To face his fears, a father dives into the deep end

The tall, tattooed black man standing before me in his swimming pool has no patience for excuses. Our bodies, he says, are remarkably light. Our lungs are like life jackets. He lies back. Sure enough, he floats.

"Your turn," he says.

I hesitate. The hair stands on the back of my neck. Trying to keep calm, I lie back — but the next few seconds feel like forever. Water washes over my shoulders.

My muscles tighten, my arms feel like logs and my legs meekly flutter. My face drops beneath the surface and warm, salty water streams down my mouth, which is locked open in hard effort. I twist toward the bottom.

Conrad Cooper, water still dripping from his ever-present hoop earring, neither laughs nor frowns. He and his six students — five women and me, all in our 30s and 40s — are in the shallow end of his pool in South Los Angeles. It's a Monday evening, the first of five straight nights of lessons.

He is known as the Swim Whisperer. And he takes all comers.

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Swimming suffers from a lack of diversity. A recent study showed that roughly 70% of African American and 60% of Latino children have little or no swimming ability, numbers reflecting their parents' lack of skill.

But Cooper's kidney-shaped saltwater pool — lined by bamboo and palm trees — is typically full of diversity: blacks and Latinos from the Crenshaw area, devout Jews from Mid-City, and Asian families from the San Fernando Valley. Famous actors and musicians bring their kids here. So do plumbers.

He mainly teaches kids, but offers night classes for adults, especially hard cases like me. He tries to get you comfortable in water and adept enough at basics like treading water and the crawl stroke to enjoy it.

I paid $200 for my lessons. I wanted them because of my son, Ashe, who will soon be 2. I hope to help him learn to swim next summer. I certainly don't want to pass along my fears.

It's silly to be afraid of water, right? Right.

"Don't worry," Cooper says, watching me wring my hands. "By Friday, you're going to be feeling a whole lot better about this. You're actually going to enjoy yourself."

In college, I was an athlete. At 45, I'm still in good shape — but none of that matters now because, try as I might to mask it, I'm as scared as I've ever been.

I try again to float.

Cooper holds me up with a steady hand.

"I can do this," I say.

He lets go.

I sink.

Teach me to swim? Can't be done.

Cooper asks us why we're afraid.

As kids, Toni, Cathy and Alicia were pushed into swimming pools and barely made it out. Angela was dangled precariously from a pier before being pulled safely back.

"What about you, Kurt?"

At 5, I was taking lessons at a community pool near our home in Seattle. I was the only black kid. Usually, that sort of thing didn't bother me, but there was something about it happening at a swimming pool, something I can't explain, that set me on edge and filled me with doubt. After my second or third lesson, I refused to go back.

The next summer, my baby-sitter decided it would be fun to teach me. At a lake, he grabbed my arm, walked me into the water, lifted me and hurled me through the air. I'll never forget the ringing, resounding splash, and how I spun beneath the cold surface and into the gushing murkiness. I knew I was going to die. The baby-sitter had to rescue me.

That day, I swore I would never swim. As the years passed, I made a joke of it. "I must have drowned in a past life" or, "Black folks, well, we just don't swim." I was masking my fear with weak humor and old myths.

Cooper says my experiences are common.

About 10 people die from unintentional drowning in the United States every day, with African Americans, particularly kids, most at risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The drowning rate for black children aged 5 to 14 is almost triple that of white children of the same age.

"A lot of minorities just don't have easy access to pools like mine, or these kinds of lessons," Cooper says, reasons also cited by the CDC. "They don't see a lot of black instructors. There aren't enough role models. That doesn't help, because not knowing how to really swim — the results can be tragic."

He needs only to think of his wife, Londa Parks, to know that. When she was growing up in the 1950s, her 8-year-old brother fell into a Michigan river. Unable to swim, he was swept away and drowned.

"Having fun and being joyful is the emphasis in our pool," Cooper says. "But we also know in a personal way that being in the water can be a matter of life and death."

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Cooper and Parks moved into their home in View Park in 1994. Until then, he'd been a salesman for United Parcel Service and the Famous Amos cookie company. The new home had a pool, and Cooper loved to swim. Informal lessons for neighborhood kids soon morphed into a full-time business, called Swim to Me.