It was the spring of 1999, a party, and Gary had been battling dizzy spells and bouts of blurred vision. He careened home, got to a hospital and received a diagnosis to explain both his current swoons and, as it happens, his past distaste for practice. It wasn't a lack of will, a well-to-do upbringing or a lingering angst over his grandfather's tragic fall (the man is convicted savings-and-loan baron Charles Keating). It was Hall's pancreas, a lack of insulin, diabetes. And when told that the disease might one day blind him, make him impotent or cause him to lose his legs, he flew to Costa Rica for a few weeks of long ocean swims through sharky waters and dark, fate-tempting thoughts. "He'd just swim straight out," his fiancée, Elizabeth Peterson, recalls, "swim for miles, until he'd disappear . . . . [And then later], while we were still down there, he told me he still wanted to live, which for Gary meant, of course, he still wanted to race."
His return to competition, after the suspension, the diagnosis and the thoughts of death -- "I didn't know if I wanted to keep on trying" -- is the stuff of legend.
AP/Wide World
Left to right: Gary Hall Jr. of Phoenix, Brendon Dedekind of South Africa and William Pilczuk of the U.S. during the medal ceremony for the men's 50-meter freestyle at the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in Sydney in August 1999. Dedekind won; Hall placed second.
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In August of '99, at U.S. Nationals, in baggy Louis Vuitton bathing trunks (a gift from Peterson) worn, he says, to irk the powers that be at Speedo ("I didn't care to endorse a company that supports the Chinese women's team, with something like 27 positive tests for steroid abuse, and yet takes this firm stance on a non-performance-enhancing substance like marijuana."), he not only beat a field of world-class sprinters sporting the sleekest of swimwear, but he set a personal best of 22.13 seconds, fifth-fastest ever, and a time that would have won in Atlanta. It's also a time that he knows he'll have to near, on his first lap in the Olympic medley, if he's to hold off the Australians on their home turf and honor the faith of his coach to put him here, as the relay's sole veteran, with so much still to prove. If behind, he knows, the Australian swimmer will be drafting, holding close to the lane line, hoping to ride in his wake. If even, he says, the two of them may flip together and push off as one for a torrid, strategy-free dash -- Hall's favorite kind; he doesn't like to overthink it -- that will leave him, win or lose, in a hallucinatory state.
His teammates will urge him on. The crowd will stand to scream. Two billion onlookers will watch on television. And the drive to finish first, for the lone U.S. swimmer still in the water, may come down to ephemeral things that may, in turn, say as much about this 40-year winning phenomenon as anything else.
"It's about working together," Hall says, "working together and doing your part, and getting to experience these moments, for once, with three other guys . . . . In '96 I swam with Jeff Rouse, Jeremy Lynn, Mark Henderson. . . . And it's not like we keep in touch, but in a strange way, after all we went through, it's kind of like we're war buddies. Like, I know it sounds corny, but I still consider them my best friends for life."
Shane DuBow is a freelance writer from Chicago who swam competitively for 15 years.
