I’ve been following the Olympic progress of Michael Phelps, mostly because I have no fucking choice. You can’t open up any American news site this week without seeing him, festooned in a lycra ballhugger Speedo, rubber cowl and reflectorized goggles like some kind of weird gay superhero (Beware, evildoers! Here comes The Butterfly! No? How about… The Breaststroke! Why are you giggling at me?).
Phelps is shooting to simultaneously become the first guy to win ten swimming gold medals and the first guy to win eight swimming golds in a single Olympics. And I wish him luck, but would like to take this opportunity to remind him that, win or lose, he is destined to become a reckless, cynical alcoholic who eventually understands that he pissed away his childhood in a pool. Trust me, I know: I used to swim competitively.
I did it because, well, my parents forced me to. My folks were of the type that never existed before around 1968: they wanted their children to participate in sports, but they insisted that those sports be actual exercise. So while I asked to join Little League and basketball, I instead got soccer and, when it eventually became apparent that I couldn’t be trained to kick appropriate balls on the soccer field, swim team.
Which is the weird thing about competitive swimming: no kid grows up saying they want to be a swimmer; it’s something your parents make you do. My mom and dad just wanted me the fuck out of the house for three hours every summer day. Phelps’s Wikipedia entry says that his folks made him start swimming after his ADHD diagnosis. The difference between him and me is that the shine of his gold medals has probably hypnotized him from understanding that, when his mom chucked his ass into that pool, she probably wasn’t hoping he’d swim well. Or, more likely, at all.
Swimming is an odd sport, in that as an adolescent, you get no credit for being in an actual sport. False modesty aside, I was an excellent swimmer. While my classmates were rocking Little League and Pee Wee football in eighth grade, I was a lettered, full varsity athlete on the high school team. And yet, the training bra set swooned over the protojocks, who could throw spirals 12 percent of the time and prayed for eventual benchwarmer spots on the JV team when they grew up, and derisively called me “Speedo Boy” in the halls.
Which is a hard name to argue against since I, in fact, wore a Speedo (Ha, ha; not in the halls. Fuck you) and was a boy. Thankfully, since I hung out with high school guys, I had much more colorful curses to throw back at those prissy Izod skanks… but even that was unsatisfying, since they had to go home and ask their mothers what they meant before they cried. However, since all of these girls would also have had to ask Mom what a “handjob” was, nothing of value was really lost.
I’ve learned that by the time a swimmer hits about fifteen years old, one of two things happen: they either are good enough to start thinking about the Olympics, or they are old enough to be thoroughly weirded out by the demands of competitive swimming and quit. I know that these are not mutually exclusive, but I imagine that the lure of Olympic gold could blind a person from the fact that they appear totally gay.
For years, I was able to accept that I needed to wear swimsuits that revealed my Irish heritage and sit around with other dudes similarly dressed. However, when I started competing on a higher level, I was asked to shave my body in order to compete on that level. Since that request came right around the time when puberty hit and my English vocabulary tests included words like “pederast” and “homoerotic”, I decided it was time to hang up my banana hammock.
Phelps didn’t, and now he’s poised to score some Olympic records. And good for him, but the ugly truth of the matter is that he’s going to have to hang it up someday and come to terms with the fact that being a good swimmer doesn’t translate into any skill that anyone gives a fuck about. Trust me.
I can still do a blind kick turn off a concrete wall in the shallow end, but that doesn’t help me hit a softball, and you rarely see a pickup 200 meter individual medley at the company picnic. Even the best swimmer in the world weighed down by more gold medals that anyone in history will need to come to terms with the fact that the backup right fielder for the Brockton Rox gets more pussy than he ever will.
I hang out with one or two dudes who used to swim competitively and we are all depraved drunks. And even Phelps, with his medals and his endorsement deals, looks like he is succumbing to the inevitable in good fashion.
Which gives me a little charge because, gold medals and Olympic records or not… he’s got one fuck of a lot of training if he wants to compete at my level.
[tags]Michael Phelps, 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing, China, swimming, individual medley, gold medals, world record, dark humor, satire[/tags]
