Somehow or another, I managed to get up and go to school each day and also keep swimming in a variety of clubs during those early years. As a child, I guess you just get sort of numb. The whole situation seemed so futile that I decided there really was no way out and the best course of action was simply to focus on things I could control. Again, this was long before the days when people looked for things like this or when kids had outlets they could go to and cry for help.
Later on in life, when Sports Illustrated did a feature about me around the time of the 1976 Summer Olympics, the writer came and stayed with us for a couple of days and wrote the following:
They are closer and stronger than the Waltons. They go to church on Sunday and visit their grandparents regularly. They say grace at meals and eschew spirits. The children do as they are told and use no bad language. The parents are self-sacrificing and, as is said nowadays, supportive. Everybody helps out and there are few complaints. Vera and Jack Babashoff are frugal, honest, industrious, and the source of the strength that helps set Shirley apart from her peers.
There was more, about how hardworking and decent and wonderful my parents were. It was just another example of how different the world was at that point. A little research on the writer’s part might have revealed many compelling things.
When I was thirteen years old, I’d had enough. When he came into my room, I decided to just keep kicking him until he left me alone. He never came into my room again. Later, my mom told me, he became a predator to my younger sister. She also told me that she had threatened him with divorce if he ever did it again. But she never followed up on it. Talk is cheap.
CHAPTER TWO
And So It Begins . . .
When I was about eight years old, my mother started signing me up for private swimming lessons. It was all the way out in the San Fernando Valley, and the lessons were given by an old woman whom I would say was about eighty-five. She had a pool in her yard and, for tax purposes, she was not allowed to accept money for giving lessons. I remember that there was just this big old jar on a table that was full of cash, where people would put their “donations” for the lessons.
The old woman was very focused on making me what she called a “pretty” swimmer; that is to say, she wanted me to have beautiful strokes and something called a “six-beat kick” which meant that you would kick your legs six times per stroke. But I was far from a pretty swimmer. In my head, swimming was all about speed. Whatever it took to swim faster, that’s what I was interested in. I had a two-beat kick, which worked better for me. It helped me keep the pace that I wanted, and I was comfortable with it. But it was not very pretty to look at.
My lessons with the old woman didn’t last long. I bounced around from place to place, taking private classes at other pools in the area, including the local high school and at a diving school with a teacher named John Riley. Mr. Riley also wanted me to abide by the six-beat kick, but I was having none of it. Early in my life—at least, when it came to swimming—I became stubborn and didn’t do what everybody else wanted me to do. Little did I know what effect this personality trait would have later on.
The chlorine used to kill my eyes, so I started wearing goggles, which were new in the 1960s. Mr. Riley didn’t like that and he let me know it, but I didn’t care. If I was going to be spending that much time in the water, then I was going to wear goggles.
When I was a kid, it seemed like whenever I started swimming someplace new, there was always some other girl that everyone would say was the best. “She’s the one to beat!” “Nobody’s going to beat her!” In my head, those were always the ones I set out to beat. I think my brain was wired at an early age to always be thinking about winning.
At one of our swim clubs, located in Bellflower, the one to beat was Sherry Duke. She was the golden child of the pool. Her father was also a local cop and my mother, in her ignorance, never wanted me to beat her for fear of getting a ticket. That was how my parents thought. Looking back, it’s almost amazing how clueless they were about life. But her concerns didn’t slow me down at all, and eventually, I beat Sherry. When I was eleven years old, I joined a team in El Monte. There, the girl to beat was Cozette Wheeler. She was untouchable, all of the adults said. She was the one that intimidated all of the other kids. Soon after getting there, I beat Cozette.
But that’s not what I remember most about swimming in El Monte. What I remember most were two other girls, Jill Sterkel and Sandy Neilson, who were also on the team. Little did I know what the future held for all of us—especially for me and Jill. Thinking back, the coach at that club, Don LaMont, must have been really good to develop swimmers of that caliber—including me and my brothers, Jack and Bill.
With the three of us swimming, my family’s weekends were filled with swim meets. In California, where the sun shines almost all year long, we could find a meet practically anywhere. We went to meets in San Diego, Redlands, Los Angeles, Apple Valley, Lakewood, Buena Park, and many other cities.
I loved going to those swim meets. There were hundreds of kids at them. I saw my friends from my own team and made new friends from other teams. I got to see my competition from a wider group of girls—not just from my own club, but from other clubs that were the ones to beat.
Sometimes the meets were far away and we would have to wake up early in the morning to travel there. Other families would stay at a hotel or motel for the weekend, but we would always come home after our meets; we couldn’t afford to pay for an overnight stay. Gas was much cheaper then, so after driving home at the end of the day, we would get up early the next day and just drive back to the meet again. My mom always packed food for us, because we needed to eat constantly and we couldn’t afford to buy our meals at the meet. She packed hamburgers, bananas, oranges—foods to fill us up.
Our meets started at 9:00 AM, with warm-ups at 8:00 AM. At the warm-ups, you could get a feel for the pool—the walls, the lane markings on the bottom of the pool, and the backstroke flags, which hung above the water at the end of the pool so backstrokers would know the wall was coming. You could count how many strokes until you hit the wall so you wouldn’t conk your head.
At those meets, I swam three or four events each day. When I was nine and ten years old, I really liked the breaststroke and freestyle. I never really fell in love with the butterfly, and to be honest, I don’t think I really got the hang of it until I was seventeen or eighteen. I knew all the other strokes, though, and that made me a pretty good individual medley swimmer.
There was such a communal feel at those meets. Part of it had to do with the snacks we ate: Jell-O powder right out of the package, pixie sticks, rainbow pops. Sugar everywhere. That’s part of what held us together. Then there were the things we did to kill time between the races. I remember everyone playing with Clackers, those hard plastic balls you’d clack together on a string that were eventually taken off the market because they would shatter. It didn’t matter, though. We still had plenty of yo-yos, Frisbees, another popular toys to help wile away the time. But the thing I liked best was playing cards. Poker, Twenty-One, War, Go Fish—it was my favorite way to pass the time at the meets.
When I was eleven, my mom became very interested in a woman named Loretta Reed. The Reeds had some money and lived in Rancho Palos Verdes. Mrs. Reed would sit on the pool deck in El Monte, watching her daughter (and my friend) Pam swim alongside me. My mother was quite transfixed with her, impressed with her lifestyle and fancy car. I would always see them talking on the deck of the pool while we swam. I’d never seen my mother so interested in another person. She would sit there, looking at Mrs. Reed’s stopwatch, and soon she had a stopwatch of her own that she would use to time my laps.
One day, as we were driving home from one of our club practices, my mother asked me how I did that day and what my times