BALTIMORE _ Michael Phelps apologizes for calling 15 minutes late.
"Boomer is in the process of making a pizza right now," he explained, referring to his 2-year-old son. And as any young parent knows, a toddler's priorities are the priorities of the household, even if Dad is a 23-time Olympic gold medalist.
What if, Phelps is asked, he could jump back a decade and describe this scene to his 23-year-old self? What would that fearfully driven world-beater have thought of this happy husband, father of two and mental health activist? Would he even have recognized this as a potential path forward?
"I would have been blown away," the 33-year-old retired swimmer said from his home in Arizona. "I still have a group of friends who are all figuring things out. I have a buddy of mine and I said to him (recently), 'Dude, if we had bet in 2004 who would be married first, I would've been like a million-to-one compared to you.' It was like no shot."
It's been 10 years since Phelps authored his signature chapter by winning a record eight gold medals over a remarkable week in Beijing. When he takes stock, the passage of time strikes him as "bizarre."
"Because it's like for me, thinking back to 2008 and where I was _ just the good, bad and ugly of what I was back then _ and now being able to come back and look at something that was so special and so meaningful, I see how much change can happen," he said. "It's maturity, it's growing up, it's going through life-changing experiences at a young age, good ones and very bad ones."
For all the grand and touching moments that would follow, along with the missteps and times of impenetrable despair, the Beijing Olympics remain essential to Phelps' story.
He eclipsed the great Mark Spitz and culminated his boyhood quest to do something unprecedented in the sport that had consumed his days and his dreams.
At the same time, he began a pivot toward adulthood that would see him fall out of love with the pool, reach suicidal depths and ultimately rediscover himself as a more complicated but more contented man.
Beyond those broader narrative strokes, Beijing offered terrific sporting theater. Phelps did not win his races clinically _ he needed a teammate's desperate relay comeback, a blind swim and an impossible surge to the wall to pull it off.
The meet of his life paid off a plan he and his coach, Bob Bowman, had devised over 12 years, starting when Phelps was in grade school.
It did not start as a quest to chase down Spitz's record of seven gold medals won at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In fact, Bowman laughs recalling a news conference Phelps gave in 2001, when he'd just broken his first world record at age 15.
"Who is this Mark Spitz guy and why do they keep asking me about him?" the teenager asked.
Phelps did not care about surpassing Spitz, per se, something he said repeatedly in the run-up to Beijing. His goal was more abstract, to push his sport to a new realm of possibility. It just so happened that if he completed his program as planned, the eight golds would provide a tasty hook for those telling the story.
