Stevie was too weak to see anyone after his craniotomy, except for his family. I sent a basket of junk food and silver balloons over to the hospital.
Stevie improved somewhat over the next year, and the following summer, I sent him an e-mail saying I wanted to come and see him at one of his meets at Spring Lake, in Timonium. I went over sort of unannounced. I found Stevie at the place called the kiddie round out and gave him a hug. “Wow, you really showed up,” he said. And he proudly showed me the club’s bulletin board that had clippings about my progress. Stevie looked really good that day—strong, smiling, almost carefree. The more I talked to him, the more I forgot about his illness. I think he did, too. I heard one of his friends say, “Can you believe Michael Phelps came out to watch Stevie,” and that really made him smile. I walked him up to the starting blocks for his races and watched him swim the free, fly, and relay. At one point when Stevie was on the blocks, the P.A. announcer told the crowd, “We have a special guest today, Michael Phelps.” It was funny, because the kids who were already on the blocks turned around and started to clap. There is no place like home.
At some point I volunteered to swim a relay leg in a parents and coaches race. I didn’t have a suit with me, so I borrowed one from one of the coaches. I took off from the shallow end of the pool and had to make sure I didn’t dive in too deep. I posed for pictures after the race and Stevie’s little sister, Gracie, wanted me to sign her forehead, so I put my name down in a red sharpie.
Three weeks later, Stevie came to Meadowbrook to watch me practice and we stayed in touch during the year. Later that summer, Stevie was re-diagnosed with tumors on his spinal cord. In the fall of 2003, Stevie developed severe back pain and had to undergo steroid and morphine treatment before they could get him to the operating room for another surgery.
The Hansens took a radical approach to radiation therapy, based on the St. Jude Medical Center in Tennessee. Stevie underwent six months of chemotherapy with two weeks on and two weeks off at a time. He tolerated all the pain with amazing courage, but his white blood cell count was down and he got tired very easily. He could train for about 45 minutes at a time before his body hit a wall.
I can’t imagine how Stevie continued to swim through most of his treatments, but swimming was probably the best medicine he could have.
Before the 2004 Olympic Trials, I put a Roots hat and a basket of apparel in a duffel bag for Stevie. My mom gave Gracie and Mrs. Hansen a bag of 200 red, white and blue buttons with my name on them and Stevie handed them out to the other kids at an 8-and-under meet where he was the high-point scorer for his team. In 2004, the Timonium Recreation Council gave him its MVP award.
Say what you want about what makes a hero, but I can’t think of a bigger one than Stevie.
Jim Lears was the salt of the Earth. Miss Cathy’s husband and Erin’s father was like another member of the family. He was the treasurer of the NBAC and a very active parent. He began helping Whitney with her finances when she started earning a stipend from USA Swimming. Eventually he became Bob’s accountant and mine. Most of all, he was one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. He always had a way of making you feel like you were talking to someone who wanted good things to happen for you. He was also a picture of health. Mr. Jimmy never smoked or drank; he jogged regularly and even finished the Boston Marathon. One day in November, he came in from his daily jog, went downstairs to do laundry and never made it upstairs. At 55 he had passed away from a heart attack. We were devastated.
I don’t think Bob would have objected that day if I had asked for the afternoon off, but I tried to get through practice and was simply horrible. Bob felt it, too. He cut me all the slack I needed that afternoon and after shortening practice we sat and talked about Mr. Jimmy at the end of the day. Everybody at the pool knew him and loved him. Everybody was in shock.
We went to a viewing for Mr. Jimmy down the street from my home and I couldn’t bring myself to stay very long. There were pictures of him throughout the funeral home. I walked up to his casket for five seconds and then went outside with Hilary and lost it in the parking lot. I walked home and cried myself to sleep.
I didn’t know if there was anything I could do for Erin, except to try to be there for her. She’s so much like Mr. Jimmy: peppy, giggly, full of energy and sweet. She can’t go more than a few minutes without finding something to laugh about. A week after Mr. Jimmy’s death, I passed by a Cadillac dealership and borrowed a Jaguar from someone I knew who worked there. I went to Erin’s house and told her I had something special to show her. We got in the car, drove around and laughed about things that really didn’t matter. It was a good release and a means of healing for both of us.
My mom had a black Jetta that was always giving her problems and she kept saying she needed to get a new car. The problem was that Mom always wanted to make sure we were okay before she would think to do something for herself. I figured I would practically have to lift her up and place her in the front seat before she’d buy something like that for herself.
We went to a Mercedes Benz dealership in December 2003 and took one of their silver ML320s home for the weekend. She really liked the way it felt, but at $35,000, she felt it was just too expensive. I knew that was about twice as much as she was willing to spend, so I put the down payment on the car and after I finished swim practice on Christmas morning (yes, you read that correctly), I left the keys in her stocking and had the car waiting for her in the driveway. What followed was definitely one of those Mom moments. She inhaled with surprise, put her hand over her mouth and gave me a hug that almost squeezed my head off my shoulders. Then I told her, “You know, this is for everything you’ve done for me—all the car rides to practice and meets, all the food and Gatorade you’ve bought, all the encouragement, all the patience. There’s no way I could have done any of this without …” At that point she started smothering me with another hug and the words kind of got lost. The size of the gift was irrelevant; it was the fact that I had the chance to say thank you for so many things that seemed to slip by unnoticed. What would I have done without them? She’s done so much and asked for so little in return over the years. When Dad left, she poured her heart and her resources into her kids. I don’t acknowledge it all the time, but I had been looking forward to the day when I could do something like that for her. That was a great Christmas.
15
DOWN UNDER AGAIN, MATE
Winter was here and there was nothing like a good snowfall. Near the Meadowbrook complex, there is a huge hill that is perfect for sledding. I was heading out after practice one day with Corey, Matt, and a group of their friends, and I casually told Mom where we were going. Mom, why are you staring at me like that?
“Michael, is it a good idea to go sledding?
“Why can’t I go?”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t.”
“Everybody else is going.”
“Well, let’s see, guys, are you going sledding, too?”
“Yes, Miss Debbie.”
“And are you going to Barcelona next summer for World Championships?”
“No, Miss Debbie.”
“Michael, are you going to Barcelona for World Championships?”
Oh, I know where this is going. I guess if Matt Gribble can tear a shoulder by bowling, I can always sled into a tree. Anyway, compromise is okay when you can still stand at the top of the hill and pelt everyone else with snowballs.
In April, we had a combination of two competitions in Indianapolis: our national championships, held over three days; and a competition called Duel in the Pool against the Australians, held on a single day—Bob’s birthday, April 6. I won three races during Nationals—the 200 free, 200 back and 100 fly—becoming the first U.S. swimmer to win races in three different strokes at a national championship. I was pretty nervous about racing against Lenny for the first time. He was coming back from surgery on his shoulders after being the best backstroker in the world for a couple of years. At the airport in Indy, we
compared training notes and he told me: “Dude, the times you’re doing in practice are sick.” Hear that, Coach?
When the Duel was first conceived, there was a real buzz to the Australians’ visit. It was going to be the biggest meet held on U.S. soil since the Atlanta Olympics seven years earlier. Instead, most of the Aussies didn’t show up. Not only Ian Thorpe, but also Ashley Callus, Geoff Huegill, Leisel Jones, and Jodie Henry all stayed home. The word was that many of them were injured, but we weren’t completely convinced. I was especially sorry not to see Ian there. This was essentially a made-for-TV event and it would have been great to promote the sport by showcasing Australia’s best swimmers against our best in one of our pools.
Bob doesn’t always say things to me on the day of a race, but on the morning of the Duel, he came up to me and asked if I was ready. “I’ve been waiting for this day all year long,” I told him. A few years earlier, Bob began using an analogy with me about training that came into play on that day. “When we practice long hours,” he said, “we’re depositing money into the bank. We need to deposit enough so that when we need to make a large withdrawal, we have enough funds to withdraw.”
Until the Duel, I had never had a day this tiring or this rewarding in my career. The long training hours got me through four races in the span of an afternoon. In the first event, I lowered the world record in the 400 IM to 4:10.73. The atmosphere in the stands was electric. Each time I’d come up for air in the breaststroke, the crowd seemed to get louder. About 40 minutes later, I missed the 100-butterfly world record by .03 of a second, losing a chance to be the first male swimmer to set two individual world records in one day. I came back an hour and a half later and rallied from half a bodylength down to touch out Tom and win the 200 fly. Up in the stands, I could see a sign that my Mom had brought to the pool. It wasn’t your typical Go Michael sign. Instead, she wanted me to see something I would recognize as hers because nobody else would know what it meant. The sign contained one of those sayings I used to think about before a big race, the type Bob used to email me once a day before the 2001 Nationals. It said simply: Actions Speak Louder than Words.
In my last race of the day, I swam a 51.61 on the butterfly leg as we beat the Aussies in the medley relay. I had swum multiple events on one day many times in my career, but never against a field like this. It was a great litmus test of how I could come back from one race, get a quick shake in the practice pool and get ready for another race as quickly as possible.
It was especially important for us to monitor my lactate levels in between races, something Bob and I had been doing since before my first Olympics. Think of lactate as a sort of fatigue level that your body builds up when it expends a lot of energy. If you swim a fast race and ask a lot of your muscles in short period of time, the lactate will accumulate in your legs and make it difficult to come back right away and swim fast again. A lactate test measures the amount of lactate in the blood, which indicates how quickly you go into oxygen debt. Coaches use it to determine how efficiently swimmers produce energy. Essentially, someone pricks your ear after each race and places a few drops of blood into a machine, which measures the number of millimoles of blood lactate per liter of blood. The level can rise to 10 or 12 after a hard race, but we try to get it to clear, or reduce, to a manageable level (below two), so that I can swim again without too much fatigue in my body. We try to get the rate down to 1.1 or less by having me swim down slowly after a race. The tests tell me how much I need to swim down afterwards, which is usually about 23 minutes. Hmm, Bob Bowman: Mad Scientist or Raging Genius … you decide.
Afterward, Grant Hackett, Australia’s top distance swimmer, told a group of reporters that he thought I might be spreading myself too thin by swimming so many events. “I think Michael should focus on one or two events,” he said, “because it nearly takes a world record to win an Olympic event.” I was looking forward to having a chance to talk to Grant about that during my upcoming trip to Australia, and I was really looking forward to training with Ian.
Bob had worked on this for six months, trying to coordinate training schedules, pool time, flights, and an appearance at a training clinic. The plan was to train with Ian at his pool in Sutherland for three days and then to the Gold Coast to spend time training with Grant. A week before we were due to go, Ian’s new coach, Tracy Menzies, emailed Bob to tell him they weren’t going to be able to host us, because they had a sponsor commitment and they’d be out of town. I was really upset. I thought of Ian as the best freestyler in my lifetime and I was so eager to learn as much as I could from him. Bob tried to cheer me up, reminding me I’d still be able to train with Grant and see the Australian way of training up close, but I was really disappointed.
The trip was still great even without Ian. After the first day there, I remember saying: “Bob, what’s this about? They swim freestyle every single workout. No wonder they’re all such great freestylers.” Bob arranged some independent time for me to work on the other strokes for the IM and for Jamie Barone, who was also on the trip, to work on the breaststroke.
Grant and I had a blast. We raced each other over 50 meters, both with and without fins, 30 times with a tenth of a second rest. Every time we raced with pulleys of some kind, he just destroyed me. Without them, we were pretty even. Just the adrenaline rush of racing Down Under, with somebody as fast as Grant got me through the workouts. I really think those workouts helped take me to where I am today.
Grant and I hung out away from the pool and kidded each other about a lot of things. Grant played that trick on me where you put a finger in someone’s chest, say, “What’s this?” and wait for the guy to put his head down, so you can pull your hand up and slap his chin. I tried to do the same, but he was too wise to it. It’s hard to get a guy with his own jokes. Every time Grant kidded me about American football players, I just started ripping on Australian rugby players.
“Are you kidding? If Ray Lewis hit any one of those guys, they wouldn’t have a chance.”
“Yeah, well, your football players have to wear all that padding. Our players don’t need it.”
We laughed a lot in that week. It was the first time I ever tried to go surfing, but I wasn’t very good. I went out on the water with Jamie and he managed to get up on his board a few times. I tried, too, but couldn’t make it to a standing position, so I bodysurfed instead.
One night our group went to Benihana restaurant where the chef makes a show out of preparing steak, chicken, and the rest of the meal by juggling his utensils and flipping his food around. Grant was pretty good at catching flying shrimp in his mouth. I caught one eventually, but the first one nailed my chin and landed on the floor. See, every trip has a food story.
Bob and I conducted our clinic at a fitness center on the Gold Coast. We agreed to a request to speak to a “couple” of reporters there, and that couple turned out to be about 40 of them. At the end of the interview, we mentioned in passing to two reporters that our practice the next day would be open to the public. We arrived the next morning and didn’t expect to see anyone, since it was 5:30 a.m. and it was pouring rain. Instead, the deck was lined with people, from end to end, waiting for us. I loved it. This was the way I wanted people to feel about swimming in the U.S. I looked at the people on the deck who were as wet as I was and I remember thinking that whatever I did in my career, whatever times I registered or medals I won, I wanted to do something to make people feel passionate about swimming. Our results are every bit as good as theirs. In fact in Sydney, they had been much better. Maybe the sport won’t ever be as big for spectators at home as it is in Australia, because we have such a huge variety of other sports to do and to talk about, but I really wanted to do something to push it in that direction.
When I got back to Baltimore I had a new housemate. Kevin Clements was an outstanding IMer at Auburn University. He was a teammate of mine on a few national teams and he was looking for a change of training scenery. Bob was excited to have him come to North Baltimore, where h
e, Jamie and I pushed each other in training and hung out after training. When Kevin first arrived, he also needed a place to stay, so the plan was to have him stay with us for three weeks, while he made arrangements to move in with Jamie. Instead he stayed through the summer. It was good for him that Kevin liked hip-hop and video games, because he would have been dragged into them otherwise. I held my own at Mario Kart, but take away the console, and he beat me pretty badly at the billiard table. I think I helped Kevin rediscover his love for swimming, but he was also like a big brother to me. I had to be careful about Kevin because he and Hilary would synchronize made-up stories to make me think that I was late for something or that somebody had broken or stolen something that belonged to me. Of course, nobody’s perfect. Kevin also listens to country music and I’ve been telling him to seek professional help.
Jamie’s musical tastes were pretty close to mine, but he had more of a range. One day, we were listening to the radio as we were driving to practice and Kelly Osbourne started singing the words to her new single, “Papa Don’t Preach.” I hadn’t heard it before, but Jamie knew the words right away.
Beneath the Surface Page 13