The statement stunned her like the sound of a starting gun interrupting a daydream. The 2004 season was about to begin in earnest, with Cal hosting dual meets against Arizona and Arizona State, and they would mark the last time that the greatest swimmer in school history would perform at Spieker Pool. “Today and tomorrow are your final home meets,” Coughlin’s friend Mohamed Muqtar, the athletic department’s director of student services, reminded the senior on the morning of Friday, January 23, as they sat in his office in Haas Pavilion.
“Whoa,” Coughlin said. “Oh, yeah, I guess they are. Wow, that just snuck up on me.”
The meets would take place concurrently with dual meets featuring Cal’s men’s team against the same schools, with the women and men alternating events—meaning more people than usual would be there to appreciate Coughlin’s farewell performance. On paper, the Cal women were better than ASU, but the talented Wildcats presented a major challenge to the Bears’ goal of going undefeated in dual meets. With standout swimmers like Emily Mason, Marshi Smith, Jenna Gresdal, and freshman Whitney Myers, Arizona was the nation’s sixth-ranked team with a bullet.
The eighth-ranked Bears, meanwhile, would have to rely on a winning formula of Coughlin’s comprehensive excellence, teamwide precision, and overall toughness. “We’ll lose the first relay,” Coughlin said, “but if we can win the first two or three individual events, they’ll fold. That’s the kind of team they are. But if they have some early success, they’ll get into it, and then we might have problems winning the meet.”
Coughlin’s own mind-set was not ideal for such an intensely competitive competition. For one thing, she was distracted by the impending end of her collegiate career and the big decisions that go along with turning pro. The first and biggest was whom to hire as an agent. He or she would not only immediately negotiate what figured to be her most lucrative deal—an apparel contract with Speedo or Nike, or perhaps a wild-card entry into the swimwear sweepstakes—but also relieve McKeever of many of her responsibilities as Coughlin’s first line of defense from the outside world. Additionally, as Athens approached, Coughlin’s agent would play the central role in the marketing of this potential crossover personality who insisted upon being heavily involved in the shaping of her own image.
As Coughlin and McKeever assessed the swimmer’s many options, they were fortunate to receive guidance from a pair of Cal swimming fans, former Olympic medalist Steven Clark and Leland Faust, who worked for a San Francisco financial firm called CSI Management, to which many prominent athletes had entrusted their investment dollars. Clark and Faust met with McKeever and Coughlin, helped them understand the agent-selection process, and would ultimately join them in interviewing candidates. Among the logical possibilities: Octagon, led by Peter Carlisle, who had already signed Michael Phelps (that agency’s Tom Ross had arranged for Coughlin to throw out the first pitch at an Oakland A’s game in September); New York–based Peter Raskin, who had previously represented Janet Evans; and Evan Morganstein, whose Premier Management Group represented 20 of the nation’s top swimmers and at the time also happened to rep McKeever.
Then there was a woman named Janey Miller, a former IMG employee who, after having moved to Boulder, Colorado, had left the business to start a family. Now with two young children, Miller, whose former clients included track star Michael Johnson, speed skater Apollo Anton Ohno, and swimmer Amy Van Dyken, was starting her own firm and looking for a marquee client with whom to launch her business. “I’ve talked to her a couple of times on the phone, and we’ve really connected,” McKeever had said of Miller in December. “She’s the first person who suggested that Natalie could drive the process, rather than the other way around. I’m looking forward to talking with her more. She just had a good feel about her.”
In addition to the business-related distractions, Coughlin had emotional ones. It had been a traumatic week in Berkeley, as several days earlier Cal basketball player Alisa Lewis had died from bacterial meningitis after suddenly falling ill. The Cal athletic community was overcome by grief—and by paranoia. Lewis’s teammates and coaches were given the antibiotic Cipro as a precaution, and everyone who trained in or near Haas Pavilion, including the swimmers, was lectured on the importance of maintaining sanitary environments. The day before the Arizona meet, Coughlin and many of her teammates went to a memorial service at Haas that left most attendees in tears. “I didn’t know her,” Coughlin said, “but by the end it felt like I did, because they really brought her to life. It was so tragic.”
What Coughlin and her teammates didn’t realize was how sharply the tragedy resonated with their assistant coach. Nine years earlier, Whitney Hite had nearly died from a similar illness—and only his love of swimming, along with his intestinal fortitude and the grace of God, had pulled him through.
A Denver native, Hite had arrived at Texas as a 6-foot-4, 140-pound stick of a swimmer good enough to earn scholarship money for his books and little more. Asked to describe himself as a swimmer, Hite says, “Slow. I tried real hard, but I certainly wasn’t anything special.”
Following his junior year at UT—his sophomore season of swimming, thanks to an earlier redshirt year—Hite returned home to Denver for Memorial Day weekend. He had planned to run the Boulder-to-Boulder 10-kilometer race on Memorial Day and went out for drinks with friends on Saturday night to…carbo-load. He woke up on Sunday, he recalls, feeling “kind of hungover. I had just come back from training with the team in Colorado Springs and was in peak physical condition, but I felt so lousy that I stayed in bed and slept most of the day.”
His fever worsened as the evening went on, and by 10 p.m. it had shot up to 106°. Ice baths reduced his temperature to 102°, but it kept spiking to 106°. At 4 a.m. Sunday the phone rang at the Hite household—Hite’s grandfather had died while coming out of surgery. Hite’s father headed to Colorado Springs to attend to his father’s funeral arrangements. At about 5 a.m., Hite began throwing up repeatedly, lying prone on the bathroom floor between heaves. His body ached, especially his head. His skin was covered by blood blisters—the meningitis, which had begun in the brain, had progressed down his spinal cord and entered his bloodstream.
At that point Hite’s mother insisted they go to the hospital. “I couldn’t put on my own clothes,” Hite recalls. “I had started to bleed into my joints. It’s by far the most painful thing I’ve ever been through.”
It was very nearly the last thing he ever experienced. Upon Hite’s arrival at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver, doctors placed the patient on intravenous penicillin and braced for the worst. “It was pretty touch and go,” Hite says. “They told my father to drive back from Colorado Springs because I wasn’t going to make it. When you’re sitting there in bed and you see that your blood pressure is down to 60 over 40 and your heart rate is 25, knowing that you have no control, you get pretty scared.”
Soon a priest arrived to perform last rites. The patient, however, was strangely defiant. He kept asking his doctors about going home even as he endured the most brutal pain he’d ever experienced. “I kept wanting more morphine, but that lowered my heart rate, so they had to stop giving it to me,” Hite recalls. “The ibuprofen was making me throw up, so I couldn’t take anything for the pain. They wouldn’t let me sleep, because my heart rate was so low that they were scared I’d fall into a coma.”
The day after Hite was admitted, he got a visit from his boss at a local pool and insisted he be placed on the lifeguard schedule for the following week. “I wasn’t worried about how sick I was,” he says. “I was worried about getting back home and getting back to normal. I kept pushing the doctors to let me go home, and one of them said, ‘I don’t think you understand—you’re lucky you’re not pushing up daisies.’ They had told my parents, ‘You need to make preparations. He is going to die.’ And they later said I was a million-to-one shot. There had been six cases in Colorado that year—four people died, one was a paraplegic, and then me. I could’ve been blind, deaf, an amputee, a paraplegic, afflicted with seizures for life. I was very lucky.”
Hite’s determination to get back to the pool certainly didn’t hurt. Leave it to an exceptionally driven athlete to insist on getting up and going to the bathroom, even when the painful process took half an hour. “Every time I sat up, I got a huge migraine,” he recalls. “Every joint in my body killed; I couldn’t bend my legs. They took me to get a chest x-ray one day, and I told the nurse, ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch my legs.’ She did it anyway when she was trying to lift me off the gurney, and I let out a primal scream that was so loud it even surprised me.”
After 4 days in intensive care and another 4 days in a regular room, Hite decided that was enough. He told his doctor, who wanted him to stay at least another week, “I’m leaving whether you check me out or not.” Finally, his doctor agreed to let Hite go if he could walk 30 yards during his rehab session later that afternoon. It took him an hour, but Hite passed the test and went home. He had lost 24 pounds and had to learn to walk again, but he was dead set on making it back to the pool.
“When someone takes something away from you, and then you get it back, you have an incredible appreciation for it,” Hite says. “Looking back, I say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” He was grateful to Texas coach Eddie Reese for allowing him to “start over,” and the story ended happily, with Hite’s being part of the Longhorns’ NCAA Championship team in 1996. “I did get back to where I was before,” Hite says, “but I was still slow as hell.”
Hite also changed his outlook on the sport, becoming more attuned to technique and motivational strategies. “As a teammate,” he says, “when you know your contribution’s not going to be in the pool, your challenge is, how are you gonna make everyone around you better?”
It was that mentality that led Hite to coaching, though his quest to enter the profession wasn’t especially well conceived. After graduating from college in 1998, Hite drove from Denver to US Summer Nationals in Clovis, California, crashed on a friend’s hotel-room floor, and hoped something good would happen. On the last night of the meet, it did—Hite was introduced to Georgia coach Jack Bauerle, who mentioned he might have space for a volunteer assistant. So Hite, without having formally accepted the position, “packed up everything I had, put it in a trailer, and just showed up.” He worked at an Athens, Georgia, bagel shop and spent mornings coaching high school kids at a local club, landing a paid position with the Bulldogs—at $9,000 a year—after 4 months, when another assistant left the program.
Five years and three national championships later, Hite landed in Berkeley, where his steely toughness and motivational majesty jibed with McKeever’s technical excellence to create a killer coaching combination. “Whitney is so intense, so hard-core, and so fired up about swimming,” freestyler Lauren Medina says. “I think we needed a change, someone to come in and say, ‘Stop whining and get the job done.’ His philosophy is that you need to work your ass off, day in and day out, if you want to get better. At first, I was intimidated by him. I felt I was never gonna be good enough for him. I wanted to prove to him I was as dedicated and driven as the swimmers from Georgia.”
Says backstroker Helen Silver: “What’s nice about the program is the Teri-Whitney mix. You get the relentless intensity from Whitney and the teaching and nurturing from Teri. It is a very family-oriented program, just because we are like her kids. I’ve talked to people in other programs that are successful, and it’s not a team thing for them at all.”
As the Arizona dual meet was about to begin, Hite had already played it out in his mind, time and time again, and broken it down to a pair of pivotal efforts. “The two backstroke races are the key,” he said as he confidently paced the deck. “We need to come up big in both.”
The good news was that the greatest backstroker of all time was standing 2 feet away, wearing a blue cap with gold Cal script and the name “Coughlin” inscribed in block capital letters. The bad news was that, as usual, she wouldn’t be swimming the backstroke for the Bears.
That’s because, in Helen Silver, McKeever and Hite felt they had another swimmer capable of beating almost anyone. The almost-6-foot sophomore’s effort could be uneven in practice, but in meets her competitive fire emerged, and she had made a habit of defeating higher-ranked swimmers in dual meets during her Cal career. Today she was especially primed because her sister Emily—Cal’s star signee for the following season—was in attendance. In the end, Emily had chosen Cal over Arizona, and Helen felt the Bears could validate that decision by prevailing.
As Coughlin had predicted, the Bears were beaten in the first relay, the 400 meter medley. (Because this was an Olympic year, NCAA meets were being staged using short-course meters, rather than the usual yards, though this was not a uniform implementation. The Pac-10 Championships, for example, used yards.) But freshman Erin Reilly out-kicked Arizona’s top swimmer, Emily Mason, to win the 800 free, and Medina took down fellow junior Jessica Hayes in the 200 free, staking Cal to an early lead. Then came the essential 100 back, with Silver battling a pair of powerful sophomores, Jenna Gresdal and Marshi Smith, in a taut affair. Surging out of the last turn, Silver put away the competition and won comfortably, and the Bears looked capable of fulfilling Coughlin’s prophecy.
Yet there was no reason for the Wildcats to fold; because of the inherent disadvantage of having a perpetually feeble diving program, the Bears were essentially 26 points down. This was the case going into every dual meet against a strong opponent—and for similar reasons, Cal would be all but mathematically eliminated from competing for the Pac-10 Championships at that meet in late February. Such was the curse of Cal swimming: You had to beat any legitimate opponent by 27 points or more simply to win a dual meet.
Why was diving such a disaster in Berkeley? The most obvious target of blame was longtime coach Phil Tonne, who in 20 seasons of coaching the men’s and women’s teams had contributed alarmingly little to the Bears’ overall success in important competitions. This was especially true on the women’s front—only one of his divers, back in the ’91 and ’92 seasons, had even qualified for NCAAs. McKeever was so frustrated by the situation that she would gladly have given away one of her 11 scholarships for a diver who could at least score points in dual meets, let alone Pac-10s and NCAAs. Tonne, however, couldn’t attract anyone of that caliber. By way of explanation, he would complain that Cal’s facilities weren’t as attractive as those of many of its opponents. Stanford, for example, had a state-of-the-art platform in its pool, while none existed at Spieker, where the divers shared the pool with the swimmers.
There was also the philosophical question of whether diving belonged in a swim meet in the first place. “Other than the fact that it takes place in water, it is so far removed from what we do,” Coughlin says. “It would be more logical to stage a water polo game between races and count the goals toward the point total than to do what we do now.” Indeed, collegiate diving had a judging setup that made international figure skating seem steeped in integrity. Each dive was judged by the two diving coaches of the competing schools, meaning Tonne, at least technically, was half-responsible for quantifying his athletes’ dismal showings in competition.
There were two diving events and 14 swimming races (12 individual contests bookended by relays) in each dual meet, meaning that diving essentially counted for a whopping eighth of the point total. In dual meets, quality opponents would finish first, second, and third in each diving event to capture a total of 16 points, while Cal would be relegated to the fourth and fifth positions and the three points that came with them. Often, in fact, Cal’s best diver would finish worse than fourth, but the rules mandated that a team could accumulate no more than first-, second-, and third-place points for any one event. Thus, in theory, McKeever could have entered a pair of discus throwers from the women’s track team, instructed them to do pikes (the most basic of dives), and still received the exact score: a guaranteed 32–6 deficit overall.
All of this was why, when the 1-meter diving scores were posted midway through the meet, there was a giddy sense of excitement among the Bear swimmers: Five-foot-one freshman Lila Korpell had taken third place, meaning Cal’s deficit in the event was 15–4 rather than the customary 16–3. While it’s possible that some of Arizona’s divers had simply faltered, the Bears weren’t about to question Korpell’s unlikely breakthrough—that two-point difference might decide the meet.
It was going to be close. Coughlin had done her job, leading 1-2-3 sweeps in the 50 and 100 freestyles and cruising to victory in the 100 fly. But Helen Silver, in her best event, had been dusted by Hayes in the 200 back, one of the races Hite felt the Bears had to have. As the meet played out, it became perilously clear that Erin Reilly would probably have to defeat Mason again, this time in Mason’s specialty, the 400 free.
Though game as always, Reilly would come up 2 seconds short—and it wouldn’t matter. That was because Ashley Chandler, she of the disappointing freshman season, showed a measure of grit that both surprised and delighted McKeever. Maybe it was an Arizona thing: Chandler, who hailed from the Phoenix suburb of—no lie—Chandler, was suddenly swimming like the decorated teenager who people joked must have had her town renamed in her honor. She utterly overpowered Mason down the stretch, winning by nearly 2 seconds, to keep Cal in contention as the meet wound down.
Silver had sulked for a couple of minutes after her defeat in the 200 back, but McKeever made sure she understood the importance of her performance in the final individual race, the 200-meter individual medley.
“You have to take at least fifth,” McKeever urged. “If you do that, and we go 1–3 in the relay, we can at least tie.” Silver took fourth, by 0.32 second, to put the Bears in even sweeter position: Win the 400 free relay, and the meet would end in a 150–150 deadlock. Take first and third, and Cal would win by a 152–148 score.
With Coughlin leading off Cal’s A relay, McKeever liked her team’s chances of finishing first. When Coughlin swam her 100 in a sizzling 54.01 seconds—far faster than her time of 55.52 in winning the 100 free an hour earlier—it was effectively over, with seniors Danielle Becks and Micha Burden, along with Medina, cruising from there. So Cal had a tie in the bag—the victory would come down to whether its B team could edge Arizona’s B relay for third. With Chandler and Reilly providing solid opening legs, the B Bears were still in fourth, until junior Emma Palsson made a move during the third leg. That meant Cal’s fortunes would be decided by its unlikely anchor, 5-foot-2 junior Keiko Amano.
Not only was Amano by far the shortest swimmer on the team, but she was also the quietest. So unassuming was the Japanese-born sprint-freestyle specialist from Camarillo, a small town 50 miles northwest of LA, that the Bears had managed to lose her on her recruiting trip.
McKeever, then-assistant Adam Crossen, and about a dozen team members had been walking through San Francisco’s Pier 39, a popular outdoor shopping area that backed up into the Bay, on a Friday night in the spring of 2001 and left to make the 20-minute walk to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream sundaes. They were almost there when McKeever suddenly looked around and blurted, “Wait—where’s Keiko?” A dozen swimmers shrugged in unison. “Oh my God,” one blurted out. “We left her!” The Bears’ Katherine McAdoo ran back to retrieve the recruit outside the Pier 39 bakery where she’d last been spotted. Amano, it turned out, had gone inside to use the restroom and was standing there, looking lost and forlorn, when McAdoo arrived to rescue her.
“Well,” McKeever said to Crossen at night’s end, “I guess we blew that one.”
The coaches were able to laugh at their faux pas. The valedictorian of her private high school, Amano was intrigued by Cal’s prestigious bio-engineering department and had contacted them in the first place. McKeever and Crossen had regarded Amano as a project who might someday help with relay depth. When it came time to take inventory of the incoming class, McKeever told Crossen, “She’s not coming. It’s fine. Call her and get it over with.”
So Crossen called Amano, asked if she’d made a decision, and nearly dropped the phone when she answered, “Yes. I think I’m coming to Cal.”
What? Crossen nearly blurted out. At conversation’s end he ran to McKeever’s office and said, “Teri—she committed!” It was the first verbal commitment he’d secured as a collegiate coach.
Once in the fold, Amano confounded McKeever by behaving as if she were unreceptive to coaching. This girl is incredibly bright, McKeever thought to herself. How can she be so intelligent and yet be so blocked when it comes to swimming? During hypoxic sets, Amano had been known to cry because she was so unnerved by the specter of oxygen deprivation. By the end of Amano’s freshman year, McKeever figured, That girl’s only gonna make it a year. She’s chosen the most academically demanding thing you can do, and she’s not getting any better when she does swim.
Amano’s sophomore year was nothing special. She stayed in Berkeley for summer school, kept working out with McKeever, and, as she competed in various long-course events, underwent a remarkable transformation. Her swims were cleaner, more technically precise, and faster. “How come you can’t do that during the year?” McKeever asked.
“I’m too tired,” Amano answered. “I’m up late studying all the time.”
Many coaches would have scoffed and told Amano to reevaluate her commitment to swimming. McKeever responded that fall by amending Amano’s schedule, allowing her to skip certain workouts to allow her some rest. That did wonders, as did Amano’s suddenly improved ability to assimilate McKeever’s lessons on technique. “Sometimes she’s too smart, too analytical about things,” McKeever says. “I tell her, ‘Let it go—just let your body take over and see how it feels. There’s not a right way and a wrong way. It’s a concept.’ Sometimes she just has to work through it on her own.”
One afternoon in May 2004, I sat with Milt Nelms and McKeever at Cancun, a taqueria in downtown Berkeley, when the coach posed a question to the stroke guru. “I’ve always wondered,” McKeever said, “can you teach someone how to be talented? What do you think?”
“Yes,” Nelms replied. “Especially in a sport that’s so sensory.”
“I didn’t used to think so, but I do now,” McKeever said. “Do you know who taught me that? Keiko Amano. It took a long time for her to get it, but eventually she decided she wanted to be coached; she wanted to listen. I had to reprogram her, and once I did, it was like she had a whole different skill set.”
Nelms took an enormous bite of a chicken burrito and laughed. “I see her in the water and say, ‘Look at that little thing. How can she go that fast?’ It defies everything we know about physics,” he said. “How can someone that short go 22.8 (in a short-course 50-yard freestyle relay split)?”
This was not as insulting as it sounded—Nelms and McKeever loved Amano as much as they did virtually any swimmer on the Cal team, partly because she was a testament to McKeever’s penchant for milking the most out of her swimmers and partly because the swimmer by that time had already carved out a place in Golden Bear lore with several transcendent performances.
Amano’s second-biggest moment as came at the end of that relay against the Wildcats. Given a slight lead over Arizona’s B team by Palsson, Amano briefly lost it before powering back into third after the first turn. She kept charging, setting off a wave of euphoria in the Spieker stands. Cal’s male swimmers and coaches stopped what they were doing to behold the spectacle—Amano not only was going to win the meet, but was making a run at Arizona’s star-studded A team! In the final 25 yards, she closed on the Wildcats’ Lisa Pursley, finishing a mere 0.93 second out of second place. Had the race been 5 yards longer, there was little doubt the pint-size piranha would’ve run Pursley down.
If Amano had emerged as the swimmer McKeever would most want anchoring a B relay, the A equivalent unquestionably was Lauren Medina. With Coughlin preferring to swim the leadoff leg for several reasons—it made for less choppy water, the better for her faultless technique to prevail over physically stronger swimmers; it allowed her to set records by producing a pure time from the starting gun; and it usually so demoralized the opposition that they psychologically gave up—Medina’s bravado and fortitude made her the perfect closer.
There was no closer route to McKeever’s heart than to swim a deciding relay leg against UCLA, a Pac-10 rival also coached by a woman, Cyndi Gallagher. Of the school’s three biggest rivals, UCLA ranked a distant third on the animosity scale, behind Stanford and USC, for the vast majority of Cal students and student/athletes. McKeever, however, still had some of that old USC undergraduate in her—the thought of losing to the Bruins tormented her. Medina, who had once dreamed of swimming for UCLA, was determined to make sure that wouldn’t happen.
The 10th-ranked Bruins had served notice that they were a major force by throttling 4th-ranked Stanford, 151–92, in Los Angeles on January 30. The Bears, who had cruised over Arizona State, 185–110, the previous Saturday (the day after the Arizona meet), had just completed a surprisingly easy 180–80 rout of 9th-ranked USC across town and were dining with family members and supporters at LA’s famed Mexican restaurant El Cholo when they heard the stunning UCLA-Stanford score.
When the Bears entered UCLA’s Student Activities Center pool (more commonly known as “Men’s Gym Pool”) the following afternoon, the atmosphere was electric. An overflow crowd cheered as the Bruins opened the meet with a victory in the 200 medley relay, only to have the Bears capture the next four events. Coughlin again won the 50 and 100 frees and the 100 fly, and Helen Silver (100 and 200 back) and Ashley Chandler (400 and 800 free) also came up huge with two victories apiece. Yet UCLA got the obligatory 32–6 diving edge and stayed in the meet, and with one event to go, the 400 free relay, it was 142–141 Cal, meaning the winner of that race would win the meet. The Bears had Coughlin leading off, but the Bruins, a team known for its sprinters, had depth and a roaring crowd to their advantage. Coughlin, with a swift 54.40 opening split, gave Cal a lead of a body length and a half, but the Bruins steadily closed the gap, and Kim Vandenberg nearly caught Micha Burden by the end of the third leg. That left Medina and senior Malin Svahnstrom, whose adrenaline-fueled surge in the first 50 meters nearly matched Coughlin’s time over the same distance.
The UCLA swimmers and fans were going nuts—they had seen this type of race hundreds of times. Svahnstrom had all the momentum, and Medina would soon surrender the last vestiges of her lead and succumb. As the two swimmers came off the final turn, Medina slowed for a moment—it was as if time stopped so the fans could appreciate Svahnstrom’s closing burst.
It turned out Medina was just getting started. She flashed back to her days as a recruiting afterthought, when Gallagher called to woo her long after McKeever had expressed interest. No way we’re losing this meet, Medina thought as she pulled back in front, the apparent leader vacillating with each swimmer’s stroke. The knot in McKeever’s stomach began to dissipate—Medina smelled the wall like a shark smells blood. Thwap! Medina outtouched Svanhstrom by 0.41 second, setting off a wild celebration on the Cal end of the deck.
McKeever’s Overachievers had done it again.
“Teri has an incredible knack for bringing the best out of people,” says her friend Dave Salo, the Irvine Novaquatics coach. “Too often we get credit for the good athletes that come out of our programs and do well on a national or international level. But a better test of coaching ability is, what do the nonstars do? When you take the Lauren Medinas and the Erin Reillys and turn them into impact swimmers, then you’ve got my attention.”
Now, more than ever before, the Bears had become McKeever’s Believers. Their goal of completing an undefeated dual-meet season had just one remaining obstacle—the biggest one of all.
“We have to win this meet,” Coughlin said as we sat in Barclay’s, a restaurant/pub in Oakland’s Rockridge district, 2 days before Cal’s showdown with Stanford, sliding her pint of microbrewed beer across the table for emphasis. It wasn’t as scandalous as it seemed, or at least it wasn’t intended to be—we had tried to get ice cream cones across the street at the Dreyer’s Factory Store, but a note on the door said “Back in 15 Minutes,” so here we were. I was always a little self-conscious during my public meals with Coughlin, but this time, what with the daytime beers and the fact that we were perilously close to my ’hood, who knew what danger lurked? At any moment, I expected some hypervigilant mom I knew to burst through the door from the outside patio and make a major scene.
Coughlin was in a terrific mood. She and her teammates had been looking forward to taking another crack at the Stanford Cardinal since August, when she decided to return for her senior year. The Bears had actually beaten the Cardinal in swimming in each of her previous years, but the meets were swimming and diving competitions, and Cal had lost all three by narrow margins, the past two on the final relay. A year earlier at Spieker, Coughlin, having already swum the maximum four events (three individual races and a relay), had watched helplessly as the Cardinal’s star sprint freestyler, Lacey Boutwell, predictably dusted breaststroke specialist Stacianna Stitts in the final leg of the 400 free relay to complete a comeback triumph. This year, Coughlin vowed, the Bears would finally end their 28-year drought against their archrivals.
She wanted to vanquish the red menace and win the Big Meet for many reasons: as a parting present to McKeever and validation of the coach’s teachings, as a repudiation of a school and culture she fundamentally loathed. But the biggest driving force was the battle she’d waged more than 4 years earlier to attend the school of her choice. “I want to show my parents how wrong they were about Cal,” Coughlin said.
Choosing Cal over Stanford had been Coughlin’s first definitive move as an adult, and it was, in her mind, the sole reason she was now setting world records and being talked about as a multiple gold medalist. Hell, it was probably the sole reason she was still swimming, period.
“With the frailty she had back then, I don’t think she would’ve made it to Christmas of her freshman year if she’d gone to Stanford,” says Milt Nelms, who previously worked as a volunteer assistant for Cardinal coach Richard Quick. “Richard just charges straight ahead, and she realized, maybe not consciously, that he was going to get her to do whatever he wanted to do—that he would have control—which was the opposite of what she needed at the time. I told him once, ‘That kid would not have made it 8 weeks with you,’ and he got really quiet, like he was visibly hurt I’d said it. A couple of months later he asked me what I’d meant by that, and I told him. I know athletes that are perfect for Richard, but Natalie Coughlin would not have been a good match. But I remember vividly when she signed with Cal—he was stunned. He could not figure out how that had happened. And, of course, everybody was waiting for her to fall on her face.”
Now, after having proved so much to so many, Coughlin was going to throw in the faces of her parents something that they had long since come to understand and accept. After the Bears’ meet against Stanford during Coughlin’s freshman year, McKeever held a picnic for her swimmers and their families in the beautiful eucalyptus grove on the southwest end of Cal’s campus. There Jim Coughlin approached her and said, “Teri, I want to apologize. I had a chance to watch your team and their team, and see you and Richard coach against each other and how each team behaved, and now I realize how wrong I was. I understand now why my daughter felt so comfortable being here with you. This is absolutely the best place for Natalie.” McKeever was so touched she nearly cried. She and the Coughlins later became exceptionally close, and the coach cherished their involvement, with Zennie and Jim hosting dinners and making goodie bags for the Cal swimmers and raising money by selling snacks during home meets.
Rapping her long fingers on the wooden table at Barclay’s, Natalie had the unmistakable air of a 21-year-old who knows more than anyone in the room. “I feel really good about this meet,” she said. “It just feels like we’re about to do something great.”
Coughlin was excited that her longtime boyfriend, Ethan Hall, would be in Palo Alto to watch her swim. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Hall had returned to the Bay Area and was working at a mortgage-brokerage company. “He’s had to work a lot of weekends,” she explained, “so he hasn’t been able to make it out to too many meets.”
She certainly would welcome his emotional support, for there had been times that winter when she’d felt so alone. Relating an incident from the meet at USC, Coughlin told me she’d had “a breakdown” against the Trojans, a reaction to the pressure she felt to maintain her career-long winning streak in Pac-10 dual meets. It started before the 200-meter freestyle, when the Trojans’ public-address announcer said during introductions, “Natalie Coughlin has never lost a race in her college career.” The stat wasn’t even accurate—Coughlin had failed to win a couple of throwaway races as a freshman—but what bothered her was the undue pressure she faced to stay undefeated throughout her senior season. She was also upset because in the lanes on either side of her happened to be the two American swimmers most capable of taking her down at that distance: 2000 Olympian Kaitlin Sandeno and American record holder Lindsay Benko, a former USC swimmer who was competing as a member of the Trojans’ Swim Club. Technically, a victory by Benko wouldn’t count, but Coughlin still felt pressured to win the race. She pulled out the narrowest of victories, outtouching Sandeno by 0.19 second, with third-place Benko less than a second behind the winner.
Three events later, McKeever sent Coughlin back out to face the formidable Sandeno again, this time in the grueling 200-meter butterfly. By then Cal had the meet in hand, and McKeever could easily have juggled the schedule so that Coughlin didn’t have to swim that event. As she was walking to the blocks, Coughlin, in her own words, “became a total brat. I snapped at Teri, ‘Why do I have to be the one who’s thrown out there?’ ” She won handily, beating Sandeno by more than 2 seconds, then retreated to a nearby bench and began to cry. Her closest friends on the team, Emma Palsson, Marcelle Miller, and Micha Burden, went over to comfort her and calm her down. McKeever approached and said, “I hate to see you like this. By going out there, you won so much more than that race.”
Looking back on the incident, Coughlin was not proud, but she understood the emotions behind her outburst. “For most of my college career I was able to revel in the joy of victory,” she said. “But this year, as people have drawn attention to my streaks, it’s been more of a fear of losing, and that’s not nearly as enjoyable. I remember when I finally set my (long-course) world record in the 100 back in 2002. People had been expecting me to do it for a year and a half, so when I finally did, it was almost as if I couldn’t really even enjoy the accomplishment.”
McKeever, too, sensed Coughlin’s tightness in the face of such constant attention, later saying, “After the thing happened at SC, when she was over it—or, at least, partly over it—I said to her, ‘It’s good that you were able to confront an uncomfortable situation. That’s probably the one person (Sandeno) who could’ve beaten you, and you didn’t let her.’ Because of what she went through before the last Olympic Trials, I’ve been hesitant to put her in uncomfortable situations. But as the Olympics draw near, I probably need to think about pushing her more.”
As excited as she was about the team’s prospects for beating Stanford and achieving a top-five finish at NCAAs, a part of McKeever was eager for the collegiate season to end so she and Coughlin could get down to business in their preparations for Athens. The swimmer McKeever was coaching right now seemed geared toward getting through the next 2 months without absorbing any significant blows, rather than someone savoring the end of an amazing career. “College swimming is the first time that it’s not about you, and that’s what was so liberating for Natalie when she came here,” McKeever said. “And that’s also what’s paralyzing for her now. It’s become about her again, and she feels the strain.”
Gliding her empty glass across the wooden table 2 days before the last and most important dual meet of her life, Coughlin conceded that she hadn’t been having a whole lot of fun. “I was thinking last week that I’m not swimming as well as I should,” she said, “because I’m worried too much about having to win—or, really, about trying not to lose. I’m stressing out about this Pac-10 win streak instead of just getting in the water and going for it. I need to get back to just looking at the girl next to me and thinking, I’m gonna beat her.”
Especially if she happened to have a red S on her swim cap.