27
A BAD MISTAKE
I didn’t drink in high school. Some of my classmates may have experimented or tried to be cool by showing they could handle alcohol, but I really was focused on swimming. I didn’t stay out late and I skipped a lot of parties, another choice I don’t regret because it allowed me to reach my potential as a swimmer. When I did go out, I was often a designated driver, and my mom got used to calls from me that I’d be a few minutes late because I had to drop off one of my friends.
After my swimming was finished in Athens, I had a drink to celebrate. The minimum age in Greece is 18, so it was legal there. Up until my last race in Athens, I was focused on the job I had to do and I wasn’t going to jeopardize all the work I had put in to get to that position.
That changed in early November. I was antsy upon my return to Baltimore, nervous about the future and unable to get back into the water. Dating back to the Olympics, it had been several months since I’d been in my normal routine. Still, that was no excuse for making a terrible choice. This isn’t easy to write about. In fact I hate talking about it, but I know it was an important lesson for me and that sort of lesson can be important for other people, too. One night I went to visit a friend who was studying at Salisbury University nearby. I hung out with him for a while at a party before we split up and I started talking to other friends and people I didn’t know as well. I also made a terrible choice to drink at the party before driving home. I say choice, because even as I have tried to rationalize what happened, the fact is it wasn’t something anyone did to me; it was something I did to myself. The responsibility and consequences for my actions rest squarely on my shoulders, and I was lucky I didn’t get in a wreck. When I was pulled over by police after driving through a stop sign, I was as scared as I have ever been. What had I done? As I realized what was happening, my initial reaction was, “I screwed up. I ruined everything. Why did I do this?” I understood right away that this wasn’t something trivial. I would have to be held accountable for doing something very wrong.
I called Peter first, mainly because I didn’t know how I was going to tell my mom and Bob. I had never been away from both of them for prolonged periods, but I shouldn’t have had to rely on them to avoid losing my self-discipline altogether.
First I had to face the people who mattered to me. Bob was at a meet in Wisconsin when I called him. He was supportive, but he also let me have it over the phone: “Michael, just because you want to blow off some steam doesn’t mean you can be an idiot.” Facing my mom—literally just looking her in the eye—was a killer. I was so sorry for what I had done that I almost didn’t know how to say I was sorry.
Peter, Bob, my mom, and I sort of had a team meeting to talk about the situation, which didn’t become public right away. I kept some public appearances over the next few days, but we decided that it was best for people to learn what had happened from me as opposed to someone else. I called friends and extended family, but I also called reporters I had come to know over the years to tell them straight out that I had messed up and was willing to take responsibility. It was a long, uncomfortable process, but I had to do it. The best way to atone for screwing up is to start by acknowledging you screwed up.
Over the next few days, reporters wrote about what impact my misbehavior would have on my public reputation, what my sponsors would do, and so on. I never even had time to think about any of that. All I knew was that I had let down my mom. Other people around me, good people, knew me as a swimmer. She was the person who would always look at me as her son, regardless of whether I ever jumped into a pool again. She didn’t care about raising a gold medalist; she wanted to raise a son who did the right thing. This was one time, more than any other in my life, when I had let her down. I didn’t fear facing the cameras, facing my friends, even facing Bob, because he had seen so many different sides of me already. But the day I had to face my mom after making such a bad decision and setting such a bad example was one of the worst days of my life. Of course, she was forgiving and understanding; but she also hurt—not for herself, but for me. More than anything, I hated putting her in that position.
Over the next few weeks, I was amazed at how many people provided support, everyone from sponsors and influential people within the swim community to friends and fans who offered support privately. For the first time, USA Swimming held an awards presentation in New York called the Golden Goggles. It was a great affair held in a ballroom near Madison Square Garden. Every swimmer on the Olympic team attended. The guys dressed in tuxedos; the women wore nice dresses and gowns. NBC’s great Olympic anchor Bob Costas emceed the event. There were speeches and highlight videos all evening. I was honored with the swimmer of the year award and had a chance to thank everyone who stood by me. I had prepared some notes, but when I got to the part about my grandmother, I started to choke up and had to ad lib my way through the speech. I also got pretty emotional when NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, the man who runs the network’s Olympics coverage, got up to speak and started to talk about my character. As I said, it’s easy for people to stand by you when they can only see good things. Mr. Ebersol’s comments were a great example of the way people looked past a time I messed up to remember the good things, and I’m very grateful for that.
Pretty soon I started going around and talking to people, especially kids, about what I had done. I went to the Boys and Girls Clubs in Aberdeen. These were kids who made me feel so at ease over the years, because I knew they looked up to me, and I knew anytime I said something to them I was having an impact on their lives. At the least, I could make them feel better about their day. Maybe I was even inspiring someone to strive for goals. It always feels good to do something good for someone else. I almost don’t know how to explain it, but as great as it feels to win medals and set records, I really appreciate what I’ve accomplished more when I see kids stand a little taller just because I’ve gone in to see them. Now I wondered what it would feel like to see them. Most of them had heard about the DUI. Would they still look at me the same way? I didn’t know.
I was a little more nervous than usual speaking to the kids this time, but I was as honest as I could be about what happened and that seemed to make it easier. I talked about making good decisions. The kids seemed to understand both the message and how hard it was for me to give it. Some of them came up to me afterward and told me about mistakes they had made, too. I think this session especially was as helpful for me as it was for them. Each day, I began to understand more and more that the people who stood by me when I wasn’t famous were going to support me through tough times, too.
The next day, I gave another speech at a local health and fitness expo. The age range in the audience was bigger, but the butterflies in my stomach were about the same. I started to feel more at ease when I went back to another high school and was able to talk to students who were really at a stage of life I understood. “I’ve been in your shoes,” I told them. “Some of you are looking forward to prom. I know you can have it all and lose it all. It isn’t worth it to take a stupid risk. It’s a part of my life that will stay with me as much as the swimming medals. The one thing I can do is not to make the same mistake again.”
It was obviously a difficult time in my life, but that fall, a trip with my family helped me keep things in balance. I went to New York with my mom and sisters for a special tour of Ground Zero. We started by visiting the offices of NYC2012, the organization leading the bid to bring the Olympics to New York. The window from their conference room directly overlooked the area known as The Pit, where the buildings collapsed and the rescue workers pulled out the last remaining survivors from the rubble. Since three years had passed since the tragedy, the area looked a lot like a regular construction site, but you could get a vivid perspective of what had happened from where we were standing. It seemed like we were extremely high up and yet we were only a third of the way to where the tops of the World Trade Center buildings reached.
As we were looking a
t the site, a surprise visitor arrived. Jason Read was one of the first people on the scene that day. At 26, he wasn’t much older than me, but he had been elected chief of the Amwell Valley Rescue Squad in New Jersey for seven straight years, making him the youngest chief in the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Jason spoke to our family about the early morning call he received that day, about rushing to the site with the smoke, the smells, and the reality of what had taken place. Like most of the rescue workers, he pretty much worked around the clock, eating in a makeshift mess hall, sleeping in a gutted booth of an adjacent restaurant with inches of soot and ashes all over the place. He was there when the rescue workers found the last survivor among the debris.
The one thing we didn’t realize about Jason was that in addition to his great work in the community, he was also a gold medalist in Athens. Jason was a member of the rowing team that won the men’s eights event in Greece. I have no idea how he managed to keep such an important job while training for the Games.
Afterward, he took us down to St. Paul’s church, which was already famous because George Washington had worshipped there. In the days after September 11, it was a sanctuary for the volunteers, who received refreshments and could read cards from families around the country thanking them for their work. It was great that so many people pulled together and pitched in during that time, but sad that it took such a terrible event to get people to think about helping. It was really a visit that put a lot of things in perspective, like the highs of Athens and the lows of my DUI. Some events in life are just bigger than all of that.
28
OFF TO ANN ARBOR
Before I settled in at Michigan, I spent time looking for a home in Ann Arbor, near the campus and the Canham Natatorium where I’d be training. While I was looking, I moved in with Bob in his new place, and those were the longest weeks of both of our lives. It wasn’t a lack of physical room, but rather a lack of space, if you know what I mean. You don’t really have freedom to do much when you have a roommate. When that roommate is your coach who drives your butt into the ground half the time, well, I’m not sure we could have lasted another week. I wanted to come and go. He was still stuck in watch-over-Michael mode, especially after the fallout from the DUI. Little things set us off. Even by our standards of random bickering, it was a combustible time.
Bob was getting after me pretty hard one day when I told him I was out of there. “Okay,” he told me, “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Of course I didn’t expect him to beg me to come back, but the fact that he was so unfazed by what he said set me off even more. “I’m going back to Baltimore,” I told him. I barely had enough time to throw things in the car when I was back on the road. A few minutes later I called my mom to tell her I was heading home, and as always with Debbie Phelps, calm soon trumped panic. “Now Michael, what are the advantages of coming home? Of course you can come back, but would you train here?”
She had a point.
“Are you going to find a new coach?” she continued. “What about school?”
Okay, time to turn the car around. Mom is the ultimate steam defuser. I was back at Bob’s a few hours later, still grouchy, but still there.
My mom and Hilary helped a lot by scouring real estate ads, looking for apartments and houses. I kind of liked the idea of a house, but my mom pointed out the advantages of an apartment, including security. Score another point for Mom logic. Hilary actually found the place I bought. It had more space than I needed, room for a large TV and all the essentials a young man needs to become domestically capable without having his mom there to cook, wash dishes, wash clothes, pay bills, dust, vacuum, and figure out where the keys are hiding at a moment’s notice.
Once my mom left for Baltimore, it was time for Domestic Ace to show his colors. I woke up one morning ready to start my day. I had bought both milk and cereal, so what else do you need to have a bowl of cereal? Maybe a bowl? The house didn’t come with any, so it was time to improvise. I had a Gatorade canister, which was going to have to do. I poured some milk and some cereal into the canister and sort of drank my breakfast.
Once I actually had dishes, I didn’t want them to pile up and get dirty, so I put them into the dishwasher and tried to follow the directions exactly—with just one small change that shouldn’t really make any difference, should it? I put liquid hand soap in the dishwasher instead of the dishwasher soap I was supposed to use. This worked just fine for the first five minutes. Then I spent the next few hours trying to get the bubble bath out of my kitchen.
I had been at the apartment for a while when I first tried to make steak the way my mom used to cook it: seasoned just right. I figured I could do the same, except that the steak came out like shoe leather. So I had to order out. At least I had cooked myself a good pair of jogging shoes. I was having a conversation with someone about it, and he gave me a few tips: put the salt and pepper on the outside before you start and make sure the pan or grill is really hot so you get a nice sear on the outside of the meat. That keeps the juices from getting out. Then let the meat rest for a few minutes before slicing into it, so the juices have time to settle and don’t run and make the meat fatty and chewy. Good, I could use the advice, except, well, the guy giving it to me was a vegetarian. Am I really hurting that bad in the kitchen?
At least I took care of the important priorities. I found a place close by that had a satellite dish where I could watch the Ravens. And even though I wasn’t a huge college football fan before I went to Michigan, I started enjoying Wolverines games. It’s hard not to when the stadium seats 100,000 fans. We rarely compete in places that seat more than 10,000. A few weeks earlier I had watched the Wolverines beat Michigan State in triple overtime and it took me a few hours just to wind down. By the way, sorry Mom, but you know those Olympic rings I had tattooed on my left hip in the name of team spirit? Well, there’s this, um, Wolverine “M” on the other hip.
Because of my schedule, I began college life just taking courses in public speaking and sports marketing. I have some experience in both areas and I think once I retire from competitive swimming I might be doing things that involve one or the other. We had a lab of sorts in the speaking class that I enjoyed. Each student wrote down a random topic on a piece of paper, which was placed in a bag. Then each of us reached into the bag and pulled out a slip with a topic we had to discuss ourselves. My topic turned out to be sleep, something I know a lot about. I started by saying that as an athlete, rest was very important to my preparation. I never trained well if I didn’t have the right amount of food or the right amount of sleep. A lot of people might not look at proper sleep as an important part of a training program, but without it, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do nearly as well. See, sleeping in class is bad, but talking about sleep in class? Not so bad.
The tradition and training atmosphere at Michigan are great. Just look around. NCAA and Big Ten banners line the upper level at Canham. The Wolverines had won 11 NCAA team championships and 156 NCAA individual titles before Bob took over. Since the 1924-25 season, the men’s team has had a winning record in dual meets every year except one (1955-56). If you go through a back entrance to the pool, you pass a series of glass-enclosed cases holding caps from all the countries represented by Michigan swimmers at the Olympics over the years. Each cap (72 from 11 countries) has the name and flag of a Wolverine Olympian. On the side of the complex near the diving tower, there is a large clock located below large Olympic rings. The clock doesn’t have the current time. Instead, it counts down the time until the opening ceremonies in Beijing. The second fractions are extended to eight decimal places.
The culture of swimming is everywhere. Bob was in local deli a week after starting his job when a father and son noticed his USA Swimming jacket and started to chat him up. After wrapping Bob’s turkey sandwich, the student behind the counter pointed at him and added, “and you swam at Florida State.”
29
THE WAKEUP CALL
I
could come up with a lot of excuses from the bad back to the DUI to the move to Michigan, but the fact is I was about to have a very unsatisfying year in the pool. It wasn’t a total failure, but I always want to be able to build on the previous year, and by the winter of 2005-06, I really didn’t feel I had improved in any one area since the Olympics. Bob and I had talked about trying to incorporate more weights into my training program after Athens, but we didn’t dare try it in 2005, because we were worried about what that might do to my back. I still did a lot of cross-training strength and core work, like push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups and work on the medicine ball. Barbells would have to wait.
I think Bob was looking for a way to keep my energy level up during the post-Olympic year. Especially with the bad back, he wanted me to train and recover with the right amount of caution without having to think cautiously all the time. It was a good year to experiment, so looking ahead to World Championships over the summer in Montreal, he decided I would swim two new events, the 100 and 400 freestyles, while dropping two familiar ones: the 200 fly and 400 IM. I would still swim those periodically during the year, but not during the season’s big meet. If we decided afterward that we wanted to go back to the old program, there was still plenty of time to do that before the next Olympics.
The competitive year kicked off in March at the American Short-Course Championships in Austin. Bob entered me in six races over three days, both to test my back and get ready for World trials in Indianapolis a month later. This was home to a lot of the guys on our national team: Brendan, Aaron, Neil, and Ian. The Reeses, Eddie and Randy, have really done a great job in keeping the college and post-collegiate programs strong down there. My first day went okay. I broke Matt Biondi’s old American record, winning the 200-yard freestyle in 1:32.08, won a 400 IM in 3:42.74, and swam a leadoff leg for our Club Wolverine against the Longhorn guys from Texas, which we lost. I wasn’t happy with my times, but at least my back felt okay. The next day, I swam a 200-yard breast, missing my personal record (PR) by a second and finishing third behind Brendan. I won two more races on the last day and felt as though I could go through a long meet without worrying about tweaks and aches.
Beneath the Surface Page 23