Beneath the Surface

by Phelps, Michael; Cazeneuve, Brian; Costas, Bob

  It was a huge commitment for a number of reasons. First of all, that kind of dedication meant that I would have to start gradually sacrificing my time playing other sports in order to focus on swimming. That would be rough. I loved other sports, and I had the bruises and trophies to prove it.

  In fifth grade, I won a school contest called the vortex throw. The vortex was actually a small football with bells and a tail. It was shaped so you could really heave the thing a long way. I threw the ball farther than anyone in the grade, and I felt like I was on top of the world. It felt like the ball sailed about a mile. Maybe a block. Okay, maybe from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. But it felt like a mile.

  I had a huge trophy in my room for being named best player in home run derby. The derby’s “fence” was a series of cones about 20 feet beyond the infield. I played catcher and always wore number 13. I used to love watching major league catchers throw their mask off and take off after pop-ups. It just looked cool. I remember one day when a player on the other team hit a pop-up just behind me. I grabbed the mask, ripped it off my head, flung it over near the on-deck circle and took off after the ball. I missed it. What’s worse, when I threw the mask away, I also tossed the helmet that was underneath it and broke the helmet. It wasn’t a play for the highlight reels, but it made me feel like I was in the majors. I strategically put my trophy near the entrance to my bedroom and didn’t mind if my friends happened to pass through and see it.

  At the time of that meeting I had also just started playing midfield in the Towson Rec. lacrosse league and I loved running up and down the field. I scored once in a while, but other players on the team were better than I was. The part I loved, even at age 11, was the hitting. It was unreal. I was a tall, skinny kid, so I often got the worst of it. But I remember one day when a kid was chasing after the ball with his head down. I stepped into his path and he just ran into me and fell over. I loved being in the center of the action. I remember my mom driving me to a lacrosse game and asking: “Do you have a cup in case you have to play goalie?” All goalies were required to wear cups, and my mom had reminded me twice before we left that morning to bring mine because the kids sometimes took turns playing goal. I didn’t like having to stand there and wait for the action to come to me, so I sort of forgot the cup, accidentally, on purpose. “Michael, what if you have to play goalie?”

  “Mom, I’m not going to play goalie. That’s why I forgot my cup.”

  I didn’t take Ritalin on Saturdays because I had so many outlets for energy release. I’d go from a lacrosse game to a baseball game to swim practice. That was a blast. I played three sports with three different sets of rules and goals. If that didn’t make me tired, I’d usually come home, eat and shoot baskets with Matt. We played one-on-one, of course, but we also played a game called Fifty in which you’d try to make a foul shot for ten points and then subsequent shots for five points each. You could keep shooting until you missed, and the first one to 50 would win the game. It was our version of H-O-R-S-E.

  The balance of sports was a saving grace for a mother’s son and it would be hard to disrupt that balance. As easily as I tended to lose my temper, what if I got so fed up with swimming that I decided to quit? At least the way things were now, I had multiple outlets for my restless energy, and if I was angry about something that happened on the baseball diamond, I always had the lacrosse field to look forward to. But if my parents needed a reason to think twice about having one of their children focus so intensely on swimming, they only needed to think about what happened to Whitney.

  5

  A SISTER’S BRAVE FIGHT

  If you look at our family photos, you’ll notice something interesting about the first baby pictures taken of my sisters and me: Hilary has both of her eyes open, Whitney has both of her eyes closed and I have one eye open and one eye closed. I’m not sure what that means, but many people think I split the difference between my sisters, that my personality is a cross between Hilary and Whitney. Both of my sisters had great careers in the pool, where their favorite stroke, like mine, was the butterfly, but I gained a lot from each of them well beyond their enjoyment of swimming that helped me as I got older.

  Hilary is very nurturing and modest, and she has a strong sense of right and wrong. My parents always told us to be honest, no matter what the consequences. One time when we were having a catch, Hilary was helping me get a ball that had rolled right under the center of my mom’s car. She had just started to drive, so when it rolled underneath, she started to move the car. The door wasn’t completely closed, so it banged against the garage as she opened it. The nick on the side of the car was barely noticeable, but Hilary apologized as if she had rolled over the house. She called my mom from the kitchen and then called my dad at work to tell them what she had done and how sorry she was. She didn’t get in trouble for it and she didn’t need a scolding from our parents that she wasn’t already giving herself. That’s Hilary.

  Eventually, she swam mostly to have fun, but still set three school records at the University of Richmond, where she went to college. Over the last few years, Hilary and I have become really close. She is an easy person to joke around with and have fun with.

  Whitney was one of my best pals growing up and we had a lot of fun together doing things like shooting baskets and slinging balls against a bounce-back lacrosse net. Every morning, she’d come back from swim practice with the unenviable task of waking me up. Don’t let the hyperactivity fool you. At 7 a.m., I was a zombie, barely emerging from my coma. After my mom would leave to go to her teaching job in Harford County, Whitney would always fix me an egg sandwich and since she knew I ate everything, she would throw almost anything on that sandwich, from cinnamon to peppers, and I wouldn’t notice, because I’d smother the bread in heaps of mayonnaise. Afterward, Whitney would pack my lunch and we’d sit in the kitchen and watch the cartoon Bobby’s World together until it was time for the bus to pick me up for school. She always watched the clock and made sure to walk me outside in time to catch that bus, before her boyfriend, Victor, arrived to pick her up and take her to high school.

  Whitney often refused to compromise, just as my dad did. We were visiting my dad’s mother in western Maryland one day, when my sisters got into an argument. Hilary pushed Whitney because of something nobody can quite remember and Whitney headed back downstairs to tell my dad about it. “So, get her back,” he told her. That was Whitney’s green light. The next thing we heard was a loud squeal. Then Hilary came downstairs sporting one less tooth. It wasn’t as though Whitney and Hilary were enemies. Even though Hilary was the older one, Whitney once scared away a bratty girl in Hilary’s middle school class by telling her to “leave my sister alone.”

  Whitney didn’t take no for an answer and she applied that zeal to her swimming. She was named outstanding swimmer in the state of Maryland from 1990 to 1993. In ’94, she was 13 when she qualified for her first world team by placing second in the 200 fly at spring nationals. She went to Worlds in Rome four months later as the U.S. team’s only 14-year-old and finished ninth there. I remember her coming back from Europe with free watches, tales of travel, and an optimism about the future.

  It’s amazing for me to think that Whitney first resisted swimming when she was six. She cried about it as much as I did, and her coaches had to bribe her with a Snickers bar to get her to stay in the water. But once she started improving, they couldn’t get her out, and she never complained about anything. If a coach told her to do ten of something, she’d do 12; if he told her to be someplace by noon, she would be waiting for him at 11:30. She didn’t really hang out much with kids from school, because it wasn’t her scene and she was pretty mature for her age. She and Victor would usually rent movies or she would do things with us or with my dad. The rules were different for her, though. I went rollerblading around the house with Whitney, wearing whatever I wanted and going wherever my legs would take me. Whitney dressed up in kneepads, elbow pads, and a helmet and wasn’t allowed to skate p
ast the driveway to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt. None of that seemed to bother her. She didn’t see her lifestyle as a sacrifice, because she enjoyed swimming so much. She also heard the buzz around swim circles: Whitney Phelps will be the next star of USA Swimming. The gold medals are a matter of time.

  Unfortunately, two things were standing in Whitney’s way. First, when she was nine or ten, she began to have problems with a sore back. They were minor at first, but they would recur more and more frequently. In early 1995, Murray Stephens, who was also Whitney’s coach at the club, placed a training device called a monofin on Whitney’s feet and had her swim with it. The idea was to add resistance to the stroke in the water and, therefore, make you stroke harder in order to get from here to there. The device didn’t cause the problem, but for the first time Whitney felt a serious strain in her back after practice was over; only she didn’t tell Murray about it. In 1995, she went to the Pan-Pacific meet in Atlanta, where she won a bronze medal, representing the U.S. in the 200 fly. But Whitney also left the pool in pain that day. Every time she had to do a flip turn, the motion would cause the nerves to tug at her back. Whitney wasn’t one to speak up about pain, but she really felt the effects. Her arms and legs would sometimes go numb when she bent over.

  Whitney was doing training sets that I never had to do. If that extra lap was going to take an extra hundredth off her time, she’d plow through it, trying to gain an advantage. She wanted to be the fittest in order to be the best. There was another way to accomplish that, she figured: by eating less. If I’m skinny and small, she thought, it will make me faster. If I drop fat, it will make me faster. The spiral began innocently enough, when she started skipping between-meal snacks and treats like ice cream and donuts. Then she began eating less at meals. It happened so slowly, people around her didn’t realize it. Even she didn’t realize it. Susan Teeter, one of the U.S. team officials, was already getting worried before the Pan Pacific meet and mentioned to my mom that she noticed Whitney had really gotten thin. My mom confronted Whitney about it periodically, but each time, she downplayed it, made light of it or simply denied that there was a problem. Of course, I had no idea. If Whitney and I sat together on the couch in front of a movie and a box of Oreos, I might offer her one of my cookies, but if she declined, I’d be glad to finish the carton by myself while she sat and watched me. I didn’t think anything of it.

  Over the next few months, Whitney did not train well at all. She was losing energy and turning blue after long sessions in the water because she had no body fat and low glycogen supplies an active body needs. She aggravated her back injury and sometimes couldn’t finish practice, yet she became good at hiding the warning signs by staying under water until her color came back and trying to shake off the back pain as if it were a scratch.

  At home, food was still an issue. On the advice of Whitney’s nutritionist, my mom insisted that Whitney keep a calendar of what she ate during the day. She would also try to sneak calories into Whitney’s dinner by putting extra butter on potatoes or whatever she could think of. My mom also made it a point to buy as many healthy snacks as possible, deliberately leaving some out on the kitchen tables in case Whitney should walk by.

  Whitney got worse before she got better. She made increasingly frequent trips to the bathroom to purge herself of her most recent meals. My mom would go in minutes after she left the bathroom to see if Whitney had purged her food, but she was good at cleaning up the telltale signs. She denied what she was losing from her body to my mom and exaggerated what she was putting into her body to her nutritionist. If she had a problem, she would handle it herself, the way big girls were supposed to handle problems, but she didn’t think it was an unmanageable situation.

  Against this backdrop, Whitney somehow made it to the ’96 Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. She came in with the fastest time of all the swimmers in the 200 fly, 2:11.04, and was favored to make the Olympic team that summer. I knew nothing about Whitney’s health problems or about my mom’s concern about what would happen to Whitney after the Trials were done. To me, the Trials were an opportunity to see swimmers I had watched on TV or read about in swim magazines and a chance to get autographs. When I wasn’t watching races, I waited by the door that led from the stands downstairs to the pool. I took a cap off my head and collected signatures from Beth Botsford, Whitney Metzler and Jenny Thompson. “Michael,” my mom said, “why don’t you let Whitney be the first one to autograph your hat?”

  “Mom, some people already signed it.”

  “Well, let her sign the center.”

  Whitney qualified for the finals of the 200 fly and finished sixth. It was a great result given her condition, but I remember Hilary and my mom being in tears after the race. Why is everyone so sad, I thought to myself? We’ve been to other events before where things have gone well and events where things have gone badly, but nobody cried. I remember wanting to say something to cheer up my mom, but I didn’t know what to say. Somebody either tell me what I’m supposed to say or come over and say it themselves. As we walked into a waiting area outside the stands, Eric Wunderlich, the breaststroker who used to work with Bob, stopped by. “Whitney’s going to be okay,” he said. “You know how tough she is.”

  At a competition five months after the Trials, Whitney finished second in a time that would have allowed her to win the trials, even though she was having trouble stretching and bending over. Whitney realized she would have to stop swimming for a while to take care of her back. She confided in people that her pain was more than had let on and she was diagnosed with two bulging disks and a stress fracture that affected both her back and neck. Her support system circled around her and also helped her improve her eating habits, even if it wasn’t something we discussed at the dinner table. It wasn’t an easy thing for Whitney to welcome, because as she saw it, she didn’t want to be a burden on people by sharing her problems. Those are common traits among people with eating disorders.

  So after all that Whitney had to overcome, here was Bob telling the family that another Phelps might be good enough to make a run at the Olympics.

  6

  A BIG STEP

  I especially enjoyed it when my dad worked as a swim official at my meets, because it allowed us to stay close. When I was behind the blocks, he’d ask what time I was shooting for. If I didn’t reach my goal time, I could always count on him to say, “Oh, so close. You’ll get it next time.” Whenever he said that, I always figured he knew what he was talking about and it gave me a lot of confidence. Since he was at the starting end of the block, there wasn’t much chance I’d get disqualified, even if I dove in a week early and threw fishnets in the other seven lanes.

  For a while our relationship was pretty good. Dad taught me the importance of a firm handshake and had me practice it on him so I didn’t greet somebody with a fist full of mush. I also learned about good and bad ways to handle autographs while I was with him at Baltimore Orioles baseball games. I remember one afternoon when I saw an Orioles pitcher standing over by the railing, near third base, talking to a friend of his. “I’m going to get his autograph,” I told my dad. “Michael, he’s talking to someone,” Dad said. “If you interrupt him now, it would be rude. Just stand near them and wait until they’re finished. Then you can ask him for his autograph, and I’m sure he’ll give it to you.” It didn’t quite work that way. As soon as the pitcher was finished talking, I spoke up, but he waved me off, because he didn’t feel like signing. My dad had been sitting in the background watching all this, but he shot up to the railing and just about undressed the pitcher in front of everyone.

  “Now why are you so special that you can’t sign one autograph for this boy? He was waiting for you for ten minutes. I know you saw him. He was the only one waiting and he was very polite. Do you really think you’d be playing baseball in Camden Yards if you didn’t have kids looking up to you like that?”

  The pitcher never did come back to sign anything, but he did sort of crawl away.

&nb
sp; As a kid, I didn’t understand why an athlete would behave that way. I understood that the players sometimes needed to prepare for games, so it never phased me if a player said, “Sorry, I can’t. I have to go take batting practice.” But this player was simply rude. He didn’t acknowledge us. Before that, I thought all players were nice guys. I thought for some reason that you had to be an especially good person in order to be a great athlete, and that being an especially good person meant that you treated other people well. The pitcher’s attitude was a shock to the system.

  I try to accommodate everyone who asks for an autograph. Until 2004, that’s been pretty easy to do. But at times when I can’t because I have to catch a plane or I have Bob screaming at me to get in the pool, I try to be polite about it. I try to apologize and, if I know I’ll be available later, I’ll tell people when practice is over and where I’ll be. I remember how I felt after the exchange with the pitcher and it kind of blows me away when I think of how I’m in a position to make or break a kid’s day based on how I respond to him for a few seconds. Fortunately, I also had a good example to draw from.

  My dad worked security detail at a number of functions and often met prominent people from the area during his assignments. At different times, he worked on the security team for President Reagan and the Pope. While working at one of the local hotels, he struck up a friendship with Ben McDonald and Chris Hoiles, two Oriole players who were very good guys. Through his connection with them, he was able to get me into the clubhouse one day to meet the players, and my dad had already prepped them about the trophy in my room from my home run derby days. “You don’t know those guys,” I told him. “Michael, yes, I do,” he said, “and you’re going to meet them.” I saw McDonald, one of Baltimore’s top pitchers, first. “This must be Michael,” McDonald said. I must have had the goofiest grin on my face. “I understand you’re a tremendous baseball player.” Now my grin was as big as the ballpark. “I wish I could hit like you, but I’m just a pitcher.” Okay, bigger than the ballpark. It wasn’t just that this was Ben McDonald, an Orioles pitcher, taking time to scribble his name or pose for a picture because I knew something about him; he actually knew something about me. So maybe I really was a pretty good player. Way to go, Dad.