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Michael Phelps

Brennan: Michael Phelps a changed man? We'll see

Christine Brennan
USA TODAY Sports
Michael Phelps outside a courtroom in Baltimore, where Phelps pleaded guilty Friday to driving under the influence. A judge handed down a one-year suspended jail sentence and 18 months of supervised probation.

Michael Phelps is one lucky guy today.

He is lucky to not be going to jail after pleading guilty to driving while under the influence of alcohol in late September. He is lucky to not have killed himself, or a mother or a father, or a child, or a family, while changing lanes at 84 miles per hour in a Baltimore tunnel while drunk.

He is lucky to not be banned for life by USA Swimming or the U.S. Olympic Committee.

He is lucky to have the very real possibility of representing the United States at another Olympics, the 2016 Summer Games in Rio.

He is lucky that a vast majority of Americans will still probably think of him first and foremost as an Olympic hero, not as the nearly 30-year-old drunk driver and anti-hero who has been arrested twice in 10 years for the same offense.

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The conversation will soon begin, if it hasn't started already, about what this will mean for Phelps' chances to try to add to his record of 18 gold medals at the 2016 Olympics.

That's the last thing anyone should be talking about right now. Phelps is a troubled man. He willingly signed multi-million-dollar contracts making him a role model for our children while at the same time living a life of personal destruction that no child should ever emulate. He is no longer a teenager, even though he still acts just like one. He seeks the spotlight, yet apparently has no idea how to act when it finds him.

Perhaps this will change. His attorney said Phelps completed a 45-day treatment program in Arizona and is continuing in an aftercare program in Maryland while planning to participate in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Phelps has apologized for his actions, just as he apologized when he was arrested 10 years ago for alleged drunk driving, pleading guilty to a reduced charge of driving while impaired, and just as he apologized in 2009 when a photo surfaced of him smoking a marijuana pipe at a party.

He says all the right things and apologizes at all the right times, yet we still have to wonder. In court today, Phelps was accompanied by his mother Debbie, and by former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis.

Yes, Ray Lewis.

The man who was once charged with two counts of murder, later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the still-unsolved case of two stabbing deaths and was fined $250,000 by the National Football League.

Perhaps Phelps picked Lewis because he knows his way around a courtroom.

Who in the world is advising Michael Phelps? Does he not run these ideas by his management firm, Octagon? Or does he keep these flawed decisions to himself?

At this critical juncture of his life, of all the people on earth Phelps could have chosen to join him in court, he picks a man who was infamously on trial for a double murder?

So is Michael Phelps a changed man? Does he get it, really get it?

You tell me.

PHOTOS: Michael Phelps through the years

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