“Well,” she said, “I think Christine is a great swimmer who has earned my respect by her consistently strong races. I hope to be around long enough to earn hers, and yours, with my swimming as well.”
After that there were a couple more mundane questions before James said the fifteen minutes were up. When the swimmers made their way off the podium, there was a security guard leading them and one following as they walked up the aisle. Susan Carol waved Stevie over as they got close to the door, but when he walked in her direction, one of the security people put a hand out.
“Sorry, no media,” he said.
“It’s okay, he’s with me,” Susan Carol said.
The security guy looked confused but held firm. Stevie checked around for Mike Unger, but he had disappeared, no doubt to round up Phelps after his race. There was a lot of noise coming from the pool deck, so he figured Phelps was in the water.
Magnuson jumped in. “Hey, fellas, cool it,” she said. “This is her boyfriend—right, Susan Carol? The other kid reporter you told me about? It’s fine for him to walk with us.”
“No, it’s not,” said a voice from behind them.
It was—of course—Trevor James.
“Rules are rules. He’s in here on a media badge, he abides by the same rules as anyone else.”
Now Susan Carol looked frustrated. “Don’t you make these rules to protect the athletes? So we aren’t harassed? This is my boyfriend. I promise you, he’s not harassing me.”
“We make these rules for the safety and security of everyone. There are no exceptions, even for swimmers’ boyfriends,” said James.
“For goodness’ sake, this is a swim meet, not the White House,” Susan Carol responded.
“What would you know about the White House?” James said in a sneering tone.
“I’ve been there!” Susan Carol said, clearly trying to remain calm—though the “I’ve” came out as “Aahve.” “I interviewed the president. So did he”—she pointed at Stevie—“and we were treated a lot more politely there than here!”
“I really like this kid,” Magnuson said. She turned to Trevor James. “You want to pick a fight right here with your next glamour girl? Or you want to walk away and cut your losses?”
Stevie decided he really liked Christine Magnuson.
James seemed torn but said, “Fine. We’ll discuss this further in the morning.”
He stormed off, forgetting, it seemed, that he needed to keep the rest of the media in line. The world’s best swimmer would be arriving in a few minutes.
When they got to the end of the hallway near the locker rooms, Kelleher was standing there with a tall, middle-aged man who was also wearing the USA Swimming uniform.
“Susan Carol, I’m sure you’ve met Chuck Wielgus,” Kelleher said. “Stevie, Chuck is the executive director of USA Swimming.”
“Then he needs to do something about Trevor James,” Stevie said, still angry.
Wielgus frowned. “Was there more trouble after Bobby left to come find me?”
“Oh yes,” Susan Carol said. “It was outrageous.”
Stevie loved both the fact that she said “outrageous” and the way she said “outrageous.”
“I’m truly sorry,” Wielgus said. “Trevor’s new at all this. Mike always handles the media, but I guess he needed some help because of the throngs around Michael Phelps. I told Bobby I would find out what happened as soon as we wrap things up tonight.”
“How did Michael’s race go?” Susan Carol asked.
“He won pretty easily,” Wielgus said. “Slow time: 1:56 plus, but he looked pretty smooth and easy.” He smiled. “It was not as impressive as what you did.”
Susan Carol gave him The Smile. “I got a little bit lucky,” she said. “I’m not sure Christine knew I was closing in on her. She’ll be watching for me next time.”
Wielgus laughed. “Still, 57.88 is 57.88, and your coach told me you didn’t taper at all.
“Look, my apologies for all the confusion tonight. I’ll take care of it. The back door and the locker room hallway are open again, and everyone will get all the time they need with the swimmers after their swims tomorrow and Sunday.”
“That’s great,” Stevie said. “And I think you might want to talk to Mr. James about his attitude toward the media.”
Wielgus nodded. “Actually, Steve, I think I need to talk to him about a lot of things.”
Susan Carol headed to the locker room to shower while Stevie went to the media room to write. Bobby walked with him on his way back to the interview room to listen to Phelps. Stevie was going to write about the Anderson-Magnuson race. Kelleher planned to write about Phelps, and Tamara was working on a Phelps-Lochte rivalry column.
Stevie filled Bobby in on what Magnuson had said in the interview room. “Do I need to include that?” he asked Kelleher.
Kelleher laughed. “What, do you think not writing it will keep it a secret?”
“No. I know it’s kind of a juicy story, but I don’t want to be one more writer talking about Susan Carol’s looks rather than her swimming.”
Seeing the look on Stevie’s face, Kelleher put a hand on his shoulder. “Look, I know how you feel about Susan Carol. But when you’re writing about her, you have to think like a reporter, not like a boyfriend.”
“How do I do that?”
“Pretend you’re writing the same story, only it’s about Phelps instead of Susan Carol,” he said. “Would you include the exchange then?”
Stevie tried, but failed, to imagine someone saying reporters only liked Phelps because he was so attractive.
“We’ll talk more about it later,” Kelleher said. He pointed down the hall. “Meantime, here comes the entourage. I have to get in there.”
Stevie saw Phelps and company coming down the hallway. The crowd was so big he stood back against the wall to make room, but Phelps stopped when he got to him.
“Hey, I know you,” Phelps said. “I remember seeing you do that show—what was it called, Kid Sports?—with Susan Carol Anderson a couple of years ago. You were good.”
“Um, thanks,” Stevie said, trying to refocus his brain. “I’m Steve Thomas.”
“Michael Phelps,” he said, offering his hand.
“Yeah, I know,” Stevie said, then wished he could snatch the words back.
Phelps was smiling, clearly unbothered by Stevie’s lack of imagination.
“Susan Carol had some swim,” Phelps said. “I was watching it in the locker room.”
“Yeah, it was amazing,” Stevie said. “I don’t think she even knew she could go that fast.”
Phelps nodded. “I remember that feeling—I’d look up at the clock after a race, see my time, and think it must have been someone else who had gone that fast.” He sighed just a little. “Nowadays it might very well be someone else.”
Stevie was amazed by how relaxed Phelps seemed to be. He could feel the posse getting antsy. One of the guys in a suit was tapping Phelps on the shoulder to indicate he needed to get going.
“I think you’re doing just fine,” Stevie said as Phelps held out his hand again to let the nervous people around him know he understood he needed to get going.
“I guess,” Phelps said. “But I’m not the one dating America’s newest sweetheart. That must be a great feeling.”
Phelps gave him a friendly wave and moved down the hall, his various minions following as if attached by some magnetic force.
Phelps was clearly a good guy, even after all the fame and money that had come his way. But he was wrong about one thing: Dating America’s newest sweetheart was not a good feeling at all. In fact, it made Stevie feel a little bit sick to his stomach.
He walked into the media room. It was time to write. Or at least try to write.
9: USA Today
Susan Carol was relieved when the meet finally ended. After all the hoopla and hassles of the first day, the weekend felt like a cakewalk.
Her only swim on Saturday was in the heats o
f the 200 butterfly. Ed Brennan told her to swim it as if it was the first one in a set of five: smooth and steady. She did as instructed and qualified second—behind Becky Ausmus. None of the big guns from around the country or the world had entered the 200 fly. Ed had even talked about having Susan Carol skip it too on the grounds that a swimmer only had so many good 200-fly swims in them.
Susan Carol wanted to swim—she still thought of it as her best event. “Phelps is swimming it,” she argued.
“I’ll tell you what,” Ed said. “When you win fourteen Olympic gold medals, you can swim anything you want to and not listen to me. The Olympic Trials are what matter. I think you should rest.”
She had finally talked him into it by making the point that it would be good for her to get the feel of swimming it in a fifty-meter pool again at least once before the trials.
So, after following Ed’s instructions to the letter on Saturday afternoon and having a very nice dinner alone with Stevie at a great steak place called Del Frisco’s, she climbed on the blocks Sunday morning hearing Ed’s final words of encouragement.
“If you break 2:10, I’ll kill you.”
Susan Carol had gone 2:03.44 in Shanghai, but that was tapered and swimming the race of her life. What’s more, she knew the only swimmer in the pool who could go anywhere close to 2:10 was Becky Ausmus. She knew what Ed was thinking: Don’t put too much into a swim you can win easily and, ultimately, means nothing. Standing on the block, she thought maybe she should negative-split.
Or at least try to.
To negative-split meant to swim the second half of the race—in this case the second 100—faster than you swim the first half of the race. It was a tactic used most often by distance swimmers, who would patiently build their speed as the race wore on. It was unheard of in the 200 fly because even if you held back the first 100, you were going to be tired in the second 100. But the best way to not break 2:10, Susan Carol thought, was to come as close to negative-splitting as she possibly could.
When the horn went, Susan Carol glided into the pool and almost went into a daze during the first 100. When she hit the wall, she could see that she had a body length on Ausmus, surprising since she knew she hadn’t gone out fast at all and Becky almost always did—even in the 200.
On the third length, she began to pick up speed and she could hear the crowd getting into it. Coming off the third wall, she could see that Ausmus had dropped back and no one was close to her. The last length felt like a victory lap. She barely felt any pain in her arms—no doubt Ed’s insistence on doing that brutal 5 × 200 fly series four days a week had something to do with that—and so, almost for yuks, she picked up her kick the last fifteen meters.
She glided into the wall and heard the cheers. She turned to see Ausmus just getting to the flags. Before she could look at the clock, she heard Ed’s voice: “I warned you,” he said. “I’m gonna kill you.”
Confused, she looked at the clock and started to laugh. She’d gone 2:06.22.
“Ed, I swear I took it out as slowly as I could,” she said. “I was trying to negative-split.”
“You did negative-split, you nutcase,” Ed said, using a term he only used when he was happy with her. “You were out in 1:03.5 and back in 1:02.7. You’re insane!”
Ausmus finished second in 2:12.79. No one else in the pool was close to 2:15.
After she had gone through what had now become the ritual post-swim interviews, Susan Carol barely got to say goodbye to Stevie, Tamara, and Bobby before she had to hit the road—she had school in the morning.
She had grown accustomed to the extra attention she had gotten in school after Shanghai. In fact, that hadn’t been nearly as difficult an adjustment as a couple of years earlier, when she and Stevie had co-hosted a TV show for a few months and she actually had kids stopping her in the hallway to ask for autographs. Now that sort of thing felt almost like old hat to her.
But she wasn’t prepared when she got to school on Monday and several of her friends, without saying a word about her swims over the weekend, started going on about “the USA Today story.” She had no idea what they were talking about.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, given their comments, but she sneaked down to Ed Brennan’s office during second period—when she was supposed to be in study hall. When she walked in, she knew instantly he had read the story. “Those agents of yours have to be reined in,” he said, clearly upset. “And your father is going to have to be the one to do it.”
She could see USA Today on his desk.
“I haven’t seen it yet,” she said. “Is it that bad?”
“You be the judge.”
He handed her the newspaper, and she sat down on the couch next to his desk to look. When she unfolded the sports section, she gasped. In the middle of the page, running almost from the top to the bottom, was a photo of her, clearly taken shortly after she had gotten out of the pool after winning the 100 fly. She had taken off her cap and was shaking out her hair and beaming—Stevie called it The Smile.
The headline read TEEN WONDER GIRL BRINGS NEW “HEAT” TO AMERICAN SWIMMING.
“Oh, God,” she said under her breath.
The story confirmed her worst fears. It had almost nothing to do with her win over Magnuson or her easy win in the 200 fly. It was all about the “marketing frenzy surrounding the long-legged teenager with the incandescent smile who has people talking as much about how she looks in her bathing suit as about how fast she swims in it.”
“Jesus,” she said, reading that sentence, then looked around instinctively because if her mother had been in the room, she would have barked her name in disapproval.
The story was full of quotes from J.P. and Bill on all the companies who wanted her to represent their products. There were quotes from various sponsor-reps on why her looks were every bit as important as her ability.
One quote from J.P. really made her cringe.
“Look, this is a fifteen-year-old girl. She’s a minister’s daughter. The girl next door, the girl every boy in the school dreams about going out with. So we’re not marketing Britney Spears here. But Amanda Beard has made a lot of money selling sex appeal. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Oh yes, there is, Susan Carol thought. Amanda Beard had posed in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and in Playboy. She had also been in her mid-twenties and had made a conscious decision that her future was at least as much in modeling as in swimming. Susan Carol had no desire to be a model—now or ever. And she and her father had made that very clear to the people at Lightning Fast. They agreed that she would be seen as an athlete and only an athlete.
She finished the story and looked at Ed.
“Do you think my father has seen this yet?” she said.
“I would think so, unless he moved to Siberia this morning.”
“Should I call him or wait until I get home?”
“Wait,” he said. “You should have this conversation face to face.”
She stared at the photo again. Then she thought of Stevie reading the story and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He would absolutely want to kill J.P. and Bill and anyone who had ever worked for Lightning Fast. She kind of liked that idea.
Stevie was standing at his locker putting books into his backpack when he first heard about the story.
“Wow, Thomas, your girlfriend really is hot,” Andy Hague said as he pulled open his locker a few feet away from Stevie’s.
This was nothing new. Stevie was often asked if he was really going out with Susan Carol Anderson or if that was just big talk on his part. Actually, he didn’t talk about it that much. Others did.
“You saw her swim yesterday?” Stevie said, knowing the taped highlights of the meet had been on NBC while he was flying home from Charlotte.
“Nah, I don’t watch swimming,” Hague said. “I saw USA Today. Whoa! Good luck hanging on to her.”
He banged his locker shut and walked off, leaving Stevie desperate to find a copy of USA Tod
ay. There was a 7-Eleven two blocks from school. He wondered if he had time to run there to get the paper before first period started. Then he heard the bell signaling that first period was starting in three minutes. He would have to wait until lunch.
The morning crawled along, not helped by several other guys making comments similar to Hague’s. Lonnie Levine, the captain of the basketball team Stevie had once dreamed of playing for, poked him in the chest walking out of Spanish. “You better not ever bring her around here. She’ll drop you for Buzz in a heartbeat,” he said, talking about himself in the third person.
Levine’s nickname was Buzz for reasons Stevie didn’t know and didn’t really care to know.
When lunch finally came, Stevie ignored his usual midday hunger pangs and sprinted the two blocks to 7-Eleven. There was one copy of USA Today left. He forked over a dollar for the paper—which seemed like a lot since he only wanted to read one story—walked outside, opened to the sports section, and almost choked at the headline and the photo. He got angrier and angrier as he read all the quotes from the agents about how they planned to market Susan Carol as America’s newest sweetheart/sex symbol.
He was just reading the last quote from the soon-to-be-dead-if-he-came-anywhere-near-Stevie J. P. Scott when his cell phone buzzed. It was unusual for someone to call him during school, so he pulled the phone out of his pocket. It was Bobby Kelleher.
“I assume you’ve seen USA Today by now” was Kelleher’s opening gambit.
“I’m just finishing the story,” he said. He read J.P.’s last quote aloud just to see if it sounded as slimy as he thought it did: “She wins gold in London and she’ll make people forget Michael Phelps in the advertising world. I mean, look at her. Who wouldn’t buy anything she was selling?”
When Stevie finished, Kelleher was laughing. “There’s steam coming through the phone,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better, Tamara says she prefers Phelps.”
Stevie recovered his sense of humor for a minute. “Well, that should at least make you feel good,” he said.
“Yeah, my wife is going to run off with Michael Phelps. Makes me feel great. Listen, I talked to Matt Rennie and we agree you should write about this.”
Rush for the Gold: Mystery at the Olympics Page 7