Just for the Housewives

Champ Kind · 08-07-2008, 12:32 PM

Untarnished
40 years after claiming Olympic gold, local swimmer devoted to faith, family, flora
Ben Smith

CHURUBUSCO – But of course there is a next, now that she’s had 40 years to think it over.

Next is breakfast.

Next is an orange-juice-and-goat’s-milk shake, and Sharon Jones takes a sip, arches an eyebrow, conveys the unspoken message: I know you think this is gross. She laughs, a trifle nervously. This was never her favorite part, talking about herself.

Fame, after all, entered her life without knocking in the midst of all the turbulence that was 1968, and four decades later she’s the first to admit she was ill-prepared for it. She was, she says, “16 going on 10,” a late-bloomer in every sense of the word. Even while she was winning Olympic gold and bronze in Mexico City, she was so homesick she cried every night.

“Some 16-year-olds have a lot of poise and personality,” she says now, sipping on her shake. “I spent so much time with my head underwater I was really socially immature compared to the other girls. And back then, I was afraid to say anything for fear that people would take it as cockiness.

“I didn’t want anyone to think I thought I was ‘something.’ ”

And yet she was, of course. She was.

Mostly it all just happened. That’s the first thing she wants you to know.

Her two older brothers were superb swimmers, which is how 12-year-old Sharon Wichman – a “mediocre” swimmer, she recalls – wound up at Club Olympia, one of the premier swim clubs in the country.

At the ’68 Olympic Trials, Catie Ball won both the 100 and 200 breaststroke, which opened up a spot in the 200, which is how Wichman, who hadn’t qualified in the 200, made it to the event that would bring her glory.

Suddenly there she was on the blocks for the Olympic final, a high school junior from Fort Wayne, going up against defending Olympic champion Galena Prozumenshikova of the Soviet Union.

The weight of an entire nation hunkered down on her slender shoulders.

“Even though I was young, I was very aware of the Cold War,” Jones recalls. “Between my coach (Stephen Hunyadfi) and my Spanish teacher, I got an earful about communism. She left Cuba, and he got run out of Hungary.

“So I guess I wanted to show that America was a better place to live than Russia. I wanted to beat (Prozumenshikova) to prove that.”

And then she did, overtaking Prozumenshikova and Yugoslavia’s Djurdjica Bjedov – the two women who’d beaten her in the 100 – in the final 10 meters, breaking Prozumenshikova’s record in the bargain. She was the first American in Olympic history to win that particular event.

Not long after, she came home to a rousing welcome in Memorial Coliseum. Hilliard Gates interviewed her. She was, ready or not, famous.

“It was pretty neat for a while,” she says now. “But, you know, all that fades. And I was like, ‘OK, so what do I do next? I don’t have a ‘next.’ There was no ‘next.’ ”

Except there was, of course. There was.

“Next” greets you at Sharon Jones’ front door.

It’s a left turn off U.S. 33 that takes you past a big white barn and the greenhouses where Jones and her husband, David, make a living cultivating annuals and perennials. It’s a comfortable home with a two-car garage and a basketball goal and two friendly dogs who nuzzle a visitor’s hand, bucking for a scratch behind the ears.

Fame comes into some people’s lives and puts its feet up, or it leaves and the person it touches grasps pathetically at its retreating shards. Jones was never like that.

Jones found something else, something you see as soon as she closes the front door.

Taped on the other side are plain white sheets of paper. A Bible verse adorns each one.

“The Olympics hasn’t really changed my life a whole lot except that it the first in a series of big events that … all led me to Christ,” Jones says. “So that’s how it changed my life in the biggest way. It let me see by comparison that Christ is the only thing that can fill my life.”

And the medals? The glory? The fame?

All fleeting, she’s decided. What’s permanent is what’s here: the greenhouse and the dogs and the whole busy, austere life she and her husband have made.

She notes, with some amusement, that she doesn’t own a computer or a cell phone. But she does have her faith and her two boys and the grandkids she’s teaching to swim, and that’s enough.

“You know, to go to the Olympics, it’s, ‘Oh, everybody will see how great you are, blah-blah-blah,’ ” Jones says, 40 years after Mexico City. “And they did for a while.

“But I was lucky to barely make it to one Olympics. I killed myself, physically, to do it. And then I came to realize that if we swam that (200 breaststroke) again the next day, I might not have won. So it’s kind of a fickle thing to make such a big deal about.”

Especially when you’ve got next.