Monday photo feature

It's been at least 20 years since I last saw Albert Mitchum.  But learning he had passed away last week was a stiff gut-punch nevertheless.

By the time I got into whitewater slalom racing in the mid 1990s, Albert's peak racing years were winding down.  But he had a lot to show for it.  He was a regular contender for a spot on the U.S. national team, and he had seen elite-level international competition in some half-dozen World Cup events.

Albert decided to hang up his paddle after the 1996 U.S. Olympic Team trials, but he found he couldn't walk away entirely.  By 1998 he was entering some club races again, and he trained himself back up to compete in the 2000 Olympic trials.

I had known who Albert was earlier in the decade, but it wasn't until this latter period that I really got to know him.  He was very generous with his knowledge of slalom technique, and as a self-coached athlete I appreciated that very much.  He also was quite willing to discuss his skills in home construction; I was only just beginning to dabble in woodworking, and I was eager to learn whatever I could about any kind of building.  So we found plenty of conversation to bond over.

The 2000 trials was Albert's last "serious" slalom race, but for the next few years he continued to show up at events within a reasonable drive of his home in southeast Tennessee.  I usually saw him at the Alabama Cup races on the Locust Fork and Mulberry Fork rivers, and it was there that I had one of my proudest moments as a slalom racer when I managed to beat him in '02 or '03.  Sure, his peak years were long past by then, and he probably wasn't really even training, but hey... the guy had raced in World Cups, and that was something I could only dream of.  He of course accepted the result graciously, because that's the kind of person he was.

Soon enough, we both moved on to other things and our paths no longer crossed.  But I always remembered him as one of the kindest, most genuine people I knew while involved in slalom racing.  Unfortunately, I had entirely lost track of him until last week, when I saw in a social media post that he'd died.  Apparently he'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease some four years ago, and declined rapidly toward the end.  He was 65 years old.

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