldn't throw it into the net—which required goalies to physically block opposing players. The result was often a scrum in front of the net—what the rule book permitted as "indiscriminate tackling"—with players piling on top of one another. The Los Angeles Herald reported, "it is nothing unusual for eleven players to pile on one, and the entire twelve then to go to the bottom."
What happened under that pile often determined the outcome of a game—holds and body blows that punished players who tried to hang onto the ball. "About half the game is played under the surface," The Honolulu Advertiser reported, "and, as the tanks seldom are crystal clear, the referee, unaided by umpires as in other ball games, has small chance to see the tactics used down at the bottom."
Freeth excelled in such conditions. He'd been a football star in Honolulu, where one reporter waxed, tongue-in-cheek: "Talking about football, George is—oh, well, what is the use? Ask any of the boys who played with him. You needn't look for any who played against him—they are all dead." The same paper had reported a week earlier, "Danger or no danger he goes after a thing to win." Freeth possessed the strength and agility, not to mention endurance and determination, that soon earned him the reputation as the best water polo player on the Pacific coast. Not only could he easily dive thirty or forty feet in the ocean, but he could hold his breath for minutes at a time. He would have been a formidable opponent in any aquatic scrap.
The first water polo season attracted much fanfare around Los Angeles. Newspapers reported large groups of "rooters" following their teams to away-games on specially-ordered trolleys. The matches, held on Friday nights over a six-week period, drew between five hundred and two thousand spectators at each contest. This was a time, of course, before radio and television. Such live sporting events were a welcome diversion for the average citizen, who worked nine hours a day, six days a week. Sports, and "physical culture" in general (the period term that covered exercise, dieting, and competition), also attracted the region's movers and shakers, thus knitting together all levels of society. The Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Freeth himself would later work, was founded in 1880 and patronized over the years by a Who's Who of industrialists, oil tycoons, politicians, railroad magnates, and Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin, who actually lived at the facility. If it was one thing an entire region could get behind during an era of boosterism, it was the local sports team. Admission to the water polo games was ten cents, used to help pay the traveling expenses of the visiting team, which was allowed under amateur rules. Although Freeth had been refused amateur status as a swimmer, he was allowed to play water polo because the games, while being held under amateur rules, were not sanctioned by the AAU.
Freeth was captain of the team and the goalie. He trained seven young men how to play the sport and guided them to the first championship of the Southern California Water Polo League. They tied each of their opponents in the first three games, then beat them all in the back-half of the season. Their championship came down to the final night where they beat the second-place team, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, two to zero. Freeth scored both goals to ensure the win. One of his signature moves was to leave the goal and swim across the tank to score just before halftime or in the final minute of the game. His team's victory was even more impressive since Redondo hadn't been expected to compete well against the more established clubs.
Another one of Freeth's winning moves had been to recruit Louis Hammel to the Redondo team for the second half of the season. Hammel had worked with Freeth as a Volunteer Life Saver in Venice but wasn't playing on the Venice water polo team. Hammel's presence sparked the offense, and Redondo won the next three games, outscoring their opponents six to zero. Henry Huntington's Redondo and Los Angeles Railway awarded the team the "gold bar trophy" at the end of the season. C. H. Burnett, president of the Redondo Chamber of Commerce, presented individual trophies to the players at a celebration at Huntington's pavilion. Freeth had put Redondo on the sporting map, boosting the pride and sense of identity of this new and growing community.
Beyond the pleasure of competition, Freeth understood the great benefits of water polo for training lifeguards and keeping them in shape. The same techniques that players used to break holds and evade tackles helped them fend off the desperate clutches of drowning swimmers. Experts of the time recommended violent measures for lifeguards to protect themselves—"A vicious bite on the arm or a sudden twist of the thumb or wrist may help you." In the most drastic cases, a lifeguard should knock the swimmer out: "Should you have the slightest doubt of your ability to handle a struggling man (or woman, for the matter of that) stop their struggling first by a determined blow of your fist on the jaw, just below the ear . . . and then carry them in."
One of Freeth's great legacies in California was the young generation of lifeguards that he trained so that they wouldn't doubt their abilities in the water. Tom Witt, who started competing in diving events when he was seven years old, described his training in Redondo: "I can remember Freeth's instructions and encouraging words. Freeth taught all us kids confidence, style and fearlessness of the water." Freeth's expertise not only saved many lives but he advanced lifeguarding techniques beyond the practice of injuring people in order to save them.
This is an excerpt from the book Surf and Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture. The book will be available this summer, click here for more.
