13
LIFE AS A PRO
I still had to find an agent to handle my contracts and appearances. I talked about it with my mom and Bob. We spoke to different people at several agencies, but weren’t really impressed with anyone. One day, we visited McLean, Virginia, home to the offices of Octagon, a large agency that represents Olympic athletes. We had made an inquiry about meeting with Peter Carlisle, who was handling a number of athletes competing at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Because of his commitments to those athletes, Peter couldn’t meet with us until after the Games were over. I spoke to several of Octagon’s people for a while in McLean, but just didn’t connect with them, and we were set to cross them off our list. Then one morning during the Olympics, Bob was watching the Today Show and saw an interview with Peter. He was blown away. “Wow, this guy gets it,” he thought. “That’s who should represent Michael.” Peter wasn’t able to meet with us for another month, while he looked after his winter athletes who had just won Olympic medals. We finally arranged a meeting with him at Frank Morgan’s office in April.
During that second meeting, I let the adults do the talking while I sat there for a good 20 minutes. It was weird to hear people sitting around, discussing my life, almost as if I wasn’t there. At some point, Peter turned to me and asked: “So what do you want for your future, Michael? What are your goals?”
I looked around and saw everyone staring at me. I said the first thing that came to my mind: “I want to change the sport of swimming,” I told them. That sounds like a boastful statement, but I didn’t mean it to reflect me as much as the sport. How often do you see swimming highlights on SportsCenter next to the dunks and home runs and touchdowns? How often do guys hang out at the water cooler and talk about split times the way they talk about batting averages? In Australia, I saw swimming as the lead segment on the evening news, the lead topic on talk radio. Swimmers are on billboards, in commercials. Kids see them and want to be like them. When kids bug their parents about things they want to do, they want to jump in the pool. That’s great for swimming and that’s what swimming should be in the United States. “I want to change the sport of swimming. I want people to talk about it, think about it, and look forward to seeing it. I want them to want to jump in and do it. That’s my goal.”
After the meeting broke up, we walked around the offices for a while and then ate some sandwiches around the table. I wanted to leave a mature impression and so what did I do, but drop my plate full of food all over the carpet. Good one, Michael. It isn’t as if adults don’t think kids are goofy enough. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re marketing … a klutz. Fortunately, Peter seemed to forget about it in about ten seconds. He sat down with me—and my second plate of food—to talk to me alone. He started to ask me about my favorite hobbies, what music I liked, what video games I played, what subjects I liked at school, what I watched on TV. I told him I was curious about the questions. “Michael, I need to know who you are, so I can tell people what you’re about,” he said.
I liked the fact that Peter asked me a lot of questions, that we talked less about money and more about goals than I thought we would. I liked the fact that he thought my opinion mattered and I wasn’t just a prop in the room who wasn’t supposed to be a part of the conversation just because I was only 16. We all liked Peter and we decided to hire him very enthusiastically.
I was a challenge for him. When we talked, I’d say, “Hey, did you hear Ian’s launching a food line? He has underwear ads, too. And you should see what he has in Japan.” It was a lot of pressure for Peter, because most companies think in terms of football and basketball players before they think of swimmers to market their products.
Soon after I began working with Octagon, Peter arranged for me to have media training. They brought in a crew with mics and lights for a mock interview session and had the interviewer come at me with aggressive questions, Jim Gray style. They tried to keep me from being nervous and defensive and, most of all, to feel as though I were in control.
They also taught me to relax. Interviews are like giving book reports in front of a classroom. You know everyone is looking at you and listening to you and you want to make sure you say something, so you say the first words that come into your head. Sometimes the words fly out of your mouth before your brain has time to edit them. Whenever I gave an interview, I had a problem with the word unbelievable. It was my crutchword. Lights, camera … “Michael, how did it go today?”
“It was an unbelievably unbelievable meet, if you can believe it.”
I needed to stop that, so the Octagon people put an unofficial “unbelievable” meter on me, counting the number of unbelievables in an interview. Once I learned to think about not saying it, I started to relax, take my time with my answers and say what I was actually thinking. Believe it.
I was starting to get more requests for interviews when I went to swim meets. The autograph requests began picking up, too. One day a girl asked me to sign her shirt and there was a slight problem: she was still in it. I asked her to turn around and I signed the back. I’ve had a few other requests like that since then. It’s awkward signing a body. I don’t know what lines to cross; what’s okay, what’s inappropriate.
In 2002, I began taking some crank calls in my hotel rooms when I would travel to meets. There were some kids on one of the other teams who would call my room, ask to speak with me, tell their pals listening in that they had me on the phone and then hang up. So early that year for the first time I started registering under a different name in order to avoid those calls. It was an example of how you’ve arrived within your profession, kind of like an actor being featured in the National Enquirer.
That summer, we headed to Colorado Springs for altitude training three weeks before going to the Janet Evans Invitational in Los Angeles. I was giving Bob a hard time again and he was getting under my skin telling me to knock it off. I took that pretty hard and told Jamie Barone later that evening that I didn’t deserve to be there and should probably go home. Instead, I went for a ride with Cathy Lears, who was acting as chaperone for the trip. We didn’t say very much, but she let me look at some peaceful scenery, if only to soothe my mind. I slept off my anger and Bob and I gave each other the silent treatment at practice the next day. It’s odd, but on race days we were already at the point where we really didn’t need to talk in order to communicate. When I swim, especially at meets, there is no way for a coach to scream above the din of noise so he can be understood. Instead Bob will whistle in four or five different tones and I’ll try to carry out the instructions encoded in his whistles. I can’t describe exactly how each one is different from the others, but I can recognize each of them. There’s the whistle that says: C’mon, pick it up. There’s the one that says: Good job. Keep up the same pace. There’s the whistle that says: Good, but give it some more tempo. And there’s the half-whistle, half-slap of the hands that says: What the heck is up with you today? Get that gorilla off your back and start swimming.
I was frustrated by the meet in L.A., even though I swam well. Erik Vendt touched me out at the wall of an exciting race in the 400 IM. I remember standing on the podium with Erik and wanting to trade gifts with him. I got a mesh bag, he got a nice Speedo towel and hey, I needed a clean towel.
Three weeks later at the Nationals in Ft. Lauderdale, I set an American record in the 200 IM and was just off the world record in the 200 fly. I remember putting my head in my hands after the race. That was really my first taste of understanding what not training properly for butterfly could do. Bob made almost all the training decisions, but when it came to the butterfly, he’d occasionally throw me a little rope and give me a choice of doing extra butterfly sets at the ends of practices. I usually declined, because I was tired. Hey, it’s my best stroke and I already did a full day’s work. I thought I was the coach and I knew what I was talking about. I had no clue. He let me learn the hard way. It’s always the best way to learn. I hadn’t improved my time since the race in Fukuok
a and it would take me a while to swim that fast again.
Still, if my butterfly was lagging, I was making strides in other areas. I used to watch videos of Ian Thorpe’s races and marvel at how smoothly he swam the freestyle. Ian had the best underwater dolphin kick on the planet and I wanted to incorporate that into my training. I’ve always been a decent kicker, but Bob really stressed that I should maximize my strengths and so we made the dolphin kick a priority that summer. We gradually worked the kick into my IM sets in practice. If we did ten 400 IMs, he would say, “Michael, I really want you to use the dolphin on the last two, from breaststroke to freestyle.” Then it would be the last four, then six and so on.
The dolphin kick was probably the deciding factor when I out-touched Vendt in the 400 IM in Fort Lauderdale. Erik and I turned even at 300 meters and I tried to get in as many dolphin kicks as I could after he came up. Erik turned before I did at 350, but I stayed under for another 12 meters. I watched the tape afterward and he had taken five strokes before I broke the surface. The race came down to the touch. After we hit the wall, we were both trying to look around a tent that obscured our view of the scoreboard at the opposite end of the pool. When I finally saw the results, I raised my arms up in the air and held up my fingers in a number-one pose. Some photographers caught the picture and I think photographers look out for it, because it always seems to be a pose they use in newspapers after I win a race.
I had two other close finishes in Fort Lauderdale. First, Klete Keller edged me in the 200 free and later I outtouched Ian Crocker for my first big victory in the 100 fly. After the race, Anthony Nesty, the gold medalist in that race at the 1988 Olympics, came up to me and said, “That’s how I beat Matt Biondi in the hundred fly that day. It was the touch.” Talk about close. Nesty hit the wall first in his race in 53.00 seconds, followed by Biondi in 53.01. That was really the first time I realized that if I nailed the touch at the perfect time, that could make the difference in the outcome of the race. It was weird because I had never swum short races against a field like that and it was the first time I stepped up and swam one that well at a world or national level. Bob was pretty excited when he came up to me afterward and asked: “Where the heck did that come from?”
We left three days after nationals for Pan-Pacs in Yokohama, Japan, and I didn’t adapt well to the time change. The busride from the hotel to the pool took an hour, so it was hard to get my usual nap in between the morning prelims and the finals at night. Before the final of the 400 IM on the first day, I overslept and almost missed the bus. Bob had to get off the bus before it left, run upstairs and wake me. It was a good model for days when things don’t go according to plan and you have to fight through anyway. I felt really grumpy before the race, but I touched Vendt out in a time that was two seconds slower than I had swum at Nationals.
I lost again to Tom in the 200 fly, which was my second indication that summer that I couldn’t take butterfly training for granted just because I held a world record. I hated losing and I hated hearing Bob say, “You see what I mean?” From that day on, whenever Bob gave me a butterfly set, I did it and gave it my best effort. That’s all he wants. Bob really has a feel for when I’m not swimming well because I have a technical problem and when I’m simply not trying my best. He’s not the easiest guy to trick. If you do well, Bob will say “good job” and that’s usually about it. He wants and expects as many consecutive days of hard training as possible. If you give him that, you’re on his good list.
I finished the Pan Pac meet with three gold medals and two silvers. I won the 200 IM and swam in the 4x200 free relay, which the Australians won again. I had never been a part of a U.S. relay team that won a major event, but we had a good feeling about the team we’d put together for the 4x100 medley relay on the final day: Aaron Peirsol (backstroke), Brendan Hansen (breaststroke), me (butterfly) and Jason Lezak (freestyle). Brendan gave me a lead, ahead of the Australians, and I swam a 51.1, at the time the fastest split in history. Then Jason brought us home in 3:33.48, breaking the world mark we had set in Sydney by .25 seconds. After the race, we were jumping around in all different directions on the deck. It was an awesome feeling to be a part of a team with a common goal. Individual races are good, but relays are a blast.
Afterward, I got onto a bus that was nearly empty. The only other swimmer I recall being on the bus with me was Ian Thorpe. We had a really good conversation and I remember how much I liked talking to him. At one point he told me, “If you ever want to train together, I’d be more than happy to welcome you in Australia.” Really? I was thrilled. Training with Ian? Wow, what an opportunity. I’d learn so much. “And you can train with us in Baltimore, too,” I told him. Ian was like a rock star at that meet. He had left such a good impression with the Japanese people when we were in Fukuoka the year before, and when we got off the bus, everyone pushed past me and surrounded him. He was definitely still the man.
Soon after I was back home, I saw Juan Dixon, the Maryland hoop star, walking through the Towson Town Center. It was neat just to walk by him, but I figured it must be weird to be recognized a lot. There was only one woman in one of the stores who knew me. Sort of. “You’re that swimmer guy,” she’d say.
As many hours as Swimmer Guy spent training for swimming, he didn’t always put in what was required in other areas. I had worn braces for three or four years starting in 1996 and I couldn’t wait to get them off. During that time I almost never wore the clear retainer the orthodontist had given me and I paid the consequences for it. I got the braces off in 2000 and I figured I was done, but a year later, he told me I had to wear the retainer again at night. I was mad about it, but I had nobody to blame but myself that I still had to wear the retainer.
I was also lazy about driving, even though I was eager to get my license. Bob often let me practice by driving his car in open parking lots and in places where there weren’t any other vehicles around. I was getting pretty comfortable behind the wheel, but unfortunately, that was only half the battle. I didn’t read the book, so I failed my written test. I tried passing it off with the guys at school as no big deal, but they ripped on me pretty hard when they found out I failed the test. Mom made a good point later on when I told her I chose to take the test on a computer rather than on paper.
“Michael, can you go back and check your answers on the computer?”
“No.”
“Could you have checked them if you had taken the test on paper?”
“Yes.”
Of course I still didn’t read the book the second time and failed it again. The ribbing got really intense after that one.
“Mike, hire me. I’ll drive you.”
“Michael, want to borrow my bike?”
After that I read the book pretty intensely, passed the written test, got my learner’s permit and eventually got my license in time for senior year. Ah, freedom.
With the extra money I was making through swimming, I was able to purchase my prized possession: a Cadillac Escalade, the kind you see a lot of pro athletes and rappers driving around. I spend a lot of time in the car, so I wanted to put my signature on it. I received a bonus from USA Swimming each time I broke a world record, but even with the money that would be coming in, I would have to okay any large purchase I made with my mom. Our deal was that any time I broke one of those records, I could buy something nice for myself. Usually, that meant adding something to the Escalade. After one record, I bought spinners for my rims, which I really loved. I got a kick out of watching people stare at the spinning rims after the car stops. I had TVs installed on the dash and in the backs of the seats and I’ve had the stereo system upgraded twice. I know Bob liked riding around in there and having me blast 50 Cent in his ear. It was good for him and it makes up for the fingernails on a chalkboard, known as country music, he subjects me to in his car.
That fall, USA Swimming voted me U.S. Swimmer of the Year and named Bob U.S. Coach of the Year. Swimming World magazine awarded Ian International Swimmer of the Yea
r honors for the third year in a row. He had won 11 gold medals at his two major meets—the Pan Pacs and the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England—and had lowered his world record in the 400 freestyle to 3:40.07, an event in which nobody could touch him. But unlike the previous two years, when he won the award going away, I finished a close second in the voting. I was in serious company.
14
HEROES AND INSPIRATIONS
A lot happened over the next few months to make me think about people who had either inspired me or looked after me, about people who were important in my life.
I think we overuse the word “hero” a lot. Being a good athlete, a good actor, or a good musician who happens to be in the public eye doesn’t make you a hero; it makes you someone who has achieved something in a very public world. I’ve always admired other athletes both in and out of my sport. When I started in swimming, I was a huge fan of Pablo Morales. He was the Olympic champion in the butterfly and he was very friendly with fans and people in the swimming world. Outside of swimming, how can you not be in awe of Michael Jordan? I don’t know that anyone has ever made people appreciate his sport more simply by playing it better than anyone else. Basketball just looks like a better game when he plays it. The last few years I’ve become a huge Ravens fan, and I love watching Ray Lewis put a big hit on somebody.
But a hero should be somebody who can lift up other people with his courage and dedication. I always think kids should have role models within their families, as I’ve been lucky enough to have with my mom. But actually, heroes don’t have to be family and they don’t have to be in the newspapers. They don’t even have to be older than you.
Sometime in the fall, the Hansens, a family from Timonium, Maryland, contacted Bob about their son Stevie. He swam for one of the local clubs and was seven at the time. In October, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and was due to go to Johns Hopkins for a brain surgery called a craniotomy. I went over to the Hansens’ house on Halloween to meet Stevie. I brought him a flag, some T-shirts and a poster and shot some hoops with him in the Hansens’ driveway. Afterward, we talked about our favorite sports, favorite TV shows, and favorite junk food and it felt good to see him laugh. We also talked a lot about courage and not giving up. I could tell Stevie was worried about what was in front of him, even though I’m sure he didn’t understand all of it, but I was amazed at how strong he was. It was pretty neat being the older brother for a day and I really hoped I made a difference. Stevie’s surgery was on my mind that night and the next day at practice. How would I face that sort of thing if I had to? How bad is a bad day at the pool, if you really think about it?
Beneath the Surface Page 12