BERKELEY, Calif. — There was a point earlier this year, after his house — along with his livelihood and his worldly possessions — had vanished in a fiery blaze, when Gary Hall Jr. perhaps fully realized why he was a swimmer.
“Sport is not life or death,” the five-time Olympic gold medalist told USA TODAY Sports. “It's entertainment. It really is, even at the Olympics. You've got so much invested by then. But still, at the end of the day, the world's not a better place because I swam fast.”
He was sitting at a picnic table under a tent at the Project Play Summit. Coaches and leaders from across the youth sports landscape traveled to the University of California in late March in search of ways to keep kids playing amid what has become a $40 billion industry that often pushes them out.
Hall, 50, was a late bloomer in a simpler era. He didn’t join a year-round swimming program until he was 13 or 14. Less than 10 years later, his long and graceful body climbed to the top of the podium at the first of his three Olympics (1996, 2000, 2004) representing the United States.
He had fun with talking trash to opponents to the point where it motivated an entire nation to want to beat him.
Today, he is putting his life back together while living in a guest house near his sister’s home in Encinitas, California. His swim school, where he taught 2-to-6-year-olds out of his backyard pool in Pacific Palisades, vanished, too, that day in January as wildfires ravaged Los Angeles.
A father of two teenagers who have played sports, Hall Jr. spoke to USA TODAY Sports about his athletic journey and how looking back at it could be helpful to young athletes and their parents.
He pulled out what remained of two gold medals he recovered from the fire — one from Atlanta, one from Athens. They were now melted together. This could be lesson No. 1.
"Success,” he says, “was a very humbling experience.”
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When he was winning medals, Hall used to wear silk boxing robes to the pool deck. He was poking fun at ego and convention. He had done it since he was a boy and Olympians would come to his local pool club to give motivational talks to him and his teammates.
“I was rolling my eyes, like, ‘Yeah, OK, character development,’” he said.
As a teenager, he wanted to be more like Tony Hawk than his father, three-time Olympic medalist Gary Hall Sr.
Hall Sr. was as a swimmer in the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Olympics, and a two-time world swimmer of the year. ...
