We’re gonna do a song I wrote after a night I spent right here on this block,” the bespectacled man with the dreadlocks said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “I was out with a good friend of mine at a bar that used to be right across the street called the New Amsterdam, and we were getting really drunk and watching his dad play flamenco guitar, and it was a really cool night …”
Seconds later, Adam Duritz and his band, Counting Crows, broke into a stirring rendition of “Mr. Jones,” the 1993 hit that propelled the San Francisco group into the national consciousness. A Berkeley native who later attended Cal, Duritz has made the most of his rock-star reality and reveled in many of the spoils of celebrity. The singer’s most cherished perk, however, is the access he enjoys as the world’s most conspicuous Bear Backer, and his love for Cal goes far beyond the traditional pursuits. He is as likely to show up at a women’s soccer game—or, for that matter, a volleyball practice—as he is at a football or basketball event. Thus, it was no surprise that at this private show for roughly 100 friends (and, eventually, America Online subscribers) at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco’s North Beach district just before Halloween 2003, Duritz had invited several Cal athletic luminaries to the gig.
One of them, Teri McKeever, sat motionless in a folding chair near the stage, alternately mesmerized by the music and tormented by a tumultuous blow she had absorbed earlier that afternoon. She tried to immerse herself in the moment—partly because she doesn’t get out much; partly because of the unique opportunity to experience a popular band play its trade in a behind-the-scenes setting. For McKeever, the real magic lay in the between-song asides and the backstory Duritz provided to songs like the one to which she was now grooving.
I was down at the New Amsterdam staring at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired flamenco dancer
She dances while his father plays guitar
She’s suddenly beautiful
We all want something beautiful
I wish I was beautiful
So come dance this silence down through the morning
Cut up, Maria! Show me some of them Spanish dances
Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes
When the show ended, Duritz drifted into the audience to schmooze with friends and acquaintances. McKeever and her assistant coach, Whitney Hite, thanked him for the invitation, and he responded with the utmost sincerity, “I’m really glad you guys could come. How’s Natalie? Tell her I said hello.”
I brought my wife, Leslie, over to introduce her to Hite and McKeever. In the 2 months since I’d been hanging out with the team, I’d already learned that McKeever tends to act awkward in situations such as this, but she seemed unusually rattled, even for her. Eventually, the two of us ended up off to the side, and she revealed the source of her misery: “Haley’s leaving.” Long pause. “She told me earlier today.”
The woman looked shell-shocked. Suddenly she was as vulnerable and exposed as Duritz had ever been onstage, and I didn’t have to draw her out to understand how big a hit she’d taken and on how many levels: She felt betrayed by Cope, who’d been like a daughter to her; she feared this would derail her dream of being the first woman to serve on a US Olympic coaching staff; she worried that Coughlin was losing the training partner and friend who could most relate to her pre-Olympic pressure; and she was questioning everything from her abilities as a coach to the direction of her program. “I wasn’t going to come,” she added, “but Whitney dragged me. He said I needed to get my mind off this; what I need to do is get a life. Or maybe I just need to get drunk.”
She was kidding—at least, I assumed she was. As far as I knew, McKeever avoided alcohol, an understandable stance given the tragic role it had played in her father’s death. Her voice quivered. “She told me, ‘I’m leaving because you’re not as good a coach as you were 2 years ago,’ ” McKeever added. “That one hurt.”
Five minutes later, she was gone. Fourteen hours later, she was still reeling.
The Kleenex box was a bad sign, albeit a melodramatic one. “I thought we might need this,” Cope told McKeever as the swimmer pulled the box from a plastic bag, placing it between them as they sat on the grass at a park just west of campus.
Cope had gotten into a tiff with McKeever at practice the previous Thursday—Cope had been showing several younger swimmers an arm-rotation drill, which the disapproving McKeever called “stupid”; it turned out the drill had been conceived by Cope’s husband, Brian Clark. For the next several days, Cope had been absent and incommunicado until finally she contacted McKeever and told her, “We need to talk.” Now here they were, with 7 years of bonding in the bank and less than 10 months until the Olympics, about to have the conversation McKeever dreaded.
McKeever had come to the meeting believing she and Cope could talk through their problems and preserve the relationship. But a few minutes into the discussion, she realized Cope had already decided to leave. One of Cope’s main complaints centered on what she perceived as a change in McKeever’s coaching style. “Some of the things that got you here,” Cope told her, “you’re not doing now.” Specifically, Cope cited a decline in the openness of McKeever’s communication with her swimmers—less of a willingness to solicit their input. She also bristled at a gradual increase in yardage and what she believed was an abandonment of her coach’s alternative philosophies.
“There’s some truth in what you’re saying,” McKeever told her, “but come on.”
“The faster we got, the more attention we got, and the harder Teri fought to hold on to (the program’s newfound success),” Cope would explain months later. “As an athlete, I felt like we had less input and control than in the past, and the yardage was getting higher and higher. I understand it, to some degree—she’s a college coach, and she has to produce in those 4 years. That’s a whole different perspective. I had a much different set of needs and less than a year to address them.”
McKeever’s perspective: As the program’s profile rose, she started attracting more decorated swimmers, many of whom came from programs where traditional approaches were employed. In the process, she became more hesitant to mess with their tried-and-true methods than she had with the less accomplished athletes she’d coached in the past.
Had Cope’s beef been primarily a philosophical one, McKeever might have kept her cool. But things degenerated as the conversation continued, and after a while it became clear: This was a divorce, and a particularly messy one at that.
“I’ve been unhappy for years,” Cope told McKeever. “I love my teammates, I love the school. You’re okay. Everyone on the team thinks you’re mean.”
Now McKeever was angry. “Haley, you don’t know my relationship with Flora (Kong) or Cheryl Anne (Bingaman) or Ashley (Chandler). You don’t know the stories behind some of the things that go down between us or how hard I try to help them. My job is to set a standard of excellence for the entire team.”
McKeever was taken aback at what she considered Cope’s lack of loyalty. “You don’t know how hard I’ve had to go to bat for you in your career,” she said. “Do you realize how committed I’ve been to your success? A lot of the dreams you’ve been able to realize—getting married, having a chance to start a family—I don’t have those things, whether it was by direct choice or otherwise.”
At that point, Cope went to the Kleenex box.
The conversation also featured a couple of classically caustic Cope moments. At one point, she said, as if taunting McKeever, “Just because I’m doing this, I don’t want things to change between us.”
“Haley,” McKeever replied, “are you kidding me?”
Toward the end of the discussion, as Cope began breaking down the motivations behind some of McKeever’s actions, the coach snapped, “Haley, don’t psychoanalyze me. I pay someone to do that.”
“Yeah,” Cope shot back. “I know.”
A day later, McKeever clutched a can of diet cola while walking across the lush north side of Cal’s campus, still visibly reeling. Near tears, cursing every 30 seconds or so, she recounted the incident and pondered its ramifications. “This wouldn’t have happened between two guys,” she said. “Guys would’ve ridiculed one another mercilessly or fought each other and gotten over it—girls keep score. Haley was keeping score, and I fell behind without even knowing there was a game. The bottom line is that I was having a relationship, and she wasn’t.”
McKeever’s voice cracked. “I mean, what am I doing? Maybe this is a sign from God. I need to start having a life, make some friends, meet a guy, have kids. And here I am, going to pieces over someone who apparently didn’t care as much about me as I thought she did. I mean, nobody died. No one’s house burnt down.”
She stopped walking and leaned against a wooden bench overlooking a gorgeous hill of grass. “This is the closest I’ve ever come to just saying ‘screw it’ and quitting,” she said. “I talked to my brother Mac on the phone last night, and I told him, ‘Screw this. I’m done.’ ” Like every coach I’ve ever met, McKeever had an escape fantasy all mapped out: She’d move back to Southern California, get a job substitute teaching, hang out with her brothers and nieces and nephews, and regroup. “I told Mac, ‘I just need to be close to my family right now.’ He said, ‘Teri, I won’t let you do this. You’ve worked too hard. You care too much.’ ”
A few seconds later, McKeever, for the first time in an hour, turned to me and smiled. “Well,” she said, “this’ll be great for your book. Lots of drama.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s great.” We both laughed, and then McKeever said, “Well, there goes my best chance for Athens.”
She was only half kidding: She knew that should Coughlin swim as expected at Trials, it would behoove US women’s coach Mark Schubert to include McKeever on his staff, if for no other reason than to keep his most important swimmer in her comfort zone. But the fact was, with Coughlin and Cope on the US team, McKeever’s selection was a no-brainer. Now, with only one swimmer likely to make it, McKeever would have to sweat out her candidacy to the bitter end.
That was merely a secondary worry. As McKeever began walking back across campus toward her office in Haas Pavilion, it dawned on her that what most alarmed her about Cope’s defection was that Coughlin, one of Cope’s closest friends, might feel similarly frustrated with McKeever—perhaps even enough to leave. It wasn’t a fear born of rationality; Coughlin, by all indications, was both loyal to McKeever and thrilled with her coaching. Said McKeever: “The first thing I thought after I left Haley was ‘Oh my God; does Natalie know? Does she feel this way, too?’ When I saw Natalie today we talked about it, and Nat said, ‘Hey, I’m closer to her than anyone, and I didn’t know anything about this until Sunday.’ Then Natalie said, ‘I need her.’ And I said, ‘I know, and that’s what bothers me so much about this.’ Though, if you really break it down, that’s one of the reasons Haley’s leaving—because Natalie needs her.”
As McKeever began to process the situation, she became resolutely certain of one thing: She wouldn’t let Cope or anyone else question her coaching. If nothing else, her own coach wouldn’t allow it. Since the height of the Mike Walker messiness, Kathie Wickstrand-Gahen, perhaps McKeever’s closest friend, had devoted a great deal of time and energy to keeping McKeever in a healthy frame of mind. This was hardly the worst crisis they’d confronted.
“Teri was always a phenomenal coach,” Wickstrand-Gahen says, “but sometimes we’re the last to see our own gifts and talents.”
For much of her life, Wickstrand-Gahen has been on a quest for self-awareness and improvement. “I’ve always been a restless God seeker,” she says. “I did EST (Erhard Seminars Training) in high school.” Back then, as Kathie Wickstrand, she was an Indianapolis-based middle-distance free-styler and butterflier with Olympic potential as the 1976 Games in Montreal approached. Three months before the US Trials, her club coach, Gene Lee, was diagnosed with cancer.
Emotionally distraught, she tanked at Trials, then went to Indiana University to swim for the legendary Doc Counsilman, to whom she had been referred by the dying Lee. One afternoon in 1981, shortly after she’d graduated from IU, the 6-foot-1 Wickstrand emerged from a workout at Illinois State University, where her fiancé was an assistant football coach, and walked toward his office to say hello. “I was all sweaty, wearing my nylon shorts and bandanna, looking like Olivia Newton-John,” Wickstrand-Gahen recalls. “The women’s basketball coach, who was also the interim athletic director, stopped me in the hall and said, ‘Do you have any eligibility left?’ I told her I didn’t, and then we started talking, and I said, ‘You know, what’d I’d really like to do is coach.’ I told her how I’d swum for Doc Counsilman and worked in his camp for years, and her eyes got huge. She said, ‘Do you have a résumé? Our swimming coach just retired, and the search committee’s meeting right now to name his replacement.’ ”
It turned out Wickstrand did have a résumé in the trunk of her car. She brought it inside to the athletic director, who told her, “I’d like you to come in and talk with the search committee.”
“Great,” said Wickstrand. “When?”
“Right now.”
So the sweaty, utterly unprepared college grad in an Olivia Newton-John getup went in and lit up the room. “It was a rough situation,” Wickstrand-Gahen recalls. “The former swim coach had been there for 35 years, and he had groomed his longtime assistant for the job. But I got a call that night offering it to me.”
An uproar ensued, especially given that a woman had been hired to coach both the men’s and women’s swim teams. “This one parent, Chip Smith, was a legislator for the state of Illinois,” Wickstrand-Gahen says. “He called me and called the AD and told each of us, ‘No son of mine is going to swim for a female.’ I said, ‘Mr. Smith, give me 1 month with your son, and see what he says. That’s all I ask.’ ” She apparently did all right: After her first year with the team, Wickstrand received a framed declaration from the statehouse in Springfield granting her the key to the State of Illinois.
Later, Wickstrand followed her husband to Purdue, where, upon her nighttime arrival in West Lafayette, “literally the first thing I saw was some drunk pissing on the sidewalk of the main street.” Looking back, she considers it an omen. Unhappy at Purdue, Wickstrand took a job at Northwestern. It was a period of transition: She got divorced, and decided to seek help for what she says was a problem with alcohol. Then, in 1991, was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. “I used to say, ‘This job is killing me’—now, all of a sudden, I had to confront the possibility of death,” Wickstrand says. “Being a coach is too much like drinking—it’s addictive, and you’re totally insulated. You don’t watch TV or look at the newspaper; you just go to the pool and back, and nothing else exists. It’s a lifestyle.”
So, in 1994, having beaten the cancer and successfully gotten sober, Wickstrand walked away. She moved to Esalen, the picturesque “alternative education center” chiseled into the central California coast. She had no TV, no phone, and sometimes—like many of Esalen’s other residents—no clothes. She began grad school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with designs on becoming a social worker, but dropped out, picking up cash by giving private lessons to competitive swimmers. By the mid-1990s, she says, “life coaching had started to explode. There were articles about it in Newsweek and Time. People would hand me articles and say, ‘This is you.’ ” Then a friend introduced her to a life coach named James Gahen, the man who is now her husband. They moved to San Diego and went into business together, and the first person to hire Wickstrand-Gahen was McKeever.
“Teri was seeing a therapist at the time,” Wickstrand-Gahen recalls, “and when she’d talk about how much stress she was under, the therapist would say, ‘Just take a week off. Don’t go to the meet.’ Obviously, that’s just not something a coach can do. She got frustrated with the process. With me, she could talk about coaching to someone who understood the lifestyle. If you think about it, it makes sense: Swimmers have coaches. What do coaches have?”
McKeever had first noticed the outgoing Wickstrand at swim meets—partly because she was one of the rare women in the profession and partly because her athletes always seemed to be smiling. When they finally connected on the phone that day in the early ’90s, their friendship formed quickly. Wickstrand suggested McKeever come to an experimental workshop in Lake Delevan, Wisconsin, and McKeever accepted on the spot. A month later, they spent 3 days immersed in self-exploration with a group of women—a weekend Wickstrand-Gahen says was “like a year’s worth of therapy for Teri. She wasn’t really ready for something that heavy; she probably thought she was going to a spa when she agreed to come out.”
The most revelatory moment occurred late in the weekend, when, in an attempt to illustrate the amount of responsibilities each participant was shouldering, the women were asked to hold out their arms and identify the people and entities in their lives for which they were accountable. A corresponding number of pillows would then be placed into their arms. “When it was Teri’s turn,” Wickstrand-Gahen recalls, “they kept stacking more and more pillows, and people around us were stunned. They didn’t realize how swim coaches are. It was like, ‘We’re gonna need some more pillows.’ So they keep putting more and more pillows on the stack, until eventually it reached the ceiling—and still, Teri held on. She didn’t get it.”
Finally, McKeever started crying and let go of the stack. As the pillows came crashing to the floor, the other women converged on McKeever, offering hugs and encouragement. “It was a defining moment,” Wickstrand-Gahen says. “Teri has been a caretaker her entire life, and it’s her nature to try to take on so much.”
Yet McKeever’s willingness to accept responsibility—combined with her sincere desire to impact the lives of her swimmers, not only as athletes but also as people—is what has helped her ascend to a level few of her peers believed was possible. “I think that’s what makes me a good coach,” she says, “but I think it’s exhausting at times, and I wish there was a way to—not disengage, but to manage it. Because I know what kind of person I am: I will kill myself before I fail. That’s the way I’m wired. It’s not always a good thing. But that’s the only way I could’ve ever made it here—being too stubborn to fail.”
There are numerous stories of McKeever’s displaying deep sensitivity when confronted with a swimmer’s personal crisis. Leah Monroe, Coughlin’s old Terrapins teammate, remains grateful for the way McKeever handled her departure from the sport. “We were very open with each other,” Monroe says of McKeever. “I would tell her everything, and she was always very supportive. During my sophomore year, a family emergency came up, and I decided I wanted to deal with that and focus more on school, maybe go study abroad in Peru. I went in to tell Teri, and she was really understanding. She said, ‘I just want you to you to be happy—and if you’re not happy swimming, you’re not going to be happy, period. So yes, you should take a break, and maybe quit altogether.’ ”
Conversely, McKeever expects her swimmers to display a great deal of dedication to their craft—not only in grueling workouts but also by devoting intense focus to the task at hand. When she believes that someone is slacking mentally, emotionally, or physically, she is not shy about jumping down the person’s throat. “They’ve expressed to me that they have certain goals and will make certain sacrifices to reach those goals,” McKeever explains, “and I am very serious about holding them to that, every day. I hold them accountable 100 percent of the time.”
Watching McKeever become riled during a practice underscores the central paradox of her personality—at times her greatest strength as a coach can also be her downfall. Both hypersensitive and profoundly committed, McKeever can’t hide the fact that she cares as much as she does. “She still takes things really personally,” Wickstrand-Gahen says. “She’ll tell me about a conflict within the team or someone’s behavior, and I’ll say, ‘That’s not personal.’ But she has a hard time letting things go.”
At those moments McKeever is like an open wound, and to some swimmers she can come off like a demanding, guileless mother figure. And oddly enough, she has something in common with Haley Cope, at least when she loses her temper—tact is not always her strong suit. Breaststroker Marcelle Miller would graduate from Cal in 2005 as one of McKeever’s biggest devotees, but the walk-on from Massachusetts didn’t feel that way at first. “I almost quit my freshman year,” Miller says. “I felt she was degrading me in the pool all the time. We have a really good relationship now, though. I can talk to her about anything, and I feel like she’d do anything for me—not only to make me swim faster but to help me as a person.”
While it’s true that McKeever is one of those coaches who tend to be appreciated after the fact, she’s no Vince Lombardi or Bill Parcells, control freaks who manipulated their charges in an effort to prod them to greater heights. With McKeever, there’s nothing calculated or contrived. She vents not because she’s trying to toughen up her swimmers, activate their inner fire, or help them learn how to deal with pressure. She simply does it because she cares a lot and (like most coaches) is under a great deal of stress, and that’s how she responds to it.
And in the fall of 2003, even before Cope’s departure, McKeever felt a tremendous amount of pressure—to get Coughlin ready for the Olympics and help boost her program to the next level.
Back in her office after our walk across campus, McKeever’s immediate issue was how to break the news of Cope’s departure to the team. She didn’t want to overdramatize the event, but she knew her swimmers weren’t stupid; they would soon hear the news and talk about it among themselves. McKeever’s nature is to discuss things openly and honestly, but the mere act of mentioning the loss stressed her out—telling the other swimmers would make it more real.
A few minutes before the start of practice, McKeever grew distracted. Nike, with whom Cope had an apparel deal, had called earlier that day, wanting to know what was going down. “Whitney took the call, and he handled it really, really well,” McKeever said. “Instead of getting all freaked out or gossiping, he just said, ‘Hey, I wasn’t there. You need to talk to Teri.’ ”
She was less pleased with a US Olympic Committee official who had called to deliver an “urgent” message to Coughlin. It turned out the message was from a sports agency, IMG, that was pursuing Coughlin as a client, and the caller was hoping to collect some background information. “It was completely unprofessional that he called to deliver that message,” McKeever said. “I told him, ‘Look, they’ve been in contact with her and her parents and me, and it’s not your job to facilitate that communication.’ He said, ‘All agent signings have to go through us.’ I said, ‘That’s not true. I’ve had professionals under my care, and they didn’t go through you when they signed.’ It’s just ridiculous.”
It was easy to see why McKeever hoped to shield Coughlin from such dealings. Her star swimmer still seemed weakened by the virus that had sidelined her in Barcelona, wasn’t looking particularly good at practice, and was feeling overwhelmed. In less than 2 weeks, Coughlin would move into a condominium she had purchased in Emeryville. McKeever said as she left her office, “I’m worried about Natalie.” McKeever made the walk through the Haas Pavilion hallway, down a flight of stairs, and into another corridor, which housed the locker rooms leading to the pool. When she got out on deck, 20 of her athletes were already in the water, taking warm-up laps. It was 95°, and the workout bikinis most of them favored were skimpy and flattering. The coach called everyone together at one end of the pool and said, “I just wanted to let you all know that Haley talked to me yesterday and informed me she’s going to be training elsewhere. She’s played a big part in the building of this program, and we wish her well. This doesn’t change any of our goals or what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Emma Palsson, a junior sprint freestyler and butterfly specialist from Sweden—and probably Coughlin’s best friend on the team—rolled her eyes. No one else reacted visibly. After a 5-second pause, McKeever called out a freestyle set, and everyone was back in the water, speeding off toward the opposite end.
Three weeks later, Coughlin sat at Fatapple’s, a casual restaurant in north Berkeley—famous for its olallieberry pie, which, the locals claim, rivals Pitocin in its ability to induce extremely pregnant women into labor—having devoured another tasty breakfast special, and voiced some frustrations of her own. “Well, apparently I’ll have to take a full class load this spring—and I’m not happy about it,” she said. It seemed one of the athletic department’s compliance officers had told McKeever the previous spring that Coughlin, if she returned to school, could take as few as three units in the spring of her senior season while remaining eligible and preparing for the Olympics—thanks to a rule designed to help athletes who were prospective Olympians. “Then,” Coughlin said, “a week ago, he told Teri, ‘I was wrong.’ Teri jumped down his throat, and rightfully so. I mean, that was a huge factor in my decision to come back.”
Coughlin figured she’d sign up for 13 units but drop all but a single four-unit psychology course immediately after competing in the NCAA Championships in mid-March. “It’ll leave a mark on my record,” she said, smiling, “but so what?”
In other words, Coughlin expected to be a well-known Olympic champion—not to mention a psychology major with a bachelor’s degree and an otherwise sparkling academic record—by the time any prospective employer or grad school admissions official got around to asking, “What about those incompletes in the spring of 2004?”
The Olympics were squarely on Coughlin’s mind, and until recently, she’d have bounced her thoughts off Cope, the one person in Berkeley who could at least partly relate to her pressures. When Cope left, Coughlin’s initial reaction was panic: Not only were the two friends; they were also training partners. “It’s a big loss for me,” she said a few days after hearing the news. “Haley and I went through so much together, and I couldn’t have done what I’ve done without her. There were times when everyone else was gone and it was just the two of us here training with Teri—before the Worlds, before the ‘Duel in the Pool’ with Australia last spring after NCAAs. That time, everyone else was on spring break, and it felt like we were the only people in Berkeley.”
Now, with Cope having landed an hour east at the University of California, Davis (where Natalie’s sister, Megan, was a freshman), to train under Pete Motekaitis, the coach of that school’s men’s team, Coughlin was starting to adapt to her friend’s absence. She took comfort in the presence of another postgraduate swimmer, ex–UCLA all-American Keiko Price, a sprint freestyler who was attending graduate school at Cal. “As long as I have Keiko,” Coughlin said, “I’ll be okay.” It helped that Price, a native of Hawaii, was relentlessly cheery and kind, devoid of the abrasiveness that Cope sometimes displayed.
A few days after Cope’s departure from Berkeley, Coughlin and the Bears had flown north to compete in the nonscoring Colleges’ Cup in Vancouver. Coughlin, continuing a frustrating pattern—Cal had previously trounced the University of the Pacific and Washington State in dual meets—hadn’t been particularly pleased with her swims in Canada. After returning to Berkeley, she got a call from Cope, who asked about the Vancouver trip.
“It was fun,” Coughlin told her. “It was a good team-bonding experience, but a bad meet. The pool was terrible, and I swam like crap.”
“Yeah,” Cope agreed. “I saw the times.”
“Haley,” Coughlin said, seething, “I’ve gotta go.”