Sports

WE’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE HIM

BEIJING – It was Bobby Jones who perfectly summarized Jack Nicklaus back in the day, when Jack was Fat Jack and was rocketing the ball farther and putting it smoother than anyone has a right to on a golf course.

“He plays a game,” the great Jones said, “with which I am unfamiliar.”

We don’t follow swimming as a nation the way we follow golf, or baseball, or any of our regular sporting obsessions. But every four years, the pool matters to us. Every four years we take a peek into that mysterious, lonely, aquatic place to see the yield of four years of impossible work from the laborers who toil there.

And we’ve never seen anything like Michael Phelps.

Really, it doesn’t matter if he gets those eight gold medals, the heavyweight haul to which he’s aspired since leaving Athens with five. Not if you saw what he did last night.

Not if you watched him swim the sport’s most demanding course – the 400-meter individual medley, 100 meters each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle – not only faster than anyone before him, but faster than probably even he imagined.

By the time he’d finished, in a borderline inhuman time of 4:03.84 (bettering his own world record by a second and a half, his own Olympic mark by a fraction under three seconds), he’d not only captured his first gold of the games, he’d elevated the National Aquatics Center and converted the Water Cube to an artist’s canvas. The crowd wasn’t sure how to react at first, before exploding in glee. It was that astonishing.

“To be honest, I had no idea I was going to go that fast,” Phelps said. “It was a pretty exciting race. I’m almost shocked that I went that fast.”

And here’s the thing: for the first three-quarters of the race, this was no runaway (or would that be a swimaway?). Over the first 150 meters he wasn’t even in the lead, trailing his countryman Ryan Lochte by almost a quarter second.

But it was in the next 250 meters that we saw in Phelps a trace of what Jones likely saw in Nicklaus almost half a century ago. As he made the turn off the wall for the final 50, he was Secretariat, extending his lead as if the other men in the pool were all wearing cement Speedos. It was a matter of Phelps versus the clock now, and over the past five years the clock has never had a chance, and it didn’t now.

“I looked to my right and saw I was ahead of Ryan and Laszlo,” Phelps would say, “and I sort of started smiling.”

It also began a flood of emotions inside Phelps, who is usually stoic when he isn’t coming across as something of a goofball – which is to say, acting every inch of 23. Maybe it’s the thrill of gold, which Phelps swore would never grow old, and hasn’t. Maybe it was doing this in front of the president. Maybe it was that eye-popping number on the scoreboard. Maybe all of it.

But you could see a mist forming in Phelps’ eyes after he mounted the medal stand, after he lowered his neck to receive gold, as they raised Old Glory to the ceiling of the Water Cube. The perfect storm of sentiment surprised him, and kept him from singing the national anthem.

Asked where it came from, he said: “I have no idea. I said to Bob [Bowman, his coach] that I wanted to sing on the medal podium but I couldn’t stop crying.”

The rest of us can’t stop shaking our heads. Eight years ago, in Sydney, Tom Dolan turned in what, to that time, was a head-scratching lowering of the world record by winning gold and shattering the existing record by more than a half second. The record then stood at 4:11.76. Phelps broke that two years later.

And now, he has lowered it by more than 6 1/2 seconds. It’s like someone coming along and shattering Joe DiMaggio’s hit streak record by hitting in 95 straight games. It’s absurd. It is something we have never seen before, and may never see again.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com