26
	TOURING

Once the swimming competition was over, I was able to stay in Athens and see some other events. I watched the U.S. men’s basketball team lose its semifinal game to Argentina, but I also saw women’s soccer live for the first time. The game was a good one to see: the U.S. women defeated Brazil, 2-1 in overtime, to win the gold medal. After the match, I posed for pictures with the U.S. team.

I moved onto a ship and went to some rocking parties thrown by MTV, Speedo, and Sports Illustrated. My family got into some of the parties and when I wasn’t looking, the woman shaking it on the dance floor over there was … Mom?

The parties were a good place for Australian journalists to pick up (or make up) stories about me. There is a friend of mine on the Australian team named Mel. We hung out together a lot. We ate together in the dining hall, we rode with each other to the pool most days and she came with my family to the Sports Illustrated party. The day after one of the parties, an Australian publication reported that I had asked Mel out on a date and she rejected me. So, let’s make up every aspect of a story. By the way, I don’t believe in the so-called Sports Illustrated curse. I made the cover twice and I didn’t feel jinxed … unless the jinx extends to Aussie reporters at SI parties.

Greetings and interview requests were coming in from everywhere. In the second week, I had over 500 text messages. One day, Peter had to borrow my phone battery after using up his own, except that he used up mine, too. From the ship, I did a cool segment for the Today Show in which I raced against Matt Lauer.

Almost as soon as I got back from Greece, I went on a tour with Ian Crocker and Lenny Krayzelburg that required an amazing team effort from a lot of people and really showcased swimming in a fun and inclusive way. Disney got behind it and so we called it the Disney Swim with the Stars Tour. The tour began in Disney World in Orlando, Florida, at the end of August, criss-crossed the country for a month and ended at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. In between we stopped in places such as Atlanta, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

We traveled on this amazing bus that slept 12 and used to belong to David Copperfield, the magician. The bus had a huge video screen in the front, next to tables and a microwave. In the back there was another large video screen where we often played either Madden Football or Tiger Woods golf.

We visited schools and then conducted shows at local pools that usually seated one or two thousand people. We began each show at places that had video boards with a series of video clips from the Olympics. The three of us gave swimming stroke demonstrations and raced against each other in different strokes from show to show. (Who knew Lenny was such an intense breaststroker?) We conducted question-and-answer sessions, and then the three of us took our turns as anchors on relays of local kids. Sometimes if the kids weren’t very good swimmers, we’d jump in and have them ride on our backs. After each show, Lenny, Ian, and I would get back on the bus and discuss what worked and what didn’t with Shaun Jordan, who was the MC for the events, and the tireless Octagon staff (Peter, Marissa Gagnon, Morgan Boys, and Sean Foley). Along the way, we shortened the stroke demonstration part of the show, frequently searched for appropriate background music and tried to come up with better ways to sell merchandise. Ian, Lenny, and I were practically signing as many hats, shirts, and posters as we could fit on the bus.

It was honestly like being in an advanced event marketing class. It’s early to be talking about my post-swimming career, but I’ve picked up on a lot of business and marketing-related things because I’ve been able to live some of them. I’ve been able to be a part of contracts, appearances, photoshoots, and this tour. I’ve lived what people teach, and I’m very lucky.

We had great sponsor support on the tour from Disney, Speedo, PowerBar, AT&T Wireless, USA Swimming, W Hotels, and VISA. We sold most of our tickets for around $25, which was pretty reasonable for families, but we also sold a handful of VIP seats for $100. The VIP would get seats on the pool deck and have a dedicated autograph session with us at the end of each show. Of course we always signed for the other spectators, too. Disney even constructed a pool on Main Street in Disneyland just for the event there. Peter pointed out afterward that there is a model now for the type of tour that didn’t exist before. Other swimmers will be able to do this after future Olympics in the way figure skaters have post-Olympic tours.

The most amazing response was definitely in the Baltimore area, where county leaders gave me their first honorary key to the county and then organized a parade for me they called the Phelpstival. Local politicians named a street in my honor on Cedar Avenue, near Towson High School. Two rival politicians, Democratic mayor Martin O’Malley and Republican governor Robert Ehrlich, got onto a stage at Courthouse Plaza to welcome me home.

The Baltimore Sun held a contest to choose a nickname for me. Entries included: Phast Phish, Phlash, The Phin, Physique, the Phantom of the Aqua and Greece Lightning.

One afternoon, I was heading for an hour-long autograph session at one of the AT&T centers in the area, and I couldn’t find the entrance because a large group of people were blocking the storefronts near a multiplex cinema. “What’s playing here?” I said. “It’s doesn’t even get this crowded at night.” Only when I saw one of the teenage girls waiting in line did I realize the line was for me. The shirt on her back that read “Marry me, Michael” was a dead giveaway.

The session passed the two-hour mark and the line was still around the corner, but we needed to get to the show in time. I apologized for leaving and we headed out along the Interstate. From the rooftop of a car in the lane to my right, out popped two girls holding up Wheaties boxes with my picture and screaming my name. I was laughing pretty hard about that. After a van that was in front of us moved up, I sped up so my car could be alongside theirs. In stop-and-go traffic, the girls’ mother passed the boxes through the passenger-seat window and eventually to me. I signed three boxes, passed them back and then pointed ahead to remind the mother that she was in a moving car on a road and the effusive thank yous weren’t necessary.

Things got a little crazy in Baltimore, where people would show up at our door to pick through our trash and even the local funeral home had a sign at its entrance saying: Congratulations, Michael Phelps.

Peter saw to it that I had a plainclothes security guard with me whenever I went out in public on the trip. After each event, we would walk through a line of screaming kids outside our bus and the security guard often led the way. He was a cool guy named Ricky Frazier, a former New York cop who once fought Roy Jones for the light heavyweight title. We would often find girls’ phone numbers taped to the outsides of the doors. It was pretty overwhelming. I’m not sure how I ended up in this movie.

At different stops on the tour I also appeared on Good Morning America, Regis & Kelly, and made a second appearance on The Tonight Show. On September 16, I broke off the tour for a day and flew to Michigan where I helped open The Ryder Cup golf tournament and met Donald Trump, who gave me his business card and told me to call the next time I came to New York.

We made a stop at Penn State, where I fielded some questions from the audience. The first guy was a swimmer who asked about pre-meet meals. I told him I usually favored carbs over protein just before I raced, because I needed the energy. A girl asked the second question. “Hi, Michael,” she said, as muffled laughter spread through the crowd in anticipation of her question. After a long pause, she asked, “Are you single?” The crowd broke out in laughter. I replied that I was, and for a minute I thought somebody had turned a mouse loose in the room. Whoa, this is getting out of hand.

When the tour stopped in New York, I made an appearance on MTV’s popular TV show Total Request Live. The host who brought me on started joking about the way all athletes my age had huge egos. Then I walked out and surprised the audience. They asked about my choice of music (hip hop, of course) and one of the hosts, Vanessa Minnillo, convinced me to lift up my shirt partway to show my abs.

I really liked what we accomplished for the sport during the year. USA Swimming usually gets about a four percent jump in membership after an Olympic year, but this year the increase was around eight percent. There is a lot of credit to go around for that, but I’d like to think that what we did in Athens and what we did afterward, including the swim tour, was a big factor. After the Games, the Wolverine program held swim camps for almost a thousand kids. Families flew in from places like El Salvador and Thailand so their kids could attend the camps. The sport was enjoying a great upward swing in momentum.

I really appreciated that swing after a surprise conversation that took place at a party in New York for ESPN’s 25th anniversary. I met a number of sports legends there, including Joe Theismann, Franco Harris, Ozzie Smith, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. But one man I’ll never forget came up to tell me, “You know, you really did the country proud and it was so much fun to watch you.” It was Mike Eruzione, the captain of the 1980 hockey team whose miracle story became my favorite movie and a source of inspiration.

Unfortunately, during the tour, I felt a twinge in my back during an exhibition stop in Portland. I suppose the hours sitting and sleeping on the rocky bus didn’t help. I completed the tour, but still felt some discomfort during easy swims. It was time to pull off the throttle, but we had world short-course championships coming up in Indianapolis. It’s the sort of meet a tight back might have made me skip in other years, but this was in front of a home crowd, and one of my sponsors, Argent Mortgage, was behind the meet, so I didn’t want to disappoint. Scott Heinlein flew to Indianapolis to look at my back, and I decided to go ahead and race.

I swam in one race and won the 200 free in 1:43.59. Then my back started to tighten up again the next morning. I really didn’t want to drop out of the meet, but it was clearly the right thing to do. I went back home the next day to be looked at by doctors Lee Riley and Peter Rowe at John’s Hopkins, one of the best hospitals in the country. They gave me a bone scan and an MRI, which revealed a pars fracture, a malady of the lower back that involves repeated bending and stretching of the spine. It’s something I may have had since I was a little kid. Nobody wanted me to undergo back surgery, because that would have kept me out of the pool for months. The doctors decided I would wear a removable brace and stay out of the pool for six weeks. If the back didn’t improve during that time, then they would need to surgically fuse the vertebrae. I was worried about it because of what had happened to Whitney. I tried not to think that my career might end prematurely, as hers did, but of course it entered my mind.