Alan Ford, 84; broke many freestyle swimming records
NEW YORK - Before Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz, there was Johnny Weissmuller, also known as Hollywood's Tarzan, who in the 1920s set dozens of world marks, including 51 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle, a record that stood for 16 years.
The man who broke it was Alan Ford, a 19-year-old Yale student. He bettered his record three more times in the next 13 months, until he became the first swimmer to break 50 seconds for 100 yards, a barrier that some likened to the four-minute mile. No one else accomplished the feat for another eight years.
Mr. Ford became known as the human fish, an unofficial title he took over from Weissmuller. Mr. Ford was, simply, the fastest swimmer in the world.
He died Nov. 3 at age 84 in Sarasota, Fla., where he lived. The cause was emphysema, his son Robert said, a result of a smoking habit that began in the Navy after Mr. Ford graduated from Yale.
Mr. Ford was an unusual champion. At 5 feet, 9 inches and a muscular 170 pounds, he was far smaller than Weissmuller. Unlike Spitz and Phelps, he was built like a bullet.
Under the tutelage of the legendary Yale coach Bob Kiphuth, who emphasized muscle building and dry-land training - this was before the advent of goggles, when swimmers were restricted to about 90 minutes a day in a chlorine-treated pool - Mr. Ford became a physical specimen.
In a series of photographs in Life magazine, he was shown demonstrating his freestyle stroke and displaying his physique, lying face down on a table in his swim trunks.
"He had the perfect body for swimming," Phil Moriarty, one of Mr. Ford's coaches at Yale, said in a phone interview. "He was slim in the areas where he had to be slim, and he was strong."
Alan Robert Ford was born in what was then the Panama Canal Zone, where his grandfather had moved the family 16 years earlier to work on the canal's construction. When he was 8, Mr. Ford won a swimming medal that was presented by a visiting celebrity, Weissmuller.
At the suggestion of a swimming coach, Mr. Ford's father sent the boy to high school back in the States, at Mercersburg Academy in New Jersey, which had a strong swimming program. And then he spent 2 1/2 years at Yale, graduating with a mechanical engineering degree in a program that had been accelerated because of the war.
The war also caused the cancellation of the 1944 Summer Olympics, costing Mr. Ford his best chance at a gold medal. That year he won national collegiate championships in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle events and the 150 backstroke.
After Mr. Ford left the Navy, he and his wife, Beverly, moved back to New Haven, so that he could train with Kiphuth for the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. He had lost 20 pounds to 25 pounds of muscle since leaving Yale and had not been in a pool in almost three years.
But after six months of training, he made the US Olympic team and won a silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle.
Mr. Ford spent his professional life as an industrial engineer. In the meantime, the swimming records that had made him famous became obscure.
Since the 1950s, world records have been kept only for distances measured in meters, and training methods and rules have evolved to such an extent that racing times have been significantly lowered. Mr. Ford was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1966.
In addition to his wife and his son Robert, of Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Ford leaves a sister, Marilyn Foster of Manhattan; two other sons, Donald of San Francisco, and Randy of Lexington, Ky.; a daughter, Joy Recla of Jacksonville, Fla.; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
"He was very modest for someone who had already been in Life magazine," Beverly Ford said, recalling their first date. "He did not like pomposity."
Which perhaps explains the irritation he always felt about Weissmuller.
"He never wrote me to congratulate me or made an effort to meet me," Mr. Ford said in an interview last year with Bruce Wigo, the chief executive of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. "The only time I spoke to him since meeting him in the Canal Zone when I was a kid was when I was inducted in 1966. When I was introduced, someone let out a loud 'Boo!' It was Weissmuller. Everyone laughed when they saw who it was. But I'm not sure he was joking." 