On the days I worked with Tom, I’d start looking at the clock and calculating split times in my head. Let’s see: If that guy wants to swim X, that means he has to hit the 50-yard mark in Y. My mom realized I was getting serious when I started talking to her about tenths of seconds and negative splitting. If my math teachers had used textbooks that related questions to swim calculations, I might have been ready for calculus.
And have you ever heard of sleepswimming? Mom also remembers me sitting up in my bed and waking the family in the middle of the night by yelling: “One, two, three … go.”
Swimmers did serious work at NBAC, but there was also time for fun. We played a game called Categories in which guys would line up 20 feet from the wall. We would have a topic for the game—ice cream, for instance. We’d go along the wall, with a swimmer in each lane, and if another swimmer named your flavor of ice cream, you’d have to race against him.
Before practice, we also played Wall Ball, which could sometimes be kind of painful. In that game, you threw a tennis ball against the wall as hard as you could. A designated “fielder” then had to catch the ball as it bounced back off the wall. If he couldn’t catch it, he had to run to the wall. If I, the thrower, got to the ball before the fielder reached the wall, then he would be charged with an out. Once a person had three outs, he had to line up against the wall and let everyone else take a shot at him with the tennis ball. I was the youngest one in my group, and I soon discovered that the other kids knew how to throw.
Swimming with older kids made me feel important and accomplished, but that also came with a price. Two of the older guys, Matt McDonough and Justin Freidman, sort of adopted me as the group mascot. They used to pick me up and toss me back and forth over the lane lines. Michael Phelps, Human Volleyball. The pool also had these rubber trash cans that were full of medicine balls. Matt and Justin would take the medicine balls out of the cans, put me in the cans and then put the balls on top of me. Once you passed the point of no return, you were really in trouble. The farther I’d sink into the cans with my arms and legs flailing on the outside, the harder it would be for me to get out. My only hope was to keep my head above the line of the balls, push myself to one side, and then knock over the cans until the balls spilled out and I could extract myself from the bottom. I actually didn’t mind being picked on by Matt, Justin, and the older kids. They pretty much left my ears alone and at least they didn’t ignore me. After a while I just accepted the fact that since I was the youngest kid in the group, I was also the entertainment.
My mom loved the fact that I swam, because she wanted me to drain as much energy out of my body as I possibly could. I was a pool rat, running around, sneaking up behind people, stealing their snacks and goggles, tapping them on the shoulder and running away and just causing general havoc. It seemed I was always getting “benched” at the pool. A benching was a kind of detention. You had to sit by the lifeguard stand and stay silent before you went back to play. It was terrible being benched and having to watch other people have fun. It was only supposed to last 10 or 15 minutes, but I always thought it lasted longer, and it happened to me a lot.
I was also an active spectator. When we went to zone meets, each state would have about 75 to 80 swimmers on a team, but only half of them would swim in the evening finals. The other 40 or so would support the teams with whatever traditions they had. The extras on the Maryland team, known as the Indians, used to paint their faces in the Indian team colors, red, yellow, and black. Some painted their noses; others painted faces. A few of the guys came out of the warm-down pools without shirts and painted their chests. So that’s what I did. Sometimes it took the ink days to rub off. Other times it blended with my shirts in the wash and made life difficult for my mom. But if other swimmers painted their faces, I wanted to do it, too.
I had to be in the middle of everything, especially when I was around my best friends, Matt Townsend and Ayo Osho. When we were in fifth grade, Matt and I were watching a school talent show and I sort of convinced him to join in. “We both know how to juggle pretty well,” I told him. “We’re better than a lot of these kids.” It was pretty embarrassing. Whenever he was juggling okay, I was dropping balls on the stage. When I had them in the air, his collided and bounced away. At some point we started laughing, then we tried to make up for it, so we tried to be funny by throwing the balls at each other. The kids and teachers in the audience weren’t cheering or booing; instead they were just hoping we’d get off the stage.
I used to hang out in the back of the room with Ayo during sixth grade science class. We would turn on the natural gas burners for about five seconds and then watch for our classmates to start crinkling their noses at the strange smell in the distance. Fortunately nothing bad happened, but our hours of mischief also had practical applications. Ayo and I used to practice signing our names in the back of that class, in case we ever had to give someone an autograph. Some days our autographs would be from Ayo and Michael; other days they’d be to Ayo and Michael from Michael Jordan.
I simply couldn’t sit still, because it was difficult for me to focus on one thing at a time. When I was in sixth grade, Dr. Wax diagnosed me with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition that afflicts roughly two million elementary-school children who seem hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive. ADHD can be pretty serious. Some kids who have it will have related learning problems such as dyslexia. Others become antisocial and don’t try to make any friends. Others suffer from severe depression. I was lucky that those things didn’t happen to me, but Dr. Wax wasn’t taking any chances. He prescribed a medication called Ritalin to help me control the condition.
I started taking Ritalin three times a day: in the morning, at lunchtime, and before dinner. The second dose used to bug me. If I didn’t go downstairs to get it either before or after lunch, the nurse would call me out of my next class to remind me to go downstairs. Other kids used to ask me why I would just disappear like that and what my problem was that I had to go to the nurse’s office all the time. At first, my mom didn’t tell me what it was or what it was supposed to do, but I did notice that it calmed me down and made me less jumpy in class. Once I became used to the drill, it wasn’t really a big deal, but the medication didn’t solve everything. I didn’t take it one weekend, when my schedule could be monitored and when we would often have swim meets. It showed.
Sometimes there were so many kids swimming in so many heats at the smaller competitions, the parents needed to figure out a way to make sure that everyone made it to the starting blocks in time for their races. They managed this by placing kickboards in rows of eight along the deck. We were told to stand or sit on top of our boards and move them up one place until the start of the next race. The fastest heat was usually the last, so I was supposed to wait in the back. I could never sit still. I was either running off to the side to play with the other kids, banging my kickboard against the pooldeck or sneaking to the front of the line to jump into someone else’s race. Parents and officials would have to pull me away from the front row of boards, while my board often sat there unoccupied six or seven rows in the back. “No, Michael, you have to wait your turn,” they’d tell me.
Some kids threw fits when things didn’t go well; I’d throw my goggles. With an outfielder’s throwing arm, I could get some pretty good distance from a very energetic windup. To be fair, I had a lot of practice.
One afternoon, a kid from Delaware beat me in the 200-yard freestyle at a meet in Princeton, New Jersey, and I remember feeling the goggle-tossing urge inside me. This could be a really good heave, I thought. I’m really mad about this. Instead, I kept it inside, let it simmer and waited for it to boil over during the remaining races. I had five more events at that meet, won each of them and equaled a national age-group record. It was uncharacteristic of me not to vent publicly, because that’s what I did back then when things didn’t go well, but it was a good lesson that I could find more constructive outlets for my frustrations by keepin
g my mouth shut, getting back in the pool, and kicking everyone’s butt. If I could only remember that all the time.
I had a well-earned reputation as a source of mischief at NBAC, but sometimes when trouble struck, people just naturally assumed I was responsible even if I wasn’t. Our team was swimming at Towson State one day and two of our kids started throwing soap and clothes around the men’s bathroom. I walked in and some of the older kids started picking on me and shouting out my name, as if I had been the instigator. I hadn’t been formally introduced to one of NBAC’s new coaches, but he already knew my history. “Michael Phelps, what did you do?” he asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” I shouted back. “It was them.”
“Well then why were they shouting your name?”
“Ask them.”
“No, Michael, I’m asking you. What did you do?”
I didn’t get into real trouble, but I remember leaving that day saying under my breath, “I’m glad he doesn’t coach my group. It’ll really stink if I ever have to work with him.” At the same time, the coach walked away, mumbling to himself, “Thank goodness, I will never have to coach that kid.”
We were both wrong.
4
COACH BOB
Later that spring the new coach who cornered me at the meet in Towson took over an advanced set of swimmers at the NBAC, made up of 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds and me, an 11-year-old. I didn’t know what to make of Bob Bowman at first, but I remember I couldn’t put anything past him. If he told 20 of us to swim ten laps at different intervals and I only swam nine, he called me on it. If he asked us to show up at the top of the hour and I arrived at 5:01, he’d be at the front door to ask why. If I splashed a teammate when he wasn’t looking, those eyes in the back of Bob’s head would let him know, and he would be sure to let me know that he knew. Bob scared me.
I remember the first set he gave us: a 400 freestyle, a 4x100 stroke, one 400 IM and a 4x100 freestyle. I did each set three times. I remember it because it hurt. Is every set going to be like this? What did I do wrong? In fact, Bob wanted to see how we would react. When Bob watched the final set of four 100 frees, I didn’t realize that I was actually coming back faster at the end of the set—one minute, five seconds for each hundred—than at the beginning. Bob realized it, but he didn’t know yet what to do about it.
For several months, whenever I wanted to talk to Bob, I usually confided first in Erin Lears, Miss Cathy’s daughter, who also swam at Meadowbrook. “Erin, will this be okay? Do you think we can do that in this lane? Erin, let’s ask him together.” I wasn’t the only one he intimidated. Swimmers swiped and hid each other’s backpacks, food, and attire all the time, but when Bob put that rickety plastic chair down by the side of the pool, nobody dared touch it or go near it. Eventually, somebody decided to stick a “Beware of Bob” sign on his door.
I tried to hide my anxiety about Bob by driving him crazy. I was getting in and out of the water, hiding caps and goggles and chasing a girl I liked with a cap full of water. “Aren’t you supposed to be tired?” Bob asked.
“I don’t get tired,” I told him.
Soon enough, Bob would help me find myself through swimming, and I would help him find his niche in swimming.
Bob had gone to Florida State on a swim scholarship and was elected team captain of the Seminoles as a junior. He majored in child psychology at FSU, but tended to overanalyze what he did in the pool. The expression “cut your head off and let your body go to work” would have suited him, but he just couldn’t do it.
Bob made it to Senior Nationals in the 100 fly, but he got frustrated with his times and decided to stop swimming after his junior year at FSU. Bob quit the pool, feeling he hadn’t achieved his goals, yet he knew so much about the sport, it made sense that he would work his way into coaching. He took a job as an assistant with the Area Tallahassee Aquatic Club in early 1986. There, the head coach, Terry Maul, handed him a stack of books, magazines, and pamphlets about motivation, strategy, and coaching technique. It was about two months worth of material, but Bob pulled an all-nighter and had it finished by the next morning. Then he went up to Terry and asked if he had any more material.
Bob later took another position in Cincinnati with a club called the Marlins. He taught a breaststroker there named Michele Shroder who was a very positive person and very influential in Bob’s approach to coaching. There were times when Michele told Bob that she was going to accomplish something, even when Bob doubted her abilities. He learned to feed off her confidence and I think we’ve had days when he’s fed off mine. Michele went on to swim at Texas. Meanwhile, Bob kept moving around. He had a job in Birmingham, Alabama, and two others at the Napa Valley Swim Club, where he coached Eric Wunderlich, one of the country’s top breaststrokers. In all, he had coached in seven places in five states over a nine-year span.
In 1995, Bob’s coaching career was going very well. Eric seemed primed to become his first pupil to make the ’96 Olympic team, but in the meantime, Bob had interviewed for his dream job as head coach of the prestigious Dynamo Swim Club in Atlanta. It was Bob’s second attempt at landing a job there. In 1990, they interviewed him for an assistant coaching position but hired someone else, sensing that he was going to get along better with swimmers than he would with parents and administrators.
But in ’95, word had gotten to Bob that he was the front runner for the Dynamo job. Instead, the club offered the position to someone else, and later that week, Eric told Bob he was switching clubs. That was it, Bob thought. It was time to try another profession. He decided to pursue a degree in farm management at Auburn University so he could eventually run a horse farm for a living. In the meantime, he would take a part-time job as an assistant with the team at Auburn, but only until he earned his degree. That was going to be the end of his coaching career.
Then, with the Atlanta Olympics around the corner, Bob had a phone conversation with Murray Stephens, the head coach at NBAC. Murray had trained Anita Nall, an Olympic breaststroker at age 16 in 1992, and he was training Beth Botsford, who would go on to win the 100-meter backstroke in Atlanta. He respected Bob and wanted a chance to bring him on board.
“Bob, we’re looking for somebody here.”
“Murray, I don’t think this is my future. I just want to go back to school.”
“Okay, but you can go to school somewhere in Baltimore. Just help us out on a part-time basis.”
“Well …”
“How much is Auburn paying you?”
“Ten thousand a year. That’s not bad for a part-time …”
“I’ll pay you thirty-five. When can you start?”
“Um, how is next week?”
By then I was training full time at the Meadowbrook pool, which is really an inclusive environment for all ages, the kind of place where potential Olympians cross paths with beginners all the time and where swim parents always pitch in to help one another. Before you get to the pool after entering the front door, you have to pass a sign on the wall that reads: “Meadowbrook requires the use of swim diapers and/or plastic pants on children who are not toilet trained or marginally trained and prone to accidents.”
Bob and I didn’t seem like a good match at all. I was the goofball; he was the taskmaster. Before I discovered football and hip-hop, I liked baseball and Top-40 hits; Bob liked racehorses and classical music. I did without thinking; he thought before doing. If a ball rolled under a couch in front of me, I would ask: “Why don’t I have a big brother or a small dog to either move the couch or crawl under it?” If a ball rolled under a couch in front of Bob, he would ask: “Does the ball really exist?” We came at everything from different places, which was why we often went at each other.
Early that fall, Bob wanted my technique to mature, so he tried to get me to switch from a two-beat kick to a six-beat kick. I fought him. Sometimes I’d start swimming a lap the way he wanted and then I’d lapse into my old style. Sometimes I did it out of rebellion, other times out of laziness. Bob�
�s antidote was simple: if I couldn’t swim with a six-beat kick, he’d kick me out of practice and send me home. The next day he did the same thing. For a week, Bob kicked me out each day until I got fed up and started doing what I was supposed to. I was furious with him, but when he told me I wasn’t old enough or mature enough to go through a whole day of using a six-beat kick, that was the first day I proved to him that I could.
Bob never really told me how talented he thought I was or that, based on my skills, I would probably soon join the club’s Senior Performance Group, the elite set of potential Olympians at the NBAC. In some respects he didn’t want to deal with me any more than I wanted to deal with him, but he also figured he had nothing to lose, because he knew once I jumped to the next level, he’d never coach me again.
Bob also saw me making improvements, lowering my times in meets and practices. He also knew that I rarely got tired and if someone could just push the right buttons with me, they could also push me pretty far in the right direction, even one day, to the Olympics. In October, Bob called a meeting with my mom and dad to confide some of his projections with them.
“But Bob, he’s only 12.”
“I know, Debbie, but in 2008, for instance, he’ll be 23 and …”
Bob was very frank about my talents, my attitude, my inconsistent focus, and my dueling moments of indifference and determination. He also said that I had a realistic opportunity other kids didn’t have. Bob talked to them about where they were planning to send me to high school, what my hours might look like in a typical day and what sort of sacrifices we would all have to make in order for me to be the best swimmer I could be.
Beneath the Surface Page 5