No Limits (16 page)

Not surprisingly, Whitney's training began to suffer. After long sessions in the water, she would turn blue. She got good at staying under the water until her color came back.

Whitney came into the 1996 Trials, held in Indianapolis, with the best time in the nation in the 200 fly, 2:11.04. She finished sixth.

I knew nothing of any of Whitney's eating-related issues or her back problems. All I knew that day in Indianapolis was that Hilary and Mom were in tears after the race.

Several months after the Trials, Whitney confided that her back pain was worse than she had let on. She also sought help for her eating habits.

I saw her overcome all of that.

Then I saw her overcome her own heartache.

Before the Trials, college swim coaches were keenly interested in Whitney. Afterward, she was suddenly without that attention. She finally did get an offer, from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. After time away from the pool, she came back, won her conference title, was named the conference's “newcomer of the year,” and made the cut for the 2000 Trials. That spring, she came
home and started training again at NBAC. But it didn't take long for her back to start hurting again. Rather than enter a race she knew she'd have no chance at winning and jeopardize her health over the long term, she withdrew.

These were the Trials at which I, at age fifteen, made my breakthrough, coming in second in the 200 fly.

Instead of chasing our Olympic dreams together, Whitney and I, it was just me.

Those 2000 Trials were back in Indianapolis, at the same pool where Whitney, favored to make the team just four years before, had not. It took extraordinary courage for Whitney to show up there again. After I had placed second to Malchow and made the Sydney team, she made her way down to the pool deck and threw her arms around me. I knew I had made that 2000 team in no small part because of Whitney; she had shown me what kind of dedication and commitment it took.

Whitney's heartache was far from over, however. She spent the next couple of years wrestling with her conflicting feelings. On the one hand, she had done great things in swimming; she'd earned her way to the top of the national rankings, she had represented the United States on the world stage. On the other, girls she had raced were now representing the United States at major meets, and it was too tough to watch. Something she had loved had been taken from her and it wasn't her fault. She had been injured; this was no fault of will.

I would go to meets, in Sydney, for instance, at the 2000 Games, and my mom and Hilary were in the stands, but Whitney was not.

It wasn't that she was spiteful.

Far from it. She was hurting. And being at meets felt even more hurtful. It was simply too frustrating for her to sit in the stands and think how fast she could have gone if she'd only been able to train.

Time is a great healer. One day, she realized that she had done
amazing things, had accomplished a lot, should be proud of herself. That's when she started going to more of my meets.

One of the first back was in Indianapolis, in 2003, the Duel in the Pool; the one Ian and many of the other Australian swimmers declined to attend. I won four events that day, including the family legacy, the 200 fly.

Now, when I look into the stands, I see Whitney and Hilary on either side of my mom. Knowing what it took to get Whitney there, how could I not be even more motivated?

•   •   •

Everyone makes mistakes. In November 2004, I made a big one. I drove after drinking. I should not have gotten behind the wheel. It was wrong. Wrong for so many reasons.

By way of explanation, not excuse: After the Athens Games ended, I was, for the first time in my life, on my own. No Mom, no Bob telling me what to do.

Almost as soon as I got back from Greece, I went on a tour with Ian Crocker and another American Olympic swim star, Lenny Krayzelburg. We traveled around the United States on a bus that slept twelve and that used to belong to David Copper-field, the magician. We would visit schools and conduct swim shows at local pools; the three of us would demonstrate stroke techniques, then race each other, different strokes from show to show. We would also take turns as anchors on relays made up of local kids.

From the time I was fourteen, I had been sensitive to back pain, mindful of what had sidelined Whitney. As the post-Athens exhibition made its way through Oregon, I felt something sharp on my right side. It did not feel good.

The pain went away on the next leg of the trip, a six-hundred-mile bus ride down to Sacramento. All the way, however, I was obsessing about me, about Whitney, about back pain. I was unsettled. I felt insecure.

The tour ended in early October, in Anaheim. Mom and Bob met me there. We flew to Indianapolis, to the FINA short-course world championships, held at Conseco Fieldhouse, an event one of my sponsors was helping to underwrite. I won the 200 free in an American record time. But then I felt it in my back, again.

I withdrew from the meet and went to Baltimore. An MRI showed what's called a
pars fracture,
from repeated bending and stretching. Maybe I'd had it since I was a kid; maybe not. The doctors told me to wear a removable brace for six weeks and stay out of the pool.

I didn't know what to do with myself. I had no structure, no rhythm, no routine to my days or my nights.

One of my good friends was in college at a town on Maryland's Eastern Shore and so we decided, that first weekend of November, to go out there. Road trip. I had just gotten my new car, a silver 2005 Range Rover. One of my friends made sure to tell me before we left: no drinking and driving. I said, come on, that's not me.

We hung out at a party. I had three beers. We decided to go get some food. I got behind the wheel of the Range Rover. A few blocks away, I rolled through a stop sign. The car coming down the street, as it turned out, was a Maryland state patrol car.

As soon as the lights on the police car started whirling, I knew I was in trouble. I immediately understood I had made a seriously stupid mistake. The trooper gave me a Breathalyzer test. My blood-alcohol reading measured 0.08, precisely the state standard for driving under the influence.

I was thoroughly ashamed.

My decision to drink and drive could have hurt someone. I was lucky it had not.

I was not yet twenty-one, the legal drinking age. I had flouted the law.

I had embarrassed myself, my family, my coach, and my team, just for starters.

I would have to be held accountable.

Who to call first?

Should I call my mom, who would yell at me and worry? Bob, who would yell at me but help me? Or Peter, who I knew would help?

I called Peter. He said, let me figure out what we ought to do next, I'll get back to you.

When I called Bob, who was at a meet in Wisconsin, he was supportive, but he also gave me the hard truth: “Michael, just because you want to blow off some steam doesn't mean you can be an idiot.”

Then, face to face, I had to tell my mom.

She knew I had made a mistake. But that's not how she had raised me, to make that kind of mistake. I was so, so sorry. I was immature and I'd been stupid. That didn't change anything but that was the reality.

I felt I'd gone from seemingly being on top of the world—the Olympics in Athens had ended a little over two months before—to being in the deepest black hole on the face of the earth.

Peter, Bob, my mom, and I met to talk about what to do. I said, it's on me to tell people what I had done. I called friends and extended family. I also called reporters I had come to know to tell them what I had done, that I made a mistake, and that I wanted each of them to hear it from me. I sat there for hours.

The look on Bob's face never changed; he was extremely disappointed.

Mom started crying. That hurt worse, maybe, than anything. I had never seen my mother that upset. I vowed it would never happen again.

We worried that my sponsors might abandon me. None did.

A week after my arrest, USA Swimming held a fundraiser, an awards dinner called the Golden Goggles, in New York City. Everyone makes mistakes, but I just want you to know—I've never seen anything handled the way you've been handling it, I
was told by Dick Ebersol, the NBC Sports chairman. It meant a great deal to me that he said so.

In late December, I went to court in Salisbury to plead guilty to driving while impaired. It was humbling indeed to walk into court, my every step recorded by television cameras. Inside, after my guilty plea, the state dropped its other charges; I was ordered to pay $305 in fines and court costs, to attend a meeting of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and to speak at a number of schools about drinking, driving, and decision making.

The next April, back in Salisbury, I spoke to the seniors at Parkside High School. It was a few days before their prom. Have fun, I said, but be responsible. You need to set goals and keep in mind that the decisions you make can determine whether you will achieve those goals, I said.

The night that I got behind the wheel after drinking, I said, I had lost sight of my goals. I was not thinking, as I should have been, about Beijing and 2008. “In order to make good decisions, you really have to see the whole picture,” I said. “I guess you could say my head wasn't really on straight…my goals were not in order when I got behind the wheel.”

I'd like to think that maybe I helped at least one person make a decision not to drive after drinking. Maybe at Parkside High School, maybe somewhere else. If even one person has looked at me, or heard about what I did, and shuddered, and thought, no, I don't want to go through that, then it was all worth it.

In no way would I wish the experience, any and all of it, on anyone, but it changed my life. It reminded me in the most direct way possible that no one is so important that he deserves to be, or will be, treated any differently than anybody else.

The experience also led me, in one of those connections in life that, after it happens, seems like one of those things that was all along somehow meant to be, to Greg Harden, who is an associate athletic director at Michigan and the school's director of athletic counseling. I went to check in with him after I'd moved to
Ann Arbor. He knew what had occurred. Look, he said, one of the biggest things I'll tell you is this: Whenever you make a mistake, learn from it. As long as you can learn from every mistake, he said, you'll be fine. You can make a million mistakes, just not the same one twice.

Greg Harden gave me good advice. I am grateful.

•   •   •

Such good advice and yet, at least when it came to swimming, apparently just to swimming, I already knew not to be reckless.

I had learned that lesson the hard way, too, after my first Olympics, in the way I approached the 200 fly in particular.

Yes, I set the world record in Austin. Yes, I lowered it in Fukuoka.

But for a year after that?

At those 2002 Fort Lauderdale nationals, I had such a great meet except for the 200 fly, at least by the standards that mattered, mine and Bob's. I set out to break the record. I did not get there, and after the race I put my head in my hands. At that moment, I was only beginning to understand what not training diligently in the butterfly would yield. Bob directed my training sets, of course, but when it came to the fly he would every now and then give me a choice of doing extra butterfly sets at the close of practice. I usually said, no, thanks. It was, after all, my best stroke. At the end of a workout, I was genuinely tired.

Bob had let me learn the hard way that there was no substitute for the hard work it would always take to get better.

Later that summer, at the Pan Pacs in Yokohama, Malchow beat me in the 200 fly. If I needed an even more blunt reminder, now I had it.

I hated losing.

I also hated hearing Bob say, “I told you so.”

After that, Bob gave me punishing butterfly sets. Through Athens, I devoured them. That is what Bob wanted—my best
effort. There's a huge difference in not swimming well because of a technical glitch and not swimming well for lack of effort. Bob knows what's what. What he wants and expects are as many consecutive days of first-rate training as possible.

Bob also, quite deliberately, would arrange practices, schedules, workouts, drills, whatever he could think of, around the idea of being uncomfortable.

His thinking always has been to put his swimmers through every scenario possible. You're tired; you feel you can't move; you're truly hurting. That's when he would throw down especially hard sets. Bob wanted to gauge not only how I felt under pressure but, more important, how I responded under pressure. If I could deal with whatever it was when I was tired, I could deal with anything that came my way. Because that is the real definition of a champion, someone who can deal with any obstacle that comes his or her way, can deal with any situation at any given point.

Michael Jordan was so sick with the stomach flu before game five of the 1997 NBA Finals that he hardly slept the night before. He was exhausted and dehydrated. He played 44 minutes and scored 38 points, and his Chicago Bulls won the game by two points.

A champion can deal with any kind of pressure.

It wasn't just the intensity of the practices, however, that made up the Bowman approach to stress management. It was anything and everything. It was why, going all the way back to 1999 and the nationals in Minneapolis, we dragged back to the hotel to get me a swimsuit.

In Baltimore, I never had a lane to swim in by myself. I swam four or five to a lane, like everyone else. No special treatment, not after the 2000 Olympics, nothing.

That trip to the Bahamas, the same day I did a lengthy photo shoot with the dolphin? That day started off with a morning practice. The photo shoot followed. In the afternoon, instead of enjoying the island scenery or lounging poolside with a fruity
drink, Bob ordered up practice. He knows that I shiver if I stay in cold water too long, and it was a cold, gray day in a pool warmed only by solar heat. Would I tough it out? Yes.