UNCHARTERED WATERS MEDALS AREN'T FORMER OLYMPIC SWIMMER ERVIN'S PRIORITY THESE DAYS.

Byline: ROSS SILER Staff Writer

NEW YORK - It's all about the story. You have to have one if you're going to the Olympics -- the television networks filling all those prime- time hours, reporters from around the world, a public that tunes in once every four years. All demand a good story.

Anthony Ervin, a Valencia native and former Hart High of Newhall swimmer, doesn't have to worry. He has a great story, and he knows it.

He didn't have one the first time he went to the Olympics, back in 2000, when at 19 he won the 50-meter freestyle gold medal. As far as Ervin is concerned, his story was told for him in Sydney.

But if he can make it back in 2008, make it from his new home in Brooklyn back to Berkeley and then on to Beijing, the story will belong to him, and it will be told as only he can.

Ervin last raced at the 2003 World Championships. He no longer has his gold medal, he auctioned it in 2005 to benefit UNICEF's tsunami-relief efforts.

His arms are covered in tattoos that scream out from under a long- sleeved shirt. He is playing in three bands in New York, with songs that come to him and swim in his head as he walks down the street.

But nobody will speak of Ervin's career in the past tense, even if he would rather pick up a guitar than jump into the water any day.

If he was not the world's fastest swimmer, he was on the short list of the fastest. He still owns the fourth-quickest time in history in the 50 free (21.80 seconds) and, at 25, should be in the prime of his career.

The clock is ticking -- 656 days to go -- toward the opening ceremonies in Beijing. Whether Ervin will be there is something he has no intention of addressing now.

``I know what I want,'' Ervin says, ``but that usually doesn't coincide with what other people think that I should want.''

All Ervin will say is that he is considering a comeback. He knows that he can't do the training necessary to make it to the 2008 Games unless he is reunited with his former sprint coach, Mike Bottom, at his college home in Berkeley.

When Ervin will move back is another matter. He says it could be January ... or maybe May ... or maybe not until next summer. A lot depends on where he is musically. Having his band in Beijing is almost as important as being there himself.

``There's a lot of other things that I think prelude getting back into swimming,'' Ervin says. ``I'm not going to just go back into swimming just for the sake of swimming. I have an agenda if I'm going to go back into the public eye as an Olympian. Because I know I can make the team again.''

After moving to New York last March, Ervin crashed for a month with Erik Vendt, a two-time silver medalist in the 400 individual medley. It was through Vendt that Ervin found his current job, coaching at the Imagine School of Swimming in the city.

One day, Ervin made a telling comment to Vendt about his plans.

``He was like: `You know, Erik, the only way I'm going to come back is if I have a great rock band to promote along the way,''' Vendt says. ``That kind of showed me where his head was. His head was in the music, and that's great. As long as it's something to keep him focused.''

Bottom says that until Ervin walks into his office at Cal, he won't consider the possibility of a comeback. There always is a difference between thinking and doing, he says, when it comes to Ervin.

``If Anthony looks at it like: `I'm going to try to get something out of swimming,' that won't be enough to keep him in swimming,'' Bottom says. ``The day Anthony comes in and swims because he wants to execute his potential is the day that I'll be ready to give him 100 percent of my coaching skills.''

With Ervin, questions only lead to more questions.

For starters, what if you won a gold medal too young? Ervin was barely a year out of his parents' home, an adult only because he was 19, when his life changed forever in Sydney.

And what if you won a gold medal so young that you found the time to figure yourself out? Ervin has answered to no one in playing guitar, riding motorcycles and working at a tattoo parlor in recent years.

Then there's the toughest question of all: If you've already won a gold medal, do you owe anybody -- including yourself -- anything more?

``I just don't think he understood that (swimming) is a gift,'' Bottom says, ``and it's a gift that in other areas of his life he will never have a greater gift than that.''

Six years after Sydney, Ervin is asked if he has figured himself out.

His answer: ``I figured out enough to be, like: `I don't need to figure that much out about myself. I just need to make stuff and say it's mine.'''

He would be trying to make a comeback after taking more than three years off, in a sport that separates winners and losers by hundredths of a second. But to understand Ervin's story is to remember that it isn't about swimming. It's about finding meaning in life.

A means to an end

The gold medal spent most of its time in a closet. Ervin never was much for displaying it. He won it in a one-in-a-million swim, tying for first with Gary Hall Jr. -- his training partner -- in

21.98 seconds. Both won gold, only the second time in Olympic history there were two winners in a swim race.

As the story was told, Hall was swimming's bad boy redeemed and Ervin the changing face of the sport, the first swimmer of African-American heritage to make the U.S. team.

``There wasn't much to me before,'' says Ervin, whose father is three- quarters black. ``I was 19. You could dig up my ethnicity, and that was about it.''

Ervin won the 50 and 100 frees the following year at the World Championships in Japan. He was 20 and the best swimmer in the world, having twice beaten Pieter van den Hoogenband, still the world-record holder in the 100free.

That was a distant memory by the time Ervin returned to Japan for a swimming clinic at the end of 2004. He had long wanted to travel the world, on his terms, and finally was getting his chance.

Only a week later, Ervin watched in shock as a tsunami devastated Southeast Asia. He was back in the U.S., watching on television, and his feelings were profound.

How Ervin saw the tragedy offers a window into his mind. He always had looked at his gold medal not just for winning a race, but for conquering water itself. It was man against the elements, and man had won.

Then he saw the fury of the tsunami, the loss of more than 150,000 lives, and the medal became inconsequential.

``It's even selfish in what I did, I felt,'' Ervin says. ``I did it for me. I did it for my own sake while trying to actually help.''

What Ervin decided to do was auction the medal on eBay. The final bid was for $17,100, which Ervin donated to UNICEF. All he knows is that the man who bought it was from the Philippines. Neither eBay nor the Philippines swimming federation have more information.

``I think it was something he needed to do,'' Bottom says. ``If you talk about the big picture of things, it was something he was destined to do to make him a better person. And it did make him a better person.''

Ervin, who still has the silver medal he won in the 4x100 free relay, always has been one of the most compelling and complicated people to those who have known him.

His coach at Hart, Steve Neale, remembers getting calls from Ervin's teachers complaining that he was barely trying in class. One described him as ``insolent.''

``Then he gets 5s on the AP tests,'' Neale said. ``I guess it comes from knowing himself very well.''

Ervin went to Cal for fouryears and bounced from one major to the next, from neuroscience to religious studies, finally to philosophy. Bottom says his greatest regret with Ervin is that he never graduated, although he remained eligible to swim.

``A lot of times,'' Bottom says, ``he would be reading stuff that would have nothing to do with his classes.''

He also was undoubtedly the first Olympic gold medalist to work at Zebra, a tattoo parlor on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Ervin manned the cash register, helped the artists and soaked up the stories they had to tell.

It didn't matter to Ervin if the stories were true or not. Or if he had the best one of them all.

``We used to tell people and people used to trip out about it,'' artist Olmy Rosenstock says. ``He was pretty quiet about it. He preferred not to talk about it.''

Ervin got his first tattoo, a star on his left elbow, in Amsterdam after the 2003 World Championships. He also has the lyrics to the Smashing Pumpkins song ``Rocket'' -- ``Bleed in your own light/Dream of your own life'' -- inside each forearm.

Ervin has had both his arms inked, one with the design of a Japanese phoenix, the other with an exoskeleton. He has been told he has to swim at the Olympics again, if only for the sight of those arms churning through the water.

Without hesitation, Ervin says the greatest thrill in his life wasn't winning the gold medal in Sydney, it was playing guitar at his first show, with a crowd screaming for more at a house party in Berkeley.

Although he left behind his old band, The Weapons, when he moved from the Bay Area, Ervin has three new projects in New York: a rock band, a goth-rock band and an acoustic band, complete with a cellist.

Ervin says he is never more honest with himself than when he is writing songs. There is something music provides that swimming never will.

``The high that you get from music,'' Ervin says, ``when you're writing something as a band, and it all comes together, it's irreplaceable.

``You can't get that in swimming. In swimming, all you get is training your ass off and racing and beating people, defeating people, boosting your own ego to make you better than the rest. Sometimes you can't even see it -- you have to look at the clock afterwards.''

If he can make it to Beijing, Ervin wants his band there to play for the world. He intends to go on tour afterward. If he can win a gold medal, maybe he can launch his own line of swimwear. He can see himself, a decade from now, as a novelist.

Swimming will not be what defines his life.

``I don't think I have anything to prove in swimming,'' Ervin says. ``I think I have something to prove to myself and swimming is a part of that. But swimming is really just a means for an end for me.''

Out of nowhere

It wasn't the Olympics nor the World Championships, but Neale can remember one mesmerizing Ervin performance. It was in the 100 free at the Pacific-10 Conference championships one year at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach. The Hart coach stood on the pool deck and could feel it shaking under his feet.

Every swimmer in the race was among the best in the world. Ervin was a body length ahead of all of them.

Says Neale: ``It was just amazing to watch him swim.''

In barely a year, Ervin went from Southern Section titles to NCAA championships to Olympic gold. And he didn't even swim the summer before college, working instead at a department store in the Valencia Town Center.

That Ervin could come out of nowhere so quickly is what gives hope to those who think he could make the 2008 team.

``Just seeing his stroke. It has the same pop. It has the same quickness,'' Vendt says. ``If he wanted to, there's no doubt in my mind that he could come back and be the best. But as long as Anthony wants to do it, that's all that matters.''

Age won't be the issue. The second- and third-fastest 50 free times in the world this year belong to swimmers older than Ervin.

Bart Kizierowski, also coached by Bottom, won at the European Championships in 21.88 seconds. He was 29.

For the time being, Ervin coaches beginning swimmers with Imagine. The kids think he's a superhero because of his tattoos. Every so often, Ervin will stay after practice to work out or jump in with one of the Masters programs.

The door is open at USA Swimming, although national team coach Mark Schubert said he last talked with Ervin in May.

``If he decides to do it,'' Schubert says, ``I hope he gives himself enough of an opportunity, as far as coming back early enough and training.''

There are major obstacles Ervin must overcome to get to Beijing. He cannot dedicate himself full-time to swimming unless he doesn't have to work. But he can't earn USA Swimming money until next summer, at the earliest.

``We don't do it based on reputation,'' Schubert says. ``We do it on performance.''

Ervin faces a crowded field in the 50 free. The world's fastest time this year (21.84) belongs to 22-year-old sensation Cullen Jones, an African-American swimmer out of North Carolina State who just signed an endorsement deal with Nike.

Ervin would have to finish first or second at the Olympic Trials to swim in Beijing. He could finish in the top six in the 100free and make the U.S. team in the 4x100 free relay.

If he can get back to the Olympics, Ervin finally can tell his story. Until then, others will speculate on its meaning. The ending has yet to be written.

``I think he's searching for what he already has, truthfully,'' Bottom says. ``That's my opinion. He's searching to realize who he is, and I think swimming is part of who he is.''

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CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Anthony Ervin, who graduated from Hart High of Newhall, auctioned off the gold medal he won in 2000 to raise money for tsunami relief.

(2 -- color) Valencia native Anthony Ervin, who won a gold medal in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2000 Olympics, is now a musician in New York City.

Shiho Fukada/Special to the Daily News

(3 -- color) Anthony Ervin, center, and Gary Hall Jr., right, tied for the gold medal in the 50 free at the 2000 Olympics. Pieter van den Hoogenband took bronze.

Nick Wilson/Getty Images