Part I: The Cry, The Cure, and The Coach
How Michael Phelps Transformed Restless Into Relentless
The Cry: A Boy Adrift
Michael Phelps was like a string puppet. His arms seemed to fly around his shoulders while his long legs moved to the beat of a song no one else heard. At eight years old he could not stop fidgeting. Not in class, not at home, not even long enough to focus on a single thought before it flew away like a leaf in the wind.
“I simply couldn’t sit still because it was difficult for me to focus on one thing at a time,” Phelps recalled in Beneath the Surface. “I had to be in the middle of everything.”
His teachers saw a problem kid. With a pen perpetually spinning between his fingers like a cheerleader’s baton, his energy spilled into mischief or mayhem — turning on all the natural gas burners in science class to bug his classmates, signing up for a school talent show to juggle even though he didn’t know how.
His kindergarten teacher finally broke. “Your son will never be able to focus on anything,” she told his mother, Debbie Phelps.
It stung. But Debbie, a middle school teacher herself, didn’t buy it. “That just hit my heart,” says Debbie Phelps in an interview. “It made me want to prove everyone wrong. I knew that, if I collaborated with Michael, he could achieve anything he set his mind to.”
School was a battleground. Phelps was eventually diagnosed with a condition first observed in 1798 by Scottish physician Sir Alexander Crichton. Crichton became increasingly interested in the subject of attention after studying insanity. He described the symptoms as:
“Symptoms become evident at a very early period of life and render him incapable of attending to any one object of education. What is very fortunate, it is generally diminished with age.”
It could have been written about Phelps. He was describing ADHD.
When he was nine, his parents divorced. The struggle with focus only worsened. His father, Fred Phelps, a Maryland state trooper, had once been his best friend — the “man” of the house alongside Michael’s two older sisters. Phelps thought his dad was the light of his life. Now the light dimmed. The pen started to twirl even faster.
According to Sports Illustrated, Fred Phelps found it as difficult to be the divorced father of three children as his adolescent son found it to be hard being the son of divorced parents. Mostly, Fred remembers trying the best he could. “I bought a boat specifically to do things with the kids,” he says. “The girls never ended up liking the boat very much, but Michael and I went fishing all the time, caught rockfish out on the Chesapeake. We went to ball games. It was wonderful.”
At first, they still had sports. His father’s police connections got them into the Orioles clubhouse. But by the time Phelps hit adolescence, something shifted. Their relationship began to fray about the time Phelps started to excel — in the pool.
And then, just like that, Fred was gone.
“What happened after that,’ Fred Phelps commented, “I couldn’t tell you. I felt like Michael started to look at me as some sort of ogre. We started to separate.” Another reason that Phelps struggled was that once his swimming career grew more successful, given the grueling swim regimen his father became a shadowy figure.
Michael felt it, too. “I felt abandoned,” he confessed. “I have an amazing mother and two amazing sisters. But I would have liked to have a father in my life, and I’ve been carrying that around for 20 years.”
Without his father, Phelps lost something deeper — his identity. His full name was Michael Fred Phelps II, but now, the archetype was gone. No one to emulate. No bond to tether him. His name felt like an empty echo.
The feeling manifested in a recurring dream. “Snakes would appear suddenly in my path, and I would freak out,” he said. He says, “As I began to grasp that my dad would be away for a long time, I needed something that could grab my attention.”
He would wake up in a sweat, heart pounding. The dreams started after the divorce, and though he didn’t understand them at first, they reflected what he feared most: losing control of who he was.
The Cure: The Pool That Tamed Him
Debbie Phelps knew her son was in trouble.
“Whenever a teacher would say, ‘Michael can’t do this,’ I’d counter with, ‘Well, what are you doing to help him?’” she recalled.
She adapted. When Michael struggled with reading, she handed him the sports section of the newspaper. When he lost focus in math, she had his tutor use sports statistics for word problems. The example he fixated on?
How long would it take to swim 500 meters if you swim three meters per second?
Debbie had a mantra: You take every moment of your life, and you make use of it.
So, when school failed him, she turned to something else. A pool.
Three miles from their home, the North Baltimore Aquatic Center was no ordinary community pool. The unassuming brick building held something extraordinary inside. It was, in fact, the NY Yankees of swim teams. Known for sending eight young swimmers to the Olympics, and six returning with gold medals, the NBAC took ordinary swimmers and turned them into stars.
But Michael wasn’t thinking about medals. He was thinking about how to escape.
“I was scared to put my head underwater, so I started with the backstroke,” Phelps recalled. “I was scared because I don’t think I had goggles.”
“You would think that on the first day I hit the water, I just sort of turned into a dolphin and never wanted to leave the pool,” he wrote. “No way. I hated it. We’re talking screaming, kicking, fit-throwing, goggle-tossing hate.”
But something changed.
In the water, he felt something he had never known before — control.
“I could go fast in the pool, it turned out, in part because being in the pool slowed down my mind,” he said.
Debbie’s instincts had been right. The very thing that made school impossible for Michael — his ADHD — became his greatest strength in the water.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School call it hyperfocus — the ability of kids with ADHD to zero in on an activity that fascinates them for hours at a time. Phelps had found his obsession.
But there was one more piece missing.
His ability to swim wasn’t enough. He needed someone who could shape it, mold it, and drive it toward something greater.
He needed a coach.
The Coach: A Mentor, A Mission, A Medal
By age 11, Michael Phelps was a name at the NBAC. Not yet a star, but noticed. That was when Bob Bowman entered his life.
Bowman was not warm and fuzzy, nor particularly generous with compliments. He was intense, authoritative, the kind of man who could see a flicker of greatness in a child and demand more of it than the child even knew was possible.
“Bob and I didn’t seem like a good match. I was the goofball; he was the taskmaster,” Phelps recalled.
But Bowman saw something in the boy. “Bob was very frank about my talents, my attitude, my inconsistent focus, and my dueling moments of indifference and determination,” Phelps said. “He also said that I had a realistic opportunity other kids didn’t have.”
At age 11, Phelps made a decision: he was all in.
Everything changed. His attention snapped into place. He followed Bowman’s every word, every demand. He trained before school. After school. Seven days a week.
At the time, neither Phelps nor his parents were thinking about the Olympics. But Bob Bowman was.
In 1996, he pulled Debbie and Fred Phelps aside.
“This is my prediction,” Bowman told them.
2000: Michael will be in the audience at the U.S. Olympic trials, just getting a feel for big-time competition.
2004: He will make the Olympic team.
2008: That will be his breakthrough year.
2012: That will be his greatest Olympics ever.
Debbie shook her head. “Bob,” she said. “He’s 11 years old.”
Bowman was wrong. He underestimated him.
At the 2000 U.S. Olympic trials, Michael Phelps was not in the audience. He was in the pool. At just 15, he became the youngest U.S. Olympic swimmer since 1932. He didn’t medal in Sydney, but he finished fifth in the 200-meter butterfly — the event he would later make his own.
The next four years were a storm of training, discipline, and sacrifice. Phelps lived in the water.
By 2004, he was ready.
After placing fifth in Sydney, Phelps received a note from officials congratulating him. It read: Well done on your top-five finish!
Phelps was furious.
“I’m not going to get a piece of paper. I’m going for a medal,” he said.
Bowman agreed. The next morning, he told Phelps to get back in the water. “In six months, you’re going to break a world record,” he said.
Six months later, Phelps broke a world record.
The Cry had been silenced.
The Cure had been found.
But Michael Phelps’s path to becoming the world’s most decorated Olympian didn’t begin in the pool, but as a little boy in need of love and guidance.
When the coach was found, a novice swimmer transformed into a champion.
