22
	TIME TO THINK

Bob and I still had some kinks to iron out before Athens. My starts and turns always need work, and we really emphasized those areas during the day I announced my schedule, while we were still in Long Beach.

The day after I was finished swimming at the trials, Bob enlisted Pete Malone, the coach of the Kansas City Blazers swim team, to help me with the starts. Pete gave us a few ideas, and we incorporated some aspects but left others alone. With my long body, it’s hard for me to get rigid when I go into the water. Ideally I want to be locked out and straight from top to bottom, almost like a broom handle. Instead I often go in with something bent and it’s usually my waist. Bob also wants me to have my head pressed against my arms so my head is not visible from the side. If you watch me dive in, my head is often drooping and you can see a space. That space creates drag and slows me down. We started working incorporating more starts into practices.

Bob and I also try to spend at least 15 minutes a session working on turns. Again, I’m tall and lean, as most swimmers are, but my arms are also really long. I rotate too slowly into the turns, so I’m not in a tight enough ball going into the wall, I don’t change direction quickly enough and I lose momentum coming into the turns. Bob always made sure I didn’t shortchange the time we spent on the transitions by reminding me that the Texas boys, Ian and Aaron, usually gained ground on me at the turns.

As much work as we were putting in, I still had some time to do some cool things before I left for Athens. A day after we announced my schedule, I went to Hollywood to attend the ESPY Awards, and we were almost late getting to the Kodak Theater. My Mom noticed that my suit jacket was wrinkled, so we were frantically driving around trying to find a dry cleaner who could steam the wrinkles out of my suit jacket. My mom held the suit in the car and we finally made it to the theater with 15 minutes to spare.

I was nominated for two awards, including best record-breaking performance, for what I did in Barcelona. It was neat that one of my fellow nominees was Jamal Lewis, the Ravens’ running back who rushed for an NFL-record 295 yards against the Browns in September. The winner, however, was Eric Gagne, the Dodgers’ relief pitcher who set a record of 55 consecutive saves in one season without a single blown save. I couldn’t complain. I was honored just to be there. My mom sat downstairs with me and I remember talking to NBA rookie star LeBron James and a few of the Detroit Pistons. I sat near Priest Holmes, the Chiefs’ running back. I couldn’t believe the company I was in, and just the fact that I was there reminded me that I had already accomplished some pretty special things.

The next day, I went to Burbank to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I was more excited than nervous. How many people get to see The Tonight Show, much less be in the chair next to Jay? And for a swimmer to have this honor? Wow, what a great chance to talk about the sport.

Before the show, I was in the waiting area known as the Green Room with Bob, Peter, and Marissa Gagnon from Octagon. Jay walked in to shake my hand and give us a briefing of what I could expect. He was very personable and he told us about his old car collection that he keeps inside an airplane hanger. He drives himself to work each day, and we saw his old silver Cadillac that was sitting outside in the studio lot.

I called Corey and Matt from the Green Room and they were getting pretty excited to see the show. Of course they tape it in the late afternoon on the West Coast, so it was still a few hours from being on the air in Baltimore. They told me they were going over to our friend Tyler’s house to play cards and wait for the show to come on. I wanted to make sure all my friends were able to watch.

I was on with actor Mark Wahlberg and singer Sarah McLachlan. I walked out and handed Jay an FS2 fullbody Speedo suit. “I wear this on TV,” I told him. “You should be able to, too. This could fit you.” It was a great way to break the ice and a good way to please a sponsor. I also made sure I sat with my arm draped over the chair next to mine, so people could see my Omega watch. Check number two for the sponsors. I remember I was surprised at how cold the studio was, but they need to keep it that way because of the camera equipment. I joked with Jay during the commercial break that all the 18- and 19-year-old girls were sitting in the front row. “It’s like that every day,” he told me. “The camera doesn’t mind looking at that for an hour.”

When we came back, Jay asked about how swimmers shave. Are you like monkeys? Do you shave each other? How does that work exactly? Now before anyone makes jokes about this, let me tell you they’ve already been made. You cannot come up with an original line. Basically, you shave yourself everywhere you can reach, but you can’t reach your back. Jamie and I are usually each other’s designated shavers. Shaving a guy’s back is a little like taking cough syrup, but it has to be done.

“Mike, let’s get this over with.”

“Okay, go.”

Two minutes later, it’s finished.

I was on the set for about five minutes, but it felt like two seconds. I couldn’t wait to go back.

Before we headed to Athens, we had two training camps for our team. One was in Palo Alto, at Stanford University and the next was in Mallorca, Spain. Soon after we arrived in Palo Alto, I had a chance to meet a legend. It isn’t just anybody who can walk into a room and have everyone stop what they’re doing, but that’s what we did when we met Muhammad Ali. Everybody was in awe. He didn’t tell us much. He is very soft-spoken these days because of his medical condition, but you could see a glimmer in his eye as he looked at an Olympian who was chasing a dream he once chased as an Olympian in 1960. Before people knew him as The Greatest, they got to know him as an Olympic champion, which is also pretty great.

Afterwards, I actually had a very vivid dream in which I met Ali again when I was with Matt. In the dream, Ali and I started smiling and Matt coaxed me into shadow boxing with him. Then Ali’s punches started getting close and I had to walk away. The only thing I learned from that dream is that I’m glad I took up swimming.

I shared a room at Stanford with Peter Vanderkaay, a freestyler who swam for Jon Urbanchek at Michigan. Lenny came into the room a lot to play Madden Football and the games got pretty intense. Lenny won the first one, 86-68, and I, of course, suggested we play two out of three. It went down to the final game, with Lenny trailing by two touchdowns in the closing minutes. He scored twice and kicked an extra point to win the game in the last seconds. I was not happy. “Krazy, we need to play again,” I said. Over the next two months, I was with Lenny at training camps, the Olympics and our post-Olympic tour. We played Madden Football a lot and I didn’t let him off the hook very easily. If computer games could speak, the trash talking would be pretty intense.

There were also some important discussions going on about the selection of the relay teams. Even at the Trials, people were asking which swimmers Eddie Reese would place on the 4x100 freestyle team. The coaches can select the relay swimmers at their discretion, and the idea is simply to put the fastest four guys on the blocks who can give us a chance to be successful. That never stops the politics. I hadn’t swum the race at the Trials, because we didn’t want to add three more races to an already crowded program, and Bob felt that I had already made a clear case to be on the relay. Based on performances at the Trials, Jason Lezak was clearly the top-seeded swimmer for the squad. Bob felt that because I had won the Nationals in the spring and had then beaten Lezak head to head the last time I swam against him, I was at least among the top four and should be on the relay with no trouble. Some other swimmers felt that wasn’t fair. Gary Hall Jr. was the most vocal. Gary is an amazing swimmer. He had won eight medals over the previous two Olympics, and he was one of the most recognizable names in the sport. He had been saying for a while that he felt I didn’t deserve to be on the relay because I didn’t swim the open hundred at the Trials. The order of finish there had been Lezak, Crocker, Hall, with Neil Walker fourth and two swimmer in places five and six, Nate Dusing and Gabe Woodward, who could swim in the preliminaries. Gary and I talked about the situation in Palo Alto. We agreed that we were all in this together. He said, “Gabe wants to swim fast.” I told him, “Everybody wants to swim fast.” After that, we both went our own ways, agreeing to disagree.

I had one last talk with Mom before the trip overseas. She stopped by not to talk about swimming, but to tell me how proud she was that I conducted myself so well over the previous year. She got pretty emotional, which is what proud moms do.

On August 1, we left Palo Alto and headed for Athens. I slept through most of the flight because—remember Bob’s thoroughbred analogy—I generally travel well. It was a charter flight, so we relaxed, stretched out, and sat where we wanted. We were due to check into the athletes’ village and undergo processing with the USOC at the American College of Greece, a place that was heavily fortified because of the anti-American sentiment that had been building up in the world. It was still two weeks before the start of the Games, and the village was still pretty empty at that point. After two days in Athens, we detoured to Mallorca for our weeklong camp at Decallia Air Force Base, a short walk from our dorms. I acclimated quickly. Bob was happy to see that I was one of the few swimmers who jumped right into double sessions on the first day. I swam a 52.6 hundred in practice, which is as fast as I’ve ever gone in training.

We stayed in single rooms, and every day I’d open my blinds and look out onto the Mediterranean and watch the sun rise and set. I was more reflective than usual, and I spent some time thinking about what it took to get me there. I wanted to break up my serious mood, so I called Matt and Corey and that really did the trick. I was pumped up to talk to them. It made me feel like I was at home. Matt told me they’d had a week of straight parties because their parents were out of town. The blow by blow was intense:

“Mike, I played poker last night and lost all my money.”

“Mike, we were at Julie’s house and his girl fell through an opening in the railing between houses and landed on a heating vent.”

“And Bennett passed out and we took out sharpies and drew all over his face and legs.”

“Then Bennett got mad and started chasing us. Corey was hiding behind a door and he threw a handful of flour in Bennett’s face.”

It was great to hear friendly voices from home, no matter what they were talking about. As I was talking to them, some of the girls on the team were tossing water balloons across the balconies. I started telling Corey how I had just nailed one of them when suddenly I felt this splash of water from an exploding balloon on my neck. Spoke too soon.

Bob and I broke the monotony of the trip by going down the hill to get some pizza. We had security with us everywhere we went. I remember one bilingual bodyguard who always walked ahead of us and entered every facility before we did. Later on, Bob did some sightseeing on his own and made sure to visit a cathedral he had read about. I started reading Bringing Down the House, a book about MIT students who go to Las Vegas and beat the odds by outsmarting the people running the casinos. I could either see Corey as a character in that book or on ESPN, winning The World Series of Poker.

Aside from training and sleeping, I usually found a diversion with video games on trips like these. But in Mallorca, I really had a lot of time to just sit and think. I started reviewing things that happened the summer before, about movies and phone calls and things I had tucked away in my mind for a year. I had started dating a girl named Amanda in January of 2003, our senior year, and we spent about six months together. We met through friends and fell for each other pretty fast. I loved hanging out with her, but most of all, I felt I could talk to her about anything. When my grandmother contracted pancreatic cancer, it hit me how much I would miss my grandmother if she wasn’t there. It made me pretty emotional to think of how much she meant to me, and I just didn’t feel comfortable sharing that with other people—or showing that to other people. But I could do it easily with Amanda. She always seemed to know when to give me space, to hang close and listen, to comfort me. Not everybody would have the patience to hear me out, but she always did.

The next three or four months were hard on her, because I traveled so much and she was at home. We basically broke up right before Worlds. I had pretty much figured that I was going to concentrate on swimming over the next year. I was planning to take a year off from school before heading to Loyola, and I wasn’t thinking too much about dating.

I saw Amanda again at an appearance in May when Hecht’s, a local department store, was giving me a shopping spree in their branch in Towson. It was the first time I had seen her in months. We agreed to keep in touch and soon the text messages began flying. It was as if we hadn’t stopped seeing each other at all. I wanted things to be as they were.

I started thinking about Amanda and how much I missed her. I didn’t think I could just call her and tell her that right away. I had to think about it. I called Matt again, this time for consultation. It was weird. We know each other so well that within seconds, he wasn’t asking how I was or what I did that day; he was asking, “What’s on your mind?” I tried to tell him “Nothing,” but I guess he sort of waited until I told him what I was thinking. As soon as I said the name Amanda, he knew exactly where I was going.

“You know, I could see you guys being friends for a long time and then ending up together,” he said.

“Dude, I was sort of …”

“… thinking the same thing?”

This wasn’t your typical teenage guy talk. It’s true that good friends listen to everything you say, but best friends also hear what you don’t say. I didn’t really want to be thinking too much about anything that could distract me from swimming, but I missed Amanda. Time for another text message. Or five.

I was still going to be well represented in Athens. My mom was going with both of my sisters and my dad was going, too. I was really pumped to have Whitney there, because she hadn’t been to too many meets. She had been planning to travel to Barcelona, but she had just started a new job and it would have been hard for her to request time off. I was psyched to have everyone there. They had always been there to help create any success I might have in my future. Now, in Athens, they’d get a chance to share in it, too.