Tough Going for Babilonia

Put her on skates and in a tutu and Tai Babilonia looks like something out of a fairy tale or off the top of a music box. Tchaikovsky wrote ballets for people like this.

There are those liquid brown eyes, the olive skin, perfect features and wide smile and you know this is no first runner-up in anybody’s beauty pageant. This is an exotic woman with an exotic name. Father was a Filipino cop, mother was black.

It is hard to believe an American beauty with these credentials and assets could sit in a window at the height of her career with a bottle of whiskey on one side, a vial of pills on the other and decide that life was not worth living and resolve to kill herself. She tried. She was only twentysomething years old at the time.

An Olympic gold medal is worth--what? A few bucks in a meltdown? A few more as an artifact? It’s not even solid gold. What it is, it’s a dime-store bauble. Tiffany’s wouldn’t stock it.

But for those who pursue it, it symbolizes everything the Hope diamond does. Success, fame, importance. It becomes a Holy Grail. An affirmation.

For the world at large, the Olympic Games are a quadrennial festival of athletics that occupies the world’s stage for a few weeks. The laurel wreaths and medals are given out and the world goes on to other diversions.

But for some athletes, it is the focal point of their entire existence. They work toward it all their lives. They dream about it, sacrifice for it. Its pursuit dominates their psyches. They work all their lives for a four-minute (or nine-second) chance at immortality.

In 1980, Babilonia and her pairs skating partner, Randy Gardner, were the talk of the skating world, the new America’s Sweethearts. They were the first American pair in 29 years to take the world championship. They had been national champions five consecutive years. Their routines were breathtaking, innovative. They would surely win the gold medal at the Lake Placid Olympics. America readied itself for ticker-tape parades, keys-to-the-city ceremonies, talk-show celebrity. Everywhere they looked, there was fame--and money.

And suddenly, in a shattering instant, it was all gone. Gardner, in a warm-up for the most important five minutes of the young skaters’ lives, aggravated a groin injury. He was unable to compete.

For Tai, the news was devastating. Eleven years of tunnel-vision existence had gone for nought.

It was understandable. She was ready to skate. She would never be more ready. She had spent her life on ice. She had been on more ice than a polar bear. The spotlight she had slaved for went out.

She felt betrayed--not by Randy, by fate. She was bitter. In a rage. But she didn’t deal with it. She buried it beneath a smile, a shrug, a murmur of sympathy. The rest of her life suddenly seemed an anticlimax. This is one of the pitfalls of the pursuit of athletic success. If it doesn’t happen, you have nothing to fall back on.

It would have somehow been better if Tai--or Randy--had fallen or otherwise blown the routine. At least, they would have had their chance.

They had been a team since they were moppets. A sagacious coach, Mabel Fairbanks, had seen how perfect they were together and linked them for life. They became “Tai and Randy,” no further punctuation needed, almost as if it were one word, almost as if they were joined at the hip. When one coughed, the other’s chest heaved. They almost had no identity without each other. They were Astaire and Rogers, George and Gracie. Perfect for each other.

How cataclysmic then was the Lake Placid disappointment? Tai discounts it today. But the evidence disputes her. It was life-threatening, eventually. It preluded a descent into booze, amphetamines, eating disorders, destructive relationships.

To be sure, she was to find herself in a world for which she was ill-prepared. She had been, so to speak, in a deep freeze all her life. Her only classroom had been a rink, her only teacher a tutor. On ice, she was a star. On land, she was an insecure adolescent, even at age 20. She got suicidal. Randy got an ulcer.

Therapy taught her what anyone in the movement could have told her: She didn’t have a childhood, she had a career. When it aborted, it was crushing. She realized her father had been incommunicative. Policemen are taught to suppress emotions. Mother worked at three jobs to pay for the skating lessons.

But the story has a happy ending. Tai finally dealt with her problems, her addictions. Randy was always there, and the pair, radiantly happy together on ice once again, are starting a 43-city run in the Campbell’s Soup World Figure Skating Tour this week. It marks 25 years these best of friends have been holding hands on ice.

Lots of great athletes blow gold medals. They fall over a hurdle, they no-height in a pole vault, they clip heels, false-start, rap out. But they don’t leave suicide notes.

Tai says the medal loss might be overblown. Her therapy discounts it. “I’m as neurotic as ever,” she says, laughing. “Only now, I’m a mature neurotic. It was other things which trapped me.”

Maybe so. But I always remembered the great author, Gene Fowler, once told me about a kick he had missed in a schoolboy football game that would have won for his team. It hit the crossbar and fell back, as I remember it.

Now, Fowler went on to become one of America’s great authors, a literary prize winner, a multiple best-seller. But he told me once, “You know, in my dreams to this day, I still see that kick going over for the win.”

He never got over it. And that was a high school football game. Tai’s miss was a world title, a gold medal. Forget it? Nobody’s that mature.