The Seoul Games / Day 3 : The Mermaid Who Wears a Smile of Gold

In a movie once, Woody Allen asked his date if she ever played any sports in school.

“Swimming,” she said. “I swam.”

Woody made a face.

“Swimming’s not a sport,” he said. “Swimming’s what you do to keep from drowning.”

Janet Evans is still in school. She will be a senior when she gets back home to Placentia, Calif., and returns to her classes at El Dorado High School. She has a 3.68 grade-point average there. She was princess of the junior prom. She likes buying clothes and sometimes shops till she drops.

Oh, and last we heard, she was on the swim team.

Probably make it again this year, too.

Janet Evans, jewel of the pool, won an Olympic gold medal here Monday in the women’s 400-meter individual medley, then popped out of the water with a smile ear to ear, fizzy as an Alka-Seltzer. She was refreshing, she was bubbly, she was cool, and she hit the spot. She had ice water in her veins, with chlorine in it. She had so little trouble, it might as well have been a dual meet against Los Alamitos. The girl has gills. Compared to Evans, mermaids prefer the desert.

Happy? Sure, she was happy.

“I’m not happy, I’m ecstatic,” Evans gushed. “No words to describe it. However happy you can be, that’s how happy I am.”

Nervous? Nah, fish have no nerves.

“She’s not the nervous one. I’m the nervous one,” Barbara Evans, Janet’s mother, said after the race. “Guess she gets her cool from her father.”

Cool? Yeah, Paul Evans was cool.

“Another star athlete for Southern California,” he said. “Kirk Gibson, Magic Johnson . . . one more now to add to the list.”

Proud? Hey, they have a right to be.

Paul’s the guy who chauffeured his daughter every morning to the Independence Park pool, before driving to his veterinary office just down the street from their house. Janet labored through some of her 11 weekly workouts, swimming 8 to 10 miles a day, and then Barbara picked her up, brought her home and got her off to school, right after stoking her up with one of her four meals a day. Chocolate cream pie, doughnuts, pudding, oatmeal cookies, you name it, she ate it.

“She’s a junk-food freak,” said her father, more than willing to be her supplier. There are worse vices.

“But how can she eat all that stuff and stay so small while the rest of us diet and just get larger?” he was asked.

“Because you probably don’t swim 10 miles a day,” Paul Evans said. “Or 20, or 30.”

Janet’s mother and father arrived in Seoul four days ago, not having seen their 17-year-old daughter since Labor Day. They went to the opening ceremony, dined out together, looked for bargains in the marketplace, bought some shoes, some kimonos, looked at some eel-skin bags and waited, like everybody else, for a chance to see Janet.

Like everybody else, they had to come to the swimming pool to do it.

“We didn’t have a chance to see her until we came here to see the prelims,” Barbara Evans said. “Then we got stuck in three security-check lines that all felt like they had 1,000 people in them. We ended up late for the prelims.”

Race day itself was a time for the payoff for all the hard work, as well as a time for remembering. Remembering Janet splashing around in the pool when she was a year old. Remembering how even as a baby she took to water, never objecting when it was time for mom to wash her hair. Remembering swimming in Orange County competitions at 5, attending a national junior meet in Wisconsin at 11, winning a national title at 12.

Over the years she developed her style, a hard-churning, big-splashing style that is less pretty than effective. Janet Evans does not swim with finesse. She swims as though she’s being chased by Jaws. She swims like something with teeth is after her.

Of course, she’s half-fish herself. When Dr. John Troup, a director of sports medicine, tested her recently, he was amazed at how little oxygen she needs, how much energy she uses. “I’ll stop short of saying Janet’s a fish,” he said, “but physiologically, she’s very similar.”

And then there’s her size. Or lack of same.

If she was a fish, you’d throw her back.

At 12, when she won the national junior, she was 4 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 68 pounds. Three years ago, she was 5-1 and 87 pounds. This girl didn’t shop in Junior Miss sizes. She shopped in Freshman Miss. The U.S. rowing team has oars larger than her. Janet Evans is America’s guppy.

She’s strong enough to wear three gold medals around her neck, though, and one already is hers.