Hello again, Mary Lou

NEW WAVERLY, Texas -- Mary Lou Retton wore white jeans. Size zero maybe, and if she had put on a leotard and hopped up on the balance beam it would have seemed not at all strange.

Yet it would have been.

Retton turned 40 last January and if Nancy Lieberman can play basketball in the WNBA at age 50, Retton giggles at the idea of herself doing gymnastics at 40. “Not even in my dreams,” she said.

She had come to the ranch of her former coach, Bela Karolyi, on July 18 to support and console the girls who made the 2008 U.S. Olympic team and those who didn’t.

As the mother of four daughters ranging from 6 to 13, Retton had the right touch with the happiest new team member, Bridget Sloan, who had made it back from March knee surgery to sneak away with the sixth, and final, spot, and with the teary-eyed alternate Jana Bieger, who had expected more after being a 2006 world silver medalist. Sloan got a happy Retton hug. Bieger got a shoulder rub and some whispered words of consolation.

In 1984 Retton won the first Olympic all-around gold medal for the United States. Though she did it in the year when the Russians boycotted, the strong Romanian team busted the boycott and made her championship more worthy.

Even now, Olympics fans and Wheaties eaters call Retton “America’s Sweetheart.” While Retton will happily be called an Olympic champion her whole life, she said she’s ready to give up the “America’s Sweetheart” thing.

“I don’t want to be 80 years old, in my walker and having people come up and call me America’s Sweetheart,” she said. “I don’t think anyone wants that.”

Still, the search for the “next Mary Lou” seems never-ending.

When Kim Zmeskal won a world championship in 1991, the first American to do that, and because she was also a Karolyi student, Zmeskal was going to be the next Mary Lou until she stumbled early in her first Olympic routine and didn’t win the all-around gold medal in Barcelona.

The next Mary Lou was to be Dominique Moceanu, who at 13 in 1995 became the youngest U.S. girl to make a world championship team. But in the 1996 Olympic year, Moceanu competed with a leg injury that kept her from individual greatness. The 1996 star became Kerri Strug because of her vault on a sprained ankle. Strug, though, didn’t have Moceanu’s forceful smile or outgoing personality. She was not the next Mary Lou either.

The 2000 team had no medalists at all, but in 2004 Carly Patterson finally duplicated Retton’s gymnastics -- she won the all-around gold.

“But Carly had other plans,” Retton said. “I think she wanted another life outside of gymnastics.”

Indeed Patterson is pursuing a music career, and it is still Retton who is a popular inspirational speaker who tells tales of Bela Karolyi -- “He asked me if I wanted to win enough that I’d bounce quarters off my head,” Retton said “and I didn’t even know what that meant!” -- and who speaks only of the great things the Olympics means.

And she also suspects that U.S. gymnastics might just produce the next Mary Lou this time.

“We’ve got Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin,” Retton said. “They’re going to be great. They do great gymnastics, they each have their own styles and they have the personalities to sell.

“Little girls love them, the camera loves them, they’re smart girls.”

Kind of like Mary Lou.

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diane.pucin@latimes.com