A Kind of Grace

by Jackie Joyner-Kersee

  “I don't know if I'm good,” I said shyly when Mr. Ward said I could join his team.

  “Don't worry about that. We're just having fun. If you win a ribbon, good. If not, that's okay, too,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  The practice sessions with Mr. Ward's group were a lot of fun. Suddenly I had six new friends. I didn't know Gwen Brown or any of the others from Franklin Elementary because I attended John Robinson Elementary and the schools were in different parts of town. Most of the others had been training with Mr. Ward for over a year and, as I would soon discover, were already very strong, fast runners.

  The first race I ran for Mr. Ward was the 440-yard dash, now called the 400 meters. He lined us up opposite two bent steel poles. Then, stopwatch in hand, he walked around to the other side of the circle and stood on the board 440 yards away. From there, he yelled, “On your mark, get set, go!”

  The rest of the girls charged ahead. I ran as hard as I could, but I couldn't catch them. I finished last. Once I caught my breath, I was disappointed. I couldn't believe how fast the others were!

  “What can I do to get faster?” I asked Mr. Ward.

  “Just keep coming to practice, you'll get better,” he assured me.

  I finished last or nearly last in every race that summer. But Mr. Ward stuck with me. When school resumed, he picked me up every afternoon at home in the spring and drove me to track practice at his school. I looked forward to it all day. I was eleven. I would rush home after school, cram down a few oatmeal cookies or a bag of potato chips, quickly do my geography, math, spelling and science homework and then do my chores—or pay Debra to do them—so that I was ready when his car pulled up. I waved good-bye to Momma, who was getting home about the time I left, and hopped in Mr. Ward's car.

  The practices were pressure-free, but there were rules. We weren't supposed to talk while running. But I chatted away with my new friends. Every time Mr. Ward caught me, he stopped us, pulled me out of the group and scolded me. As punishment, he made me run in the opposite direction from the others. I didn't mind. I was so happy to be out there with the others. With a smile on my face, I ran clockwise while the others ran counterclockwise.

  One day I got sick and started throwing up while running. Mr. Ward asked me what I'd eaten. When I told him about the oatmeal cookies, he shook his head. Junk food was a no-no, he said. My punishment that time was three extra laps, all in the opposite direction. He said he wanted me to feel how eating junk food would affect my endurance. But it didn't bother me. I felt as if I could run forever. I just wasn't very fast yet.

  After several more races and no ribbons, however, I became discouraged. “Am I ever going to win anything?” I asked.

  He gave me a consoling pat on the back as we walked to his car. “You will if you keep working hard.”

  I wasn't crazy about running the 440-yard dash. But it was a challenge. I wanted to catch those other girls. My real love was jumping. But I was too shy to tell Mr. Ward. At the time I didn't know anything about the intricacies of the long jump. I just knew my legs were strong and I was a good jumper, based on my cheerleading and dancing performances.

  For weeks, I watched Gwen Brown run down the long-jump track and leap into the air, like a plane taking off. I bit my lower lip as she practiced, yearning for just one chance to run down the dirt path and jump into the shallow sand. When I returned home that afternoon, I got a brainstorm. I found potato chip bags and convinced my sisters to go over to the sandbox in the park, fill the bags and help me bring the sand back to our house. Over the next several afternoons we secretly ferried sand from the park to the front yard, where I made a small sand pit. On the days when I didn't go to practice, I hopped onto our porch railing, which was about three feet high, crouched down with my back arched and leaped into the sand. The feeling was so satisfying and so much fun, I did it over and over again for about an hour.

  One afternoon after all the other girls had left practice, while I waited for Mr. Ward to drive me home, I walked over to the runway. It was nothing more than a long strip of grass, marked off with a strip of tape at one end and a shallow hole with a thin layer of sand at the other end. The sun was ready to set, but the air remained hot and thick. I was tired after running sprints and conditioning drills in the oppressive heat. But standing there, looking down the long-jump lane for the first time, I was energized. I mimicked what I had seen Gwen doing. I charged down the lane as fast as I could, planted my right foot and jumped up as high as I could. I kicked my legs out in front of me and pushed myself forward.

  What a feeling! It was like flying. I stood up, content with myself and feeling daring. I smiled as I dusted the sand off my shorts and legs. Mr. Ward ran toward me. I was afraid he was going to be mad. But there was an excited look in his eyes.

  “Do that again!” he shouted.

  I trotted back to the starting line and repeated the process: charge, plant, push, kick, fly. His jaw dropped.

  “I didn't know you could jump!” Mr. Ward said when I emerged from the sand.

  “Oh, I love to jump,” I said. “My legs are strong from cheerleading. I have wanted to try jumping for the longest.”

  “Starting tomorrow, come to the long-jump pit and I'll work with you and Gwen together,” he said.

  I was delighted. When he dropped me off, I skipped through the yard, bounded up the steps and ran inside to give everybody the news.

  Mr. Ward was volunteering his time to the after-school track program. In coaching young girls, he and Nino Fennoy, a teacher at Lilly Freeman Elementary who had organized a girls' squad at that school, were exploring uncharted territory and exposing themselves to criticism. No one in town had ever tried cultivating athletic interest among girls. While boys had high school and junior high teams, Little League baseball and Pop Warner football, girls in our community had no organized sports activities whatsoever.

  Congress had recently passed Title IX, the federal legislation requiring public schools to give girls and boys equal opportunities to participate in athletics. Mr. Ward and Mr. Fennoy used the new law to develop opportunities for girls in sports. The combined Franklin-Freeman Elementary School team competed against other schools during the academic year. In 1974, when I was twelve, the two men organized a track squad of male and female athletes from all the schools in town that competed in summer Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) track meets. The squad was called the East St. Louis Railers.

  Although I didn't realize it at the time, my participation on the Railers squad set me on a course that would lead far beyond Piggott Avenue and the Arch, into a world full of life experiences both painful and joyous.

  6

  My Guiding Light

  People have always assumed I succeeded at sports because I was a natural talent. Not quite. I had talent and determination, but I needed someone to help me develop it. Nino Fennoy was that person. He encouraged me to imagine myself doing great things and worked with me to turn my fantasies into reality.

  I met Mr. Fennoy on a spring day in 1973. Mr. Ward piled the girls he'd been coaching into his car and drove us to the field at Hughes Quinn Junior High, some eight blocks from my house. Every evening Mr. Fennoy worked with a group of boys and girls from Lilly Freeman Elementary at the Hughes Quinn playground. The two men had decided to divide the coaching duties of the Franklin-Freeman squad, with Mr. Ward taking the boys and Mr. Fennoy the girls.

  To determine our skill level, they asked us all to run 120 yards, then circle around and run back, and repeat the drill several times. I did it easily. I still wasn't the fastest, but after almost a year of training with Mr. Ward, I had lots of stamina. I stood about 5′ 5″ tall and weighed a lean 120 pounds—all arms and legs.

  “What else are we going to do?” I asked the two coaches when we were done. Mr. Fennoy looked at me and smiled.

  The longer I worked with him, the stronger and faster I became. But I still wasn't in the front of the pack at the end of the races—my 440 time was well over a min
ute. In my first race with Mr. Fennoy as my coach, I didn't finish last, but I was well back. I hoped he wouldn't be disappointed and drop me from the team.

  “I tried,” I said, shrugging my shoulders apologetically afterward.

  He responded with a reassuring smile: “That's all I ask.”

  Over time, lots of girls started the Railers track program. But as training drills intensified, sessions lasted longer and the temperature rose, many of them dropped out. A group that included Gwen Brown, Deborah Thurston, Carmen Cannon, Tina Gully, Danette, Cindy and Mona Onyemelukwe, Devlin Stamps, Pat Riggins and me stuck it out that summer and all the seasons thereafter. We formed the core of the girls' athletic program on the south side of East St. Louis. That program included volleyball, basketball and track squads. Most of us played two sports. I was one of the few who played all three. In summers, we competed as East St. Louis Railers. During the school year, we competed for our respective junior high teams, and later, as Lincoln Tigerettes in senior high.

  Mr. Fennoy, the son of an East St. Louis political leader, was a high school classmate of Daddy's. After an undistinguished athletic career at Lincoln, he realized his future was in coaching, rather than competing. He studied physical education in college and earned a master's degree from Southern Illinois University. He got the idea of using sports to help the youngsters in East St. Louis after administering the President's Physical Fitness Test to a group of Lilly Freeman students early in the school year. When they scored in the top percentile, without any preparation or coaching, he knew he'd found the seeds of a potentially fruitful program. The influx of federal funds to East St. Louis for educational and recreational programs in the 1970s, coupled with passage of Title IX, provided the fertilizer.

  Mr. Fennoy was only about 5′ 7″, but his ideas were lofty. The skin beneath his afro, mustache and beard was the color of parchment and he dressed like many of the other thirtysomething men in town. But he spoke like a wise, old man—a combination sociologist, philosopher and motivational speaker. With his index finger jabbing the air and his hazel eyes staring intently at us, he peppered his speeches at team meetings with phrases like “making maximum use of minimal resources” and “the parameters of acceptable behavior.”

  He had a broad vision of what he wanted to accomplish through the track program. He encouraged us to work hard in practice, as well as in class. With a solid foundation in athletics and academics, he told us, the possibilities were unlimited—college scholarships, graduate school, good-paying jobs and productive lives.

  In one of his first speeches to us after practice when we were still in elementary school, he explained that success in sports could open doors for us and set us on the path to broader success. “Doing well in sports is fine. But in order to compete and get any portion of what this country has to offer, you have to have an education. You can't get a job if you can't fill out an application.”

  Like my parents, he stressed that there was a world beyond East St. Louis and that life in that world wouldn't be a struggle if we were properly prepared. “You have alternatives,” he said. “You don't have to just be housewives. You don't have to settle for staying here.”

  Other than my parents, Mr. Fennoy was the major influence on my attitudes and outlook. He inspired me to make the most of my talent, to withstand peer pressure and to avoid the traps into which others fell.

  He was a constant force in our lives, serving as our AAU coach from elementary school through junior high. By the time we entered Lincoln High, he was the head track coach there as well. He got to know us almost as a parent would—sometimes even better. Beginning in junior high, he asked us to record everything we were thinking and doing and eating in a daily journal. I recorded my times on sprint and endurance drills, as well as my long-jump distances. I reviewed the day's activities at school. I wrote that I hated typing class and that I was flunking home economics because I couldn't cook. I described how excited I was to be involved in the History Club's program to bring Donald McHenry, the United Nations ambassador and Lincoln High alumnus, back to campus for a lecture to the student body. I also related my experiences with my boyfriend.

  Every week until my senior year, Mr. Fennoy reviewed what I wrote and discussed it with me. Nothing got by him. After hearing about my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend being pregnant, I was melancholy and uninspired. Mr. Fennoy talked to me about it away from the others.

  “What's wrong?” he asked.

  When I told him, he said, “I figured that was it. You shouldn't be upset. Breaking up with him was the best thing that could have happened to you,” he said. “Now, let's get back to work.”

  As protective as my parents were, they allowed me to go to out-of-town meets with Mr. Fennoy because they knew I was in good hands. He was like a father away from home. Mr. Fennoy always seemed to know what we needed, without our having to ask. He gave me my first pair of track shoes and never asked for any money.

  When it was time to travel to meets out of state or across country, we sometimes raised the money for travel expenses by holding bake sales and raffles. But Mr. Fennoy often turned down huge donations from people in town, even though expenses could run as much as $5,000 when several of us and a coach had to travel out of town. We heard about some of the offers and asked why he'd refused them. “You never want anyone to think you owe them something,” he said. Also, he reminded us, eligibility rules prohibited gifts to high school and college athletes.

  Mr. Fennoy, assistant coach Arlander Hampton and Mr. Ward drove us to meets in their cars when the Railers were first organized. After the program became successful and our victories were publicized, the school board agreed to fund the summer track program. From that point on, we rode to meets in chartered buses and rented vans.

  On one of the first trips I took with the Railers, I didn't have money for lunch. My father wasn't working and my mother said she just didn't have anything to give me. If I went, she said I'd have to wait until I got back home that night to eat. When the van carrying us pulled into the McDonald's parking lot at lunchtime, my mouth watered and my stomach gurgled. I'd exerted myself all morning and I was starving. But when it was time to get off the bus, I was too embarrassed to say I didn't have any money, so I told everyone I wasn't hungry.

  While my teammates rushed inside with bills clutched in their hands, I waited on the bus. No sense torturing myself by going inside and smelling the french fries. Mr. Fennoy walked back to the bus and asked why I wasn't inside. I told him I wasn't hungry. Without inquiring further, he said, “Come on inside with me and order what you want.”

  “Thanks!” I said, flashing a big, grateful grin. We walked in side by side.

  After that, whenever Momma was running short and a trip was approaching, I saved my lunch money during the week or bought candy bars at the store for a nickel and sold them at school for a dime. At mealtime after the meets, I rolled down my socks, pulled out the ball of money hidden there and walked in with everyone else, carrying a fistful of money.

  With Mr. Fennoy, I got a taste of life away from East St. Louis. It was, at times, a bittersweet experience. But he tried to insulate us from the most painful aspects. In most cases, the only way white schools would agree to compete against us was if we traveled to their schools. East St. Louis had such a bad reputation, people were afraid to come into town. One white coach told Mr. Fennoy he was afraid his bus would be vandalized. It made me sad to hear what people thought of the place I lived.

  Some of our trips took us to remote towns in Illinois and Missouri. Without explaining why, when the driver stopped for gas in those places, Mr. Fennoy said we should stay on the bus. Whenever a ticklish situation arose at a meet that indicated prejudice or a racial bias, Mr. Fennoy handled it diplomatically and taught us to do the same.

  During the preliminary round of an AAU meet in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, in 1976, when I was fourteen, I landed a jump in my last turn during the qualifying round, which should have been long enough to put me in
the final round. But the official failed to record it. As a result, I was out of the competition. At the time I thought it was a deliberate oversight. The disappointment was all the more bruising because I had to finish in one of the top three spots to advance to the AAU Regional competition, and to have a chance at ultimately competing in the AAU National meet. When the official told me I'd failed to qualify, tears welled up in my eyes and my body stiffened. I was ready to yell at someone. Mr. Fennoy saw my face and called me over.

  “It's not fair …” I started to rant.

  “Don't say another word,” he ordered, pointing his finger at me. “Let me handle it. And you better not cry, either.”

  He didn't make a scene. He huddled with the officials, discussing the issue calmly. Then he walked back over to me and told me the decision was final. I wanted to scream about the injustice of it all. I felt as if someone had stolen something from me. While he was gone, I had overheard some of the chaperones say that Mr. Fennoy had run into trouble with one of the judges at the meet in the past. The conversation made it sound like it was a racial issue. When I asked him about it, he said whether the oversight was racially motivated or not wasn't the point.

  “Rather than looking for someone to blame or to be mad with, let's learn from this,” he said. The idea of blame and anger appealed to me more, but I listened.

  “From now on, after every jump, always make sure that the judges have recorded your mark. And let's work harder on your jumping so that next time, one jump won't mean the difference between qualifying and not qualifying.”

  The lessons stuck with me. Watching Mr. Fennoy, I learned to handle controversy and adversity calmly. And at each long-jump competition I enter, I walk by the judges after every jump and, while pretending to look at the standings, make sure they've recorded the result.