MESA, Ariz. — As his life unraveled, the athlete rued that all he knew how to do was swim. “So I was just this little hole where a man should be,” he said.
The speaker, Danny Kelly, is a character in the recent novel “Barracuda,” by the Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, but his lament was echoed this week by the 18-time Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps, who returned to competition after a six-month suspension resulting from a second drunken-driving arrest.
Phelps, 29, who spent 45 days at an alcohol rehabilitation center in Arizona about an hour’s drive from here, said that in the years after the 2000 Olympics, which he qualified for as a 15-year-old, he gradually distanced himself from his mother and two sisters.