Phelps addresses the media in December 2014 after his trial following a drunk driving arrest. He was sentenced to 18 months probation. (Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images

“Bro, I need to talk to you,” Phelps said, according to Lewis.

Phelps told him what had happened. Lewis was dismayed but sympathetic.

He says he later met with Phelps, his mother and others for several hours at Phelps’s house. Phelps was despondent. He told Sports Illustrated that at one point he didn't want to live anymore.

But Lewis says, “we had a come . . . to Jesus meeting.”

“I basically told him, ‘Okay, everything has a purpose, and now, guess what? It’s time to wake up,’ ” he says. He gave Phelps a copy of Christian author Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” .

Five days after his arrest, Phelps announced via Twitter that he was taking time off “to attend a program that will provide the help I need to better understand myself.”

He flew with Johnson and his sister Hilary to enter a 45-day program at the Meadows, a facility in Wickenberg, Ariz.

“You’re fearful,” Johnson recalls. “You don’t know what that entails and what it means for Michael. And you also don’t know, from my standpoint, what’s going to happen on the other side of it, and what he’s going to take from it.”

Johnson went back to Los Angeles and flew down to visit on Sundays. “It’s a quick trip,” she says.

Phelps was resistant to the process at first, but gradually he came around. “I felt myself walking taller and being happier every day,” he says.

He and Lewis talked and texted about Warren’s book, Lewis says.