EVERETT — It’s been 30 years since Steve Tallman last swam a competitive swimming stroke, but his legacy as one of the region’s top all-time swimmers has hardly diminished with time.
On Sunday, the 52-year-old Tallman, who lives in Everett, will be one of four former swimmers and one ex-coach inducted into the Pacific Northwest Swimming Hall of Fame. The event will be at the King County Aquatics Center in Federal Way.
Tallman and the others will be joining a select circle of past and present Northwest swimming greats, including a host of onetime Olympians and several Olympic medalists. The latter group includes Mary Wayte Bradburne, once of Mercer Island; brother and sister Rick and Lynn Collela of Seattle; Kaye Hall Greff, originally from Tacoma and today from Marysville; and Megan Quann Jendrick from Puyallup. Jendrick is on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team bound for Beijing.
“It’s really a great honor to be selected,” Tallman said. “It’s very meaningful, and I was really happy when I heard the news. Most of those people, I know them and a lot of them are from my era. So it’s really an honor to be in there with that group of people, and it makes me look back at things and maybe feel even a little bit better about my career.”
For Tallman, the most notable member of the Hall of Fame is his father, the late John Tallman, a longtime swimming coach in the Seattle area, including seven seasons as head coach at the University of Washington in the 1960s.
“It’s especially an honor to be in there with my father,” he said.
Tallman grew up in north Seattle and attended Shorecrest High School through his junior year before the family moved to southern California. He returned to swim two seasons at Washington, but left in 1975 when the school began to de-emphasize its once-powerful men’s program.
He ended up at Arizona and swam two more years. By the time he finished his collegiate career, he was a four-time All-American, was a third-place finisher in the 200-yard butterfly at the 1977 NCAA Championships, and had been ranked in the world’s top 10 in the 200-meter butterfly for six straight years, including as high as fourth.
Tallman was part of U.S. teams to eight international competitions in Australia, Europe and South America. In a memorable trip in 1973, Tallman and the other Americans were in Chile during a violent military coup and had to take refuge in the U.S. Embassy.
He twice competed at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Once as a teenager in 1972, when Mark Spitz was on his way to swimming stardom. And again in 1976, when he missed by about one second of qualifying for the U.S. team in the butterfly. In fact, the Americans were so strong in Tallman’s event that they went 1-2-3 at the Olympics in Montreal, with Mike Bruner, Steve Gregg and Bill Forester taking gold, silver and bronze, and Bruner setting a world record.
As Tallman looks back at his career, his Olympics near-miss is an obvious disappointment.
“I wouldn’t say I was the favorite,” he said, “but I was certainly somebody who had a reasonable shot. I swam against (Bruner, Gregg and Forester) many times and I beat them some of the time, but to be honest they probably beat me more.
“But you get over (the disappointment). And as I look back on it now I can say, ‘Gee, it was a good career.’ I’m happy with the way a lot of things turned out. Would it have been nice to make an Olympic team or a world championship team? Sure, that would have been great. But you need to step back and put all that stuff into perspective. And when I do that, I feel good about my career.”
In those years, only true amateurs were eligible for the Olympics. By the time many athletes graduated from college, as Tallman did in 1978, it was necessary to give up swimming and get on with life. He moved back to the Seattle area, got a job, got married and in time had kids. After his marriage, he and his wife initially settled in Mukilteo. They have lived in their current home between Mukilteo and Everett for the last 17 years.
Tallman, who works for a Seattle healthcare venture-capital firm, rarely swims anymore and never competitively, except for the sprint triathlons he enters from time to time. For fitness, he said, “it’s just easier to go outside your door and run, or hop on your bike at night and ride around.”
Still, Tallman feels fortunate for the lessons and benefits he received from swimming.
“Swimming is quite demanding, and to be good you have to spend a lot of time and effort,” he said. “It’s not the glamour sport that a lot of sports are. In high school, you probably don’t get as many people going to a swim meet as you do to a high school basketball game.
“But when you get up at 5 in the morning (to train) for eight straight years — we had to swim 2½ hours in the morning and 2½ hours at night, and then go to school (in between) — I think it certainly builds a work ethic and discipline. And it obviously keeps you in great shape, which is certainly an attribute.”
For those hours in the water, he said, “you’re going up and down, and staring at the bottom of the pool. You’re not talking to anybody, so you don’t get that social aspect as much as in other sports, although I think you ultimately get that. Because some of my best friends today are the people I swam with.”
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