Phelps and Caz in the News
Written by Maria T | Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Since his record-breaking feat in the Beijing Olympics Michael Phelps has always been in the news. First it was for his love for poker but now things have taken a personal turn.
He seems to literally be showing off his girlfriend Caroline “Caz” Pal, a cocktail waitress at the Palms Casino Resort’s Moon Nightclub in Las Vegas. Phelps met her about two months ago and the two have been together since. Incidentally Caroline is about three years older than the 23-year-old Phelps.
Apparently People Magazine was the first to break the news but now both the news and photos are splashed all over the Internet. And the photographs are something. As Wicked Chops Poker put it Caroline is a girl “with the kind of tattoos that let you know way in advance that she’d be good at certain things.” This by the way is the nicest description of Caroline. The others are, for the want of a better word, “trampish”. That Phelps is serious about her can be gauged from the fact that he took her home to Baltimore for Thanksgiving dinner and introduced her to his family for the first time. How Phelps mother reacted to the new love in his life is not known.
Phelps has another agenda in Las Vegas. He is polishing up his poker game. And there is progress to report on the poker front as well because Phelps final tabled the Caesars Palace Poker Classic In October. He finished in ninth place in the $1,570 buy-in event and won $5,213. In his interview to People he said, “It’s just like a game that I could become better at and use some of my competitiveness at the poker table.” Later he was seen at the WPT event at Festa al Lago. He was escorted by an even greater publicity seeker, Phil Hellmuth. So great is Phelps fan following in the poker world that the tournament was put on hold while he met the poker pros like Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, and Daniel Negreanu. According to eyewitness reports it was the pros that were in awe of Phelps. He was rumored to join in on Day 1B of the event but did not.
That Phelps ranking as a celebrity has grown by leaps and bounds can be judged by the fact that he was interviewed on the prestigious 60 Minutes program that was aired on the 30th of November. In that interview he revealed a secret to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He had won six gold medals and needed one more to tie with Mark Spitz. In the seventh race, the 100-meter butterfly, he was drained and unable to make that extra effort required to go ahead of Milorad Cavic. It was then that Cavic made the million-dollar mistake. He raised his head while touching the wall and this slowed him by one-hundredth of a second and gave Phelps the gold.
Now Phelps has two things on his mind, not counting Caroline. The First is the 2009 Word Series of Poker, for which he has already begun training. The second is the London Olympics of 2012 for which he will start training in January.
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· Written by Maria T · Filed Under Poker News · Comments Off
