Before and After the Olympics, as Well as in and Out of Water, Terry Schroeder Received . . . : PLENTY OF EXPOSURE

“He’s gorgeous.”

That quote isn’t from any of the squealing teenagers posing for pictures with 1984 U.S. Olympic water polo team captain Terry Schroeder after a recent speech at Pepperdine’s Smothers Theatre, rather a businessman unlucky enough to have to follow Schroeder’s formidable act.

The businessman is right, Schroeder is, indeed, gorgeous: 6-foot-3, 205-pounds--not an ounce of which is fat--muscles aplenty, blonde hair, and an Olympic medal bouncing off of his massive chest.

Schroeder had been invited to the Pepperdine campus to address a group of high school leaders at a youth citizenship seminar earlier this summer and he handled their pointed questions with the same aplomb he did the two-meter position on the U.S. Olympic water polo team.

Before the question-and-answer session, Schroeder gave the youngsters a motivational speech and showed some slides highlighting his water polo career:

Let’s see , there’s Terry riding a camel by the Great Wall of China, there’s Terry’s parents cheering wildly for him at the Olympics, there’s Terry among the athletes being cheered by two million people at a post-Olympic ticker-tape parade in New York City.

Tough life, this Olympic medal-winning-athlete stuff.

“I’ve not only had the icing on the cake, but the entire cake, too,” Schroeder admitted between speaking engagements at Pepperdine.

One year after the Los Angeles Olympics, Terry Schroeder has clearly emerged as the most-visible member of the silver medal-winning U.S. Olympic water polo team and possibly the most-visible of all of the American athletes involved in the so-called “minor sports.”

It used to be that about the only place where water polo players were recognized in public was in Hungary, but the big problem there is that Madison Avenue doesn’t have an office in Budapest.

Now, with Schroeder and his affable Hunk City demeanor out in front of a carefully orchestrated media push following the Olympics, it seems that Hollywood has discovered that there is a kind of polo that doesn’t involve horses.

After the Games, Schroeder was in a television commercial for milk, was the host of the water polo segment of ESPN’s recent Olympic presentation, and appeared on several Los Angeles television talk shows. Is the 26-year-old Schroeder overwhelmed by all of this? Well, yes and no.

Said Schroeder: “We knew that water polo wasn’t going to carry us for our lives or even that with medals we’d be set for life. I think that maybe before the 1980 Olympics (and the subsequent United States boycott) water polo was my whole life, but after that disappointment my outlook changed.

“So, going into the Olympics, we really didn’t expect anything to happen. Remember that there were 83 (American) gold medalists and that doesn’t leave a lot of opportunities left over.”

Let the record show that on this occasion, the school girls ogling water polo’s answer to Steve Garvey didn’t seem to care that Schroeder’s medal is silver and not gold. Many Olympic medal winners seem to have great difficulty getting exposure beyond the two weeks of the Games, but exposure has never been a problem for Schroeder. Even if he had never walked in front of a TV camera, Schroeder would have been remembered.

Schroeder gained a measure of notoriety for being the model for the male torso of the controversial male-female statues on the Olympic Gateway near the Coliseum in Exposition Park. The unveiling of the Olympic Gateway officially kicked off the opening of the Olympic Arts Festival six weeks before the games.

Unveiling is the operative word here. The headless, nude torsos drew much debate over their appropriateness in regard to both public standards and Olympic ideals.

Designed by sculptor Robert Graham, who had previously designed a Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C., and a Duke Ellington memorial in New York, the Olympic Gateway even inspired one wisecrack in the letters to the editor column of The Times that the Russians stayed away from the Games because they’d seen the “decapitated lewds.”

Wrote Times Art Critic William Wilson: “When. . . . the dust settles, ‘Olympic Gateway’ may go down in history as the first substantial Post-Modernist masterpiece of public sculpture, assuming of course that history cares.”

Schroeder was embarrassed--but only about the controversy and not the sculpture itself, which took 60 hours of modeling to produce.

“It was misunderstood by a lot of people,” Schroeder said. “It was headless because it was supposed to represent all (male) athletes and not just any one country or race. A Canadian water polo player told me during the games that it was something to be proud of because it brought attention to our sport, so that made me feel good.”

“Hey, someday I’m going to take my grand kids to see it and say that a long time ago that used to be me up there.”

Until then, Schroeder will be content with working toward a chiropractic degree from Palmer Chiropractic School in Sunnyvale, near San Jose. Schroeder expects to graduate in March and hopes to pursue his practice in Southern California.

He also plans to play on the U.S. water polo team in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea--there’s the small matter of a gold medal he’d like to get--but regardless of how that turns out, you get the definite impression that for one chiropractor at least, life will always be, well, a snap.