A Brave Life: Special Olympian Gives Her Personal Best

Linda Sherwood is a warrior. A fearless athlete, she has won more than 1,000 medals after four decades of participating in the Special Olympics. While the organization doesn't count medals—it’s “being brave in the attempt” that counts—she keeps her medals in a wooden chest, symbols of a brave life and doing her best.

“I like Special Olympics because it meets my standards,” the Hometown woman said. “It’s at my level. Everybody has a level of what they can do.”

After winning two gold medals and one silver in the Will-Cook District swim meet, Linda is state-bound for the Illinois Summer Games in June. For Linda, who has run, jumped, swam, bowled, pitched, power-lifted and skied her way through the glass ceiling during an era when few in society acknowledged developmentally challenged children’s potential, she has spent a lifetime “finding her level.”

“Linda has always wanted more since she’s been small,” her mother said, who's also named Linda. “I think she would like to not have any disabilities but realizes that she does and works with them.”

‘Put Away or Put Out’

Born in 1956, Linda was 6 months old before her parents realized there was a problem. Her mother was just 16 years old when she had her daughter, the oldest of four children.

“Linda was born with a cleft palate,” her mother said. “I was very young. I guess we knew she was slow. When she was operated on, the surgeon said something and we had her tested. It wasn’t anything that showed up at birth.”

Her youngest brother, Rusty, is more severely developmentally disabled than Linda, who is considered high functioning. Growing up in Hometown, a tract-home suburb established after World War II, Linda had no problem standing up to other children who called her “retarded.” Rusty was a different matter.

“I’d tell Rusty to go sit in the back yard,” she said. “He’d tell me it smelled like dog crap back there. I’d say, ‘I know, but kids are calling you retarded. Either do that or go sit in the house.’ I felt bad for him because I always protected him.”

Her father was a youth baseball coach. She and Rusty often tagged along to the park where her dad worked with an older brother on his swing. Linda and Rusty hung out on the swings, watching.

“We were always a very active family but they had nothing for Rusty and me because we were retarded,” she said. “Retarded people were put away or put out.”

Life Change

When it came time to enter high school, Linda was enrolled in special education classes, but was mainstreamed into physical education classes at Evergreen Park High School. There, she got her first taste of sports.

“I tried everything,” she said. “Basketball, trampoline, the rings. We roller-skated on the wood floors in the gym. I liked that better than anything.”

At age 15, her life changed when a friend invited her to join Special Olympics through the Chicago Park District. The year was 1971, when the U.S. Olympics committee gave the organization official approval as one of only two organizations authorized to use the name “Olympics” in the United States.

“I missed the first Special Olympics at Soldier Field by three years,” Linda said.

During her first Special Olympics track and field competition at Dunbar High School in Chicago, Linda ran the 50-yard-dash in seven seconds.

Not until she started playing floor hockey at Gage Park, when they beat another team 16-0, did she realize that she had a knack for sports.

“She’s tried every sport,” her mother said. “She used to get very angry when she didn’t win or get a medal and kind of act out. As she’s gotten older and more mature, she’s gotten better but she still likes to win. She’s not happy losing.”

Brave in the Attempt

When the  began forming its special recreation program in 1981, Linda was recruited to join the park district’s Special Olympics program. A fierce self-competitor, she found a sport for every season—cross-country skiing in the winter, swimming in the spring; track and field and bowling in the summer and fall. Her wooden chest of medals filled up.

“I’m very aggressive. I swear,” she said. “That’s the way I am with myself.

When she developed an anxiety over falling in cross-country skiing, she switched to snowshoeing 10 years ago, the equivalent of track but in snow, and discovered that she liked it.

“I did the 50-meter and 100-meter but it was too easy, so I did the 200 and 400,” she said. “I like harder events. I like to push myself.”

Throughout her years as a Special Olympian, she’s watched athletes curl up and fall asleep on the track and crawl across finish lines. In her last snowshoe race, she competed against a woman whose walker was fitted with sled runners.

“She fell off her walker and crawled across the finish line,” Linda said. “I was very moved by that. I give her lot of credit and told her so.”

Todd Mallo, special recreation supervisor for the says Linda never stops proving herself.

“She doesn’t give up, she doesn’t stop. She knows her limits and goes out there and does the best she can,” Mallo said. “That’s all I’ve ever tried to get out of her … to go out and have fun and do the best she can.”

At 55, she’s proud of her achievements. Ten years ago, she went to a tattoo artist and had three Special Olympic medals—the gold, the silver and the bronze—tattooed on her arm. Her mother, Linda said, was not happy.

“I just felt like getting one,” she said. “It’s something I’ve been proud of. I wanted something I enjoyed most, which was my medals.”