‘I Don’t Want to See Him Go’

For years, Mel Stewart avoided swimming. Oh, at first he did some broadcasting, and he stayed around the sport, that seemed the natural transition. But that didn’t feel right to him. Swimming was part of his old life. He found the conversations he had with people about his Olympic experience were stilted and odd. He did not want to live in the past. Anyway, how could he explain why it meant so much to him? How could he explain it to himself? “Swimming,” he says, “is so painful. And it’s so lonely. It’s a very lonely sport. You spend all your time alone and muffled and inside your head.”

He went to Hollywood and wrote scripts. He got married, started a family. He involved himself in a few business deals here and there. For the most part, he left swimming behind. I ask him if he missed swimming, and he says that it did not really dawn on him much. His life was interesting. He felt no aching void. He was still an Olympic champion, and that led to some opportunities, and he kept an eye on swimming from a distance. But for the most part, he was on to the next thing.

Then in 2007, he decided to watch Phelps swim the 200-meter butterfly at the World Championships. Phelps swam it in 1:52.09 — more than three seconds faster than Stewart’s fastest time 16 years earlier — and something thoroughly unexpected happened.

“It was like a religious experience,” Mel says. “I don’t even have the words for it. It was like this guy had just painted the most beautiful 200 meters I had ever seen. It was just gorgeous. And I felt this intimate connection. It’s like he was doing something so amazing and beautiful, and I was maybe one of two or three guys on the planet who could really understand it and appreciate it. … I was unsettled for weeks.”

Mel says it was watching that swim — seeing Michael Phelps’ greatness not the way we as fans see it, but the way that the greatest butterfly swimmer of his time saw it — that made him realize what was missing. He went to his wife, Tiffany, and said, “I want to be involved in swimming again.” Seven months later, he was interviewing Phelps on a pool deck (“I was star-struck,” he says) and doing some swimming writing on the side.

Earlier this year, Mel and his wife started a swimming website — swimswam.com — that he says has received more than 3 million page views and more than 500,000 unique users. He says that unexpected success, like its inspiration, is due to Michael Phelps. But perhaps the greatest gift that Phelps has given Mel is that after all these years he has brought swimming back into his life.

“You know what’s a crazy feeling?” Mel says. “You get into the water and you realize that you’re better in the water than you are walking on land. It’s like you become a fish. You get in the water and it just feels right in your brain.”

by Joe Posnanski, Joe Blog |  Read more:

Photo: USA Today Sports