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A Gold Medal for Yale
January/February 2006
by Steve Clark '65

Steve Clark '65 lives on a houseboat in Sausalito with his wife, Betsy. He has three grown daughters and is a business attorney for San Francisco’s CSI Capital Management Inc., whose clients are mostly professional athletes from across the country.

When I came back to Yale for my 40th reunion last spring, I made a gift to my alma mater: my 1964 Olympic swimming relay gold medal, one of three I won at the Tokyo Olympics. One motivation was that I hoped to persuade my 91-year-old former Yale swimming coach, Phil Moriarty, to travel to the ceremony from his home in Fort Pierce, Florida, and to honor him with that gift. We have stayed in close touch over the years and actually have become even closer personal friends—sharing vacations, phone calls, e-mails, and many insults and laughs—during the last 15 years. He was instrumental in teaching me how to be a mature, self-reliant swimmer—and both a gracious winner and a gracious loser. I knew that he would be pleased and honored by the donation ceremony.

But I had another agenda. I wanted to present a symbol to the Yale athletic department and to all student-athletes at Yale, reminding them that, even at Yale, successful world- and national-level competition is possible. Obviously, Yale has so many important nonathletic attractions, attributes, and experiences, which properly divert the attention of all students, including athletes. But my gift was intended to symbolize for those few who have the athletic talent and the focus that they can be both contributing Yale students and national or world-class athletes. Recent examples have included Kate O'Neill '03, a distance runner who made the 2004 Olympic team; Heather Daly-Donofrio '91, the former Yale golf coach who is currently on the LPGA tour; Eric Johnson '01, a tight end for the San Francisco 49ers; Emily deRiel '96, a former Yale swimmer and Olympic silver medalist in the pentathlon at Sydney; and Sada Jacobson '06, Yale’s NCAA fencing/sabre champion who earned a bronze medal in the Athens Olympics. There are many other historical examples.

My deepest reason is a little more difficult to articulate. The gift is intended to express my gratitude to Yale University—not to the swimming program and not to the athletic department and not for that marvelous Payne Whitney Gymnasium—but for the entire Yale experience. My four years at Yale provided me with a broad-based experience and outlook on life (and especially an appreciation for diverse people and ideas) that have lasted ever since, and which will continue the rest of my life. What students other than Yalies would perceive an Olympic gold medalist as inferior in some way to a Whiffenpoof or the chair of the Yale Daily News? And at what other school would that gold medalist have come to believe that those comparisons were valid?

In every sense, even though I was a highly motivated and narrowly focused swimmer (especially when I walked in the doors of Payne Whitney), the experience of spending four years with others who pursued excellence in their own sphere of experience deepened my life immeasurably. I learned to question my own opinions, appreciate outside input and differing perspectives, and just be more open to others with different experiences.

Certainly many others at Yale have achieved many more important things than my gold medals. While my Olympic swimming successes are achievements of which I am proud, the medals themselves are only symbols of that long-ago success. Because of my family upbringing before Yale and because of certain athletic and nonathletic values learned at Yale and elsewhere, the Olympic gold medals don’t define me or my character. Luckily I feel that I have achieved a lot of things since Yale that are more important than those gold medals—mostly in smaller and more personal ways than I probably expected at Yale. In significant part due to my four-year Yale experience, I think I will leave this world (when my time comes) a little better than it was when I entered. And since my post-Yale achievements have not necessarily been measured in financial terms, I wanted to give the medal to Yale not for its monetary value—it isn’t real gold—but for its unique meaning to me and the symbolism described above. It’s my partial payback.

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