In the blur that followed, I forget who called whom. I was on the phone with Mom who told me that I should talk to Dad about it if I felt I had something to say. Say? What could I say? I felt as though I was the odd man out, that we were all left out. Whatever Mom may have felt, she was careful not to badmouth Dad behind his back. She told me she’d support me any way I wanted to handle it. For a while I just decided not to speak to him about it. Eventually he said he didn’t want to give me one more thing to think about so close to the Olympics, so it was better to tell me after the Olympics. Whatever. It was done. It was time to move on.
The next day I walked around the Olympic Park with Bob and was amazed at all the people. It was my first chance to sightsee. Bob knew about what had happened with Dad and he spent the day trying to cheer me up. That would have been the day to forget a credential and oversleep practice. I bought a silver charm for my Mom around Sydney Harbour and tried to find an escape. I could deal with swimming my best and not winning a medal, but I was having trouble blocking out what happened the day before.
The final day of swimming was fun, because it was relay day for our medley teams. I love relays, probably because I didn’t get to swim in many of them with NBAC and I loved feeling like a part of a team. I painted my face half red and half blue for the occasion and I had Team USA written across my chest. We won both relays in world-record times and boosted the team medal total to 33 swimming medals, more than a third of what all the U.S. teams combined won in Sydney. Out of the 48 swimmers on our team, 41 came home with at least one medal. I was one of the seven who hadn’t and I was already starting to think about the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
11
ON TOP OF THE WORLD
As planned, I came home early from Sydney, a day after the swimming ended and a week before the closing ceremonies. In Baltimore I was treated to one celebration after another. Mom arranged for a limousine to bring me in from the airport. A group of friends came out to meet me there, and so we went where any other 15-year-old would go in his limo—to 7-Eleven for Slurpees. I was blown away by the novelty of being in that kind of car for the first time. We had some odd looks from people who must have thought we were lost, and one of the guys in the car joked that a real limo would have had ready-made Slurpees in the backs of the seats. I came back to a front yard that was dotted with American flags. It was good to be home, even if I missed out on the razor scooter the athletes received at the end of the Games.
I was ready to go back to school to catch up on organic chemistry, French, English, and geometry at Towson High School. I wanted to get there early on my first day back, but Hilary was awfully slow getting me from the pool to school. She fumbled around with the car keys, went back inside to get something she’d forgotten and suddenly had a coffee craving that could only be cured by a trip to Starbucks that was a little out of our way.
“Hilary, hurry up.”
“Michael, I’m going as fast as I can.”
She wasn’t. It was 8:25 and she still needed to waste 20 minutes to make sure I didn’t arrive before the 8:45 surprise party the school had planned. It worked. I was surprised. As we drove down Cedar Avenue, I could see the banners, television cameras and 1,200 students lining the street. I shot Hilary a look. You sneak.
Our principal, Gwen Grant, greeted me by saying: “The Olympic champion has arrived.” Mr. Brewster passed out some “Fly Michael Fly” T-shirts and buttons he’d distributed before the Games. My girlfriend was there to needle me with the news that her school, Dulaney High, had beaten my Towson team 26-0 in the opening game of the football season. Students asked for my autograph. I signed somebody’s arm. It was overwhelming.
Later, my English teacher Jeff Brotman welcomed me back and asked in jest, “Michael, do you have any excuse for your absences?” The kids in Mr. Brotman’s class had created a satirical contest entitled I Know Him. It was a trivia game in which the girls would have to guess some fact about me from swimming results to favorite foods and music. The girls who knew the answers would then have to tread water for as long as they could and the one left treading would win a date with me. There was no date, and I’m not sure who won.
I was enjoying the spoils of being an Olympian, but there was still one more thing I wanted to do. There was a tradition among swimmers to get tattoos on our hips once we made the Olympic team. Almost everybody got one and I didn’t want to be left out. I told my mom I wanted to do it before we left for our first pre-Olympic training camps in Pasadena, but I didn’t say anything about when. She didn’t raise much of an objection, especially since I told her the rings would be pretty small.
So one day I went to get the tattoo. About halfway through the process, I was talking to the guy painting the rings on me and he told me he had just gotten out of jail. “Oh, really.” I didn’t ask what he had done, but I was pretty aware that I wasn’t going to joke around with him. “Yes, Sir. No, Sir. Thank you, Sir.” I got home that day and I must have had the goofiest smile on my face. My mom gave me the old slow motion, “My-kull, where have you been to-day?” She rolled her eyes and tilted her head toward me as if to say, “Now I know something is up, so you might as well just tell me what it is.” She was fine with the tattoo. I think on a scale of offspring independence, a small, discreet tattoo that stood for something positive and upheld a team tradition was something she could tolerate. Whew.
I actually became the answer to a trivia question on ESPN’s Two-Minute Drill: Who is the youngest male to make an U.S. Olympic swim team in 68 years? Answer: Michael Phelps of Towson.
I threw out the first pitch before an Orioles game at Camden Yards and was introduced to the crowd at a scrimmage of my favorite football team, the Baltimore Ravens, at their training facility in Westminster. The players surprised me with a team jersey and the kids collecting autographs came by with footballs to ask for my signature. “You the new kicker?” one of them asked. I walked around with Ray Lewis, one of the NFL’s best linebackers, and he introduced me to Elvis Grbac, Jonathan Ogden, Jamal Lewis, Peter Boulware, and some of the other players. Some of them joked around with me. “I’ll swim you, boy,” a voice shouted. Ray gave me a Phelps jersey with the number 00 on the back. I was loving it.
Later that month, the Olympic team was invited to the White House. Lenny presented President Clinton with a team jacket. The President gave a speech in which he cited numbers about an increase in overweight teenagers. We also had jackets for Mrs. Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, who was then dating a swimmer in her class at Stanford. We stood for a group picture with the president on the South Lawn and we lined up to shake his hand and pose for individual photos. There were several hundred Olympians present, so the photos were, um, taken in a flash. I remember we had police escorts of 30 vehicles on our way to and from the ceremony. I hung out with Dominique Dawes and Elise Ray, two of the Olympic gymnasts from the area, and invited them to come to one of my meets. The Olympics felt like an extended honeymoon.
The honeymoon ended in the fall, when Bob and I had one of our worst meltdowns. I was still feeling the mixed emotions of everything that happened in Sydney, and I was also going through my most accelerated growth spurt. In a blink, Mom would line me up against the doorway, take out the tape measure and I’d be two inches taller. We were bickering a lot in practice over seemingly little things. One Sunday, Bob came over to the house and we laced into one another. Mom listened for a while, then left, then came back and we were still arguing—about commitment and direction in the pool and attitude out of it. Both of us kicked furniture and threw books on the floor. It was bad.
Bob decided we needed to go for a ride and we headed for his sanctuary. Bob had always wanted to be involved with horses, and if it hadn’t been for me, he might have trained Kentucky Derby and Preakness winners by now. These days he owns several horses by himself and shares ownership with my lawyer, Frank Morgan, in several others. At the time, he was just getting involved in the business at Bonita Farms and he would occasionally
use terminology like “he travels well” to describe his swimmers as well as his animals. “There are two kinds of people,” Bob insists, “those who own horses and those who want to.” I was pouting all the way up to the farm, a place I had never seen before. There were no buildings and no cell phones and you could hear the autumn leaves fall off the trees. If any place was going to calm somebody’s soul, this was it.
Bob asked if I wanted to get on a horse and I told him it was one of the things that really freaked me out. Another, for some reason, is picking up somebody else’s baby, because I’m always afraid I’ll drop it. Bob and I talked for hours and finally walked back into my house after dark, carrying McDonald’s bags full of food. We didn’t solve everything that day, but we understood how much we needed one another in order to succeed.
WR Austin. Bob had been writing that on almost every note he had left for me since the Olympic swim in Sydney. I hadn’t won a medal there and that drove me for the next six months. I was grabbing for a goal. I needed a goal the way a car needs fuel. I desperately wanted to break a world record to make a statement that I had arrived, to validate the work we’d put in. The Nationals that year also served as trials for the World Championships later that summer in Fukuoka, Japan. I was the only 15-year-old guy entered at Nationals that year. In the days leading up to the meet, Bob would email me a different motivational quote each day. It might have been something as simple as “No pain, no gain,” but I looked forward to getting them. Case in point: “The greatest thing in the world is not so much where we stand; it’s where we’re going.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
At each competition it seems there are certain habits I like to fall into for the duration of the meet. When we first arrived in Texas, I started playing the song “Perfect Gentleman” by Wyclef Jean on my CD player. I thought oh, I can get into this. So I played it on my headphones while I was waiting in the ready room before the races. After the song was over, I hit repeat, then repeat again. If something works, why change?
On the first day, I finished third in the 400 IM behind Erik Vendt and Tom Wilkens and missed making the team by three-tenths of a second. Still, our focus had been on that 200-meter butterfly race.
Murray Stephens is a good role model for Bob, because he is as calm before big races as Bob is nervous. I was late getting a rubdown before the start of the 200 fly final. Murray could see that Bob was flustered about something before the start of the race, so he asked Bob what was wrong. “Michael’s behind schedule,” he said. “He’s screwing up the 200 fly. He’s taking too much time getting ready.” Murray nodded, looked at Bob and said to him, “I’m going to go get a Coke. You want one?” That calmed Bob down. If Murray wasn’t worried, he didn’t need to worry either. Ever since that exchange, whenever Bob starts to panic before the start of one my races, he walks away and gets a Coke.
Before I went to the ready room, Bob told me to “stay with Tom Malchow for the first 100 or 150, then kill it coming home and you’ll have a great shot.” I made my surge later than Bob had wanted, trailing Tom by almost a bodylength at the third wall, catching him with 25 meters left, then hitting the overdrive button and hoping for a time that would be faster than the 1:55.18 Tom had swum in Charlotte in 2000 to set the world record.
I looked up and saw 1:54.92 and didn’t quite believe it at first. For a split second I just floated, squinting through my goggles to make sure I saw the numbers right. Then I went spazo. I starting flapping my arms like a bird trying to shake bubble gum off its wings. I was on top of the world, thinking, “nobody has ever done that race faster than you. That’s awesome.” At 15, I became the youngest person ever to hold a world record, breaking the standard set by Ian Thorpe when he lowered the 200 freestyle world record in 1999 at 16 years, 10 months. It was the first swim that had really meant something.
Again Bob had a long walk to the garage. Honestly as much as the world record meant to me, I think it meant even more to him. I had been thinking about this record since the end of the Olympics, seven months earlier. Bob had been thinking about it for 15 years, since I was born. He told me later that after the race, he had another long walk to get the car from the garage and he couldn’t get the smile off his face. He actually had to hide it in his hands as he walked past random people on his way to the car. He had moved around so much trying to find the right fit and this moment was sweet vindication for a lot of uncertainty.
Meanwhile, I called home to tell Mom about the result:
“Michael, did you swim?”
“Yeah.”
“And …”
Before I could say anything, I just started giggling, like a kid in a candy store who is embarrassed by how good he feels. “Mom, I broke a world record.” I could tell my mom was trying to stay calm on the other end, but we were both ready to start dancing on the walls. Make that two kids in a candy store.
Bob and I flew back to Baltimore where there were other sports stories making much bigger headlines. It was the weekend of the Orioles’ season opener and Maryland’s first appearance ever in the Final Four basketball tournament, so I kind of flew under the radar screen. Hilary visited from Florida with her boyfriend and they wanted to take me out to dinner with Mom in the Inner Harbor to celebrate. When we arrived at a Cheesecake Factory, we got hit with a two-and-a-half-hour wait. “If you tell them about the world record …” Hilary suggested. We didn’t. Instead, we left and went to a California Pizza Kitchen where the wait was a lot shorter. Setting a world record doesn’t make you a celebrity, even in your hometown. But there would be time for that later.
The next day, a Japanese television crew visited Meadowbrook to film us there. It was the first time a member of the international press came to visit me and they wanted to talk about the World Championships later that summer. Mom thought this was a huge honor to have people in from overseas, so she invited them over for dinner and served an Asian chicken salad, Baltimore style.
Before the trip to Fukuoka, the swim staff briefed us on some of the things we should be aware of over in Japan, given their cultural traditions. They told us we might be asked to take our shoes off and put on slippers before entering rooms. They also told us we didn’t need to leave tips in restaurants because tipping wasn’t usually done there.
I adjusted pretty well to the new time zone, as I had in Australia, but I was careful not to touch the street food, because I didn’t know what it was. There were soda machines in front of stores, as you would find in the States, but the flavors included things like watermelon and pear. I was rooming with Jamie Rauch, a breaststroker on the U.S. team. We stayed at a great hotel. We had two huge beds and a computer station in the main room. There was even a television in the bathroom and a seat warmer on the toilet. Bob ate sushi for the first time there, but I was a little too timid to try it. On the first day, I walked around an adjacent mall with two teammates, Anthony Robinson and Randall Bal. Anthony would make this noise that was like a little siren, so people gave us a lot of room as we were walking by.
Jamie was a fun guy to hang out with. We had a deal that every morning the person who got up first could wake the other one by whacking him over the head with a pillow. I think I got in more whacks than Jamie, but if you ask him, he was ahead. I could be pretty sleepy in the morning, so whenever I went downstairs to leave for the pool with the other swimmers, Jamie would egg me on.
“C’mon, say the word ‘lisp.’ Say it. C’mon, Mike, I know you have it in you.”
“Nope, not gonna do it.”
“C’mon.”
“No, I’m not doing it. I’m not saying the word ‘lisp.’”
Of course I had just lisped the word lisp exactly as Jamie wanted me to. Now I was sure to walk around mad for the rest of the day practicing my L-words under my breath. “L-l-l-i-s-s-p.”
Again, I had three rounds in the 200 fly. I swam the first heat reasonably well, but in the semis, Bob wanted me to go out a little faster and cut my time more than I did. I qualified third in 1:56.41 behind
Malchow and Franck Esposito of France and Bob was livid.
Some swimmers have problems with going out too fast, and their coaches need to convince them to conserve energy. I still had a problem with starting too slowly, with being too tentative. That had nearly cost me a spot on the Olympic team in Indianapolis and it may have cost me a medal in Sydney. Bob wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. “Michael, get back in the water,” he said after the semi. “You need to swim 1,500.”
I didn’t try to pout my way through this practice. I knew Bob would test me from time to time, but I also knew that I had to pay attention to him at a meet like this. I don’t necessarily want Bob to get on me at meets, because there is only so much training and preparation you can do at the last minute, but I did want him to be around, and I really didn’t want to disappoint him. After I got out of the pool, he really got on my case. I didn’t realize Bob was being strategic. He knew that Jamie wasn’t far away, so after he was done yapping at me, he went over to Jamie and started playing good cop-bad cop.
“Hey, Jamie, can you go over and talk to Michael,” he said. “I gave him some strong words and he’s pretty down right now.”
Beneath the Surface Page 10