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By Demian Bulwa Her coach, Teri McKeever, says she's the best swimmer in the world. The sport's leading broadcaster, three-time gold medalist Rowdy Gaines, says he wants his kids to see her swim, "so they'll be able to tell their grandkids." Evan Morgenstein, an agent who represents the coach and the broadcaster, says he has received calls from six major Olympic sponsors, wondering if she might leave school early and pitch their products. And Stanford's head swimming coach, Richard Quick, routinely asks his charges to emulate her. "That's a pretty decent compliment to a Cal swimmer," he says. Collecting praise for Natalie Coughlin, a 20-year-old junior and holder of five world records, is easy. What's more difficult is pinning down why she's so extraordinary, and why she's on her way to becoming the greatest Cal athlete of all time, challenging fellow fish Mary T. Meagher '88 and Matt Biondi '88, two-sport stars Jackie Jensen '50 and Tony Gonzalez '98, short-timer Jason Kidd, and tennis legend Helen Wills Moody Roark '27, who won two Wimbledon singles titles for each of her names.
Coughlin did speak passionately about the stress of being the poster child for U.S. swimming. "It's really hard," she says, "being on the blocks and people expecting you to do something amazing when they have no idea you just had the worst test of your life, or you're sick, or you had family problems or whatever." She held forth eloquently on multiple-personality disorder (the topic of her paper), her psychology major, and her disdain for Berzerkeley stereotypes ("That really gets me started," she says). But while she's confident and opinionated, she's also guarded and sensitive. When asked about an often-repeated anecdote about her toughness, she says firmly, "There's been enough about that story." An hour later, she walked from the locker room to the pool like a lawyer entering the courtroom, all fixed gaze and forward lean. It was clear she had business to take care of, and her walk, perhaps, said more than she herself could. Those who know Coughlin say she has "purpose"--an unparalleled ability to focus on, attack, and conquer the thousand little challenges that, taken together, make up the life of a world-class athlete. It could be the most mundane of swim drills, yoga's downward-dog position, a one-hour cram in the library--or it could be a race against the world's best. This intensity of purpose extends, as she says it must, to everything--even rest. While most college students study at night (or at least stress about the fact that they're not studying), Coughlin says: "My brain shuts off at 6 p.m." She then cooks comfort food at her Northside apartment and watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek on TV. "She has an ability to focus and put all her strength into whatever she's doing at that moment," says Coughlin's father, Jim, a police sergeant in Vallejo. "Even if you're talking about sleep--I'm dead serious, you've never been around this lady--if she decides to sleep for 29 minutes, she's going to sleep for 29 minutes, and you better not wake her up." Of Coughlin's cooking hobby, Jim says: "When she left for college she was one step above knowing how to boil water. But she wanted to cook well, so she started reading magazines, watching cooking shows, taking classes, and cooking for everybody and anybody that would come over. Now she's talking about restaurants. And not working in one--she wants to own a restaurant. That's just the way she thinks." "You don't look at her and say, 'Whoa, there's a world-class athlete,'" Coach McKeever says of the winsome, five-foot-eight Coughlin. "But how do you measure the character, the determination, the willingness to lead a whole lifestyle? How do you measure not wanting to lose?" In competition, Coughlin takes her focus to its peak. "I've watched her at meets," says teammate Michelle Harper, a senior and All-American freestyler who lives in Coughlin's apartment building. "She clicks into racing form. She puts on her game face. And you can't get her out of it." At the 2001 NCAA championships, a Texas backstroker tried to rattle Coughlin before the start of the 200-yard medley relay. Coughlin likes to be the last swimmer in the water, but the Texan waited her out. "Holy mackerel," says Stanford's Quick, who witnessed the wrangling. "Natalie finally gets in the water before this girl and has an unbelievable leg. She touches the wall with the most fierce look on her face. You don't get in her head. She will pounce." Coughlin does have some incredible natural gifts. A Kaiser doctor once ordered a second chest x-ray on a pre-teen Natalie after the first appeared to show adult lungs. She can move her toes like fingers, and can push her arms straight back until the backs of her hands touch. (At swim meets, Coughlin performs this move on the starting block simply to limber up. But it's as intimidating as if she were wearing an outboard motor.) She also got a head start on swimming. Coughlin was in the pool before birth--her parents installed one at their Vallejo home so her mother, Zennie, a paralegal for Kaiser, could exercise while pregnant--and she swam before she walked. At age 6, Coughlin joined a youth team and put up with practice because she loved the meets. It didn't take long for her to discover the drive that would allow her to tap her potential. "Even when she was young, she would find somebody in her age group who was a very good swimmer, and she had to beat that person," says her father. "I can think of almost every age group and the kid that goes with it. She would find someone and say, 'They're fast. I need to be faster.'" Coughlin says her parents are competitive, which rubbed off on her, but she believes their restraint was just as important. Swim parents are notorious for their love of the stopwatch, timing laps and counting strokes from the stands: "You have those crazy swim moms who think they're coaches, and tell their kids about technique when they never swam themselves. I have pretty strong opinions about that," Coughlin says. Coughlin embraced the swimmer's burden--cold pre-dawn swims, being faxed workouts while on vacation with her family, taking trips to all-star meets with older girls. One year she took a winter off, saw teammates gain on her, and swore never to rest again. By the time she was a sophomore at Carondelet High School, she was the best prep swimmer in the nation. And then, suddenly, it was all in doubt. Coughlin's grueling work shaved seconds off her times but strained her body, and in March 1999 she tore the labrum in her left shoulder--an "overuse injury." The timing couldn't have been worse. Coughlin missed out on the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, finishing fourth at trials in the 200-meter individual medley (only the top two qualified). "I had been swimming really well for a long time and then, all of a sudden, I was out," she says. "There was a long time where I didn't think I'd make it back"--she came close to a risky surgery--"and that was hard to deal with. I mean, I was a teenager, a junior in high school, and everyone was saying I would make the Olympics in seven events or whatever.''
"I'm tougher," Coughlin says. "I think I have a different perspective on swimming now because of the ups and downs. I think I'm a better person, too." She was ready for Cal, which she chose over Stanford and UCLA in part because she felt Berkeley would open her eyes and challenge her, and in part because she trusted Coach McKeever to help resurrect her career. This is where the tough, independent, demanding athlete could have butted swim caps with the tough, independent, demanding coach. But the timing was right. "I was open to change," says Coughlin. "If I hadn't gotten the injury, I would have thought, 'I'm swimming well now, so why change it?'" McKeever, a former All-American at USC now in her 11th year coaching at Cal, says they clicked instantly: "She allowed me to coach her. We sort of view our lives similarly. She's willing to set a world record and then ask, 'What can I work on?'" Indeed, Coughlin and McKeever are cut from the same one-piece. They are totally invested in swimming while refusing to be defined by it or obsessed with it. Their mantra is: Build an arsenal of skills and strengths in and out of the pool. Be, if not the hardest worker, the most focused one, the smartest. And have fun. "The environment here is very open, and you have a lot of input into your training," Coughlin says. "It's more about power and technique, not just beating the crap out of you in the water. It's very purposeful, and it's just the type of training I enjoy." The women's bond goes far beyond the pool. This is a coach whose office bookshelf is stocked with everything from studies of management principles to Chicken Soup for the Soul. McKeever is an accomplished skipper, having steered the Bears to top-10 national finishes in each of the past six seasons. But this isn't Florida State football, where a coach knows the focus is preparing for the NFL and its paycheck. Just a few torpedoes will ever make money swimming. McKeever's resume-topper, according to some peers and Coughlin, is clear: She is one of the best in the nation at "feeding the whole person." "It's about getting that letter from someone five years later and having them say you made them a better boss, a good mom," says McKeever, who plans potlucks and retreats and last month took her team to train in Hawaii. Coughlin, meanwhile, strives to be an everyday student and teammate as much as a world-class athlete. "I have to allow Natalie to have a place where she's just one of 22 women who swims for the University of California," McKeever says. This is a young woman, after all, who likes reading her name in the Daily Cal nearly as much as in Sports Illustrated, who claims she appreciates a good campus protest, who after setting the world records in New York hit the phones to find out the Big Game score. Coughlin's favorite professor is Mary Kelsey from Sociology 3. Why? Because, when several dozen of her 200 students showed up for an exam review, Kelsey went around the room and named each one. "She truly cares," Coughlin says. "The great thing about Natalie being here [at Cal]," McKeever says, "is that she does represent the whole package"--a student eager to soak up the best of the University while offering her own unique talent. "Her self-esteem is not wrapped up in her swimming. There's a whole person there. I don't think all world-class athletes recognize there's a world going on outside of them."
Under McKeever's guidance, Coughlin began dominating. At one of her first big meets, the Texas Invitational, she won five races and broke 53 seconds in the 100-yard backstroke for the first time since her injury. "I realized it was possible," she said. "I had overcome the injury." She was NCAA Swimmer of the Year as a freshman and sophomore, smashing records only to smash them again, and was national champion in the 100- and 200-yard backstroke and the 100-yard butterfly both years. Her legend was not just building, it was exploding. Nearly every meet brought a fresh story. In the Phillips 66 Summer National Championships last year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she became the first woman in history to break one minute in the 100-meter backstroke, and she did it in a shallow pool and with a hot sun in her eyes. "She touched the bottom of the pool on both ends," recalls Gaines, who was broadcasting the event. "Here she is, the first woman to break a minute, and she might have gone a second faster." Now nobody knows how to react to her swims. When her second and third world records from last year's World Cup meet were posted on the scoreboard at the Big Game, a group of her teammates looked up. "We were kind of like, 'Oh, look, Nat broke more records,'" says Harper. "I've never seen her fail at any big meet. She surpasses every expectation." Swimming is about maximizing propulsion and reducing drag; a swimmer moves fastest after diving in or pushing off a wall and then decelerates until the next wall. It's not about maximizing the number of strokes because strokes increase drag. In the backstroke or butterfly, Coughlin spends up to 60 percent of a race underwater--the maximum allowed under the rules after David Berkhoff proved in the 1980s that a swimmer hardly needed to paddle--using her dolphin kick and her iron lungs to carry her "wall speed" farther than anyone. Ideally, she's gaining speed and saving energy at the same time. Form is vital: Even the slightest change in the pitch of the wrist, for example, means precious time. Coughlin, who pays close attention to these details, now threatens world records in every major meet she enters. She is a finalist for the 2003 Sullivan Award, given to the nation's top amateur athlete (she was also a finalist last year but lost out to skater Michelle Kwan). She is expected to contend for as many as seven gold medals in Athens, which would make her one of the great American stories heading into those games, along with sprinters Maurice Greene and Marion Jones and wrestler Rulon Gardner. Such prospects are exciting to Coughlin. She'd also love to follow Gaines, Summer Sanders, and others as swimmers who have transcended the pool. She ate up the Today spot--even making suggestions to the producers about her segment--and mentions the possibility of being an NFL sideline reporter. She is media-savvy, explaining, "I've learned that if I don't like a question, I can just say what I want; it doesn't have to reflect the question. That way I can get what I want across." Morgenstein, the agent, says Coughlin's combination of talent, confidence, and good looks have endorsers salivating. If she turns pro, which would allow her to sign endorsement deals and collect prize money at meets, she could remain enrolled at Cal and train under McKeever. But Coughlin says she is leaning towards swimming for Cal as a senior, adding, "I'm not naïve or stupid. I've looked at my options." Coughlin may very well live up to the expectations and the praise, fashioning in gold her place as the world's best, smiling out at us from the Wheaties box. But she says she'll be okay with or without Olympic glory, and that she has upcoming events (Pac-10 dual meets, NCAAs, world championships) to focus on. She insists the greatest reward her success has brought is inner satisfaction, not fame or the adulation of young swimmers. "It's just what I've learned from this," she says. She is a rock climber who loves the face, not the vista. "I'm swimming for myself," she says, "not for others." Still, the rest of us will root for her to come out on top. The only thing that captures the imagination of sports fans more than the fight of a plucky underdog is the assurance of an uncompromising champion--a Michael Jordan, a Marion Jones, a Tiger Woods, a Natalie Coughlin. No matter how much we expect from her, we know she expects far more from herself. We admire that spirit. And we're eager to join her on the journey, to see what's possible. Demian Bulwa '96, former sports editor for the Daily Cal, is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. |
 Photos by Stephanie Rausser
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