Former Nadadore Wants to Be a Chip Off the Old Block : Swimming: Former Olympian Mike O’Brien plans to follow Schubert’s footsteps, modeling new team in Newport Beach after one in Mission Viejo.

NEWPORT BEACH —  Mark Schubert has never seen perfection. Ask any swimmer he has ever coached. But he often marveled at how hard Mike O’Brien tried to achieve it.

Schubert, former coach of the Mission Viejo Nadadores, used to joke with his assistants that O’Brien, then a sophomore at Newport Christian High School, would be the first Nadadore swimmer to become president of the United States.

“He was certainly one of the most intelligent individuals I’ve ever coached and he also made the effort to do everything just right, too much so for his own good sometimes,” said Schubert, now coach of the NCAA champion Texas women’s team. “His stress level was a little higher than I would’ve liked.”

You can bet that Schubert, infamous for his intensity, hasn’t said that about many of his athletes. And that group includes a host of Olympic gold-medal winners who spent much of their youth getting up every day at 5 a.m. to swim the first of two three-hour workouts.

O’Brien converted that work ethic into a six-second victory in the 1,500-meter freestyle final at the 1984 Olympics. Now 25 and a Newport Beach financial planner/insurance broker, he has no plans to run for president.

Instead, he wants to follow in Schubert’s footsteps and become a dictator.

The city of Newport Beach, which helped pay for a new pool at Corona del Mar High, hired O’Brien to build a swim team. Not surprisingly, O’Brien will use the Nadadores, the most successful U.S. swim club in history, as a model.

And the key to that success, O’Brien says, was the strong and single-minded direction of an enlightened despot.

“The best way to run a team is the way Mark ran the Nadadores,” O’Brien said. “The parents should be there to support the kids, take them to workouts and help out as volunteers, but policy should be solely in the hands of one person and I’m going to be that person.”

O’Brien says he can’t wrangle the time from family--he and his wife, Kristin, have a 20-month-old son, Ian--and his 2-year-old business to be the on-deck coach, so for the time being he will act as administrator for the Newport Beach Breaker Swim Club. He has hired former Nadadores swimmer Greg Farrier and former Irvine Novaquatics assistant Kim Betz to coach the team.

“I’ll give my coaches guidelines with plenty of room to be creative,” O’Brien said, “but if there are problems, they’ll be resolved through me.”

Schubert admits to having mellowed a bit over the years--no parent has pushed him into a pool in almost a decade--and he can’t help but laugh at O’Brien’s assessment of the balance of power during his days at Mission Viejo.

“I guess I taught him that the secret is to at least create the illusion that you’re in charge of the whole thing,” Schubert said. “Swim coaches always joke about the parental situation, but, at Mission especially, we never would have gotten that good without them.”

O’Brien can relate to that. Without his parents’ support, his gold-medal dreams would have evaporated. Every weekday for more than three years, his father got up at 4:30, drove him from their house in Costa Mesa to Mission Viejo and then slept in his car in the parking lot while Mike sloshed through a few miles of workouts. His mom made the trek in the afternoons.

Southern Orange County gridlock might have rendered such a pilgrimage impossible these days and that’s one of the main reasons O’Brien is involved with the birth of the Breakers.

“We’ve always had great little recreation leagues in this community, with some really good coaching,” O’Brien said. “But if you get good and want to go on, you have to go to Irvine or Mission and the traffic’s just too much.

“We’ve had a lot of help from a parents’ group called Swim for the Gold, who helped raise the money for the new pool. This is great timing to start a team in an area with unlimited potential.”

The Breakers will start slow, building a foundation of age-group teams that O’Brien believes can one day blossom into a senior group that could dominate the way the Nadadores swept men’s, women’s and combined championships in the 1970s and ‘80s.

You can’t blame O’Brien for believing in the Mission Viejo Way. It certainly worked for him. He’s one of the few people who knows what it feels like to stand on the top level of the victory stand while the national anthem rings in your ears.

“I try to impress on kids that being a swimmer is a different way of life,” O’Brien said. “It takes a lot of sacrifices, but there’s also a lot of rewards, especially the self-satisfaction. If you put in the work, then there will be a payoff in the end. Maybe not tomorrow or the next meet, but down the road.

“You can be training to be a national champion while all your friends are spending their time drinking beer or smoking dope. At least that’s what a lot of my friends were doing. But when you’re a swimmer, you’re different, you’re special.”

O’Brien is also acutely aware of the pitfalls inherent in such commitment and hopes to avoid the excesses leading to the burnout that’s so common in his sport.

“I like the way things are done at Mission, but I’m personally opposed to kids doing double workouts before they’re 13 or 14,” he said. “You want young swimmers to enjoy the sport and learn the fundamentals, but I don’t think it’s important to be a national age-group champion at 11.

“You want to establish the basics and have a lot of well-adjusted athletes who haven’t been burned out as kids . . . who won’t burn out after their first year of college.”

What happened to Mike O’Brien after his freshman year at USC was more a return from orbit than a crash and burn, but it was still the most painful time of his life.

“After ’84 when I won the gold, I was on top of the world,” he said. “I had taken a year off to train after high school so I was excited about going back to school, too.

“Three weeks after winning the gold, I was back in the same pool (at McDonald’s Swim Stadium) as a freshman at USC. I was riding a wave from the Olympics and I think most of the other guys were intimidated by getting on the blocks next to a guy who had won a gold medal.”

It turned out to be an unbeatable combination. O’Brien won every dual meet race he swam as a freshman. And he swam a lot, including the 200-, 500-, 1,000- and 1,650-yard freestyles, the 100- and 200-yard backstroke events and all the relays.

USC Coach Peter Daland keeps an all-time list, based on the top 100 all-time performances in each event by a USC swimmer. The best time in an event earns a swimmer 100 points, the 100th best time is worth one. Bruce Furness had been No. 1 on the list since 1980.

O’Brien was No. 2 by the end of his freshman year.

He capped off that first year with two victories at the NCAA meet, including an American record 4 minutes 13.06 seconds in the 500-yard freestyle that still stands. The next week, he won the high-point award at the U.S. indoor nationals with victories in the 1,650-, 1,000- and 500-yard freestyle events. The 8:47.56 he swam in the 1,000 remains an American and U.S. Open record.

“That was the top of my game right there,” he said. “I was just blowing the doors off everybody.”

As summer approached, however, O’Brien decided he was a little tired and talked about taking some time off. Daland and Schubert advised him to stay in the water.

He opted for taking a short respite. It marked the beginning of the end.

Physical problems, stemming from depleted adrenal glands, and a predictable emotional letdown combined to make O’Brien’s sophomore year a disaster.

“In one year, I went from being the top dog in the country in the distance freestyle events to not even being able to make a final in the NCAA,” he said. “My teammates got down on me, there was some real resentment and I was really down on myself.

“I didn’t know what was going on, but looking back, I had burned the candle at both ends too long, studying hard, training hard and neglecting nutrition. I was away from mom’s cooking for the first time and there were too many burgers and pizzas.

“Plus, I had pledged a fraternity and was messing around a lot out of the pool. I had such a dull high school life that when I got to college, I started to experience life a little bit.”

After an equally lackluster junior year, O’Brien finally passed Furness on the USC all-time list. After a mini-comeback as a backstroker his senior year, he thought about trying to make the 1988 Olympic team, but Schubert and Daland recommended that he retire.

“Mike always tried to do everything 110% and he had a lot of irons in the fire, academically and socially,” Schubert said. “After losing the motivation of the Olympics, he hung in for a while, but he couldn’t raise himself to that level of sacrifice. It’s impossible to train at that level and be a regular human being.”

And Daland told O’Brien that he likely would be setting himself up for a major disappointment, reminding him that he had already accomplished nearly every one of his goals, except setting a world record.

“I was 23, lived two miles from the beach and hadn’t had a summer off in 18 years,” O’Brien said. “I had my Olympiad, I had earned my scholarship and my degree (in political science). It was time to move on in life.”

He got a job in commercial real estate and picked up a $30,000 commission on the sale of an $8.5-million Mission Viejo shopping center. But he had gone eight months without earning a penny and his credit card was at the $10,000 limit when he finally got the check.

“That’s when I started thinking about becoming a swim coach,” O’Brien said. “It doesn’t pay very well, but it sure as heck pays more often.”

Instead, he entered a training program at a Newport Beach insurance company and, in 1989, started his own insurance and financial services firm. He was working as a volunteer assistant coach at UC Irvine when he was contacted by the group wanting to start the team in Newport Beach.

“I told them what I’d do and they hired me,” he said. “I coached on the deck for three months, but it was too much. I couldn’t do justice to my business, my family and the team.”

So O’Brien set up a chain of command and assumed the top spot.

“Mike’s smart, a perfectionist and a diplomat,” Schubert said. “I thought he’d be president, but I guess those are the required characteristics for running a swim team, too.”