If this had been any but an Olympic year and the Olympic city any but in America, that probably would have been the end of greatness. After all, her coach is Bob Kersee, but he is also her husband, and he says: ““It’s time for us to start a family.''
He points to the track. ““One day I want to stand at a finish line with our children and tell them: “Watch, because I saw your mother win this once’.''
Would you say that as a coach or as a father?
““Neither. I would say that as her husband.''
But it is, in fact, a year divisible by four and it is Atlanta, U.S.A., that the Olympics chose, and so she is back in training, under his direction. Only yesterday they returned from Japan. As soon as the plane landed in Los Angeles, after 12 hours in the air, he took her to the track at UCLA and made her run six 300 meters. And today it is even worse (which is to say: normal), dawn to dusk, practicing, running, jumping, throwing, lifting, training. It is afternoon now. ““Run a 500,’’ he says, ““and then three 200s.’’ She never knows in advance what he has in store for her, and when they are home, at their house in the San Fernando Valley, she cannot ask the coach, because there he is not the coach anymore.
““I was down under the sink a while ago, fixing it with a monkey wrench,’’ Bob says, ““and Jackie comes by and starts discussing her penultimate stride. And I had to tell her, very politely, that this was not the time to discuss her penultimate stride, and if, in fact, she didn’t stop, then, after I got the grease out of my hair, then the next stop was going to be divorce court.''
Now, yes, probably there was hyperbole in the air here, but more than that too. When he is at a stadium, he is not the husband. Maybe that is why he is ready for children, so he can take them to the track, and, at last, be her husband there. He’s done it once already, but only for a moment. It was in 1991 at the world championships in Tokyo, where Mrs. Joyner-Kersee was, per usual, entered in both the heptathlon and the long jump. She has beaten her great rival, Heike Drechsler of Germany, in the long jump, but she slammed into the pit hard and hurt her ankle, and he ran to her and comforted her.
““For that split-second he was my husband,’’ Jackie says. ““But then he decided I was OK, so he just said: “All right, wrap her back up and put her back on the runway. I want her ready to jump again’.’’ And she did.
““Look,’’ Bob explains, ““for a moment the husband was concerned with his wife in the pit, but then the coach took over. After all, at no time should I have to put up with any husband – or wife – out there on the field when I’m in charge of an athlete. So I had to push the husband aside.''
Even when the husband was you?
Mr. Kersee nodded, formally, without even any hint of ruefulness.
Now, in the spring of ‘96, on the track at UCLA, still jet-lagged from Japan, as she ran the 500, he timed her, scrutinizing her effort, clicking the watch off when she finished, turning brusquely away to attend to his other business. Jackie collapsed on her feet, reaching down, grabbing her knees, gasping. Sometimes the asthma is so bad that, running, she sees little white spots before her eyes. Once, in St. Petersburg, Fla., down the backstretch in the 800, a windstorm kicked up, the dust so thick that, suddenly, she was grasping at her own tights as she ran, tugging at them, trying to yank them away from her body as if they were strangling her. Still she ran. And now she reached down inside her top, pulled out an inhaler from her bra, jammed it into her mouth, squeezing it, trying to open up her lungs, to find even a pedestrian’s breath.
““All right, all right,’’ her coach barked. ““Come on, Jackie, you’ve had your three minutes, let’s go.’’ And, without a word, she lifted up her long, lithe legs and took off, straight up, breathing the best she could, a 300.
““You have to remove the husband-wife scenario,’’ she explains. ““I can’t push myself enough, so I need Bob for that. If I’m going to win the Olympics this year, I know I have to do everything right. I can’t let my pride and my ego get in the way.’'
““As a coach,’’ Bob says, ““it’s my privilege working with her – like working with Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan. I remind her that I’m like the Secret Service with the president. She may be the boss, but it’s my job to make decisions about what’s best for her. And if she doesn’t like it – all right, fire me, Jackie.''
Also, they love each other a great deal.
OF COURSE, EVERYBODY LOVES JACKIE JOYNER- Kersee, a woman of the most bountiful grace and matching good humor. She came out of the bloody urban stew of East St. Louis, deprived in general and dismissed for her particular gen- ius, because she was the wrong sex for sport. Her father, a traveling railroad man, pretty much devoted all his paternal attention to Jackie’s older brother, Al – who would, indeed, become the family’s first gold medalist as a triple-jumper in the ‘84 Games.
Then her mother, whom she adored, dropped dead at 38 when Jackie was only 18. But, for cold comfort, her salvation had already begun. UCLA recruited her to play basketball – track on the side – and it is often now forgotten that before Joyner-Kersee set world records, before she won two golds and a silver in the heps, a gold and silver in the long jump, before she made top-10 American marks in six disparate events – everything from throwing the shot, to jumping high and long, to sprinting, to hurdles – before all that she was an All-American basketball player. If Joyner-Kersee had been a male, she’d have been a lottery pick in the NBA, made many millions a year and probably never gone near a track. She possesses such an abundance of physical prowess – yea, a surfeit – trimmed so by modesty, that her spectacular feats appear merely tolerable. Her records and golds in Seoul in 1988 were barely noted, lost in the tail of the comet Flo-Jo – her sister-in-law, the glamorous sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner. What bothers Kersee is that even if his wife should win another gold or two in Atlanta, ““They’ll only say “Oh, that’s just Jackie’.’'
Almost from the first time he saw her, at UCLA, where he was an assistant coach, he could envision her destiny. But she was no athletic ““Pygmalion’’ of his. Rather, it was mostly a matter of his directing her talent, especially utilizing her extraordinary versatility to make her into a heptathlete. (The event, a truncated decathlon for females, includes the shot and javelin, the high and long jump, the 200- and 800-meter flats and the 100 hurdles.) It was coach Kersee – who himself had lost a mother at a young age – who comforted Joyner when her mother died, and it was also he who first reckoned that the young athlete wasn’t out of shape, but, probably, had asthma. ““I was in the emergency room every week,’’ she says. ““But I lived in denial. I wouldn’t admit to myself: “There’s something wrong with you, girl’.''
Kersee grew more fascinated with this kid, a decade his junior, always smiling, laughing with her rivals on the field, but then dedicated and steely as a competitor. As superb as she was at basketball, she liked track better. ““In track,’’ she says, ““I could find out if I was afraid, because then it was just me, standing at the line, waiting for the gun.’’ Who knew what was within her? At the ‘84 Games, she missed a gold in the heps, 6390-6385, a hairbreadth, but when her brother came to comfort her, she smiled through her tears and assured him that she was crying only out of happiness, for his victory. ““Defeat is good for you,’’ she says. ““It keeps you in perspective.’'
Kersee and Joyner grew so close as friends, neither could quite comprehend that they had fallen in love. Gingerly, he broached the subject at a baseball game at the Astrodome (it was a good pitchers’ duel), but he inquired in such an oblique, un-Kersee fashion, that she thought he was being philosophical, discussing the possibility of his being a good marriage prospect – not whether he would fill that bill for her. Even when, at last, she caught on, and, as Kersee explains, ““we stopped paying a lot of attention to the game’’ – even then they worried whether romance was worth the risk. ““Bobby was a great person and a great friend,’’ Jackie says, ““but when we thought about love, we also had to think about what we might lose. We were afraid that if it didn’t work out, together, it might jeopardize our wonderful relationship as friends. And we didn’t want that to happen.''
They dared marry in ‘86. The friendship has survived. And, in practice, by now they have worked together for so long that they are rather like a Shakespearean repertory company. Jackie may not know till she arrives at Drake Stadium whether Bobby will have her be Portia this morning and Rosalind this afternoon, Ophelia or Beatrice, but she knows all the lines by now, and when he assigns her her part, off she goes to play it – hurdles, perchance, throwing the shot, practicing the runup to the high jump.
Meanwhile, Kersee goes about the housekeeping – setting equipment up, taping athletes, fetching paraphernalia. This is the peonage of track and field in America: imagine, if you will, Jimmy Johnson bringing the tackling dummies out or Tommy Lasorda lining the batters box. Joyner-Kersee goes about her own way, almost slow motion, it seems, often running on a track otherwise filled with aging joggers in floppy shorts and Walkman radios.
Periodically, Kersee wends his way back to his prize pupil. Otherwise, he concentrates on his other Olympic athletes – Gail Devers, Greg Foster – or is diverted by his volunteer work as a UCLA coach.
Kersee calls Joyner-Kersee over, where he is coaching a promising UCLA high jumper, Amy Acuff. ““Give her some pointers, Jackie.’’ She helps the kid for a few minutes, till, abruptly, Bobby snaps: ““All right, Jackie, you’ve got to go lift your weights.’'
““Bob, you just asked me to give Amy some pointers.''
““And now I just said: it’s time for you to lift your weights.''
She shrugs, with a helpless smile of submission, and moves on to her next appointed task.
Everything in practice must be done on cue, with precision, so that Joyner-Kersee is in the rhythm of the hep. The events are so different, Kersee says, that ““there is an actual change in the body chemistry from one competition to another.’’ Even if she is going to work on some phase of an event for only a few minutes, she changes into the proper shoes. She is always changing shoes. By now, it is all so familiar, often boring. Besides: ““Mostly, I try to preserve her body now,’’ Kersee explains. ““I have her riding a bike, swimming in a pool. I have her running in the pool. You see, I fool her body to make her stronger with less stress on her joints.''
And then, when they are at a meet, even separated, she on the field, he in the stands, they are instinctively bound. This is Atlanta, mid-May, the meet opening the new Olympic stadium. She is recovered from the desultory, disappointing 1995 and now Jackie, in the sunshine, is aflame – red bow, gold hoop earrings, purple stretch suit over yellow and lavender and foam green tights. Up in the stands, tucked away in the shade, Kersee, dark and bearded, is his usual rhapsody of browns and blacks. On Bob, gray is a color riot.
As soon as Jackie finishes a jump, he moves down through the crowd, behind his shades, and they communicate, yelling, he critiquing her, they deciding to change her mark where she started her run. She has leapt too far in advance of the line. They call out. He ponders. She fingers her tape measure. ““She was off 18 inches,’’ he says. ““Move it up 15,’’ he calls out. She adjusts her mark. He moves back in the shadows. Her turn comes again. She hits the board almost perfectly. The jump is 16 inches longer, and she goes over seven meters, into first place. He barely registers – just an open mouth, a little sigh, as if he has tasted something good he added to the recipe.
Next time, she jumps 7.20 meters – 23'7 1/2”. ““She’s got another 20 to 30 centimeters in her this year,’’ Kersee says, clinically. ““She can beat her American record.’’ That’s 24'7”, only one and one-fourth inches short of the world mark.
Actually, Kersee isn’t all that enchanted about the long jump. Jackie would have to practice it anyhow for the heps, so he tolerates her winning some gold medals in it, too. He knows how much she loves jumping, and how much she needs that competition for her emotional satisfaction. The heptathlon is too coldly cumulative to be sufficiently visceral. ““The heptathlon is a challenge for me to me,’’ she explains. ““The long jump is a challenge for me against my competitor.''
Heike Drechsler fills that role perfectly. ““There is no animosity between us – only respect,’’ Joyner-Kersee says. One time, back on the old communist-capitalist skirmish line, one of Drechsler’s East German teammates would start a practice run on a parallel track every time Joyner-Kersee sprinted toward the pit. Drechsler told her countrywoman to knock off the gamesmanship, that the American was too fine, their rivalry too pure for it be tarnished.
But Kersee knows that it is what his wife might accomplish in the heps that will fashion her place for posterity. The long-jump gold and the basketball All-Americanization are only embroidery for the heptathlon, the core of what established her as the greatest woman athlete, what it is that provides a woman – a black woman, a black woman athlete, a black woman athlete in a minor sport – with major mainstream endorsements, like McDonald’s and Honda and Ray-Ban (plus Nike for all those shoes and Glaxo for her asthma), what it is that lifts her into the pantheon of Olympic gods.
Kersee knows all the history, that in the chronicles of the multi-event – decathlon, heptathlon, pentathlon – no one but Joyner-Kersee has ever won three medals in successive Olympics. He knows that his wife and Bob Mathias and Daley Thompson are the only back-to-back golds. He knows what Atlanta can mean. ““Three in a row? Winning three times in a row with four years in between in a competition that requires the mastery of several disciplines. That’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. And let me tell you: if Jackie’s thinking of 2000, well, fine, she can keep her husband, but Jackie’s gonna need a new coach.''
That would not seem to be an issue. Not only does her own family plan beckon her ahead, but yet does she turn back more to her past, to the miasma of East St. Louis that she escaped. She will open a community center there later this year. She keeps a house and an office in the area, and regularly visits there. It matters to her that she returns herself, that she is the presence, the symbol that she never had when she was growing up there.
So, whatever happens in Atlanta, someday her husband may stand at the start line in East St. Louis with their children and tell them: watch, because your mother is not finished here yet.
Women have sharply improved their Olympic performances, to record levels set by men decades ago. If they raced together:
A Men’s Olympic Record B Women’s Olympic Record C Past Men’s Record 200-Meter Dash A Joseph DeLoach, USA (1988) 19.75 seconds B Florence Griffith Joyner, USA (1988) 21.34 seconds C Jackson Scholz, USA (1924) 21.60 seconds DeLoach would finish about 15 meters ahead of Joyner and Scholz. Long Jump A Bob Beamon, USA (1968) 8.90 meters B Jackie Joyner-Kersee, USA (1988) 7.40 meters C Meyer Prinstein, USA 1904 7.34 meters Beamon’s record leap is 1.5 meters longer than Kersee’s, which is .06 longer than Prinstein’s. 100-Meter Freestyle A Mathew Biondi, USA (1988) 48.63 seconds B Zhuang Yong, CHN (1992) 54.64 seconds C John Devitt, AUS (1960) 55.20 seconds Biondi would beat Yong and Devitt by six seconds-or about nine meters. SOURCE: THE COMPLETE BOOK OF THE SUMMER OLYMPICS
