Michael Silver Talks About Golden Girl
Exclusive Book Help Web Interview!
Michael Silver knows athletes. This isn't surprising to anyone who has followed his career as a senior writer and columnist for Sports Illustrated.However, the sportswriter is also adept at lengthier pieces than what is found in the magazine. He i's the official biographer for such elite athletes as Kurt Warner, Jerry Rice, and Dennis Rodman. In May of 2006, he published his latest biography, that of Olympic gold medalist Natalie Coughlin.
Couglin was a star swimmer by the time she was 15, the first swimmer who ever qualified for the Summer Nationals in all 14 swimming events. But it is her career as a collegiate and an Olympian that has made her a star and a hero. In the 2004 Olympics, she brought home five medals-including a gold and a bronze in individual events and a gold and two silvers in team relay medals.
Silver spent the year before the Olympics talking to Natalie and watching her train. He also conducted extensive interviews with her family, teammates, and coaches. Right after the release of Golden Girl: How Natalie Coughlin Fought Back, Challenged Conventional Wisdom, and Became America's Olympic Champion, Silver talked with Book Help Web about Natalie and the book's creation.
Book Help Web: Given that your favorite sports are pro football, pro basketball, tennis, and college softball, what attracted you to the story of a swimmer?
Michael Silver: As the proudest of UC Berkeley graduates and obsessive fan of Cal's sports teams, I was well aware of Natalie's amazing accomplishments at the start of her college career.
One day in the spring of 2002 Cal coach Teri McKeever asked me to speak to her team on the deck of Spieker Pool-she had various guest speakers come from time to time to break up the monotony of practice, I guess. During that talk, around the time I was talking about my wife and kids and our house in the Oakland hills, I had an epiphany that I voiced out loud: "Here I am standing in front of 25 beautiful, bikini-clad coeds, and I'm hitting on you for BABYSITTING. It is so over for me. I am done."
I met Natalie that day and was impressed by her maturity, intelligence and intensity. The next summer we met for lunch and I broached the idea of doing a book. I thought I was getting a nice, feel-good story about the making of an Olympic champion-how she'd be trained and marketed in the year leading up to what seemed like sure gold in Athens. What I ended up getting was so much more: A story about a sport's pathology, how Natalie-like so many other talented young swimmers---had been chewed up and spit out by an oppressive culture. And how, unlike virtually all of the other casualties, she, with the guidance of Teri McKeever, had forged an alternative path to success and bounced back to become even more successful.
BHW: When traveling and meeting with Natalie Coughlin, what incident in her story did you find the most surprising? The most amusing?
Silver: What surprised me most was just how much skepticism there was in her midst. Even on her own team, there were whispers that she tended to choke in big meets or that her lack of traditional high-volume training would lead to her doom in Athens.
There's a story in the book about the anti-Natalie sniping on the team getting so out of control that, during the Bears' training trip to Australia in January of 2004, Teri McKeever finally calls a meeting to get it all out into the open, and Natalie-the greatest collegiate swimmer of all time-is sitting there crying.
The most amusing story, I think, is the story Natalie's father, Jim, tells about psychotic swimming parents. Even at meets with electronic-timing systems, parents inevitably would pull out their own stopwatches and time the races, as if only they could provide an accurate time. Then, one day, he and his wife are hosting a party at their house for one of Natalie's international races, and he looks over during the swim and one of the dads there has pulled out his watch and is timing the race OFF THE T.V.
Then there's the story about Keiko Amano, the 5-2 walk-on who was such an afterthought, Natalie and her teammates literally lost her in San Francisco during her recruiting trip. And Amano, the classic McKeever Overachiever, ends up being the hero of the biggest dual meet of Coughlin's career.
BHW: In 2004, you wrote that you had been hanging out with Coughlin for a year in anticipation of writing Golden Girl. Having spent years with her, what would you say is her defining characteristic?
Silver: Ha, I want to say her ultra-competitive nature, or perhaps her grace under pressure. But most of all, she has this sort of intuitive conviction about her, an unwavering sense of what is right for her and the courage to stick to her guns even when her choices are unpopular-fighting with her parents for the right to attend Cal instead of Stanford; forging, along with Teri McKeever, an alternative training approach; turning down big endorsement dollars to stay in school for her senior year; choosing Janey Miller as her agent instead of the big guns like Octagon; insisting on swimming the more competitive 100-meter freestyle instead of the 200-meter backstroke, which was considered a sure gold; sublimating her individual aspirations in order to swim on all three relays; and, most of all, being willing to put out a book that will rile many members of the swimming establishment.
BHW: Golden Girl is the story of Natalie Coughlin, but it is also the story of Teri McKeever and the University of California swim team. You spend a lot of time in the book talking about how McKeever's philosophy is at odds with most of the rest of the swimming world. Is this something you see changing after the 2004 successes?
Silver: I don't believe that all of a sudden, after Natalie's tremendous success in Athens, hundreds of coaches will junk their philosophies and start doing things Teri's way. But I do believe that trying something a little more out-of-the-box will at least be part of the conversation now, with Teri's success and with her close friend Dave Salo's accepting of the USC coaching job. One thing I do know is that if Natalie had failed to win multiple medals in Athens, there would have been a resounding chorus of naysayers screaming, "See, Teri's way doesn't work. Natalie didn't swim enough yardage." That's why I think Natalie was under more pressure than any swimmer at the Games.
Realistically, because it is so ingrained, the traditional approach to training will be tough to crack. But I think what Natalie and Teri hope is that they can help provide a blueprint for the future, and that the next generation of swimmers may benefit from their sharing of their story. In the meantime, after becoming the first woman to serve on a U.S. Olympic swim staff, Teri was recently named as the head coach of the women's team for this summer's Pan-Pacific Games, another first. And I'm thrilled that earlier this spring she turned down the women's job at her alma mater, USC, to stay at Cal.
BHW: What so far as been the reaction to Golden Girl, in particular from the people who are portrayed in it such as Haley Cope and Ray Mitchell?
Silver: I haven't heard from either Haley or Ray. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Mitchell will hate this book and view Natalie as ungrateful, and I'm confident that Haley will enjoy it immensely, as much of her story was told in her words. She and Natalie remain very close friends, and Haley, as much as anyone in the world, is the ultimate McKeever Overachiever. She was a lightly recruited swimmer from a relatively unknown club in Chico, California who kept improving every year she swam in college and became a world-record holder, world champion and Olympian-not to mention a Playmate.
BHW: Who had final approval and sign-off on the book? Was it necessary to get permissions from the people who were covered other than Natalie?
Natalie and I were partners on this project and thus she had signoff power on every single word. And I must say, she was an utter joy to work with, as was her agent, Janey Miller-I couldn't have asked for a better situation, professionally. And because Natalie and I both have so much respect for Teri McKeever, we sought her guidance on a number of issues in the book as well. Other than that we sought no permission; I merely adhered to the journalistic principles that guide me as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated.
BHW: You're a regular columnist and reporter with Sports Illustrated. How is writing a sports book different (other than length) from writing a column or article? Do your research techniques change?
Silver: With a book you can really flesh out and develop characters, such as stroke guru Milt Nelms, who might seem like a caricature in a magazine article or online column. And I think you can go beyond the typical coach-athlete relationship and the clichés associated with that and show, in this case, the symbiotic marriage of Teri and Natalie and how each one helped pull the other out of a hole.
In terms of research, my techniques never change-my philosophy is always to get as deeply inside of someone's life as a I can, for as long as he or she will allow (or until deadline beckons), and present a fair, accurate and honest portrait of that reality to the reader. I don't believe in objectivity, per se, or in the idea that we as reporters should be impassive observers. If you are fair and accurate yet deeply involved I think that's journalistically defensible.
BHW: Do you write for a different audience when writing with Natalie Coughlin than you did when writing the books with Dennis Rodman, Kurt Warner, and Jerry Rice? How does the storytelling change?
Silver: Well, for one thing, unlike, say, with the Rodman autobiography, this book is intentionally kid-friendly-Natalie was very adamant about not putting anything in that would be inappropriate for young readers, and I think that was a great decision. And though there are similarities between her and those other book subjects (all are hyper-competitive elite athletes, for starters), I hope there are readers out there who will be particularly receptive to Natalie's story. For one thing, any kid who is competing in a sport-or any parent of a kid who is-should read this book, because the pitfalls Natalie encountered as a teenaged swimmer will resonate will them. And I think it sends a powerful message that, even when everyone around you is telling you to do something one way, there are many different approaches that can lead to success, and each of us should pick the one that feels right, whatever the endeavor. Finally, whereas Rice, Rodman and Warner are sports stars, Natalie is a true American hero, someone who believed helping her country excel in the relays was more important than padding her individual medal count. I think anyone who loves the Olympics and the way athletes can represent their countries with grace and dignity will be thrilled by Natalie's story.
BHW: Why do you think the reading public finds the stories of athletes so compelling?
Silver: We're all intrigued by the notion of watching people respond to intense pressure, and anytime something like that can be quantified it's a real bonus. With sports, unlike in other realms, there is a constant measuring stick-the scoreboard, the medal stand-that defines success and failure, and the fact that the events occur in artificially enclosed mini-universes makes for high drama.
With swimming, more than with most other Olympic sports, there's an added degree of resonance. At one point or another, virtually everyone has jumped into the water and tried to swim 100 meters of freestyle as fast as he or she can. Watching someone do that against the fastest-ever women's field, and knowing that her motivation for doing so (rather than swimming another event with an easier path to gold) was because the thought of missing out on that competitive opportunity drove her mad-I mean, that's a pretty intense scenario.
BHW: You went with Saints running back Deuce McAllister back into the heart of New Orleans after the hurricane. Your account of that trip and the trip to the Houston Astrodome is both compelling and heart-wrenching. Do you think you will ever write a book about those experiences? Looking back at it from several months distance, what was the most memorable about your experience there?
Silver: First of all, thank you-that's one of those stories you wish you'd never had to have written, and it evolved in such a sudden manner. I had never met Deuce before when we spoke in the visiting locker room of the Oakland Coliseum a few minutes after the Saints' preseason game against the Raiders on a Thursday night; three days later, after visiting shelters and hearing incredible stories of survival and tragedy, we were sitting in the back of a Salvation Army van cruising through Mississippi while a worker showed us photos on his laptop of the devastation on the Gulf Coast. At that point we still thought we were going to check on Deuce's house in the suburbs, away from the real nightmare of the flood. Then it was, "Hey, do you want to go to the airport?" And, after that, "You guys want to go downtown?" Hell yeah we did, but it was a haunting experience.
What I remember most were the people we encountered who not only weren't thinking about being rescued but were actively resisting it. A couple of days later, on the TV news channels, they started showing residents who were defiantly saying, "I'm not leaving. This is my home." The people we saw weren't like that; they didn't seem to own much of anything and they weren't thinking clearly. It was like the stress of the situation had driven them crazy, which I guess is entirely understandable. They'd ask for a newspaper or for Mardi Gras beads, things that just didn't make sense.
When I talked to people, I just remember wanting to pat them on the backs and assure them that people on the outside DID care about them and WERE touched by their plight, because they so clearly had the impression that the federal government did not. Another thing that completely caught me off-guard-and caught Deuce off guard-was the way so many of the evacuees had clung to football during this time of stress. To me and Deuce the Saints seemed so completely insignificant, but to many of them, keeping tabs on the team represented normalcy and a link to the outside world.
