Rural Renegade : Road to Atlanta Passes Through Animal Farm for Olympic Swimming Hopeful Bennett

What do you feed a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig?

“Pot-bellied pig food,” Brooke Bennett says with a laugh.

Lucky Charms cereal is OK too. Noelle, a cuddly coal-black pig, is given some if she obeys and sits.

Noelle’s next trick--or is it Bennett’s?--will be getting her ears pierced. But the pet has a long way to go to catch Bennett, on the verge of becoming America’s next great female distance swimmer.

A 15-year-old sophomore from Plant City, Fla., Bennett wears six earrings, including a diamond stud, in her left ear, three in her right and a toe ring.

She will remove the jewelry for the U.S. Olympic swim trials, Wednesday through March 12 at Indianapolis, in anticipation of a star-studded summer.

Many are expecting Bennett to be wearing gold, silver or bronze in Atlanta as one of the world’s best in the 400- and 800-meter freestyle events. Her time of 8 minutes 29.21 seconds in the 800 is the best by any U.S. swimmer in two years.

But what she really wants--and Bennett usually gets what she wants--is a tattoo.

“Something small, like a lady bug . . . on the ankle,” she said after a race last month at the spring nationals in Orlando.

Rachel Bennett, Brooke’s mother, is trying to discourage her.

“She said, ‘Everybody has one. I don’t see why I can’t,’ ” said Rachel, who has a rose.

“Right next to her belly button,” Brooke said.

And Keith Bennett has one too.

“My dad’s a biker,” Bennett said. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take you to get it done.’ ”

Not so fast. Rachel has won the latest skirmish with her teenage daughter, and the body art will wait.

“Not until she’s 18, when it’s legal,” her mother said one lazy Florida afternoon while Noelle stretched her leash to the limit looking for delicacies in the grass.

The Bennetts live on three acres among the orange groves and strawberry fields of Plant City, where their orbit is filled with animals.

Noelle is simply the latest addition. She came in a shoe box under the Christmas tree and sleeps with Bennett upstairs. She gets along with Lady, a Rottweiler; Gracie, a dachshund; Ode, a cat; Taco, a donkey; Roxy, a horse, and two birds and two cows.

“We don’t have names for the birds and cows,” Bennett said. “The cows are raised more for beef. We don’t get real attached to them.”

The Bennetts had a peacock, a pet turkey and some geese until a bobcat came out of the groves one night and killed them.

This rural central Florida scene is an unusual setting for a world-class athlete, but Bennett has surfaced as one of the freest spirits in a sport of eccentrics.

Early on, some might have expected Bennett to gravitate toward the biker crowd, like her parents.

An electrician by trade, Keith has long hair, an earring, a tattoo, a leather jacket and a Harley-Davidson. He used to take Bennett to swim meets on the back of the bike, much to the envy of her teammates.

“I always knew my dad wasn’t like other dads,” Bennett said. “My parents were considered kind of wild ones.”

That assessment might make Rachel cringe. But this clearly is not the Brady Bunch. How many daughters can say they have taken both parents to the mall to get their ears pierced?

Rachel, who wears four earrings, and her tattoo, is a country-western music maven who prefers cowboy boots to high heels. She used to ride on the back of the Harley but these days is more likely to take Roxy for romps through the woods.

The tableau is incomplete, however, without Peter Banks, a serious-minded Irishman with a restrained laugh who has coached Bennett since she was 9.

Swim coach, surrogate father, whatever, Banks had the recipe to help Bennett become a world-class competitor. He quickly caught on that his protege did not respond to authority.

“Her personality is fiery,” he said. “I let her be who she is.”

That includes speaking her mind, which invited controversy into the life of the happy-go-lucky teen.

At last spring’s Pan American Games in Argentina, she touched off swimming’s hottest rivalry by making disparaging remarks about world-record holder Janet Evans, whom she will race in the distance events next week. The top two finishers will earn Olympic berths.

Although both athletes downplay the feud, the friction is evident.

“I haven’t talked to her and I don’t plan to,” Evans said. “She’s 15, I’m 24. It’s not like I have anything in common with her.”

Except swimming fast.

Bennett regrets her remarks, but Banks said it was a good lesson in handling media pressure before the Olympics.

“She cried over the article,” Rachel Bennett said. “Everything happened so fast for Brooke. [Media pressure] never goes away.”

Neither does Banks, who keeps tight reins on his mischievous swimmer.

“Peter finds out everything that I do,” Bennett said. “He’s got little tape recorders sitting in the gutters of the pool. Anything we do, I just go ahead and tell him.”

If it were up to Bennett, she would go out every night. So, the parents and coach carefully manage her social calendar so she can experience some of the joys of adolescence without taxing herself.

One recent Friday night, Banks allowed Bennett to go on a blind date as long as she returned by 10 p.m. He wanted her to get enough rest for a regular Saturday morning workout.

“He called to check,” Rachel Bennett said.

Another time, Banks questioned Rachel for letting Bennett and friends go to Busch Gardens on a Sunday afternoon.

“I just stood there with my mouth open,” she said. “We still can’t figure out how he found out.”

Rachel blushes as she retells the story. The national media attention, the Olympics . . . it is all so surreal. Neither she nor her husband was athletic. They figured they were the last couple to rear a potential Olympic medal winner.

Rachel thought Brooke might become a dancer and dressed her in pink. Bennett hated pink and was not the most coordinated child.

But she loved the water. It seemed to calm her. She’d stay in the pool so long Rachel thought her skin would wrinkle.

Rachel’s father suggested she let Brooke compete when she turned 5. Bennett arrived for her first race in a little pink bathing suit with no cap or goggles. She had five false starts and after finishing last, ran to her parents and said, “OK, I did that, now what?”

Said Rachel, “She didn’t have a clue she was supposed to swim faster.”

She learned within the year and eventually joined Banks at the Brandon swim club. The coach wanted to nurture the talent slowly.

Bennett, though, was on the fast track. Although she was scheduled to go to morning workouts twice a week, she persuaded her mother to take her on her days off as well.

“She’d say, ‘I thought I was supposed to come,’ ” Banks said.

Said Rachel, “She’d say, ‘Mom, what can he say if I show up?’ ”

It became a battle to keep Bennett from the pool. Banks had to send her home when she arrived suffering from strep throat. She has missed only about five days in six years, all because of illness.

When the older swimmers lifted weights, Bennett wanted to join them. Banks refused to let her lift because she was so small. She still doesn’t lift often, although she has broad swimmer shoulders that stick out like bookends.

Bennett swims 16,000 meters a day and has been rising at 4:15 a.m. to get ready for workouts for six years.

It takes singular dedication to be an Olympic swimmer, but a parent’s devotion is equally important. Rachel has been taking her daughter to the workouts each morning all this time. She often sleeps in her car while waiting for Bennett to finish, and then takes her to school before going to her job as a medical secretary.

Although the Bennetts are proud of--and amazed by--their daughter’s accomplishments, they never pressured her to succeed.

“I’d have started her off at golf or tennis at age 4 if I planned to do something other than entertainment,” Rachel said.

So far, success has come easily. Bennett swept the three distance events--the 400, 800 and non-Olympic 1,500--at last summer’s and this spring’s national championships, ending Evans’ eight-year reign in the 800. She won two gold medals and a silver at the prestigious Pan Pacific championships last summer in Atlanta, won gold and silver medals at the 1995 Pan American Games in Argentina, and a bronze at the 1994 world championships in Rome.

Yet Bennett has not ignored the rest of her life. She does well in the sciences and is considering a career as a veterinarian, marine biologist or dolphin trainer.

She already is talking about going away to school, perhaps USC or Texas.

“Getting away from home is good,” Bennett said of her growing independence.

Her mother is not so sure.

“It hurts when they grow up,” she said. “We have been really close and have been together. . . . It’s totally hard to let them go.”

But go she does. And will.