max s. gerber(the latest shot)

i’ll be honest, i couldn’t care less about sports. never did. never had any interest in watching sports or participating in them. i certainly never had any particular aptitude for any sport, though i did waste practically my entire freshman year of college playing ping pong, and was pretty good at it there for a while. i’ve been to one basketball game in my life, and three dodgers games. i can’t remember a single thing that happened during any of those events, save for the following:

1) the first dodger game i went to i spent mostly watching the crowd and ignoring the game. for the brief period of time i actually looked at what was going on on the field i saw two players run for a fly ball, slam into each other and fall down. i thought, ‘hey, baseball might not suck after all’.

2) at the last dodger game i went to my buddy alex managed to squirt mustard all over the ankles of the woman sitting in the row in front of us. her very large boyfriend was not pleased, and all of poor alex’s friends (myself including) immediately abandoned any shred of loyalty by pointing to him as the culprit. nobody was ultimately hurt.

3) at some point during the only basketball game i went to as a young kid – i think it might have been at madison square garden (do they play basketball there?) – i managed to get an earache and spent the rest of the time crying.

still. . .i have a soft spot for the summer olympic games. i’ll watch nearly anything during the summer games, though this year i was a little disappointed that i could never seem to find televised ping pong, and there was way too much volleyball which is really boring. gymnastics, though, is my favorite. this is mostly because i believe that gold medal athletes should be able to do things that aren’t even in the realm of possibility for normal humans. olympic level gymnastics are about as close as humans get to actually being spider man. that shit is amazing.

everybody knows, though, that this year the olympics were dominated by swimming, mostly because of michael phelps. so in the middle of all this olympic swimming fervor i got an assignment to photograph shirley babashoff.

shirley has won eight olympic medals in women’s swimming – two gold, six silver, in the 1972 and 1976 games. unfortunately, though, shirley is remembered mostly for something else that happened at the ‘76 montreal games. as she tells it, her and her teammates went into the locker room and were startled to hear what appeared to be men’s voices. investigating the noise she found that it was coming from the east german women’s swim team. when the east germans went on to dominate the games, shirley called them out for doping. this charge turned out to be accurate, but before that shirley was lambasted by the press as being a sore loser and was nicknamed “surly shirley”.

now shirley lives in fountain valley, with her son and her dog, leroy. leroy is a brussells griffon, and shirley said she got him after seeing a similar dog in the movie “as good as it gets”. these days shirley is a letter carrier with the post office, and doesn’t really swim anymore. she says she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about her olympic career, being that it’s been about thirty years since she swam competitively. she seemed proud of her tomato garden, and even gave me a bag full of really delicious plum tomatoes to take home.

my thanks to mindy benham at orange coast magazine, and to the always talented kevin miyazaki for the referral.

(my thanks to joey gu for noticing a typo above, which has now been fixed.)