Remember, the rich are manly men

Funny, why did Gen. JC Christian, patriot, come to mind while I was perusing this amusing tale of how some of the richest men in New York City engage in, um, sport?

Men swimming together in the nude dates back to before the fall of Rome and was commonplace just 50 years ago in New York City and its affluent suburbs. Yet today the practice survives at only a handful of exclusive clubs, where members hold onto it with a fierce devotion. It is for these men a peerless form of bonding, with nostalgic links to youthful activities like group showers at prep school and skinny-dips at summer camp.

"If you meet someone swimming naked in a pool, surely you're going to do much better in an interview with them," said a 24-year-old bond trader who swims as a guest at the Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue.

The Racquet Club (five recommendations needed for admission) was designed by McKim, Meade & White in the style of an Italian palazzo, its height exactly twice the width of Park Avenue to achieve an understated but unmistakable distance from the world below. It is as much of a time capsule of the Gilded Age as can be found in Manhattan, and members observe a strict code of silence about all that takes place behind its thick stone walls.

"It's a matter of the WASP ethic," said one investment banker in declining an interview about the club's swimming practices. "What goes on at the R.T.C. stays at the R.T.C. We don't want the general public having a peek at the last bastion of old-school pleasure, the last oasis."

[...]

On the street below taxis honked, and pedestrians shouted, but all sounds were muffled by the lapping of water. An elderly man with a Churchillian physique walked to my side of the pool. He began to swim his laps, and soon came perilously close to my area of treaded water. "You've got to watch out for a naked collision," warned my host, who detailed the worst injury sufferable in modern nude aquatics. "One guy wasn't looking when he was coming out of a lap and grabbed another guy. He felt something strange, but familiar."

The disturbing possibility of such a man-on-man collision perhaps explains why those who look most disapprovingly on nude swimming are often the wives and girlfriends of its practitioners. When asked what his spouse thought of his morning dip, a private equity investor in his early 30's was brutally honest: "She just laughs and says that it's very, very, very gay."

Beeeyitches! They simply don't understand the need for a Master of the Universe to unwind by letting his Little Hedge Fund Manager float in the warm amniotic bath, growing pleasingly stiff in anticipation of the occasional "accidental" reach around.

The article does not mention if they also wrestle in the manly old way of the Spartans. But it does explain the reason for the ease with which these gentlemen...er...comport themselves.

Inside the University is a soaring lobby of pink marble and gold leaf, from which a small staircase leads down to a changing room of white wood, where spotless windows look out onto the pool. At the far end of the small slip, fresh water flows from the mouth of a brass lion's head, and above it is a ceiling painted in gentle shades of blue, a trompe l'oeil sky.

There could be no more perfect refuge from the big and dirty city. "It's really meant to be a leisure pool," said one member of the University, a real estate investor in his late 20's, who explained why the idea of swimming alongside other men doesn't strike members of these clubs as particularly strange.

"At boarding school everyone showers in gang showers," he said. "It was like a social occasion. It's not a far leap to make a connection between showering at prep school and naked swimming in New York."

Hmmm. Wonder if our lovelorn preznit has heard about this.