28-05-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Is your youth swimming club safe? Bay Area author's latest will make you think
Muckraking is hard work, one would assume, but Irvin Muchnick doesn't seem worn out by almost four decades of that dirty duty.
We have met for coffee a couple times, and the Berkeley-based author and investigative reporter, now 70, has looked peppy and sounded upbeat. All that digging into the slimy, dark corners of sport certainly hasn't made Muchnick wealthy — he still hasn't replaced his old Honda Civic that was stolen four years ago — but it hasn't broken him down or dimmed his spirit.
'For whatever reason, this role suits me,' Muchnick says. 'The payoffs are few and far between, but they're there. I love my work, fortunately.'
His work? Since the late '80s, Muchnick has written a trillion words, give or take, exposing various creeps, pedophiles, enablers, profiteers and other vermin in the world of sport.
That makes Muchnick a hero to me. Some of us keyboard-pounders write the write. Others try to right the wrong, and those folks have my admiration. The least I can do is occasionally buy them a cup of coffee.
Most of Muchnick's work has dealt with abuses and crimes in football, professional wrestling and swimming. He has written six books, tons of magazine and newspaper articles, and reported extensively and relentlessly on his website.
His most recent book is 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Muchnick takes pains to point out that most youth swim coaches are honorable and honest, but, 'If it's Tuesday, a coach somewhere is preying on a young athlete, because that's just the way it is.'
He learned that dirty little secret about swimming by accident, the same way he stumbled into his odd calling in the first place. The beginning: Muchnick grew up in St. Louis, where his uncle, Sam Muchnick, was a wrestling promoter, kind of the godfather of pro wrestling in America. This was before the arrival of cable TV, global advertising and Vince McMahon.
Little Irv got to hang out with the wrestlers. He came to know them as people, not human cartoon characters, and when wrestling blew up into a major culture phenomenon in the mid '80s, Muchnick did some of the very first inside-wrestling journalism, peeking behind the theatrical curtain. In 2007 he published his first book, 'Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.'
He dug hard and found stuff. Like the story behind Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka's girlfriend's 'accidental' death. When the newspaper for whom Muchnick was freelancing got cold feet, he posted the true-crime account on his own blog.
There was no turning back. Muchnick hadn't found his calling; it had found him.
He wrote about Hulk Hogan's steroid issues. He wrote 'Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death.' In that book's third printing, in 2020, Muchnick's new introduction explains how the wrestling phenomenon pushed the rise of Donald Trump, a Vince McMahon crony.
The prevalence of concussions in wrestling led him to dig into the same issue in football, and he wrote, 'Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning.' Muchnick is not a big football fan. Calls it 'a system socially imposed on young men,' and 'a blood sport.'
After Cal football player Ted Agu dropped dead while on a training run in 2014, local mainstream media (my hand is raised) pretty much dropped the ball on the story of Cal's shameful coverup. Muchnick dug in and wrote/reported extensively. He sued Cal under the state Public Records Act and won, uncovering a lot of coverup. Cal ultimately admitted liability for Agu's death and settled with the family.
Digging up dirt, Muchnick found, was hard. From 1994 to 2000, as assistant director of the National Writers Union, he fought for writers' rights. He was the lead respondent in the landmark 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case (Reid Elsevier v. Muchnick) for freelance writers' economic rights. He successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records of a swim coach he was investigating.
Stories kept finding Muchnick. In 2004 his 8-year-old daughter took up swimming, joining the Berkeley Bears club, coached by former Cal swimmer Jesse Stovall. Muchnick loved the scene, happily taking his daughter to predawn practices. He even took some lessons himself.
In 2009, after Stovall had been pushed out of the club over financial improprieties and was coaching masters swimming on the Cal campus, the story came out that the year before, he had sex with an underage club swimmer while chaperoning her at a national meet. Muchnick contributed to an investigative story in the East Bay Express, which did not endear him to the local swim community.
'The biggest danger of the kind of work that I do is that it can be perceived as trolling,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm a troll, I think I'm an investigative reporter. But I haven't been perfect.'
After the swim story, Muchnick was ready to move on, but fate stepped in.
'The story came out, I thought, 'I'm done, I've done my little rabble-rousing thing,' which I'd done in other areas,' Muchnick says. 'The next week (ABC News') '20/20' aired a report (on widespread sexual abuse in amateur swimming), and I realized that what I had found on my team was just a local piece of a national problem.'
That plunged Muchnick into years of investigating horrors in the world of competitive and recreational swimming, culminating in his 2024 book, 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Please read it if you believe your club-swimmer child is protected by the U.S. Center for SafeSport.
Subtle book titles, then, are not Muchnick's thing. He names names, he shines a bright light on a lot of cockroaches, but with a higher purpose.
'My real hope would be to actually change the youth sports system,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm interested in getting all the bad guys, that's not really possible. I'm really interested in our taking a look at the youth sports system we have in this country, which has turned adults into children and children into adults. It's hard, because I'm a sports fan, too, we all love our sports, we just don't want to deal with the sausage factory behind them.'
The swim book, Muchnick says, might have been his 'last rodeo' in muckraking. He's veered off that trail. He's finishing a biography of Rikidozan, a legendary, pioneering Japanese wrestler in the '50s. Typically, he won't make much money off this book. Monetizing his work has never been Muchnick's specialty. He has already spent most of his small advance on translation of research material.
Muchnick, who has four kids, one of whom was adopted from China, says of the book, 'It's my love letter to Japanese and Korean culture.'
All of his writing has been love letters, really. Like wrestlers, it's cleverly disguised.
