Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
“Hart Pair Making Splash” include photos of Ryan and Anthony posing in the pool with crossed arms (knuckles pressing out on biceps to make them bulge) and the kind of dour don’t-mess-with-me expressions that still seem cool and badass when you’re a teen.
Upon beginning high school, Ryan, John, and Anthony made a vow: All right, boys, we’ll be men soon. Our goal should be to each have a threesome10 before we leave high school. It was not to be, however, for the young idealists. “We were so far off,” Anthony recalls. “Not one of us even lost our virginity in high school.” Despite his swimming fame, Anthony remained introverted and shy, especially around girls. His freshman year he was particularly tongue-tied around the older girls on his swim team, who by then had come to recognize the power of their sexuality and had no qualms about exercising it over the young star swimmer.
I still have at least a half hour before the 100. Lauren and Danielle sit on each side of me on a beach blanket laid out on a grassy area right outside the pool. Their towels are tied around their waists and over their bathing suits.
“Hey, Anthony . . . ” Lauren says.
“Hi, Anthony, what’re you doing?” Danielle says. She’s sitting really close to me and smiling. Just last night she was making faces with spaghetti hanging from each nostril and an orange wedge stuffed between her lips, but now all I notice are how her boobs are squished under the bathing suit.
“Uh, nothing,” I say.
“Oh yeah, nothing?” Lauren says. She scoots over closer to me and puts her hand on my knee. “Nothing at all?” Then Danielle puts her hand on my other knee.
My thighs tense up. “Uhhh, what are you doing?”
“You know what we’re doing,” Danielle says.
“Or more like, you know what you’re going to do,” Lauren says, smirking.
Their fingers are moving along my knee. “Wha—what are you doing?”
Lauren tosses her hair so that her auburn curls fall down over part of her face. “You’re going to rise to the occasion for us.” Her hand starts moving up my leg.
I’m frozen. I shake my head. “No . . . no, I won’t.”
Danielle leans into my ear and whispers, “Oh yes, you will.”
I look down at their hands and gulp, then look straight ahead. From the pool, I hear the whistle blow for the start of a race. The starting signal goes off to a roar of cheers. I don’t look down but I feel their fingers slide along my thigh, slipping under the hem of my board shorts.
“No,” I whisper. My mouth has dried out. But it’s too late, it’s happening. I can feel it happening.
Lauren’s eyes widen as she notices the movement in my lap and she looks over at Danielle. They both start giggling and then run off.
In high school Ervin shifted from backstroke to freestyle—mostly, he claims, because he tired of colliding into lane lines. Though he was the fastest sprint freestyler on the team, his friend Ryan led every practice. Anthony would push off five seconds after Ryan, sprint to catch up, and then hang back and draft off him the rest of the way.11 This isn’t something lead swimmers usually tolerate, since it’s like having a parasite dangling off your toes, but Ryan endured it without complaint for years.
Bruce Patmos’s workouts often consisted of high-intensity sets with plenty of rest, unlike the default high yardage/minimal rest grind that characterizes most club-level practices. This training was ideally suited for Anthony, who improved dramatically with each successive year. As Ryan, who’d been training with Anthony since the age of eight, recalls, “It was junior year when he really started separating himself from the pack and going crazy fast.”
At the biggest regional meet of the year, Anthony qualified for US Nationals in the 200 free, as it was easier to qualify in longer events than in sprints. Though he died in the last 100 yards,12 he went out so fast that he still qualified: he claims he went out in forty-four seconds for the first hundred yards and fifty-three for the second. At the end of the race, he was, as he puts it, “pretty much vertical.” It’s a tactic he’d employ in the future for his 100 sprints: go out like spitfire and then, when the polar bear jumps on his back near the end, hang on in hopes that the others can’t catch him. But this turn-and-burn, fly-and-die tactic does have a downside: it hurts.
Stroke analyst Milton Nelms remembers watching Ervin light it up off the blocks at a college meet only to perish in the final meters: “It was like he was struck by a headhunter’s curare blow dart. But that’s why I love to watch the guy. He doesn’t care. The dude races. We lose that in the sport because everything is so patterned and planned. You rarely get outliers that way, who break free.”
Among the college coaches scoping out potential recruits in the junior class that year was the Cal–Berkeley co–head coach Mike Bottom. When he first saw Anthony race, he knew he was witnessing a pure sprinter’s instinct in action. Even though Anthony didn’t win that particular race, and even though his stroke wasn’t all that great at the time, there was something about how he moved through the water, something about, as Bottom put it, “how he put his hand on the water,” that caught his eye. Other coaches would recruit him, but it was Bottom who pushed the hardest and ensured he was offered a full scholarship. (After meeting Sherry Ervin, he knew it would take a full ride to get him.) Anthony, meanwhile, had no plans to swim in college beyond his first year. He saw swimming as means to an end, as evinced by his quote at the time from a local newspaper article: “I wouldn’t say I really enjoy [swimming], but I know it’s something I need to do. It’s like work to me. I’m out there to get into college.” This sunless and calculated mindset is something he now warns against: “It’s a cliché, but it really is about the journey, not the destination. Using swimming to get to college or a scholarship is a destination. That’s not the right way to think about it.”
As Ervin grew taller and larger, his medication requirements also increased. He was soon up to three pills daily. His Tourette’s symptoms were now somewhat controlled, but at the cost of sedation. He was constantly napping during the day, which then led to nocturnality. His mother would hear him getting online to play video games in the middle of the night (this was back in the laborious and noisy dial-up era when logging on sounded like R2-D2 getting into a car crash). So she would lift and set down the phone receiver, repeatedly. “I wasn’t doing it to be mean,” she says. “I was doing it to force him to fall asleep. Eventually I would wear him down.”
Ervin has never been a conventional sleeper. To this day, perhaps out of some neurological quirk, he can’t sleep in complete darkness. He requires light and sound, preferably the preternatural glow and buzz of a screen. “It’s almost like when you eliminate the stimuli, it becomes a heightened sensation,” he says. “Nothing wakes me up faster than total darkness and silence.”
In high school he started swimming twice a day year-round (previously he only swam doubles over summers), which also contributed to his fatigue. Unable or unwilling to get up on days he had morning practice, Anthony would be dragged out of bed by his mother. After swim practice and before school, he’d take his medication. By the second or third class, when the pill kicked in, he’d often fall asleep. By lunch the medication would wear off and he’d take another pill, leading to lethargy during his afternoon classes. Sleeping in class wasn’t as alienating as the tics, but the regularity with which he drifted off still left him feeling like he was on the periphery of the “normal” high school experience. “The meds almost caused me to become less myself,” he recalls. “Not much of anything, really.”