Month: August 2024

WOWSA Director Sues Steven Munatones Et Al.

In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Quinn Fitzgerald, director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), alleges that Steven Munatones breached the WOWSA Dissolution Agreement that he and Antonio Arguelles signed last May.

The complaint, which also names Arguelles and Gerry Rodrigues as defendants, alleges that Munatones never intended to follow the terms of the agreement. It further asserts that Munatones only signed so Fitzgerald would consent to the agreement’s stipulations, including a date-specific non-disclosure section that could be the entire reason Munatones wanted Fitzgerald’s signature.

(The complaint is publicly available for free on the San Francisco County Superior Court’s website., but I posted it here for easier access. The document includes The Dissolution Agreement as Exhibit A.)

In particular, the complaint alleges that, once the Dissolution Agreement took effect, Munatones and Rodrigues “orchestrated a scheme” to remove Fitzgerald as the Open Water Swimming Facebook group’s administrator — despite the agreement making Fitzgerald the group’s sole owner.

Munatones and Rodrigues succeeded in removing Fitzgerald and now administer the group.

Details from Open Water Swimming Facebook page.

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You Can Forget Diana Nyad, But Please Don’t Forget Rebecca Morris

Twenty years after journalist Rebecca Morris met Diana Nyad in Gertrude Ederle’s den, an anthology of writing about swimming put Morris and Nyad together once more, giving us a chance to celebrate Morris and expose more of Nyad’s lies.

Author/speechwriter/swimmer Rebecca G. Morris — not to be confused with journalist/editor/true crime writer Rebecca T. Morris or artist Rebecca no-middle-initial Morris — wrote a series of quirky features for the New York Sunday News in the 1970s.

For example, she surprised foodie friends with a meal of camping cuisine in “I freeze-dried my dinner party.” In “The Scuba Cops,” she documented a day she spent with the NYPD’s Underwater Recovery Team as they searched for cars, guns, and bodies.

And in “The Challengers of the Channel,” Morris chronicled a meeting between Diana Nyad and Gertrude Ederle.  (I’ve written previously about Nyad lying to Ederle  in “Challengers.”) The Sunday News published the article on August 1, 1976, five days before the 50th anniversary of Ederle becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel.

In “Challengers of the Channel,” Morris records Nyad lying to Gertrude Ederle about her (Nyad’s) 1974 Lake Ontario crossing. I address this in “GOAT Conquers GLOAT In Battle Of Swimmer Biopic Subjects.”

Nyad would leave for England later that August to try to become the first woman to complete a two-way crossing.

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