Parallel journeys keep Nyeholt and Orr connected
CROWE'S NEST
Nyeholt, paralyzed from the chest down, and Orr, a recovering alcoholic, are the driving forces behind "Swim With Mike," which has profoundly strengthened the already tight bond between them.
Anyone familiar with the charity juggernaut that is "Swim With Mike," the annual USC fund-raiser that provides scholarships for physically challenged former athletes, knows that it was born of friendship and brotherhood.
Ron Orr, a USC athletic administrator and former Trojans swimmer, launched the swim-a-thon in 1981 after former teammate Mike Nyeholt was paralyzed from the chest down in a dirt-bike accident. Both men grew up in San Gabriel. They swam together at San Gabriel High and USC, where they were three-time All-Americans and helped the Trojans win three national championships.
And so Orr, knowing that Nyeholt would need a specially equipped van to help him adapt to his new circumstances, rallied fellow swimmers to churn laps to raise money for his longtime friend.
Less known is that the altruistic Orr was in need of a lift too -- figuratively and literally. He too was at a crisis point.
"When this happened," he says, "I was at a bottom myself."
While Nyeholt lay immobilized after hitting a bump in the desert floor, pitching himself over the handlebars of his dirt bike and landing on the top of his head, Orr was stuck too, fretting over how to tell his mother that he'd been arrested -- again -- for drunk driving. And that his driver's license had been suspended.
He finally was ready to admit it: He had a problem.
"After Mike's accident," Orr says, "it kind of put everything I was going through into perspective because I had a choice and he didn't. I went to visit him in the hospital and I said, 'Mike, I'm an alcoholic and I'm going to check myself into a care unit. I'm not going to be able to drive for three years, so we're going to have to raise money for a van because you're going to have to drive me around.'
"That's how it started and it kept going from there."
In March 1981, two months after Nyeholt's accident, Swim for Mike raised about $58,000, more than twice the cost of a fully equipped van. Nyeholt suggested to Orr that the remainder be used to set up a scholarship fund.
"I thought somebody else would get the rest of the money and that would be that," Nyeholt, a successful money manager at Capital Group, says during an interview at his downtown office. "But God bless that Ron Orr. He takes that statement and we have an ongoing fund-raising event. I don't think either one of us ever thought that this thing would continue on like it has."
