Golden Glow Finally Fades for Babashoff

As American swimmers Janet Evans and Matt Biondi dominate the Seoul Olympics, Shirley Babashoff takes in the drama on television when she can.

Perhaps the most famous woman swimmer in the United States in the 1970s, Babashoff now lives quietly in Fountain Valley with her parents and 2 1/2-year-old son, Adam. For the past six months she has been a mail carrier in Huntington Beach’s main post office.

“I try to watch as much as I can, but if he needs a bath, that’s a little more important at the moment,” Babashoff said Saturday, shortly after Evans won her third gold medal.

When Evans, the darling of Placentia, was just a toddler, Shirley Babashoff held several world and U.S. records. She won a gold medal and two silvers at the 1972 games in Munich. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, when she was 19, she won another gold medal and four silvers.

Although she has never met Evans, Babashoff, now 31, is an unabashed fan of the 17-year-old Placentia student.

“I like to watch Janet Evans. She’s spectacular,” she said.

Although she no longer swims and has lived out of the limelight for more than a decade, Babashoff vividly remembers the emotions of Olympic competition.

“I think about the swimmers, and I wonder if they are doing the same thing I did while I waited my turn to compete,” she said.

“The Olympics is a total experience. It’s not just getting up there and receiving a medal. You remember the opening ceremonies, the people in the Olympic Village dressed in their native costumes. In the Olympics, swimming was first, but there was a lot more, too.”

Babashoff helped coach the South Korean national swimming team for three months in 1986. She had hoped to attend the Seoul Olympics, but her 18-year-old sister, Debbie, failed to make the American team.

“I would have gone, but nobody offered to pay my way,” she said with a laugh.

Babashoff made enough money from endorsements after her Olympic triumphs to buy a house in Westminster that she still owns. Now divorced for the second time, she rents out the house and is thankful that her parents persuaded her to buy it in 1977 rather than the Corvette she coveted.

“I don’t miss the fame,” she said. “I’ve just adjusted. All of that has just faded. I’ve had a pretty normal life since I retired.”

Babashoff’s normal life means a 40-hour week as a postal carrier. She walks about five hours a day delivering mail in quiet Huntington Beach neighborhoods. She calls it the “best job I’ve ever had.”

But it is her spirited, red-headed son who occupies most of her time and energy. On quiet weekends, while Adam romps in the back yard, his mother tends to her garden of cucumbers, tomatoes and green peppers.

For all the normalcy of her present life, there are aspects of the Olympic experience that have had a lasting impact on Babashoff--among them, the bloody terrorism of the 1972 Olympic games.

On Sept. 5, 1972, an Arab terrorist group calling itself Black September stormed the Israeli dormitory at the Olympic village in Munich. Seventeen people, among them 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team, were shot to death during the 23-hour drama. Nine of the Israelis, seized by the Arabs as hostages, were killed along with five of their captors in an airport gun battle with West German police.

Sixteen years later, during a quiet moment on her patio, Babashoff remembers that horror.

“That had more of an impact on me, at 15, than winning the gold medal,” she said.

The eight Olympic medals Babashoff proudly collected have long been stored in a security deposit box at a bank near her home. She rarely looks at them.

“The medals are nice, but the memories are better. I can always get to my memories a lot quicker,” she said. “I was very happy with what I did, and nothing can change that.”