A Kind of Grace

by Jackie Joyner-Kersee

  The first few times I felt stinging sensations up the front of my leg, I just ran through them. Eventually, the pain in my shins became a dull ache every time my foot hit the ground. I had been able to bear it in junior high, but my first season at Lincoln High had worn me down. I played a full season in volleyball, then the basketball team went all the way to the sectional finals. By the time I got to the spring track season the shin splints were so severe, I was, at the ripe old age of sixteen, perilously close to having stress fractures, according to Dr. Stan London, the St. Louis Cardinals team physician who examined my legs.

  When he heard the diagnosis, Mr. Fennoy shook his head and apologized. “You haven't had a day off since the fifth grade, have you?” From that moment on, he said, I would take two weeks off between seasons.

  That was fine for next season. The problem was what to do about the remaining weeks in this track season. The team needed my contribution in the mile relay, the 400 and the long jump to qualify for the state championship meet. The doctor showed Mr. Fennoy how to wrap the leg to minimize further damage.

  Heading into the sectionals—the qualifying meet for state—the situation was bleak. At practice I was sluggish in the 440, running it in 60 seconds. That would never do. We figured the time to beat at state would be nearly three seconds faster. I was inconsistent on the long jump. One minute I looked like the best in the nation. The next, I looked like a novice. I told Mr. Fennoy I could bear the pain; but I was discouraged by my performance in practice. “Just stay confident,” he said. “Everything else will fall into place.”

  He consulted with Mr. Ward about my long-jump troubles. Mr. Ward came to the track the next afternoon with a stopwatch and helped me settle into a consistent groove down the runway. He clocked me as I ran down, planted and jumped. As I stood beside him panting after a couple of attempts, with my hands on my hips, he talked me through the run and pinpointed the spot where I needed to accelerate before planting my foot and leaping. I nodded after each instruction. Thirty minutes and a few jumps later, I had the rhythm down and my confidence up.

  At sectionals, we performed well enough to qualify for state. During the weeks leading up to the state meet in late May, I stayed off my legs completely, the only stress coming when I gingerly hobbled up and down the two flights of stairs at school.

  At the state championships, the Lincoln Tigerettes went about their routine as if it were just another meet. We set up our camp on the infield or in the parking lot just outside the stadium gates. Before the competition began, we all gathered and joined hands with our coaches and prayed. Then we organized our equipment and supplies: shoes, warmup clothes, water bottles, ice, pillows and blankets. Other athletes roamed around, laughing and talking and cutting up with friends. But the Tigerettes always stayed together at our camp—a mass of orange and black. Staying together allowed us to support and encourage each other and helped us stay focused. Meanwhile, Mr. Fennoy nervously roamed between our camp, the coaches section and the track, watching the races, yelling out encouragement as we ran past him, and staying abreast of the team standings.

  The track at Eastern Illinois University, the site of the state championship meet, was made of Tartan, a synthetic material softer and squishier than rubber. When I burst out of the blocks, I felt as if I was running on feathers! I finished second in the long jump, with a leap of 19′ 2¾″, which pleased Mr. Fennoy and me. My leg felt fine. I ran the first leg of the 880-yard medley, equivalent to the 800-meter relay, and our team placed second. Then I anchored the mile relay and finished in a dead heat with the girl from Eastside. We both set a state record, with a time of 3 minutes, 55.27 seconds. By the 440-yard dash, my shins were screaming. But I fought through the pain, hitting the tape first, in 56.75 seconds. It was my fastest time ever. When the times were announced, Mr. Fennoy looked at me in amazement and embraced me. We won the meet with a total of 37 points, the most ever accumulated by a team in a state girls' meet. We were 1978 state champs, the first girls' sports title for Lincoln High. We held on to the track championship for the next two years.

  I rested my legs for the next few months. To help the shins heal and to stay in condition, I ran in the pool at Lincoln Park. The AAU Junior Olympics were coming up in August and I desperately wanted to compete for another pentathlon gold medal, this time in the fifteen to sixteen age group.

  Because of the injury, I had to miss the regional qualifying meet, which on first impression appeared to disqualify me from further competition. I was crushed. But Mr. Fennoy found a loophole in the rules permitting the automatic entry of the defending champion. My legs healed and I came back from Lawrence, Kansas, with my second Junior Olympic pentathlon gold medal and another age group scoring record, 3,817 points. In Bozeman, Montana, the next year, 1979, I improved to 3,953 points. I won again at the 1980 games in Porterville, California, with 4,129 total points. I also won the long jump in Santa Clara with a leap of 21′ ¾″.

  The more awards I collected, the more pressure was put on Al to join the track team. My father came home one night, picked up a newspaper article about one of my track victories and said, loud enough for all of us to hear, “I thought my son would be the one bringing trophies into the house, but I guess my daughter will be the one upholding the family name in track and field.”

  Everyone told Al he was the spitting image of Daddy as a teenager and probably a natural athlete, just as Daddy had been. Al was over six feet tall, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist, with skinny legs. He weighed about 150 pounds, almost none of it fat. Mr. Fennoy told him repeatedly that his build made him ideal for the sport. All he needed to do was train to build up his strength and speed.

  But Al had other ideas. Like me, he dreamed of athletic success. And just like mine, his dreams were fueled by watching the Olympics. But unlike mine, they didn't involve running on the track or jumping on the field. He was a great swimmer and passed the lifeguard exam on the first try, when he was fifteen. He idolized Mark Spitz, who won seven swimming gold medals in 1972. But when he watched Phil Boggs win the springboard diving competition in 1976, his fancy turned to that sport. He thought he could learn to dive and walk on to Indiana's team after graduating from Lincoln in 1978. But the pool at the park wasn't Olympic-sized and it had neither a 3-meter springboard nor a platform on which Al could practice. Also, Al didn't have a Mr. Fennoy to help him develop and train properly.

  I didn't have much sympathy for him, though. Another reason Al resisted track was that he knew it was hard work and he was lazy. And he was obnoxious about it. He'd never spent a second on the track working out. Yet, one summer day in 1976, after I'd done well at a meet, he and some of his school friends came by our house and started speculating about whether he could beat me in a race. Al was sixteen, about to enter his junior year; I was fourteen, a rising freshman.

  “Yeah, she think she's bad but I can beat her easy,” Al crowed.

  “Bet you can't,” one of his friends said, taunting him.

  “I'll race her right now and show you!” Al said, standing up and sticking out his chest.

  I ignored them and continued talking to my girlfriends. I wasn't going to dignify any of it with a comment.

  “Come on, Jackie, let's race now and settle this,” Al demanded, beckoning me to the street.

  I was so sick of hearing him boast that I agreed—just to shut him up. “Okay, let's race from the front door of the Community Center to the mailbox in front of the tavern.”

  “Fine, let's go.”

  Like a scene out of the Little Rascals series, Al and I walked out of our yard and marched up the street, surrounded by a group of neighborhood kids. We walked the fifty meters to the front door of the Center. Our spectators, about ten boys and ten girls, gathered around the mailbox, the finish line. It wasn't quite a battle of the sexes, though. In addition to all of the girls, some of the boys were cheering for me. The men in front of the tavern watched, but didn't choose sides.

  At the starting point, Tyr
one Cavitt yelled, “On your mark, get set, go!” The kids all screamed—but Al couldn't stay with me. I beat him by several steps. Everyone surrounded me and patted me on the back, laughing and cheering. Al looked deflated. Word of the race results spread like a forest fire the following day at school. Al's friends teased him mercilessly. I felt sorry for him, but I had to teach him a lesson. I never heard another word of trash from him after that.

  The defeat prompted him to go out for track and get in shape. Confirming Mr. Fennoy's prediction, Al was an instant sensation, qualifying for the state championships in the sprint hurdles his first season on the team in the spring of 1977. In his senior year, the coach asked him to try the triple jump and he won the district championship with a leap of 47′ 9¾″, the second-longest in district competition that year in Illinois. He finished third at the state championships. At the AAU Nationals a month after he graduated from Lincoln in 1978, he triple-jumped 51 feet on his first attempt. The meet officials and everyone in the crowd watched his leap in stunned silence. Amid wild cheering, the officials scurried around, trying to devise a method for measuring the distance. Their tape measures didn't extend past 50 feet! Up in the stadium, Daddy kept yelling, “That's my boy!”

  Later that summer in Lincoln, Nebraska, Al won the AAU Junior Olympic triple jump with a leap of 50′ 2½″. Everyone in town was ecstatic, and for his part, Al reveled in his notoriety and welcomed the spotlight. Like his hero, Elvis Presley, he'd burst onto the scene from nowhere and left everyone breathless with his performance. He turned down several scholarship offers from good track programs, including Illinois and Missouri, to accept one from Tennessee State. The school had a respected women's track program and Al believed the coaches were going to build a men's team around him. Unfortunately, he arrived in Nashville to find that his scholarship was really a tiny student loan. He was always strapped for money, enduring one semester without textbooks. So, after a year, he transferred to Arkansas State. In Jonesboro, he continued his athletic progress, breaking a number of collegiate triple-jump records. But with no scholarship and only loans, his college career was a financial struggle.

  A yellow school bus carried a big crowd from East St. Louis, including Della and Daddy, to the state track championships when I was a junior. Momma didn't attend many of my competitions. She felt it was her duty to stay at home with my ailing great-grandmother. The people from my hometown all sat together in a clump, surrounded by the 5,000 other spectators.

  When the long-jump competition began and I stepped up to the line, the crowd was buzzing. “Aw, she's gonna do it, you watch,” someone shouted. “Here she goes!” someone else yelled out as he pointed to me on the field. Then I heard the familiar, “Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee!”

  I got the signal and I took off. I pumped as hard as I could, running faster, faster, faster, down the runway. I took the last three steps, slammed my right foot down on the board and leaped. As I extended my arms and legs through the air, I knew I'd popped a big one. I'd never been in the air so long. I was floating. I came down in the dry, undisturbed part of the sand pit, far down from the section they'd raked and watered after everyone else's jumps.

  In unison the crowd roared. Everyone was standing as I landed. I got up, looked back at the pit to see how far down I was and stepped out. I smiled and dusted myself off. The whole place was buzzing again, in anticipation.

  “She got it! She got it,” said a man who was not my father.

  The officials were still measuring as I walked back to our camp and put on my sweatpants. I'd set a state record in the qualifying round with a jump of 19′ 9¼″. And though I'd never experienced a 20-foot leap, this one felt like it was way past 20. I'd never landed that far down the pit before.

  When they raised the three standards—one at a time—to show my mark and the first number was a 2, the crowd exploded. I'd set a new record. The only mystery was how far I'd gone. Next came a 0, then a 7½. It was 20′ 7½″. The moment was as electric as the instant the 0.00 flashed on the scoreboard in Montreal during the 1976 Olympic gymnastics competition, signifying that Nadia Comaneci had received a perfect score on the uneven parallel bars. People who were there still talk about that afternoon at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston and the feeling they got watching that jump and seeing the numbers.

  “Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee! That's my girl! Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee!” Daddy was beside himself.

  I smiled modestly, raised my hand as far as my forehead, and gave a little wave in the direction of the stadium.

  With that leap, I became one of the best long jumpers in the nation in both the junior and senior divisions. It was the best jump in Illinois by a high school girl and the second longest among female junior-division competitors in the country that year. I ranked eighth among all female long jumpers in the nation at the end of that year. For the second consecutive year, I was named the Illinois Girl Athlete of the Year by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. I was also named a Prep All-America by Illinois Track & Field News. I repeated as the Girl Athlete of the Year the following season, and as a Prep All-America.

  I thought I'd reached the height of celebrity in November 1979 when a big picture of me long jumping during the AAU Junior Olympics appeared on the cover of Women's Varsity Sports magazine. When I saw my picture, all I could do was grin. I couldn't believe it was me on the cover of a magazine.

  With two state track championship trophies already in the case at school, I returned to Lincoln the following fall with one goal—winning the state basketball championship and adding that trophy to the case. It was senior year, the last chance for Deborah Thurston, Barbara Gilmore, Devlin Stamps and me to make history by being the first squad to win a girls' basketball title at Lincoln, and to see all our work during the previous years pay off.

  We'd gotten close enough to taste it the year before, losing the championship game to Skokie-Niles West. As the team's cocaptain, I took it upon myself to keep everyone focused and motivated. Whenever our enthusiasm or energy level sagged in practice, I yelled out to my teammates, “Remember how it felt to lose in the finals and to watch that other team get the championship trophy, cut down the nets and celebrate? If you don't want to go through that again, we have to keep working!”

  We went undefeated that season. Our only close game was against Marshall, the perennial powerhouse team from Chicago. It was late in the season and we were playing them on their home court in Chicago. Marshall's mascot is the Commando and they were in command of this game. We hadn't lost all season but we were trailing 59–61 with just a few seconds left. My teammates and I refused to believe we'd lose to any team that season. We didn't feel desperate or despondent. In the huddle at the bench during the last timeout, we told each other we'd find a way to win the game. Still, things looked bleak. Marshall had the ball and the clock was running down.

  Justine Moore, our quick point guard, stole the ball and scored: 61–61. Marshall brought the ball upcourt again. All they had to do was hold it and let the clock run out. We had to make something happen. I saw the point guard's eyes shift and I anticipated a pass. As she turned to throw the ball, I jumped out and intercepted it. My heart was in my throat as I dribbled downcourt to our basket. The rushing footsteps behind me sounded like a stampede. The pro-Marshall crowd was screaming. I focused on making the shot. I put it up and watched it fall in. A millisecond later, the buzzer sounded. Lincoln 63, Marshall 61. My ecstatic teammates rushed me and I whooped. We tumbled to the floor, giddy and relieved. We didn't come close to losing again en route to the finals where our opponent was none other than Chicago Marshall. A rematch.

  “They'll want revenge,” I told my teammates in the locker room before the game. I was standing in front of them, my game face decorated with braided pigtails and an orange sweatband. “We can't let them have it. We've worked too hard to get it. We have to want this tie more than they do to win.”

  The game was played inside Assembly Hall on the University of Illinois campus. The place holds 11,000, bu
t only 4,000 seats were filled, most of them by fans from East St. Louis. They had carpooled or ridden in one of the school buses as part of the caravan that arrived in Champaign-Urbana on Thursday night for the Friday-Saturday tournament. Our team bus, an air-conditioned charter, had led the caravan. With so many fans in the stands, it felt like a home game at Lincoln High gym.

  We were up by just six points in the third quarter when Deborah Thurston jumped up for a rebound and came down on the side of her ankle, twisting it. Gut check time. We all knew we had to play with more intensity to compensate for Deborah's absence under the boards. Debra Powell replaced her and started hitting shots from everywhere on the court. I banged the boards and snatched every rebound I could. We applied a full-court press that finally wore Marshall down. We pulled away and won 64–47. We now had a gold medal to go with the silver one each of us had received the previous year.

  We mobbed each other at center court. Then we got a ladder, walked over to our basket and cut down the net, which we draped across the championship trophy. On the bus ride back home, we sang our theme song, the Kenny Loggins tune “This Is It.” We were delirious. When Deborah Thurston and I helped the track team win a third straight track championship, it was the perfect way to finish our high school careers.

  9

  My Feminine Mystique

  There was no jealousy or animosity between the boys' and girls' squads at Lincoln. The boys respected our talents and always congratulated us after we won a meet or a basketball game. During our first basketball season at Lincoln, while the girls' and boys' coaches bickered over which squad would practice first in the gym after school, the boys on the team volunteered to let us start first, at 3:30, so that we could get home before dark.

  A few of the male long jumpers treated me as a rival, albeit a friendly one. Even though I rarely jumped farther than they did, they kept close track, as a matter of pride. They didn't mind being beaten by other boys, but they were determined not to be outjumped by a girl. At joint meets, they wandered over during the competition and stood beside the pit to watch my jumps. At school, on Mondays following weekend meets out of town, they rushed to me in the hall to ask about my performance. They always looked relieved when I told them. “Oh, that's good,” they said. “As long as we can still beat you we're happy.”