No Limits (24 page)

The 100 breast final came early in the week in Beijing, on Monday, overshadowed completely by the 400 free relay final an hour later. Brendan, who is not related to my friend Stevie's family, finished fourth. What Brendan did after that underscored again what kind of guy he is. He ran into my mom at the Beijing version of USA House, a gathering spot for the USOC and for American athletes and guests at every Olympics, and vowed, “I'll be ready for the relay.”

Brendan was not at his greatest in the medley. But, as he promised, he was ready. He did his part. And what he said after the race made plain why anyone would be proud to call Brendan a teammate.

“It's one of the greatest things sport in general has ever seen,” Brendan said when asked about the eight medals. “I mean, coming from a swimmer, looking at what he did, there's an immeasurable amount of respect for what he did. The shame of it is other athletes are not going to realize how hard what he did is.

“The world is fast at swimming now. The world was not fast when Mark Spitz did his seven. Everybody is stepping up. Michael got on the blocks for every final against seven different people and denied them every single time. That just goes to show—it's every part of sport. It's endurance, it's strength, it's pressure.

“…He made the pressure putt in the U.S. Open, he won the Tour de France, and he knocked out the best fighter in the world in the sixteenth round with an uppercut. He did absolutely everything sport is supposed to be and he did it with a smile on his face, and he's a good kid.”

Brendan had another great line that, when I read it later, I also truly enjoyed. He said he had been amazed that I could separate myself so seemingly completely from the pool when I wasn't at the Cube. Brendan said, “I'd be like, ‘Do you realize what you're doing?' And he'd be like, ‘Man, the pizza is good today.'”

Aaron and Jason had great words, too.

Aaron said, “He's coined a new term: the Phelpsian feat. We've all heard of the Spitzian feat. I think there's a new one now.” Jason said, “Before the race, I saw Kobe and LeBron, the two best players in the world in basketball. I love basketball; there is no way I was going to let these guys down. They came out here to watch this—it was awesome.”

Seemingly everyone around the pool, in the moments after the race, was suddenly fair game: What do you think of what Michael did? Some of the answers were hugely, hugely flattering. Like Leisel Jones, the Australian breaststroke champion, who won two gold medals in Beijing: “I couldn't care less about my swims. To swim the same era as him has been awesome.” Or the Australian coach, Alan Thompson: “We've been talking about Mark Spitz for thirty-six years now. I don't know if I'm going to be alive when they stop talking about this bloke. You wonder if we are going to see someone as good as this again.”

I got whisked to a news conference in the basement of the Water Cube. In those moments after we'd won the medley, it dawned on me that my life had abruptly moved into a new and completely different phase. President Bush called, and said, “If you can handle eight gold medals, you can handle anything.” I'd been told that our medley swim had been shown on the big screens at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore after the Ravens faced the Minnesota Vikings in a preseason NFL game; more than 10,000 people stayed to watch us win. The Associated Press had filed a “flash” onto the wire when the medley ended with us winning; the AP uses a “flash” only for what it believes is a “transcendent development,” which through the years has meant such occasions as the shooting of President Kennedy, the first moon landing, the falling of the Twin Towers.

And now—for swimming.

I was, as I said in my first comments at this news conference—held in a basement of the Water Cube, the room hot and sweaty,
packed beyond full with reporters and cameras—“fairly speechless.” I tried to explain: “This is all a dream come true,” seeing as my main goal was to raise the sport of swimming as “high as I can get it.” Besides the Ravens game, I said, I'd heard they had made an announcement at Yankee Stadium when I'd won the 100 fly. The St. Louis Cardinals had held up their team bus back to the hotel in Cincinnati so the players and coaches could watch us win the medley. “People all over the place are saying it's crazy. They're out to eat, the TV is on and swimming is on. I think the goal that I have and I'm working toward is in progress…I think it's really just starting to get more of an awareness for the sport in the United States. By far, it's already starting. It started four years ago. With the help of my team and the coaching staff, I think this sport can take off even more than it is. That's a goal that isn't going to happen overnight. It's going to happen over time and that's something I'm going to be in the long run for.”

I tried, too, to explain why my emotions surfaced so much more in Beijing, there for everybody to see on live television, than they had in Athens: “I've dreamed of a lot of things. I've written down a lot of goals; this was the biggest one I ever really wrote down. Sort of thinking of all the memories I've had through my career to get here, with my family, my friends, my coaches—my coach, I've really only had one coach—everything I've gone through. It's—I guess my mom and I still joke about it, I was in middle school and I had a teacher say I'd never be successful. It's little things like that. It's stuff like that you think back to and it's just fun. I saw my mom for a minute and we just hugged. She started to cry. I started crying. My sisters started crying. It has been a really fun week and I'm really glad to accomplish everything I wanted to.”

After that news conference, Bob and I were whisked away to another one, to a much bigger room at what was called the Main Press Center a few minutes away from the Water Cube. By then, Darryl Seibel, the USOC's chief communications officer,
had joined us. He had been through these kinds of media get-togethers a time or two before and knew just what to say.

“Are you hungry?” he asked me.

“God, yes.”

“Cheeseburgers?”

“God, yes.”

Darryl sent a USOC volunteer to the McDonald's in the press center for four cheeseburgers and fries, pronto. When the burgers arrived, Bob knocked back one in world-record time and I wolfed two.

Before we went out to meet the press again, I cleared my BlackBerry again of yet another avalanche of e-mails and text messages. I would clear it; it would fill up immediately; I would try to clear it; I'd get a new batch. I couldn't keep up.

When we walked out onto the stage of the room at the press center for this next news conference, it was even clearer to me just how my life was changed. This room was enormous. It was crowded beyond capacity, too.

One reporter wanted to know if I had stayed in the Olympic Village or a fancy hotel. The village, of course, I said. I got to meet Rafael Nadal; he was one of my favorite tennis players to watch on television. I saw Roger Federer. I saw Dirk Nowitzki, I said.

What about Spitz? “Being able to have something like that to shoot for made those days when I was tired and I didn't want to be there—you wanted to go home and sleep instead of work out—you look at him and you say, ‘I want to do this.' It has been something I wanted to do and I'm just thankful for having him do what he did.”

Mostly, I said, I was just thankful.

For the way it had all worked out: “Seeing 8/8/08 and the opening ceremonies starting at eight, I guess it was maybe meant to be. I don't know. For this to happen, everything had to fall into perfect place.”

For my teammates. For all the games of spades and Risk at
night. The laughs we shared. “I just wanted to make sure I took every single moment in and every single swim in, every single moment with my teammates, so I would remember them. I don't want to forget anything that happened.”

For my family, and for Bob. Bob said, “Clearly, an accomplishment of this magnitude doesn't happen with just one or two people. There are a lot of people who have been involved in this process, from Michael's family, my family for that matter, everyone back at NBAC where we started and will soon return, all our fans in Ann Arbor and Baltimore, Club Wolverine—I'd like to thank them for everything they've done. And particularly this amazing Olympic swimming team, the best group of guys I've ever been around—and it has just been an honor to be a part of it.”

For sure, I planned to be back at the Games in 2012, I said, but probably doing different events.

When that press conference wrapped up, we went across the street to the NBC compound at what was called the International Broadcast Center, to Dick Ebersol's office. There, for the first time since arriving in Beijing, I got to spend more than just a moment with my family. President Bush had given me a message for my mom: Hug her for me, he had said. I made sure I followed the president's orders.

Bob was in the room. So was Mike Unger of USA Swimming. Peter Carlisle, Drew Johnson, and Marissa Gagnon of Octagon were there, too, along with Dan Hicks, Rowdy Gaines, Andrea Kremer, Tommy Roy, Drew Esocoff, and a few others from NBC, and, of course, Ebersol, whose office had banks of TV screens. He asked, what do you want to see? The 400 free relay, I said before he could even really get the question out.

I could watch that relay 100 times and I think I'd still have the same reaction—wow, that really happened.

We watched that relay and some other races. We saw my mom cry watching me. Hilary, too.

Dick and I had come to occupy a special place in each other's
lives that had nothing to do with how many medals I won or how the broadcasts of the Olympics did in the ratings. He had supported me, stood up for my character, when I'd been called to account for drinking and driving; just a few weeks later, he was badly hurt in the plane crash near Telluride in which his son, Teddy, who was just fourteen, was killed. Mom and I were honored to be invited to the funeral. Dick had followed me as I had grown up after Athens and I had learned so much from him about what strength in the face of adversity looked like. In his eighth-grade graduation speech, Teddy had said, “The finish line is only the beginning of a whole new race.”

Watching the replays, Dick cried, too.

•   •   •

That half hour in that office was one of the few moments of quiet and calm in what quickly became a whirlwind.

No complaints. None at all. The opportunities that were extended to me from around the world were unbelievably thrilling. And every single one might be the one that would encourage some little boy or girl somewhere to get to the pool to start swimming for nine medals.

Bob and I had, before the Games, come to an understanding. I would be back in the pool, just not immediately. The 2009 World Championships, in Rome, weren't until the summer; my mom had always wanted to see Rome, so I had to be back in time to try to make the team. Bob said, fine, see you in early 2009 back at the pool, back in Baltimore. He announced several months before the Olympics that he was going back to NBAC, to become chief executive officer. Starting in Rome, you might see me focus on different events: more of the sprints, for instance, maybe the 100 free, perhaps the 200 back. Both of us were excited, me to have new goals, Bob to see whether a guy more naturally suited for longer distances could make the switch. Beyond that, I fully intended to compete at the 2012 Summer Games in London,
assuming I qualified for the U.S. team. My plan all along has been to be retired from swimming by the time I'm thirty; London, when I will be twenty-seven, figures to be my last go-round.

Enjoy whatever it is you're going to do, Bob made plain before we left Beijing. He didn't have to say the rest—make good decisions.

From Beijing, it was off to London, where I took part in the ceremony that marked the end of the Games and the handover from the 2008 to 2012 Summer Olympics. In Orlando, I rode in a convertible down Main Street at Disney World with Mickey Mouse. In Chicago, more than 150 of us from the 2008 U.S. Olympic team got to be on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
; I also was privileged to add my support to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

In Los Angeles, I got to be a presenter at MTV's Video Music Awards and a guest on shows such as
Jimmy Kimmel Live
and
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
In New York, I rang the bell, along with Lochte and Natalie Coughlin, at the New York Stock Exchange and hosted
Saturday Night Live.
On
SNL,
I got to joke that being on the show was “like, the ninth greatest moment of my life.” In the audience that night was Bruce Springsteen; at a concert a couple weeks before in St. Louis he had, before launching into “Thunder Road,” given me a shoutout: “Eight golds, man—whoo!” The
SNL
musical guest—the one and only Lil Wayne, whose music had gotten me in the mood before getting on the blocks in Beijing—he gave me a signed iPod that held forty unreleased tracks, one of them called “Michael Phelps,” about me. I hardly knew what to say besides—thank you.

Everywhere I went I was flattered to have touched so many people. A driver in Cleveland told me, “You honored the entire country with your effort.” At the baggage check-in in Newark, one of the skycaps said, “Congrats, Michael—you killed it out there.”

Everywhere, it seemed, swimming had become part of the
national conversation. When the Los Angeles Angels clinched the American League West title in early September, one of their outfielders, Torii Hunter, put on goggles, got down on the floor in a pool of champagne and beer, and shouted out, “I love it. I'm Michael Phelps!”

In late September, I went back to Ann Arbor for the Wisconsin-Michigan football game and had one of those experiences that gave me chills. I saw Bob for the first time since Beijing; we got to go into the Michigan locker room before the game, where I told them to beat the Badgers. The players were all fired up and so was I, and then Bob and I walked down to the field through this long tunnel under the stadium. The Michigan band was in there, and as soon as they saw me at the top of the tunnel, they all started going nuts. As we walked toward the field, the cheers echoed in front of us and rolled out into the great bowl, and then the people outside heard what was going on, and they started applauding, and so by the time we got to the light, the entire stadium was cheering. And that was way before we were introduced, when we got another thunderous ovation.