“What do you want me to tell him?” Jamie asked.
“Tell him to keep his head up, that this was only one day, that he’s going to swim a great race tomorrow, because he’s done it before and he knows he can do it again. Just pick him up a little.”
That’s pretty much what Jamie told me. It worked. Afterward, I knew I had work to do, but I couldn’t wait to get back in the water to do it. I was ready to attack the water and prove to Bob and everyone that I could race on the world stage against the best swimmers and just conquer everyone.
I didn’t speak to Bob the next day until we arrived at the pool. It was an unusual exchange, because he was walking past me as if he was too busy to hear what I had to say.
“Bob I want to speak to you. Bob, where are you going?”
“Michael, I’m on the staff. I have to go to the meeting. What’s up?”
“Well, I have to swim the final and should I … can I take it out?”
I remember he just stared at me for a few seconds before saying, “Hell, yes.” Then he walked off. After all that, I was completely psyched up to swim fast.
I charged through the first 50 meters and turned first, .83 seconds ahead of my world-record pace. I had never done that in a big meet. I turned first at the next two walls and touched the last one in 1:54.58. For the first time in my life I was a world champion. I was on top of the world and Bob was a genius.
Before I knew it, I was back in the water getting ready for the next day. Because of the expense and distance, my family had stayed home for this particular trip. It was the middle of the night in Baltimore, so I figured I would wait until I got back to the hotel to call my mom.
But I did call Erin Lears. A long time before I was capable of breaking records, she and I had made a pact one day at Meadowbrook that if either of us should ever break a world record, we would have to call the other person, day or night. “Really, Michael, no matter what time it is, you have to call and tell me, okay?” So I called. Miss Cathy answered and knew right away who it was and why I was calling. “Congratulations, Michael,” she said. “Hold on, I’ll get Erin.”
I don’t know if Erin was too groggy to figure it out right away, but I had to make some small talk first to be sure she was awake. “Michael, it’s great to hear you, but um, Michael, why are you calling? Do you realize it’s 3 a.m. here?”
“It is, but remember we had this agreement?”
Before I could finish, Erin started screaming into the phone. We talked for a long time and it was great to hear a friendly voice from home.
I mis-timed the call to my mom, who was already on her way to work by the time I got back to the hotel. I left her a long message, talking about different things in Japan and wishing her a good day. I almost forgot to let her know that I had won and broken the record.
The next day, I picked up a copy of the in-house daily newspaper put out in both Japanese and English by the Championships’ organizing committee. My world record had actually been only the second one set the previous night. The first was broken in the men’s 400-meter freestyle by Ian Thorpe, the 17-year-old from Australia who was his country’s national hero and who was clearly recognized as the best swimmer in the world. Ian had won five medals, including three gold, before his home fans at the Sydney Olympics and he was even better in Fukuoka. The headline at the top of the paper that day read simply “Teenage Stars Thorpe, Phelps Break Records.” Wow, what the heck was I doing in the same headline as Ian Thorpe? He was the man. I was just the kid. As soon as I saw the headline, I remember saying, “Wow, he’s, like, all-world.”
More like all-worldly. On the one hand, Ian and I were very similar. We both had mothers who were schoolteachers. We both had sisters in swimming; in fact, Christina Thorpe competed at the same 1995 Pan Pac meet as Whitney. But Ian had seen and done so much more than I had. He was already a millionaire because of his sport and had used his money to buy a house for parents and set up funding for a kids’ cancer center. He had his nickname, “Thorpedo” copyrighted. He wrote a newspaper column. He attended fashion shows with Giorgio Armani and a movie premiere with Tom Cruise. Six companies had signed him to sponsorship contracts. In a contest held by the country’s largest paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, Australians chose Ian as the person they would most like to have as a dinner guest, ahead of Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Elle McPherson, Greg Norman and prime minister John Howard. I couldn’t imagine I would ever be so good or so famous that people would make that sort of fuss over me. Ian finished the meet in Fukuoka with six gold medals.
Most of all, he impressed people with his composure and the way he carried himself. At a press conference after one of his races, a reporter asked Ian if he could recite some of the words and phrases he had learned in Japanese. Ian responded with a list of about 30 different words and phrases that weren’t necessarily related to one another. Then the reporter followed up by asking him, if he wouldn’t mind, to repeat the words in English. Again Ian obliged. Sitting among the reporters was a former swimmer, Daichi Suzuki, the 1988 Olympic champion in the 100-meter backstroke and now a newspaper columnist and reporter for Japanese television. Because Suzuki had lived in Boston for two years after he retired, he was perfectly fluent in English. He was the one who realized how amazing Ian’s memory had actually been. After playing back the tape of the press conference, Suzuki realized that even though the words and phrases were random, Ian had repeated them back in English in exactly the same order as he had just said them in Japanese, without going out of order once.
Many people saw Ian as the person who was carrying the torch for international swimming both in and out of the pool. I didn’t talk to him much in Fukuoka, but on the flight back to the States I thought a lot about how I wanted to be able to do something to make people pay more attention to the sport in the U.S. the way Ian had done in Australia.
We used Ian as a model. During that meet, Bob went up to Ian’s coach, Doug Frost, and asked if he could pick his brain. Doug was very helpful. He talked to Bob about how Ian learned to handle the press, how he recovered from races, and when, during his training cycle, he would travel to altitude. Bob saw Ian as the prototype of the swimmer I could be. He was a great example to follow.
Back to Baltimore. Mom came to get me at the BWI airport at around 1 a.m. and I had a serious food craving.
“Michael, there’s food at home.”
“Mom, there’s food at Taco Bell, too.”
“Are they even open now?”
“Until two or three, something like that.”
I ate dinner in the car in about three minutes. That night, with Bob’s blessing to sleep in, I hit the pillow right away and didn’t wake up for 12 hours.
The next day, Jamie Barone, one of the NBAC swimmers, drove me over to the pool and we blasted Dr. Dre on the stereo and told jokes until we cracked up. When I arrived, they had a little victory celebration for me at the pool. The kids were wearing “Fly, Michael Fly” T-shirts. Some people yelled, “Speech, speech,” and all I could say was, “It’s great to be home.”
12
COMING TOGETHER
Jamie was going to school at Loyola when he joined NBAC and we hit it off right away. He had two other brothers and one of them was my age. That first summer, Jamie was in Baltimore by himself. I didn’t have a driver’s license, so Jamie drove me around a lot. We kept a running score in everything, and we were almost always dead even in Madden football. He also made a huge contribution to my life by introducing me to Pete’s Grille. Pete’s was a diner on Greenmount Avenue, not fancy, but really good. Think about the normal amount of fuel that most teenagers need. Then consider that the teenager is in the middle of a growth spurt. And he’s an athlete. You have a recipe for … a lot of recipes.
Mom raised three kids on a schoolteacher’s salary, but based on her food bills, it was like raising 12. Before I discovered Pete’s I used to ask for four dippy eggs in the morning. That fall, I started asking for seconds. We’re talking eight e
ggs for breakfast. That’s why Pete’s was huge. I started going two or three times a week, then almost every day. Within a few weeks I had probably tried everything on the menu, but I eventually settled on my “usual.” Ready? Here goes: Start with three sandwiches of fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions and mayonnaise; add one omelet, a bowl of grits and three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; then wash down with three chocolate chip pancakes that the owner, Lou Sharkey, serves only to me, unless it’s a Sunday. And, no, there is no truth to the rumor that I have an army of elves living in my stomach.
When I walk into Pete’s, I feel like the TV character Norm walking into Cheers. Everybody knows my name, as it says in the song. Lou says it’s his regulars who count. Even Vinny Testaverde, the NFL quarterback, had to wait ten minutes for a seat when he went in.
My friends and I used to make bets about eating food. At an all-you-can-eat buffet one day, we decided to eat all we could. Our table tried to eat the place out of everything, and we nearly did. Of all my friends, Matt is the one who is usually up for a good eating challenge. And when teenage guys get together, some of the challenges can be kind of … teenage. Matt made $30 from me once by mixing wasabi paste with soy sauce and inhaling it through his nose. He won a DVD from me one night after we ate dinner and then went for burgers. There was no way we were ready for more food, but at the drop of a challenge, Matt added a quarter-pound burger for dessert. Three years ago, we were at my old girlfriend’s house, watching a guy on TV trying to swallow some small fish, whole. He couldn’t, so Matt and I figured we could. Swimming really came in handy, because I was able to hold my breath during the full swallow. Goldfish aren’t that big, but they start flopping around in there and they can gross you out. The money is never an issue during these challenges. If you win a penny, you feel you’ve accomplished something, though I’m not really sure what it is. I only won a dollar for downing my 50th chicken wing at Bill Bateman’s in Towson, but just think, with that dollar, I could buy … another chicken wing. Believe it or not, there really is something I don’t like to eat: angel hair pasta. I don’t like the texture of it.
I have a teammate on the national squad named Ed Moses, who used to be a huge fan of junk food before he started to eat super healthy. His dad joked once that he knew Ed was serious about swimming the day he first requested lima beans for dinner. Let me state for the record that I will never request lima beans for dinner. I don’t care how hungry I am, I will never resort to lima beans. Goldfish, yes. Lima beans, no.
Two days before we left for our summer nationals in Clovis, California, Jamie and I loaded up on food and headed off to the bowling alley. Jamie started talking about it really casually at practice the next day and Bob just flipped.
“You did what!”
“Bob, we just went bowling. It’s not like we played football.”
“Jamie, have you ever heard of Matt Gribble?”
“Ah, no.”
“He had the 100 fly world record back in the ’80s. He messed up his back bowling one night and it took him right out of Nationals the next day because of it.”
That was our last frame.
We arrived in Clovis, and it was the hottest meet I’ve ever been to. We tried to think of it as mind over matter, but the temperatures were near a hundred each day and the swimmers regularly broke out into giant fits of Bong. Guys, I-tong-song Hong-oh-tong. I tong-song Rong-eee-aye-long-long-yong Hong-oh-tong. Despite the heat, I just missed American records in the 100 fly and 200 IM and finished second in one other race. It was a good ending to a great season.
Even in Baltimore, I hardly thought of myself as a celebrity then, but I first had a sense of being able to use my story and my accomplishments to help other people. I visited some schools in the area and started getting more comfortable with speaking in front of a large group. It was great to have kids ask about my swimming, my goals, my family. I’ve always been really at ease speaking to kids, because they always seem so interested in what I have to say and they want to be able to look up to older kids they’d like to emulate. Still, younger people are one thing; older people are another.
A gentleman who used to work out in the pool had moved into a retirement home in Parkville and asked if I could come by to visit. I arrived one day, forgetting that I was still wearing a baseball cap. One of the people who ran the hospital started to introduce me to people, explaining that I was an Olympian and a world champion. One of the first men I met skipped right over the handshake and was clearly not impressed. “Remove your cap, son,” he told me. I know how older people are about manners, and I know we sometimes take them for granted. I had completely forgotten about taking my hat off. Since then, it’s become force of habit that if I’m wearing a hat I always take it off when I enter a building, unless I’m just walking into a swimming pool. That’s especially important with kids, because they model what they do after what you do.
I was just getting back into the groove of swimming and school, starting 10th grade and looking forward to another good year. I walked into U.S. history class one morning and I remember the somber looks on everyone’s faces. Word was going around that our nation was under attack and planes had just hit the World Trade Center in New York. Soon after, we heard about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, even closer to home. Nobody knew exactly what to do, so the teachers and students sat and watched television for updates throughout the day. For the most part, people were quiet and scared and there were tears in class, as there were throughout the country. To this day it’s hard for me to watch video relating to what happened on September 11. I saw a special recently about the daughter of one of the pilots who had flown the planes. Her wish afterward was to meet Derek Jeter, the Yankee shortstop, and she was able to do it. Something like that is still pretty emotional for me. I think everyone from our generation will always remember where they were when they first learned about it, but I also remember the way people pitched in afterward to help each other out. The newspapers and TV shows were filled with stories about people donating clothes, food, money, and counseling to those who needed it. I know I was only 16 when it happened, but I think it brought this country together more than any other event in my life.
Planes were back flying again on September 14. That day, Bob and I were heading out to Dulles Airport in Washington for a 6 a.m. flight to Portland, Oregon, where we were due to give a clinic. On our way, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts to get breakfast. I reached down for my wallet to pay for it and he said, “No, no, I have it.” I figured it was no big deal at the time. After we got back into the car and rode for another half an hour, I thought I felt a little lighter than usual. I reached down and realized I had forgotten my wallet, with, among other things, my ID. “Mom, can you meet us at the airport with something?” Crisis averted.
Even before World Championships that summer, Mom and I talked about whether I should turn professional and accept prize money and sponsorship money. We also talked about getting an agent to help with things such as finding sponsors and negotiating contracts.
I consulted Anita Nall, who had spent many years swimming at NBAC and she offered some very helpful suggestions. Murray had originally discouraged Anita from getting an agent. “They just take your money,” he told her. So she handled things on her own. Anita told me that if she could do it over again, she definitely would have hired someone to represent her. That conversation helped confirm my decision to turn pro and forego my eligibility to swim in NCAA meets. Of course, the decision didn’t change my plans to go to college, attend classes and get a degree, since my education was still a priority. But once you accept any money that relates to your sport (prize money, endorsements), you lose your chance to compete in sports for your university.
I turned professional a month into my junior year at Towson High. With the help of Frank Morgan, the attorney who is a family friend and Bob’s partner in the horse business, I signed a sponsorship deal with the Speedo swimwear company through 2005. A month later
, I went with my mom to Phoenix for a photo shoot for Speedo. We had a driver pick us up at 5:45 and I had my own make-up person and hair stylist. Usually I just get a guy with scissors who says, “You want it short?” I did some question-and-answer sessions with a swim group and did another afternoon photo session with an underwater cameraman. At one point I told my mom, “There’s a lot of work in this.”
A week before that session, I had competed at the U.S. Open swim meet in New York. The thing I remember most about that meet is what I forgot. I walked onto the deck to swim the 200 back and as I reached up to start scratching my head, I realized that for the first time in my career, I’d forgotten my cap and goggles before the start of a race. This was a pretty embarrassing thing to do. I looked at my mom, sitting in the stands, and we both shrugged our shoulders. I looked over at Bob, who was standing at the side of the pool, and we shrugged our shoulders, too. At that point, there wasn’t much else anyone could do. I finished second in the race and at least I didn’t forget my suit. It was one of those learning experiences. Some days you learn from a book; other days you learn from hours of practice; and then there are the times you’re so embarrassed by something, you know you’ll never do it again.
That fall, Bob and I put together a training video about how to do the butterfly. It was a fun experience. We demonstrated some drills Bob used to get me to stroke and kick properly, how to work on bodyline, posture, rhythm, and timing. The filmmakers shot me from different angles going through the water, and we spliced in questions from an interview Bob conducted with me about my swimming and my preparation. I know he enjoyed that part, especially when I told him how much I loved to train and how I needed to work on my breaststroke. “And Michael, do you have any special diet?” he asked. “Well, I get all the nutrients I need,” I said. “My mom makes sure I eat enough fruits and vegetables. I just want to cram in what I can.” Watch that smirk, Coach.
Beneath the Surface Page 11