SON SPLASH: GARY HALL JR.

It is but days before the Olympics, and the tune keeps turning around in Gary Hall Jr.’s head. The song is called The Wheel, by his favorite band, the Grateful Dead, and it goes, “The wheel is turning, and you can’t slow down.” And then, “Won’t you try just a little bit harder? Couldn’t you try just a little bit more?”

The questions weigh heavily on Hall, the lanky, mercurial Arizonan who is one of the U.S.’s best hopes for Atlanta gold in swimming. It is a sport once dominated by Americans, but today China, Australia, Germany, Hungary and Russia produce champions. No wonder Hall, a 6-ft. 6-in., 185-lb. 21-year-old who may be the most gifted U.S. swimmer since Mark Spitz, cracks his knuckles and fiddles nervously with a copper wrist bracelet–a souvenir from his first Dead concert. “I’m 10 feet from the top of the mountain,” he says. “When you’re that close, you keep climbing. It is within grasp.”

But the rap on Hall is, as the song lyrics imply, that he does not try hard enough. His coach, the former Olympian Troy Dalbey, quit six weeks ago, complaining that Hall was training lackadaisically. Last month at a meet in Santa Clara, California, Hall placed 14th in the 50-m freestyle and 41st in the 100 m. His performance was a far cry from his explosive showing at the U.S. Olympic trials in March, when he qualified for the 50-m and 100-m freestyles, and the 4×100-m freestyle and medley relays.

But what seems lazy may be calculated strategy. “I take swimming for what it is–a sport,” says Hall in an interview at the Phoenix Swim Club, his home base. “For some, training becomes a ritual as important as the competition itself. You feel trapped. The line at the bottom of the pool haunts your dreams.” Gary Hall Sr., who set 11 world records in his time and held his 21-month-old namesake aloft after making his third Olympic team in ’76, isn’t worried about his son. “At warm-up meets, he goes through the motions, and that freaks out a lot of coaches,” says Hall Sr., now a Phoenix eye surgeon. “But when the chips are down, he’s always done very well.”

“Free spirit” is the label often applied to young Hall. It is an image he cultivates, showing up at meets in leather motorcycle pants and cruising around in a customized 1962 purple microbus. When the Dead’s Jerry Garcia died, Hall swam his next meet with a black band traced on his arm in felt-tip pen. His devil-may-care attitude, however, masks a troubled past. As an adolescent, Hall was an indifferent student who clashed with his parents and took refuge at friends’ homes. But Hall idolized his maternal grandfather, Charles Keating Jr., a one-time NCAA swimming champion with whom he would shoot prairie dogs on the family compound. When Keating, former chairman of Lincoln Savings & Loan, was indicted in 1990 and convicted of fraud and racketeering, Hall was devastated. “He was one person who had confidence in me,” he says. “It was traumatizing–more painful than losing someone to death.” Soon the teen was blowing up mailboxes and carving up the green of a golf course–and he landed briefly in a juvenile detention hall. “I was lashing out at society,” he says.

A basketball player by choice, Hall reluctantly took up his father’s sport. “At first, I hated it,” Hall says. But swimming became an escape from the anguish over his grandfather. Unexpectedly, the gawky teenager was a success–with a long, powerful stroke so flawless that he seemed to glide in slow motion. But as Hall prepares for Atlanta, it is less the physical than the mental strength that concerns him. He has visited a hypnotist and two sports psychologists to help him focus–and to deal with his anger.

And he wears the copper bracelet, stamped with a Celtic knot pattern, to remind him of the tales of Celtic warriors his grandfather used to tell him. In a phone interview from his Tucson prison, Keating, 72, says, “He lived in the shadow of his father’s success, and now he wants that gold medal. He’s a warrior.” With his grandfather watching the Games on a prison TV, and his father in the stands, Hall has reason to try a little bit harder.