A Kind of Grace

by Jackie Joyner-Kersee

  We worked for forty-five minutes in the hotel hallway that night. “You'll do fine tomorrow,” he assured me as we walked back down the corridor to my room after finishing. “Just try not to think so much during the run and stop putting pressure on yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said, smiling. “Thanks for the help.”

  “You have to stop thinking that you have to be the best long jumper in the heptathlon,” he said. “Remember, it's just one of the seven events. You can't take it so personally. It's making you tighten up and that's just adding to your problems.”

  After just one day with me, Bobby had put his finger on both my technical and mental problem with the long jump. No one had ever picked up on how I felt about the event, or considered whether those feelings might be hampering my performance. I'm not even sure I had realized it myself. But as soon as Bobby said it, I knew he was absolutely right. I felt so much more secure with him than I had with my assigned coach. He'd locked into my mind-set. For the first time all season someone from the coaching staff was on the same wavelength with me.

  Bobby also encouraged me, trying to boost my flagging confidence. “You have a lot of talent,” he said.

  My face lit up. “You think so?”

  “I've never seen an athlete as gifted as you,” Bobby said. “You just have to be patient. I'm willing to work with you if you're willing to work with me.”

  “Sure! That would be great!” I said. His words gave me new life.

  The one thing every athlete wants and needs is somebody who's as motivated and committed as she is. Someone who's willing to work hard along with her.

  That was the wonderful thing about Mr. Fennoy. He recognized my talent and honed it. He could see how eager I was to improve and he helped me to do it by pushing me in practice. That's why I was so successful in high school. I had come to UCLA hoping to have the same kind of relationship with my coach, but instead, Bobby was taking on the role Mr. Fennoy had played. Like me, Bobby was always striving to be the best. He was as excited as I was by the challenge of helping me improve. I walked into my hotel room that night feeling like I'd finally found a kindred spirit.

  I finished second at the U.S. Championships in the heptathlon, my best performance all season. The 5,827 points I scored in the seven events were more points than any UCLA athlete had ever amassed in the event, and would have been high enough to beat Patsy Walker at the college championships that year.

  When he returned to UCLA, Bobby asked for and received permission to coach me full-time. Beginning in the fall of 1981, we spent a lot of time together. He was the first person I saw every morning and one of the last people I saw every night. During basketball season, I couldn't work out with the track team. But Bobby asked me to come out to the track at 6:00 A.M. to work on technique before my first class at 8:00. I'd bring him breakfast and we'd work out. After basketball season was over, I'd finish classes and tutoring, pick up lunch for us and spend most of the afternoon at the track, then go back to my room or to study hall at night.

  Spending so much time with Bobby made me increasingly comfortable with him. Each evening after practice he drove me from Westwood to my apartment in Culver City. During the twenty-minute drive, I found myself talking to him about things I wouldn't dare tell other people. All sorts of thoughts and emotions, from the goals I had set for myself in track and field, to my ups and downs with my boyfriend.

  He opened up to me, too, telling me about his girlfriend problems. He was dating a woman at the time who didn't think track was important and was jealous of the fact that he spent so much time with other women—namely Florence, Jeanette, Alice and me. He said she hated it when girls from the team came home with him to have dinner or watch videotapes of practice. He was constantly arguing with her about it. It seemed we had similar problems. And, it seemed, the reasons were the same. Like me, his devotion to athletics superseded everything else in his life. Whenever he talked about ambition, he repeated the same line. “A person shouldn't let personal setbacks destroy his dreams,” he said.

  I agreed with him.

  Bobby said he knew I would become successful, but hoped I wouldn't be spoiled by it. “Your status is going to change,” he said. “Everyone will become your friend, you'll be showered with compliments. The key to remaining on top will be not letting any of the hoopla change you or your basic values.” I told him he didn't have to worry about that. If I was lucky enough to find success, my attitude wouldn't change.

  The more time we spent together and talked about our professional and personal goals, the more it seemed that we were soul mates. Still, as far as I was concerned, the relationship was nothing more than that of athlete and coach. I considered Bobby compassionate and committed. But it was all business. It was the same kind of dedication and support Mr. Fennoy had given me in junior high and high school. If Bobby was sizing me up as a potential mate, he didn't send any overt signals.

  I thought of him as an authority figure, just as I had Mr. Fennoy. The fact that he was eight years older than me also kept me from thinking of him as a potential boyfriend. He seemed too old for me. Even when we had those talks in the car or on the track, I called him “Mr. Kersee” and said “Yessir” when I answered him. It drove him crazy. He said it made him feel old.

  Even after my feelings started to change toward him I wouldn't allow myself to think of him as a possible boyfriend while I was at UCLA. For one thing, I didn't know how he felt about me and I wanted to protect myself from rejection. Also, I didn't want to damage our on-track relationship. The last thing I wanted was for him to feel uncomfortable about coaching me because I had feelings for him that he didn't share. Most important, dating a coach was taboo in my book. It was like dating a professor. I also didn't want to start a scandal or engender bad feelings among team members by dating the coach. I knew it would cause trouble if the other athletes thought Bobby was favoring me because we were involved romantically. I also knew that relationships between coaches and athletes were considered unethical and that getting involved with Bobby could jeopardize his job. Therefore, I never brought up the subject with him or gave him the impression that I felt more for him than professional respect and admiration.

  16

  Back on Track

  With Bobby coaching me, I was happy to be competing in track and field again. I looked forward to practice each day. I felt like my old self.

  I won the 1982 NCAA heptathlon competition as a sophomore, scoring 6,099 points and setting an NCAA record. I repeated as champion in 1983, with a total of 6,365 points, another NCAA record.

  Having put my athletic career back on track and confronted my grief over my mother's death, I was ready to tackle my anger toward my father. Blaming him for Momma's death was wrong. Disrespecting him was wrong, too. He wasn't perfect in my eyes; but he was the only father I had. I'd already lost one parent. I didn't want to shut the other one out of my life permanently. So, while I was home for the summer after my sophomore year, I spent time with Daddy, talking about what we'd been through. We sat on the living room sofa at the house. He didn't apologize for anything he'd done. And I didn't excuse his behavior. Like two peace negotiators, we decided to focus on the things we agreed on. “What's past is over,” I said. “The bottom line is, we're family and we need to stick together.”

  He agreed. “I support everything you're doing at UCLA and I'm proud of you. But I'm the parent and you can't tell me how to live my life,” he said.

  Gradually, the gulf between us narrowed and we were able to peacefully coexist.

  By 1983, by junior year, I was focused on the upcoming Olympics. My leg muscles were rock hard, thanks to Bobby's running drills. But my overall health was only fair. For about a year, I'd endured chronic respiratory problems. I had one cold and bronchial infection after another. The condition flared up whenever I trained hard. First came the shortness of breath—a couple of times, my chest tightened up and I started wheezing as I strained to catch my breath. But after resting for a few m
inutes, the trouble subsided and I was fine.

  I'd experienced similar problems during basketball practice. But I hid it from Coach Moore by running to the back of the line or crouching down behind my teammates until I caught my breath. Knowing what a stickler she was for conditioning, I didn't want her to think I was out of shape.

  Bobby had to drive me to the student health center several times when my chest tightened up and the breathing problems became serious. The doctors there told me it was bronchitis and walking pneumonia. Bobby said there was no such thing as walking pneumonia. He kept nagging me to see a specialist.

  “These aren't ordinary colds or pneumonia or bronchitis attacks, Jackie,” he said one day on the track as I struggled to catch my breath. “I don't care what the doctors at student health say. You've got a serious respiratory problem. The same thing happens to Jeanette Bolden and she's a severe asthmatic. You need to go to a specialist and have it checked out.”

  I ignored him. I'd hated hospitals ever since my mother died. Also, I thought he was overreacting. I was an athlete in peak physical condition. How could I possibly have a severe health problem? I'd never had breathing problems or asthma attacks in high school. I ran for miles at a time with ease. Besides, I had other things to think about, like the 1984 Olympics.

  To get a taste of intense international competition, I competed in the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. I was at a distinct advantage going in because there was no pressure on me. I was an unknown. All eyes were on the East Germans and Jane Frederick, the veteran American heptathlete.

  The crumbling of the Iron Curtain was still years away. Germany was still a divided country and American athletes viewed their counterparts from the Communist state of East Germany with suspicion and frustration. The East Germans dominated swimming and many track and field events, including the women's long jump and heptathlon.

  “Just go out there, learn as much as you can and enjoy the competition,” Bobby told me on the flight to Europe. He didn't want me to get wrapped up in the pressure and mind games. “Above all, don't be intimidated by the East Germans. They do their best to psych people out and American athletes fall for that stuff all the time. Don't look at them like you're in awe of them.”

  It was good advice. I wasn't thinking about the East Germans. I was just doing my own thing, taking care of my own business. They say ignorance is bliss and for me at those World Championships, it was. I was going up against the world record holder, Ramona Neubert of East Germany, but thanks to my own naïveté and Bobby's coaching, I was treating it as just another meet. It was only my second trip abroad and my eyes were as big as saucers, taking in all the foreign sights.

  In each of the first-day events I set personal records, which means I turned in my best performance ever. After four events I was in fourth place and on pace to break the American record. Andre Phillips, Florence Griffith and Jeanette Bolden made the trip, along with Al, who was training with us. Valerie Brisco and Alice Brown, two athletes Bobby had coached at Cal State–Northridge but who hadn't transferred with him to UCLA, were also part of our group. Back at the hotel after the competition, we were all ecstatic about the way things were going for me. The hotel served the most delicious ice cream and we celebrated my success over bowls of vanilla ice cream.

  But I could feel that something was wrong the following morning. “My legs feel funny,” I told Bobby at the track during warmups. I was lying on my back with my right leg extended straight in the air. He was standing in front of me, pushing the leg back toward my head to stretch out my hamstring muscle. Al and the other athletes in our group were out, warming up and practicing.

  “Look how flexible this leg is,” he said as he continued pushing the leg back, against my resistance. “It's okay.”

  I was still worried. “No, something just feels strange.”

  As the minutes passed, the leg continued to tighten, as if someone had wrapped the area between my knee and my hip with an Ace bandage and then kept rewrapping it tighter and tighter.

  My leg just wouldn't relax, even after I warmed up and stretched some more. By the time I was ready to jump, the stiffness was bothering me. There was no pain. Just tightness. It tightened to the point that I couldn't move it freely. Jogging was difficult and I wasn't able to stretch it very much.

  I tried to forget about the leg and focus on just going full blast down the runway as I stood at the line for my first attempt. I ran down the runway as hard as I could, but before I got to the board, I felt a jolt of pain in the back of that same leg. Then it gave way. The sensation made me scream.

  I grabbed the back of my leg and stopped running. My hamstring was throbbing now and I couldn't put any pressure on my leg without feeling excruciating pain. Bobby and Al ran toward me. They slipped their shoulders under my armpits and supported me as I limped over to the first aid tent. I was crying and moaning, “Oh, it hurts … it hurts.”

  Through tears, Bobby kept saying, “I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't know.”

  Al was crying because he thought I'd seriously injured myself and because he was disappointed that I had to withdraw when things were going so well.

  The three of us were quite a sight. Brooks Johnson, the Stanford track coach, came over to us to make sure everything was okay. No one who's involved in sports likes to see an athlete go down during competition, because they always fear the worst—that the injury will be career-ending.

  Aside from bad shin splints in high school, I'd never been seriously injured. So I had no idea what was wrong. A physical therapist massaging the log-sized legs of decathlete Mark Anderson, who was laid out on a stretcher, came over and looked at my leg. He gingerly poked around the tender area and diagnosed it as a pulled hamstring. He introduced himself and said his name was Bob Forster. He started kneading the back of my leg to get the hamstring to relax and soften. It hurt each time he touched it. The pain from his poking and prodding was almost as bad as the pain shooting up and down my leg.

  Afterward, he said it wasn't a serious pull and that if I strengthened the muscle I would be okay in a few months. Eventually, Bob became my full-time physical therapist and accompanied me to every competition. Unfortunately, we'd replay that scene too many times in the years to come at major competitions.

  My withdrawal from the heptathlon marked the end of my first World Championships. It was a sad ending, but it taught us some valuable lessons about preparation. Just a few weeks before the Worlds, I'd competed in six events at the NCAA Championships to help the team rack up points and win the national championship for a second straight year. Looking back on it, Bobby said my leg was probably fatigued from that, as well as from the strain of the first day's competition.

  After my experience at the Worlds, he paced all of us better during the year. He didn't push any of his athletes too hard during the collegiate season if it might jeopardize their chances of competing at an upcoming World Championship or Olympic Games.

  Just as the Junior Olympics in Yakima had, the World Championships proved to me that I could hold my own against the best athletes. Bobby was even more optimistic, though. He estimated what he thought I could score in each event at the Olympics if I maintained my pace of workouts and steered clear of injuries. One morning before practice, he handed me a sheet of paper from his clipboard showing the calculations.

  The big number circled at the bottom was 7,000! My eyes practically jumped out of my head when I saw it. No woman had ever scored 7,000 points in a heptathlon. It was unheard of. The world record at the time was 6,836. I was scoring in the 6,200- to 6,400-point range on a good day. I wasn't sure I could add another 700 points to that in a year's time.

  Strategizing for the heptathlon is a complicated process. The judges set performance standards in each event and assign points to those standards. I earn points by meeting the standard, and extra points by exceeding it. The better I perform, the more points I earn.

  The first phase of strategy involves accurately estimatin
g how I'll do against the standard in each event and calculating the points I'll earn, taking into account my strengths and weaknesses in each event, as well as fatigue and weather conditions.

  Second, I have to at least consider what my competitors' point totals will be to assess how the rest of the field will stack up. I have to set targets in each event that will allow me to get more total points than all the others. From there, I go to the track and try to make it all come together.

  The way Bobby figured it, I had the ability to run the hurdles in less than 13 seconds. “I don't see how that's possible, considering that I'm running 14.6 now,” I said, pointing to the number at the top of the column of figures.

  My best high jump was 5′ 8″ but Bobby saw me going 6′ 0″, 6′ 1″ or even as high as 6′ 6″. I pointed to that number and shook my head in disbelief.

  “You haven't gotten close to your potential in that event because your technique is so bad,” Bobby said confidently. “When we correct it, you'll be jumping 6 feet easily.”

  Before I could question the rest of his figures, he said, “The same is true for the hurdles, javelin and shot put.”

  Then he launched into a detailed description of what I was doing wrong in each event and how much minor corrections would improve my results and how that translated into points. By the time he finished breaking it down for me, my head was spinning. It was difficult to imagine. Yet, I was starting to believe I could do it. I wanted to go for it.

  I took the 1983–84 school year off to concentrate on the Olympics. My day began at 8:00 A.M., when I left my apartment in Culver City and hopped on the Venice Boulevard bus and took it to Sepulveda Boulevard, a long thoroughfare running north and south alongside the 405/San Diego Freeway. Bobby wanted me to jog to UCLA each morning to our sessions. From the bus stop on Sepulveda, I had to run the four to five miles to the UCLA campus in less than thirty minutes. For a while it took thirty-five minutes. After a couple of weeks, I shaved it down to thirty-two. The morning I ran it in twenty-eight minutes I felt like celebrating. It was a tough route; I dodged traffic, waited at stoplights and inhaled exhaust fumes while I ran uphill and down. Getting the time down was significant. It was a signal to me that I would be stronger and faster in the 800 meters, the event that might determine whether I got a spot on the team.