Haley Cope had two goals in life: to set a world record and to pose nude in Playboy. Within a 6-month period that bracketed the turn of the millennium, she managed to accomplish both.
In October 1999, the 5-foot-11 blonde was featured in a “Girls of the Pac-10” pictorial under the alias Natasha Paris, the nom de plume employed as a means of satisfying NCAA rules. For a while, Cope toyed with the idea of appearing in the magazine as Teri McKeever before thinking better of it—not that prudence was one of Cope’s strongest traits.
Six months later, Cope, swimming the leadoff leg for the Golden Bears in the 200-meter medley relay at the NCAA Championships, set a world standard of 27.25 seconds in the 50-meter backstroke. By relay’s end, the team of Cope, Staciana Stitts, Waen Minpraphal, and Joscelin Yeo had also set a world record. Fifteen months after that, having just completed a stellar career at Cal, Cope became a world champion, winning a close 50-meter backstroke race in which Coughlin finished third at the 2001 Worlds in Fukuoka, Japan.
To people in the swimming community, Cope was considered one of the most improbable success stories in the history of their sport. Born in Crescent City, California, a coastal town near the Oregon border, to a 17-year-old mother and her 21-year-old boyfriend, Cope spent most of her childhood in rural Chico, 90 miles north of Sacramento. Cope lived with her single mother, and the family was poor enough that she received free lunches at public school throughout much of her upbringing. At 12 she began swimming for the Chico Aqua Jets, and her early success in local meets began to attract some attention. Two years later, Cope’s mother, who had married, moved to Maine when her husband got a job with L.L.Bean. Noting that at the time Maine ranked last among states in terms of youth-swimming programs, Cope told her mom, “I’m not coming.”
Her mother was upset, but Cope had a plan: She would live with her father, a man she now describes as “a nice guy, but he’s never worked more than part-time; he drinks too much, parties too much, and doesn’t know the slightest thing about discipline or setting rules. It’s funny, because my dad has three daughters, from three different mothers, and we’re all the same: We’re the feistiest, orneriest, most stubborn girls, and he has no idea how to handle us. I don’t blame my mom for being mad—to lose your kid when she was only 14?” The structure in her life would come from another source—Aqua Jets coach Brian Clark, to whom Cope had grown attached. Thus, over her mother’s objections, Cope stayed in Chico, spending the next several summers with her mother in Maine.
Clark not only developed Cope as a swimmer but also became her closest confidant, and the two officially became a couple during her time at Cal. Nearly a decade later, a few months after Cope had married Clark in October 2002, she accompanied the Cal team to Maui on its annual winter training trip. Driving a rented minivan to the pool in Lahaina one afternoon, Cope was asked by one of her teammates in the back, “When did you know you wanted to marry Brian?”
“When I was 12 years old,” Cope responded, giggling at the open-mouthed reactions of her passengers.
It is a statement Cope stands by, and there is a story to go with it: “I remember the exact moment. It was 2 weeks before my 13th birthday, and I was in a fight with one of my friends at school. She said, ‘If you and Brian were any closer, you’d be sleeping with him.’ I started thinking about it, and I said, ‘You know, she’s probably right.’ I don’t know if Alison realizes she helped me come to that conclusion, but here I am, married to Brian.”
However unusual his relationship with Cope might have seemed to some of those on the outside, Clark handled his prize swimmer’s athletic development with the utmost tenderness. Unlike the Ray Mitchells of the swimming world, Clark was not overly seduced by the notion of making a name for himself by pushing his athletes to great heights at young ages. Early-morning practices during the school year were unheard of, at least until Cope began initiating her own two-morning-a-week routine in high school. Clark’s daily afternoon sessions, rather than focusing on yardage or on maintaining specific times for a series of repetitions, were long on variety and short on drudgery.
“Brian coaches because he likes kids,” Cope says, “so his attitude is why make them miserable? And unlike most coaches, he’s not into making them go fast so he looks good. People in his program might quit swimming because they have other interests, but no one leaves because they don’t like Brian, or because they don’t like the environment there, or because they’re overtrained.”
When Cope was getting ready to enter her senior year of high school, Clark met McKeever while sitting next to her at a coaching clinic, and he told the Cal coach about his relatively raw backstroke and freestyle-sprint specialist. “None of the big programs recruited me; it was mostly lower-level Division I schools,” Cope recalls. “The only interest I got was based on what Brian could drum up. I begged for a recruiting trip to Texas, and I went on it, and they never called me back. I mean, I came from a team where I could shave my legs all year. When I went to Texas and Indiana, they said, ‘We stop shaving until October’ (in an effort to make their times drop dramatically at the start of the season). It was a total culture clash.”
On her trip to Indiana, a team clinging to the outer edges of the top 25, Cope made a couple of her trademark flippant comments and also deviated from the script when she declined to wait for her host to return from a date, instead sleeping at another team member’s apartment. When she returned from the trip, she remembers, “Indiana wrote me a letter saying, ‘We think you’d fit in better somewhere else.’ I think I had too much personality for that team to handle.”
A self-described free spirit, Cope was understandably attracted to “Berzerkeley,” with its quirky street people, funky shops, and overall whiff of unorthodoxy. Having trained in a less traditional program open to experimentation, Cope also recognized McKeever as a logical match. The question in the spring of 1997 was, would McKeever come after Cope? She didn’t make an official visit to Cal, instead driving down on her own and checking out the campus and team for herself. Even after McKeever, sensing the potential of a swimmer so raw and unexposed to high-volume training, became more interested, the coach offered her only a partial scholarship. “Two thousand dollars a year,” Cope recalls. “After my first year, they upped it to $4,000. Fortunately, my family was so dirt poor that I was able to get government grants and aid.”
Cope jumped at the $2,000, then earned every penny—and then some—as a swimmer while taxing her coach’s patience on a daily basis. From her seemingly unbreakable bad habits in the water to her blunt, tactless comments in the locker room, Cope continually provoked McKeever’s ire. Yet the coach also rewarded the standout swimmer with loyalty and affection, simultaneously propping up Cope’s self-image while holding her accountable for any destructive behavior.
If McKeever was like Cope’s surrogate mother, Cope was the wild teenage daughter McKeever had never had. As Cope began making a splash on the collegiate level, then internationally, admiration for McKeever’s leadership grew. “The more people get to know Haley,” McKeever said in September 2003, “the better a coach I become in their eyes.”
“That woman could become a serial killer for the next 20 years and still get into heaven for the way she handled Haley Cope,” stroke guru Milt Nelms says of McKeever. “Nobody I’ve ever met in the United States could have done what she did for Haley. She was totally dysfunctional when she got to Cal, and Teri made her into a world record holder. It was a mixture of tolerance and holding Haley responsible for what she did and said. Teri just wouldn’t let her go.”
It wasn’t just that some people found it difficult to cope with Cope and her penchant for ill-timed put-downs or melodramatic pouting. They also had trouble wrapping their heads around her increasingly impressive performances in the water. Unlike so many other swimmers, Cope began to blossom once she got to college. That, she believes, is a direct result of the way she was coached in Chico. Many Aqua Jets—Gina Panighetti, who graduated a year before Cope; Sarah Hernandez; Dale Rogers—have had success at Wisconsin, while others, including current Oregon State swimmer Kristin Huston, have done well at other schools.
“Most club coaches beat up their kids so much that by the time the athlete gets to college, she thinks, ‘I can’t possibly train any harder,’ ” Cope says. “They’re physically worn down, and mentally they also don’t see where they have to go to get better. At Chico, we talked about getting better, year by year, since I was a little kid. With a lot of club coaches, those kids don’t ever get any faster than they are coming out of high school. With my husband’s coaching, that’s not the case at all. We all get better, and we almost all end up making NCAAs our freshman year. When I was being recruited, I saw that 55s were making NCAAs in the 100 back. I had gone 56.4 (seconds, short-course), and I told coaches, ‘I think I can do 55 my freshman year.’ They didn’t believe me, of course. But I think I ended up going 54.85.”
Then Cope continued to improve, even after her eligibility expired. By the spring of 2003, Cope, at 24, was swimming the fastest times of her life. That just doesn’t happen in elite women’s swimming circles, and people were forced to try to explain it. All they knew was that whatever McKeever was doing, it was pretty damn effective.
“Hey, Teri, guess what?” Dave Salo said while walking across the deck of McDonald’s Swim Stadium near the University of Southern California campus on a warm spring afternoon in 1987. “I found your job.”
Salo, a USC graduate student in exercise physiology who was moonlighting as an assistant for legendary Trojans coach Peter Daland, had been telling his fellow assistant McKeever for months that she needed to run a program of her own. McKeever, a two-time all-American swimmer for the Trojans who, during her senior year in 1983, was named the school’s outstanding student athlete, was in the process of earning her master’s degree in athletic administration. Salo, who was working toward his PhD, had bonded with McKeever based on a shared sense that the traditional wisdom in their sport was flawed. Each had alternative ideas for increasing swimmers’ performance—Salo’s drawn from a more scientific orientation, McKeever’s from an instinctive awareness that technique and efficiency were more important than volume and brute force.
“You’ve got all these interesting notions, and you need a place where you can go and implement them,” Salo had been insisting to McKeever. That day on the pool deck, he was sure he had found the ideal opportunity for his young friend. “The women’s job at Fresno State opened up,” Salo told McKeever. “That’s your job.”
McKeever went after it and, at 25, moved into the heart of California’s Central Valley, a region that produces much of the nation’s lettuce and precious few prominent swimmers. With a limited operating budget and a low-profile program, McKeever knew she couldn’t compete with the upper-echelon schools in terms of attracting talent or generating buzz. Thus, she had to find a way to get less decorated swimmers to outperform their pedigrees. She needed to rely on team chemistry and intangibles like drive and focus. She had to find late bloomers and kids with obvious flaws, at least on paper.
She had to turn a group of low-level recruits into McKeever’s Overachievers. And she did.
Monitoring McKeever’s progress from 180 miles to the south, Salo swelled with pride. Like McKeever, he was sure the two of them were onto something new and different—they just hadn’t been able to test it out on a large enough sample size. McKeever’s now running her own show was, at least, a start.
A native of Rohnert Park, California, a Sonoma County town about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, Salo headed south to attend college at Long Beach State University and swam for John Urbanchek, the esteemed coach who later presided over Michigan’s swimming and diving program for 22 years, winning the 1995 NCAA title. Though traditional in his approach, at least in terms of yardage, Urbanchek, Salo says, favored workouts that were “much more planned, sophisticated, systematic, and methodical. He didn’t just slam you. He’s not someone who coaches from an instinctive fear, who tries to motivate by calling you soft if you don’t do what he says, like a lot of others do.”
Searching for money to help pay for school, Salo was working the counter at Cookie Munchers Paradise, until he walked by the university job board one day and saw a listing for an assistant swim coach for the club team of the city of Downey. Salo got the job, and within 6 months he’d switched places with the head coach, a man whose son was on the team and who, Salo recalls, had a habit of smoking cigarettes on deck. Six years later he left to pursue his PhD at USC, where he was approached by Daland and asked to help out with the men’s team. Meanwhile, women’s coach Don LaMont hired McKeever, who had been teaching in the San Diego area and contemplating her career options.
“Teri was the arbiter between the women and Don,” Salo recalls. “If they didn’t swim well, he figured, it must be because they needed to work harder. They had weigh-ins every Monday on deck, and he just beat them up.”
When he wasn’t coaching or attending classes, Salo had a job in the neurobiology lab, where he ended up with an advisor who had a friend on the USC medical school’s campus. From there Salo got hooked up with a pair of exercise physiologists who were studying the effects of aerobic activity on the heat-shock protein. When Salo would tell them about the popular methods of coaching in swimming, they and others in their field would look at him like he was speaking through a snorkel mask. “Exercise physiologists and academics think swim coaches are the goofiest people in the world,” Salo says. “They’d say, ‘If you’re only doing an event that lasts 2 minutes, and you’re essentially doing a marathon’s worth of training every day—why would you do that?’ I didn’t have an answer.”
So Salo started tinkering with the model, cutting back on some swimmers’ yardage and instead emphasizing concentrated, intense bursts of training. It was, to put it in its most general terms, a race-pace model—and Salo found that the results it produced were better than those garnered by the tried-and-true method. In 1983 Salo began writing a column in Swimming World magazine espousing some of his theories, including a memorable piece to which editors attached the eye-catching headline “The Distance Myth.” The column challenged coaches to look for the minimal model of preparation, rather than the maximal. “This,” Salo explains, “is the philosophy of science.”
As soon as the magazine hit the racks, swimming traditionalists began calling out “Doctor Dave” as a quack.
“In our sport, people’s credentials are judged on the athletes you’ve coached,” Salo says. “A few coaches wrote letters to the magazine that were highly critical, including Bud McAllister, who coached Janet Evans. He said, ‘Who are you? You’re a nobody.’ And he was right.”
That didn’t mean, however, that Salo’s insights were wrong, and he continued to refine them over time. At one point, in an effort to show that his ideas need not be confined to the pool, he decided to apply his race-pace principles to training for the Long Beach Marathon. Over a 12-week period, Salo spent 3 days a week running short distances at brisk paces. At first he would run no more than 30 minutes in a given day, later building up to 45. One day he felt so good that he ran about half of the 26.2-mile marathon distance; otherwise, he never ran more than 6 or 7 miles at a time.
On marathon day, Salo not only completed the race but also did so much faster than he’d anticipated. Though he started crying at 20 miles, having hit a physical and emotional wall, Salo’s final time was a brisk 3 hours, 25 minutes, about a mile per minute faster than his desired speed. “It proved to me I could train on a minimal model,” Salo says. “The thing I wasn’t prepared for was the physical damage; it took me a long time to recover.”
Salo eventually left USC to start his own swim club, the Irvine Novaquatics, where, in most people’s eyes, he continued to operate on the fringe of the sport. Then, in 1995, Salo attracted notice because one of his swimmers, a 13-year-old breaststroker named Amanda Beard, was developing so rapidly at such a young age that her performances stunned the swimming world. “We hadn’t seen a young kid like that since Donna de Varona in the ’60s,” Salo says. Far from the typically overtrained swimmer, Salo remembers Beard as “kind of a reluctant participant. If something else better had come along, she probably would have done it.”
Most swimmers her age were working out nine times a week and swimming a minimum of 5,000 yards per training session. But 5,000 yards was the most Beard would ever swim, and she typically practiced no more than five times a week, as Salo applied his race-pace principles to her training.
A year later in Atlanta, Beard became the second-youngest Olympic medalist in US swimming history, winning a pair of silvers in the breast-stroke events and a gold as part of the 400-meter medley relay. Her youth was highlighted by her habit of bringing her teddy bear with her to the starting blocks, and though Beard, who posed provocatively in FHM magazine before the 2004 Olympics, has grown up in a big way—“She’s past the teddy bear stage,” Salo says, “and into the teddy stage”—she has improved with age (after a post-high-school lull), setting a world record in the 200 breast at the 2004 Trials and winning a gold and two silvers in Athens.
Some skeptics wrote off Beard’s breakthrough as a fluke and continued to dog Salo, but his club kept producing talented performers—he boasts that no outfit has placed more swimmers on the past two Olympic teams. One thing the biggest names (Beard, backstroker Aaron Peirsol, sprint freestyler Jason Lezak) have had in common, Salo points out, “is that they keep getting better. We didn’t ruin their long-term development.”
Like McKeever, Salo was part of the 2004 US Olympic coaching staff. But it wasn’t that long ago that many of his peers were scoffing at his coaching philosophies. At one point, says Milt Nelms, “the (US) national team director made public statements saying, ‘Don’t listen to him.’ He was a pariah for a long time.”
McKeever had her own obstacles to contend with—the dearth of women in her profession, an absence of outside-the-box thinking among her peers, and the challenge of making an impact at a school most people believed was located in the middle of nowhere. Yet at Fresno State, McKeever prodded her teams into producing better-than-expected results and even coaxed some of her swimmers into meeting qualifying standards for the NCAA Championships. After two seasons of coaching the women, she was offered the concurrent duty of overseeing the men’s team as well. For the next three seasons, McKeever applied her alternative approach and technique-oriented workouts to swimmers of both genders, and most of them responded by exceeding their own expectations.
“The guys were a little apprehensive at first, but eventually they loved her,” recalls Cass Dilfer, a captain on McKeever’s last team at Fresno State. “They responded to her partly because she had such a strong athletic background, and she could relate to them as athletes. When they found out she was leaving to take the Cal job (in ’92), they were pissed, because they loved her. And these were not wimps—they were big, tough guys.”
McKeever became so popular at the school that athletes from other sports, even the troubled basketball program, would frequently find their way to her office to discuss their problems. They revered her for her compassion, her belief that athletes should be well-rounded, and her willingness to seek meaning in the process of training and competing, rather than obsessing solely on the outcome.
Saddled with substandard facilities and facing funding shortages, McKeever was industrious and proactive. On hot summer days she’d send her female swimmers, clad in shorts and bikini tops, to wash the bleachers at the school’s football stadium for extra cash. It was during such a session that Dilfer, then named Cass Franzman, attracted the attention of her future husband: Fresno State’s star quarterback Trent Dilfer, who would later quarterback the Baltimore Ravens to a Super Bowl championship.
A few months after joining the team, Franzman rolled her eyes when McKeever, on a training trip to San Diego, put the swimmers through several touchy-feely exercises designed to facilitate bonding. “First she broke us into 10-person groups, and you had to go around and say something you liked about each person,” she recalls. “It seemed silly at first, but hearing all those nice words really helped. Then she had us jumping off bridges and tethering ourselves together and all those sorts of things. It was great, because swimming is a sport in which, even when you’re on the same team, you’re naturally competing against the person in the next lane every day at practice. But with Teri, it felt like it was always about the team.”
The Bulldogs performed as a team, excelling in relays—partly because of McKeever’s attention to detail in teaching the proper technique for starts and turns—and faring surprisingly well in dual meets. Fresno State’s women went 12–3 in dual meets during McKeever’s final season, which helped her to earn Big West Coach of the Year honors in ’92. She might have been working her magic in the middle of nowhere, but people in the swimming community were starting to notice.
“Her kids were getting better every year, and that alone was unusual,” Salo says. “The criticism of her was ‘They’re just Fresno State kids.’ A lot of people assume elite athletes are so much different than the athletes who are at Fresno State, but the same principles apply. When Teri first got the Cal job, she needed to learn that as well.”
Hired to replace Karen Moe Thornton (now Humphreys) in ’92, McKeever, while socially conservative, fit in perfectly at Berkeley, becoming yet another unorthodox freethinker on a campus known for harboring such mavericks. Soon McKeever’s Overachievers were clogging the lane lines at Spieker Pool, excelling in relays and dual meets, and transcending the sum of their parts. Not fully funded, and behind in terms of facilities, the program was overshadowed by Richard Quick’s Stanford juggernaut; it finally cracked the top 10 at NCAAs in the spring of 1997—the season before Cope arrived.
It began to dawn on McKeever that she had come up with a formula for getting less polished swimmers to overachieve, just as many of her peers struggled with the opposite problem—their onetime star recruits would lose motivation, level off, and then quit or slip precipitously. She was onto something big; the problem was, she lacked the confidence to implement her system as comprehensively as her instincts told her to. With Mike Walker doing his best to convince her she was little more than a glorified administrator, McKeever doubted her teaching ability even as she saw evidence to the contrary.
In 1999, senior Marylyn Chiang set an NCAA record in winning the 100-yard backstroke and was named the Pac-10 Swimmer of the Year. Cope earned the same honor in 2000, while Coughlin won it the following 3 years—giving McKeever’s swimmers a 5-year stranglehold on the award. By now she was attracting higher-level recruits, many of whom, unlike Cope, came from more intensive, traditional training backgrounds. Whereas Cope was open to experimentation, McKeever shied away from imploring some of her other prominent swimmers to make radical changes. Coughlin, too, might have fit into this latter category had it not been for the severity of her shoulder injury. Because she was so scarred, physically and emotionally, Coughlin not only was open to a drastic overhaul when McKeever inherited her, but almost demanded it. Like McKeever, she operated largely on feel and instinct, and everything she saw about her new coach’s philosophy intrigued her.
McKeever was one of the few coaches in the country who allowed their swimmers an entire afternoon off during the week. After their Wednesday morning swim, even during heavy training periods, the Bears were on their own until Thursday morning practice. Most of her peers frowned upon such an arrangement, partly because they viewed it as a break from valuable training (though McKeever’s Wednesday morning workouts typically were the hardest of the week) and partly because they were uncomfortable with their swimmers having that much freedom.
“There’s probably not an age-group program in the country that gives you an afternoon off, and maybe five college programs do,” Georgia assistant coach Carol Capitani says. “Teri had the guts to say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ ”
By mixing in yoga, Pilates, and spin classes, along with more typical weight training and dry-land work, McKeever spiced up the otherwise monotonous routine and got her athletes thinking about body positioning and balance. Then, when McKeever introduced them to numerous drills in the pool that touched on similar concepts, they were able to relate the two. Further, unlike most coaches, McKeever explained the purpose of every exercise and asked her swimmers for feedback. “Most coaches think they’re being generous and allowing input by saying, ‘You can swim butterfly or backstroke today,’ ” Cope says. “Teri and Mike Walker really did make us part of the process.”
There was also an element of unpredictability—and excitement—to Cal’s workouts. “As an athlete, it was fun to go to practice,” Cope recalls. “They’d tie you to strings, stick a monofin on your feet, even have underwater wrestling contests as a form of hypoxic exercise. What they tried didn’t always work, and sometimes it was just terrible, but it was still interesting. The thing was, as bad as things eventually got between Teri and Mike, they were by far the best coaching combination I’ve ever seen. The way they worked together and bounced ideas off each other was awesome; they were willing to try anything. We’d do IMs (individual medleys) in reverse order but then descend them or do different 25s underwater—anything to keep it fresh. The two of them competed with each other to be the athletes’ favorite, to see who could have a more exciting practice and come up with the coolest thing.”
Eventually, the strain between McKeever and Walker became so great that practices became far less fun—which was about the time Coughlin was getting ready to enroll at Cal. With Walker gone and the number-one recruit in America entering as a freshman, McKeever was forced to identify her coaching philosophy and chart the direction of her program. “Until you have the confidence, it’s tough to define that philosophy,”
Dave Salo says. “She had to prove herself—not only to her peers but to herself.”
Until Coughlin came, succeeded wildly, and severed ties with Ray Mitchell, McKeever was viewed mostly as a benign experimentalist by most of her peers. Before Coughlin, McKeever simply wasn’t a threat to the more established figures in the sport. In the fall of 2000, Coughlin’s freshman season, Mitchell told Terrapins swimmer Leah Monroe, who was being recruited by Cal, that McKeever would be great for her development as a swimmer. “He would tell me wonderful things about Teri,” Monroe recalls. “He’d say, ‘She’s a really good coach. She’s doing great things with Natalie. She has a new coaching style. It would be a good match for you.’ ” (Mitchell would sing a different tune the following May, when Coughlin decided not to go back to train with the Terrapins over the summer. McKeever insisted the two of them go to Concord to tell Mitchell the news in person. After asking Coughlin to leave the room, Mitchell proceeded to scream at McKeever for the next several minutes, accusing her of stealing his swimmer and vowing never again to send another Terrapins prospect to Cal.)
Coughlin enjoyed everything about McKeever, but there was one especially redeeming quality: “Teri doesn’t try to run my life. She trusts us and gives us the freedom outside the pool to make our own decisions. If I’m working my ass off, I’m not going to ruin it by going out and partying or by not doing my shoulder exercises. Teri understands that if we take swimming seriously, we’re not going to do things to screw up our chances for success.” As McKeever—and Haley Cope—would soon learn, few people take competitive swimming as seriously as Coughlin.
Cope admits that she likes to talk trash, tracing it back to her days in Chico, when Clark, her coach, would encourage playful banter as a way to teach his swimmers to focus. “To so many girls it’s annoying and offensive,” Cope says. “I swear I never, ever—well, rarely—mean it to be a bad thing. I can be abrasive to people who don’t know that I don’t mean it, and I’ve been told I can be very scary to people who don’t know me.”
Toward the end of one of Coughlin’s first practices at Cal, she found herself in a lane next to Cope, the reigning Pac-10 Swimmer of the Year.
The last drill was a series of 30 hard reps, and Coughlin beat her the first 27. Then, in the final three, Cope swam furiously to overtake the heralded freshman. Her competitive fires stoked, Coughlin touched the wall, glared at Cope, and asked, “What was that?”
“When we’re in a race,” Cope replied coldly, “you remember that I beat you.”
Sitting at a popular breakfast spot in Kensington, an enclave in the hills north of Berkeley, on a mid-October morning, Coughlin laughs at the recollection. “At the time, I was like, Whoa,” she says. “But the bottom line is that guys can be competitive like that, yet most women can’t take it. There’s a part of me that loves that about Haley. Even though we’re totally different, we ended up becoming good friends. She’ll just blurt things out sometimes, and if you know her, you’ll say, ‘That’s just Haley.’ When I hear her say some of those things, I know she’s joking, so I can laugh. But most people don’t pick up on that. If you don’t know her well, like a lot of people on the national team, they’ll react like, ‘I can’t believe she just said that.’ Then they look at me and think, ‘She’s one of her best friends. She must be crazy, too.’ ”
Polishing off the rest of her chorizo-and-eggs special at 8 a.m., Coughlin raises her voice over the din of office-bound businesspeople and creative types who’ve just rolled out of bed and provides a recent example. It seems Cope, still training with the team as a postgraduate, not only is comfortable revealing her own body but also doesn’t hesitate to critique the physiques of others. In the locker room shower earlier that week, Cope had told several young Cal swimmers, “The reason Teri’s making us run so much is because you guys are so fat. There weren’t nearly as many fat-asses when I was here.”
The next day, in the weight room, a tall sophomore named Cheryl Anne Bingaman walked past Cope in a hunched-over manner. “Hey, Quasimodo,” Cope said to the unassuming swimmer, “are you done with that machine?”
“You don’t actually laugh, because it sounds so cruel,” Coughlin said. “But you sort of want to.”