It may be hard to believe, but black jelly beans played a role in Guelph Marlin Aquatic Club members getting into the Guelph Sports Hall of Fame.
Kevin Auger, the club’s first Olympian, was inducted into the hall last year. His coach and club co-founder Dave Clutchey is to officially get his spot in the hall next month.
When the club was originally formed in 1968, it used to hold practices exclusively at Centennial Pool inside Centennial CVI where Clutchey was a teacher and head of the geography department. One of the favourite parts of the practices was the jelly bean relays.
“The jelly bean relays were, no matter how many kids were at the practice and we had maybe 40 kids and we just had six lanes, but we would put every kid on a relay team,” Clutchey said. “So sometimes the relay teams would be seven or eight kids on a relay team and we tried to make the teams as even as possible. And I'll tell you, those kids would swim like they were in the Olympics just to win those jelly beans. And the winners of the relay would get a little package of jelly beans.
“Kevin Auger was a 10-year-old at the time and he was swimming in it and his team won one of the relays and won the package of jelly beans. After the race, he came up to me and said, ‘Sir, I’ve got no black jelly beans in my package.’ I said, ‘Kevin, you will get a black jelly bean in your package next time you win a race. There’ll be black jelly beans.’ I did not tell him all the black jelly beans were gone because I took them. I couldn't tell Kevin, 10-year-old kid, almost with tears in his eyes, I couldn't tell him that I took all the black jelly beans. So the next time we had the jelly bean relays, I made sure the winners got black jelly beans. But I took all the green ones.”
Clutchey, now 96, is almost embarrassed to be going in the hall and wants others to share in the honour with him.
“I don't think it's about me at all,” he said. “It's about the kids. It's about what the Marlins have accomplished long after I was gone. I was there for 10 years and we had a lot of success, but I wish somehow the Marlins could be honoured by putting the whole group there somehow. But the club will get maybe some recognition or some respect or something more and I'm satisfied with that. But I don't think it's about me.
“My wife (Beth), really she deserves a lot of credit because she would help do the work,” Clutchey said. “And she brought a bunch of kids down from GCVI (where she taught). She deserves a lot of credit and I appreciate that, but we worked together and then Dale Walters came along and he helped a lot.”
The Clutcheys came to Guelph from Trinidad and Tobago where they were both teaching, including classes at the University of West Indies.
“I was an educational advisor,” Clutchey said. “I did most of the work with curriculum development and that sort of thing. We were there for two years and that's when my children were swimming. They were swimming for the national age group team and that's why I got my entrance in swimming. I knew nothing about swimming, but I learned a lot from watching the coaches down there.”
They came to Guelph following their time in the Caribbean and their children continued swimming.
“My children were swimming at the YMCA at the time and they had a good coach there, but (the YMCA) wasn’t interested in competitive swimming,” Clutchey said. “And that's a natural thing. They were interested more in recreational swimming. They competed with other YMCAs, but they were not at a very high level. I thought my children needed more than that.”
That was the impetus for beginning the Marlins. And his son became the first Marlin to qualify for a national championship meet.
When the Marlins started, most of their swimmers were either Centennial CVI or GCVI students, but slowly it expanded to include athletes from Guelph’s other schools.
As the club’s first coach, Clutchey wasn’t paid, except for $10 a week to cover the cost of the jelly beans, and he was happy with that.
“It didn’t matter,” he said. “I had a full-time job and my wife was teaching then. We didn't need money. It wasn't a money issue.”
The Clutcheys also didn’t stress winning although the Marlins were in competitive swimming.
“You know, we like to win, but it didn't matter to Beth and I where a kid placed,” Clutchey said. “If a kid came last in his or her heat and the kid bettered his or her
personal record, that was a plus. That was a thrilling thing, that type of thing. And I always liked the relay races.”
They did put a little more importance in the relay races than the individual races because more swimmers could compete.
“It could give more kids a chance to win,” he said.
One thing that was required from the swimmers at practices was silence.
“I don't think you could do it anymore, but whatever, there was no noise in the pool. Everything was by signals,” he said, then gave examples of the signals which could be used in a game of charades to describe each swimming stroke. “If I wanted them to do 100-lap freestyle, then I just did this. And then I just count down, and then start – and with no noise. Everything was all quiet in the pool. Everything was done by, just because if you let kids yell, they're not going to hear anything. I like the kids because they were so good. They were cooperative and they listened. I guess I just liked everything about it.”
For Clutchey, it was seeing the swimmers improve.
“That's why we kept times, we kept records,” he said. “I’d go up to them and put my arm around them. It was always within the context of everybody else around and never individually. But if you put your arm around again and say, ‘Well done, you've really done well.’ And then to see the shine in the eyes.”
Clutchey is to be inducted into the hall at the annual Guelph Sports Celebrity Dinner May 15 at the Italian Canadian Club along with baseball’s Paul Ante, basketball’s Danielle Everitt-Sinclair and figure skating’s Pat te Boekhorst. Everitt-Sinclair will be going into the athlete category while the other three will be in the builder category.
