The Master Coach has blown His whistle, and called His daughter Joy Cushman out of the pool. But what an epic swim it has been.
At 97, Joy was well prepared, and spiritually ready to begin the next great swim of her tireless soul. She passed away at St Luke's Hospital after surgery to repair a broken leg, in the early hours of Sept. 22. She left this world displaying the same courage she once had as a Park Place girl during the Great Depression, playing football with admiring, scrabble-hardened boys. It was a final victorious exit after an impressive display of gameness and grace.
Joy Nell Cushman, just Aunt Joy to a special half-dozen Cushman nephews, (she called the “boys,” but this group included one niece) was better known as “Coach” to hundreds of Houston synchronized swimmers. She was born in Houston on July 22, 1924, the middle child between two scrappy brothers. Her swimmers would never have guessed her origins, or imagined the obstacles she had overcome to become one of the most respected persons involved in competitive swimming, worldwide.
Joy grew up in suburban Houston when families had chickens and donkeys in their yards, and kids played all day in the woods and caught armadillos and snakes and toads... and everybody gathered at the “sandlot” and played baseball or football. It was a boy's heaven. And Joy loved this hearty, sport-filled world and she excelled at the sandlot. So much so that her older brother confessed later that she was quite agile and strong, and could out-pass and out-kick and out-run and even out-fight any boy in the neighborhood. Strong and feisty himself, her older brother Ralph had been saved from a pounding more than once when she stepped in to even the odds, and finish what he had started. ***********************************************************************
Joy may have been a girl, but she had the heart of a lion. But that heart finally succumbed after leg surgery, the second such ordeal in the past few years. It was ironic that it would be her legs which gave her the most trouble in her old age. It had been her legs which propelled her to legendary status in the sports world.
Determined to reroute her inclinations, her mother had challenged her with swimming, one of her own areas of achievement, and a more “fitting” sport for a Southern lady. Joy could already out-swim her brothers and her parents, and swimming competition would be far more rewarding than bruising the boys on the sandlot. The Cushman family made regular weekend retreats to the sands of Galveston Island where they owned a beach house, and that was where Joy matched her will against her equal- the currents of the Gulf of Mexico.
Joy learned and loved coastal sports like fishing, surfing and water-skiing. Soon she was trying a wonderful sport then called “water ballet,” at the Golfcrest Country Club. In 1939, water ballet, later known as synchronized swimming, was an obscure combination of dance, performing art, swimming, and extreme human endurance.
A handful of girls performed in a pool wearing rubber skull-caps and nose-clips, as they gracefully, rhythmically swam into aquatic formations without the ability to breathe half of the time, interpreting music which blared from a screaming P.A. system, but which they could not hear most of the time. It was next to impossible, and it was just the kind of sport that fit Joy's inherent tenacity and courage.
Meanwhile she developed her leadership skills as the drum major for the Milby High School Band. Grades came easy, and during her studies at the University of Texas, in 1946 Joy won the state championship at the Texas AAU finals, sweeping the Synchro Solo, Duet and Team competitions. Joy Cushman had found the love of her life.
When Texas oilman Glenn McCarthy unveiled the Shamrock Hilton in1949, Joy found her way to serious competition as a member of the Shamrock “Corkettes.” After realizing her dream, making the most prestigious “Synchro” team in Houston, she became disgusted and forsook it all. It was exhausting, and frustrating, even maddening, and just too hard. She could never please her coach, and she would never make it as a “Corkette.” Her parents let her vent, knowing that Joy was no quitter. They knew the pattern... all anyone or anything had to do was to make her mad, and it was toast. As her brother later observed, she had the tenacity of a pit bull, “...Joy went back the next day, and the next... and she has been regularly going back for the past half-Century.”
Her timing could not have been more fortuitous. Actor/athletes Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller were creating a sensation at movie theaters all across the country, making all forms of water sports fashionable, and drawing particular attention to synchronized swimming.
Not long after, Joy was performing in front of thousands of spectators at the new, Olympic-sized pool at the gala opening of the “Shamrock,” where many Texas elites and Hollywood celebrities watched her transformation into a world-class athlete. Soon she was coaching the Corkettes, a position she cherished for 30 years. By following her first love, Joy found herself pioneering a popular women's competitive sport. As president of the National Synchronized Swimming Federation, she doggedly and deftly helped to negotiate the acceptance of Synchronized Swimming at the Pan-Am Games, and eventually as an official Olympic Sport.
Joy amassed a staggering record as an athlete, coach, Olympic judge and chaperon, serving the sport for seventy years, and she has been recognized in numerous sport halls of fame.
To name them all would require doubling the size of this article. The plaques and awards she was given would fill up a trunk. And all while she worked full-time for Shell Oil, crunching numbers and helping to keep the petroleum industry flowing smoothly. Joy planned her vacations around her swimming events, and Shell gladly assisted when necessary, thus supporting the Olympic program, and sending one of their most respected ambassadors all over the world. That unique partnership lasted for 40 years.
Joy ultimately served as an official at six Olympic Games and eleven Pan-Am Games. She had traveled to over 58 different countries when she quit counting. And all for the love of the sport. And she had taught workshops and consulted with other countries in their formation of Synchro programs in Mexico, Japan, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Austria, and all over South America... The sport, the athletes, were her family, the loves of her life.
When asked why she never married, she simply replied, “I'm married to what I'm doing, and besides, no man would be willing to share me with my first love.” That was Joy's special brand of wisdom, and several men's loss, but the sports world's great gain.
The young woman who wanted to quit almost before her life's legacy had begun, left a footprint on worldwide swimming and women's sports that few can match. That's because in her day it was about passion, not personal gain; patriotic sacrifice for a better world. Joy always said, the way to judge one's life, “ It's not how much you made, it's how much you gave.”
If true love is measured in time invested, Joy gave plenty. Not just to her family, to whom she was devoted, but to her swimmers. She had a way of being wherever and whenever it mattered the most. Joy always provided our whole family with a beach house retreat, to spend time together and catch and eat seafood, but mostly for us to stay connected as a family.
She loved to gather us kids in the mornings and serve us “breakfast on the beach,” allowing the adults to sleep, and making gnats in your Fruit Loops a childhood memory. Well, we assumed that she loved it, but either way she did it.
Joy made the best stuffed flounder. And cheese grits. And homemade mayonnaise. She was always there each Christmas, at the Christmas tree, indulging her “boys,” (actually five nephews and one niece) with super-duper presents that made Santa shrug.
And she was always there to coach her swim teams to perfection and many championships, and there when the American Olympic Committee called upon her many times to serve the Games and our magnificent American Olympians. And so she was there to comfort her swimmers when the Games were violated with terrorism and carnage in Munich... and there to reassure the parents who were far away, and there to bring them home safely. When she finally got too old to attend the Olympics, you could be sure she was there in front of her television watching and rooting for them.
Love is about being there... and being there when it counts. Life was about relationships; And for Joy it was about showing young people their human potential, through hard work and perseverance. Now Joy Cushman joins a pantheon of great American women, who have blazed a weathered trail of women's achievement, paved with sacrifice, and marked with excellence, in the face of great odds.
Joy lived, served, competed, and died with a spirit that was indefatigable. Nobody uses that word anymore, but that was what she had. A tireless spirit. When she wore out her body, she just put another one on. And we are told that it is far superior... She was our general, and we are going to miss her at the command of the Cushman family, but we know she will greet her latest promotion with pluck, and adapt... swimmingly.
This obit is submitted by her “boys,” (yes, the female one was an outstanding synchronized swimmer) all of whom she simultaneously spoiled and yet personally supervised their introduction to the water, and the mastery of it. This eulogy is obviously insufficient, but one way we had to notify Joy Cushman's gigantic adopted family, gathered over 75 years, especially her swimmers, all over the world, of her passing.
We wish to extend our condolences to them, who like us, have lost an inspiring, irreplaceable icon in our lives.
