BALTIMORE — Delivering multiple golds was going to be like labor: an all-out push for the Beijing Olympics, followed by a breather, then another hard push for the 2012 Games in London.
That was the master plan drawn up several years ago by
Michael Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, and approved by his mother, Debbie, and it worked like a dream. For nine days last summer in China, Phelps could do no wrong as he surpassed the swimmer
Mark Spitz’s record with
eight gold medals.
With the high-degree-of-difficulty phase of the plan completed to perfection, there seemed like less need for a safety net. Bowman broke ground on his horse farm in northern Maryland and resumed coaching. Debbie Phelps worked on a memoir and welcomed new students as the principal of Windsor Middle School.
For the first time in his life, Phelps, 23, was allowed time and space to broaden his circle of influence and interests.
The idea was to give Phelps room to breathe, not inhale.
In February, a photograph of
Phelps holding a marijuana pipe surfaced. Bowman had miscalculated. Swimming would not be the hard part for Phelps. Negotiating his way on land with only his wits to guide him would be more difficult.
For nearly 12 years, Phelps had been hermetically protected from the outside world. From his heart rate to his social activities, nothing went unmonitored.
“I had this monster goal and I achieved it,” Phelps said last week. “To be able to do what I did, my life growing up had to be how it was.”
The blueprint for becoming the most well-rounded swimmer in history turned out to have a built-in flaw. It made Phelps one-dimensional, someone who by his own admission is lost without the structure of his sport.
“The trade-off is he missed some experiences that other people had,” Bowman said. “I guess the question is, what do we do after that? And I think that’s what he’s working on now, expanding his horizons beyond swimming.”
The scope of that task is enormous. Imagine being not yet 25, and pondering how to make the next 50 years meaningful.
“I think there are a lot of things that will still happen to me in life that will excite me,” Phelps said. “The past year was something I wanted my whole life, and I finally got it. I think down the road, there will be other interests and goals that will take over my life.”
Phelps is exploring a couple of avenues. Last year, he and Bowman bought the Meadowbrook Aquatics complex, the base for the
North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Their goal is to build a world-class swimming academy like the nearby baseball academy of another Baltimore icon, Cal Ripken. “I can foresee as I sit here the businessman that Michael is becoming and will become the next four, eight years,” Debbie Phelps said.
Then there is golf. Phelps played his first 18 holes a few weeks ago. It was great, he said. He was invisible in plain view, with not a fan or a cellphone camera in sight.
With three high school friends, all avid golfers, as his witnesses, Phelps shot a 115. “I told them, Once I pick it up, it’s going to be on,” he said, laughing.
Phelps was weight training at Loyola College last Thursday when he peered out the window and noticed the rain had stopped and the sun was peeking through clouds. “I’m going to run home and get my clubs and go to the range,” he told Todd Patrick, a training partner.
Bowman and Debbie Phelps see golf as a way for Phelps to expand his network and polish his social skills.
“He can play golf with the C.E.O. of every company in America, probably,” Bowman said. “He can interact with people. I think it’s great.”
After the marijuana photograph surfaced, Phelps could have stopped swimming for good, and he nearly did. But then it would have felt less like a retirement than an exile, and he has never been a quitter.
Besides, “I still love to swim,” said Phelps, who has entered this weekend’s United States Grand Prix event in Charlotte, N.C., his first competition since Beijing. Phelps plans to retire after the 2012 Olympics, never to return. He was stretching when a television tuned to
ESPN reported that quarterback
Brett Favre was considering coming out of retirement a second time. Phelps summoned Bowman, pointed to the screen and said, “That will never be me.”
When it was Phelps’s turn do pull-ups, he strapped on a 44-pound weighted vest and asked his teammates how many they had done. Then, gripping the bar and grimacing as his arms trembled from the effort, he pushed to do more.
In the pool, Phelps is not weighed down by introspection. Asked if swimming has been more of an expression of his life or a refuge from it, his face went blank and he said, “I’ve never even thought about it.”
It has crossed his mind that he may be remembered by some people more for one marijuana pipe than for all of his Olympic gold.
“It was a stupid mistake, and I’ll live with that for the rest of my life,” Phelps said, adding, “If people look down on some of the things I’ve done or they think less of me, I can’t control that.”
So much is out of his hands now. Between swims at a recent practice, Phelps asked Bowman if he had ever eaten at the Sullivan’s steakhouse here. “No,” Bowman replied, “but I know you have.”
Phelps pushed off the wall for another swim. “How did you know that?” he asked upon finishing. “Well,” Bowman said, “you went there with 14 friends, you had the New York strip, you shared your seafood platter with all your friends, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.”
Phelps’s jaw dropped. Bowman told him the visit to Sullivan’s had popped up on his Google alert, which he uses to keep track of what is written about Phelps. “Wherever you go,” Bowman reminded him, “it’s news.”
When Bowman found out about the incriminating photograph, taken at a private party at the
University of South Carolina in November, he was furious. “That’s about as bad a judgment as you can use,” he said.
Bowman said he was not swayed by Phelps’s explanation that he believed he was among friends. He reminded Phelps that he could no longer be certain who had his back.
“Michael wants to know people and open up to them a little bit, but it just doesn’t work,” Bowman said. “You just have to approach everybody with skepticism, which I think is sad.”
Bowman scoffed at the idea that Phelps got off relatively easy. United States Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, suspended him for three months, based on circumstantial evidence, not a failed drug test.
“Why don’t you try to have everybody in the world know about one of your private moments that you’re embarrassed about,” Bowman said. “Can you imagine that anywhere you go in the world, everybody has talked about it and has an opinion on it? I think that’s a pretty high price to pay.”
Should it matter that Phelps earned tens of millions of dollars as a pitchman? With every contract he signed, he was essentially agreeing to embody America’s best image of itself — the can-do spirit, the purity of purpose, the noblesse oblige.
“Just because you make a lot of money, that doesn’t require you to be perfect 24 hours a day,” Bowman said. “That doesn’t automatically make you a superhero.”
Many times over the past few months, Debbie Phelps has wanted to scream, “Will you let my kid be human?” But that’s just it. The original master plan, while brilliant, made no provision for Michael’s being mortal.
