Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Early on a June morning, 6-year-olds in yellow T-shirts are running fast as they can across the smooth green lawns of the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center, tugging kites behind them, hoping they'll soar.
"Jackie's here almost every day if she's in town," the center's executive director, Lecia Rives, tells me. Squinting, she scans the grounds, trying to see where Joyner-Kersee is at the moment, and my palms start to sweat. A nonexistent illness got me out of P.E. for a solid year in high school. That was the year Jackie Joyner captained her high-school volleyball team, starred in basketball and track, and started refining the raw talent that would lead Sports Illustrated to pronounce her "Female Athlete of the 20th Century." I'm supposed to interview this woman?
I gulp: I've just caught sight of her.
And then I relax.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee is dribbling a kickball, her leg pointed out, hand on hip. "On our team we need some pep!" she yells to a group of purple-shirted 12-year-olds. Her lean, lithe 5-foot-10 body bends double as she cracks up at one of the kids' jokes. When a boy kicks and his shoe flies up in the air with the ball, she lets out a delighted whoop.
The teams switch places, and she hugs the first girl who's up to kick — but in a relaxed way, not a you-gotta-score way. "OK, y'all got to cheer each other," Joyner-Kersee calls. Her long, thin arms circle like windmill blades as she waves the runners in. When the coach and program director argue good-naturedly, she waits, relaxed, with no need to chime in. There's none of that sucking gravitational pull you feel in the presence of self-conscious greatness. Joyner-Kersee's tickled just to be on the team, and the kids don't even seem to register who's playing with them; their adoration's uncomplicated.
I stop worrying about memorizing her stats. Clearly, this place is her story now. But how could a born competitor land so contentedly, so far from a finish line?
"OK, line up and shake hands," she calls at the game's end. Then, in swift response to an overheard mutter: "Everybody listen up: I don't want to hear nobody talking about 'This sucks.'" A summary of sportsmanship follows, eloquent as Walt Whitman. Then she takes two of the little yellow-shirted guys by the hand and leads the parade into the air-conditioned center.
At the entrance, she frowns and turns to Rives. "Tell them to get 'Kersee' on there." I peer at the food-service flyer, hand-labeled "Jackie Joyner Girls and Boys Club." Whoa, I think. A bit controlling?
"We're going to have a quiz about Jackie," program director Barry Malloyd informs the summer-campers as they settle into the lounge, still immaculate, eight years after the center's opening. Ah well, some ego was inevitable, I tell myself. This place was her dream.
Every afternoon after school, she used to drag her two sisters to the Mary E. Brown Community Center. When she came home from college and found out the center had closed, she vowed she'd find a way to give kids in East St. Louis what she'd had: a safe place to play, learn the rules and hang out with adults who could give them hope.
I watch her face closely as the kids read the multiple-choice questions and guess all the wrong answers.
"Piggott! Right here!" Malloyd yells when they can't name the East St. Louis street where her family lived. "She grew up on wicked Piggott, baby!" When they miss the classic St. Louis question — her high school — he yells even louder, "Lincoln! And she didn't just go to high school, she graduated from high school!"
"What scholarship did she get for college?" No takers. "Basketball! Y'know how you all been trying to shoot hoops in the gym? Jackie was All-Star. She can slam-dunk. And how many Olympic medals did she win for track and field?" Rives recites the list under her breath: "Silver in '84, two gold in '88, gold and bronze in '92, bronze in '96."
"In what Olympic event does Jackie currently hold the world record?" Malloyd calls. A hand shoots up, and a boy says eagerly, "The spectaculon?"
Joyner-Kersee has been chuckling through the entire session, and at this, she doubles up. "That wasn't even one of the options!"
"The heptathlon," Malloyd shouts, but he's laughing too.
Finally, Joyner-Kersee walks to the middle of the room: "Now listen up. It's good to learn what I did athletically, but there's no way I could have traveled the world if I didn't have an education. You become a better student, you become a better person, and you can do whatever you want to do in life."
Nice endnote — but she's not through. "If you get a nasty attitude or you always think somebody's cheating you, you gotta find a way to get over it," she says, suddenly stern. "It's hard for everyone. It's hard for me. But no one can take away knowledge that you have in your head."
Following her out of the lobby, I realize I was wrong. That quiz wasn't self-indulgent at all.
She stops outside the center's gleaming gym and peers through the glass door. Senior adults are starting an exercise class. "They gonna do the cha-cha-cha?" she asks wistfully.
"Dance class is tomorrow," Rives says, steering her toward the office and asking about a luncheon menu. Joyner-Kersee suggests adding fruit, "but only if people want it, 'cause I don't want it to go to waste."
The news will break in August: The center's broke. In 2006 it ran at a deficit of nearly $1 million, and the 2007 figures don't promise to be any better. Last May, the last of the endowment went to pay loan debt. Joyner-Kersee and her husband, Bobby Kersee, have been keeping the place going with huge chunks of their own income, unwilling to cut back on programming (much of it covered by grants) and sure that any day now, enough donations would come in to cover the $1.5 million or so in annual operating expenses. That hasn't happened, and now they're making painful cuts.
If donations continue to decrease, will the center close?
"That's never crossed my mind," Joyner-Kersee says firmly.
When Jackie was born — March 3, 1962 — her grandmother said to name her for Jacqueline Kennedy, predicting, "She'll be the first lady of something."
Jackie wanted it to be the stage. Urged to take dance classes because she was so clumsy, she fantasized about Broadway, standing in front of the big mirror in her parents' room for hours in the hope that talent scouts had put a hidden camera there.
When nobody called, she turned to track — and became Sports Illustrated for Women's Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century.
The eventual accolades didn't surprise her father: Born in a different time and place, Al Joyner could have made the NFL draft or won his own Olympic medals for hurdling. But his teenage wife, Mary Joyner, had her own priorities for Jackie: Be a young lady, be an A student and respect your elders.
"The thing called sports? Didn't make any difference," recalls Nino Fennoy, who went to school with Al and coached his daughter from age 9 through high school. "That kept Jackie grounded."
As grounded as a kid can be when she's gonna long jump 17 feet by age 15. Fennoy's first impression was "her smile. Her affability. She was carefree, eyes shinin', questioning everything. 'What are we gonna do?' Attentiveness. It'd be 93 degrees, we'd be on a rough, dusty football field, and she'd say, 'We gonna do another lap?'"
Her classmate Keith Ward ran track, too: "Both of us were terrible," he says, laughing. "And Jackie joked around so much, she'd have to run reverse laps so she couldn't talk to the rest of us."
She'd dropped her Broadway dream like a lit match, the day she was told her dance teacher had been involved with drugs and shot during a deal. She ran, but not well. Then one day she watched another girl doing long jumps, and something seized her.
She drafted her sisters to help her drag potato-chip bags of sand from the park to their backyard. There she made her own (no doubt too shallow) sand pit and started practicing, and the future was written.
Granted, she lived in East St. Louis, a city better known for breeding violence than nurturing champions. She remembers being eager to see the corpse when somebody got murdered; she remembers a tavern owner writing her killer's name in blood before she died. But the Joyner home was an island: "Her father commanded respect," Fennoy says. "It's not like you were going to come into Al Joyner's space with the nonsense."
At Lincoln High, Jackie started dreaming about the Olympics. Her family had nicknamed her Joker, because she made up stories to keep from getting bored — but she was dead serious about discipline. She urged her brother, Al, who had their father's easy charisma and athletic prowess, to work harder. He blew her off for years — but by the time she was ready to push for the Olympic trials, he was right there with her.
First, though, came a loss she'd never imagined. In Jackie's freshman year at UCLA, she spent most of her time convincing her mother (and herself) that she wasn't homesick. She'd talk about the beautiful weather, the huge campus, how she loved her teammates, how she'd be too busy to come home until spring — because she knew her parents couldn't afford a flight at Christmas. One night in January, she called her mom around midnight, all pumped up: "We'd just beat Long Beach State in basketball, and they were number three or four in the country," she recalls. "She was excited for me, but I could tell she was struggling to be upbeat. She said she wasn't feeling well; she thought it was her sinuses."
The next morning Joyner's phone rang: Her 37-year-old mother was in a coma, brain-dead. She'd been stricken by the worst form of meningitis. Jackie and Al flew home. Their father couldn't make the decision, so they had to tell the hospital to pull the plug.
Jackie went back to college feeling utterly alone. "You think your mom's going to live forever," she says, "and suddenly the one person you could tell anything to is no longer there. You keep thinking, 'Who do I trust?'"
It would be oversimplifying to suggest, as most stories about Joyner-Kersee do, that young UCLA coach Bobby Kersee swooped in, and in her grief and loss, she fell head over heels in love with him. "Bobby was a stranger!" she exclaims. "He was a coach. He just said, 'If there's any time you need to talk ...' Coach Fennoy had always cared about us as human beings, and it was the same way with Bobby.
"Besides, I was scared of him."
Kersee, already famously tough, wasn't Joyner's coach — but he'd noticed her ability. He'd also lost his own mother at 14. So after offering his sympathy, he asked Joyner who was going to the nationals with her.
"They're sending me by myself."
Shocked, he went with her. And that night he knocked on her hotel door, drew her into the hallway and, right there ... analyzed her long jumps. "You're jumping 6 feet to clear 5-8," he informed her. "You're wasting energy."
It was hardly a romantic interlude. Or on second thought, maybe it was: When it came to what mattered most to her, he knew her better than she knew herself.
In Los Angeles in 1984, Al Joyner scored so well in the triple jump, he looked like a sure gold-medal winner. Then he risked it all, broke the rules and, for the first time in Olympic history, ran alongside another contestant, cheering his baby sister through the pain of the heptathlon.
Forgiven by the judges, Al won the gold, and Jackie, despite a pulled hamstring, won the silver. Fennoy was in the crowd watching, "the way a father would watch his daughter graduate from high school. You swell, you want to cry, you want her to hear your voice in the 100,000 people so you get closer. I went all the way down to the barrier."
Did she hear his voice?
"Yeah, she heard me, but she didn't turn around. She did what she's always been taught: When you are in the competitive arena, you pay attention to your event." He smiles wryly, his eyes miles away. "It was heartwrenching."
By then, Joyner was even more intensely focused than her new coach, Kersee — who was more intensely focused than most mortals. But she was never petty or surly — not even with the East Germans who walked in front of her mark right before she was ready to jump. "I don't have to hate people to want to beat them," she says. "Me not speaking to you is not going to make me run any faster or slower."
Her improvements happened at practice, working with her coach. By the summer of 1985, Kersee had discarded a series of girlfriends who didn't understand him the way Joyner did.
"I told her I wanted to get married," he recalls. "She said I'd make a good husband. I said, 'I don't think you're getting this. I think I'd like to marry you.'"
They wed in January 1986, but he told her she couldn't take his name until she set a world record. She did so that July, at the Goodwill Games. They focused even harder on her timing and rhythm. Joyner-Kersee had a rare ability to take her husband's analytical, highly cerebral, minutely detailed suggestions and instantly express them with her body.
Two years later, she won the gold.
You'd think her best moment would have been winning that first Olympic gold medal in Seoul in 1988. Or her second gold five days later. Or her third, in Barcelona in 1992. But those medals' sweetness seems a little flat, like warm Coke, compared to the fizz in her voice when she talks about winning the bronze in Atlanta in 1996.
Because two days earlier, she'd quit.
Running the first event of the heptathlon with an already injured hamstring, she'd pulled it severely. Kersee leaped over the barricades, breaking the rules just the way her brother had 12 years earlier. "Nobody stopped him; everybody loved her, and they understood," says Fennoy. "But they thought he was going to encourage her, and instead, he told her to withdraw. That was the husband coming out."
"The whole world was watching," recalls Sonja Steptoe, a former Sports Illustrated reporter who later helped Joyner-Kersee write her autobiography, A Kind of Grace. "You're crying with her as she's sobbing, and Bobby's crying, too, and you can hear him saying, 'Jackie, I'm not going to let you do this.'"
President Bill Clinton called Joyner-Kersee at 11 p.m. to say she'd made the right decision, saving her strength for the long jump. Two days later, when she stood at the starting line with a hamstring still tight enough to pluck, she took a deep breath and told herself she was going for the gold. That, she insists, is what won her the bronze; if she'd set her sights lower, knowing what kind of shape her leg was in, she wouldn't have placed at all.
"Ironically, it was that performance that cemented her place in the world's consciousness as a champion," Steptoe says. "That was the moment when she finally felt loved and respected and cherished."
It's hard to imagine Joyner-Kersee ever not feeling the rush of celebrity, once she started breaking records. But Steptoe's biggest realization was "how very sensitive she was to feeling that she wasn't respected for all she had accomplished. It's not that Jackie is filled with hubris; quite the contrary. She's lunch-pail, she gets out there and does the hard work. But in the world of big-time sports, honor has more to do with hype and marketing and self-promotion and flash.
"If you'll recall, during the time that she was breaking world records at a regular clip, there were others who were getting worldwide acclaim without her long record of success," Steptoe continues. "They had flash and sizzle, and they were everywhere. Jackie just cannot do self-promotion; it's not in her DNA. There's none of the diva act. And that's the other thing — women's track? Full of divas."
Joyner-Kersee's big event was the heptathlon: 100-meter hurdles, high jump, long jump, shot put, javelin and 200- and 800-meter races. "The others would fly down the track at one sprint event and grab the glamour, and there she was trudging away on the fifth event, her hair all over the place, sweating off her makeup," Steptoe laughs. "She was not the darling of the mainstream press."
Not only was Joyner-Kersee plain-Jane, but she was too good to be plausible. "There were those who said, 'There must have been drugs at work here,'" Steptoe recalls, "and in so many words, they would write that stuff. And she kept getting randomly tested, and she never failed one test."
Exercise-induced asthma. Exercise-induced asthma. In a woman who ran uphill for conditioning and sprinted ten 40-meters in 63 seconds and competed in every kind of climate, sometimes running with a mask over her mouth.
In 1981, she was misdiagnosed with bronchitis and then mononucleosis. "Senior year it was wet and damp; I couldn't run, couldn't breathe. The doctor said, 'You're wheezing,' and I said, 'No I'm not, that's just how I breathe.'"
At 25, she nearly died from an attack. "It was so bad I couldn't walk, and my fingernails had turned blue. They tried to put me in the ambulance, and I started panicking, screaming, 'No!' Everything closes in on you." At the hospital she tried to go back to breezy denial. "My doctor threatened to put me on the psych floor because he said I was crazy."
Then there were all those hamstring injuries, I say.
"If you really think about it, I didn't have a lot of injuries," she flashes back, defensive for the first time. "It's just, the injuries I had happened at the most prominent moments."
She says the theme of her life is "about being challenged" — not overcoming challenges, the triumphant athlete cliché, but simply being challenged. "Losing my mom. Trying to be the best I could be. Trying to reopen the Mary Brown Center."
In the first half of her life, those challenges came fast and hard. She stopped crying, kept breathing, won the gold, passed the steroid tests, raised the money. Today, her life's less intense — and more frustrating.
"Fundraising for the center, going out to meet people, you don't have a sense of what direction they're going to go in," she says. "Athletically, I prepared myself, I executed and I knew what the end results were going to be. In this scenario, you are dealing with other people's lives and hoping people have your passion."
They rarely do. It took dire straits for Joyner-Kersee to go public, during the summer Olympics coverage, about the center's financial crisis — and contributions didn't exactly roll in. "It's hard for Jackie to understand," Kersee says. "She feels like people are turning their backs."
Her childhood friend Keith Ward, who's now on the center's board, remembers the day he saw the place for the first time. "I couldn't believe this was in East St. Louis," he says. "She told me, 'This is my Olympics now. I will run this race for the rest of my life.'"
This August, it happened again. A lithe young woman from East St. Louis, humble and hard-working, survivor of knee surgeries and other ailments, surprised the world and took the gold in the 100-meter hurdles.
Dawn Harper's first inspiration? Jackie Joyner-Kersee, whom she met at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center when she was 12. First coach? Fennoy in East St. Louis. Mentor? Kersee at UCLA.
Joyner-Kersee had intended to be in the crowd in Beijing, but a clinic that would have paid her way was cancelled at the last minute. She stayed home for the center's sake, did some fundraising and sat by the phone, telling herself it was "a lot easier than sitting in the stands covering your face peeking through your fingers trying to see."
When Harper took the gold, Kersee was outside the Olympic arena on the practice field, watching on the big-screen TV so he could see the replays better. "When she hit the line, I just let out a yell. It was such an Olympic story. She wasn't even expected to make the team." He pauses. "A lot of the athletes I have recruited from East St. Louis are just good individuals: hard workers, very respectful, very easy to coach."
How to ask this tactfully — is it because they've grown up poor? "No," he says bluntly. "It's Jackie. It's the center. A lot of athletes' attitude comes from their parents and coaches — the parents hoping their kid turns pro and buys them a house; the coaches not being willing to discipline an athlete and jeopardize a win.
"Develop your character first, and your sport will follow."
Comedian Bill Cosby has known Jackie and Bobby for years. He says, with none of his usual flippancy, "Jackie Joyner-Kersee is perfect. A perfect 10 as an individual, human being and athlete — and then as a family person and friend."
To describe her athletic gifts, Fennoy says, "The only visual comparisons are the Michael Jordans — he plays basketball like Jackie competes in track and field. Tiger Woods on one knee wins the U.S. Open. It's some fire, something deep inside of them. They know something about themselves that the general population has not come in contact with."
Jordan and Joyner-Kersee sense it in each other, maybe. She flew to Chicago when he opened his youth center. Early on the morning of the celebration, she was having her hair done when someone knocked on the hotel room door. "Michael comes in the room, and her face just lights up," Steptoe recalls. "Those two just love each other. I'm there with Bobby, and he says, 'Oh, look at this.'"
The Kersees' marriage can handle a crush; they've forged a bond that crosses all categories. When Kersee was only her coach, for example, Joyner obeyed him faithfully. When he became her husband, she pushed back a bit, because no husband was going to tell her what to do.
"The transition was harder for Jackie than it was for me," Kersee says, sounding amused. "We had a little fixer-upper house in Long Beach, and one day I was trying to teach Jackie about tools. I'm fixing a sink, gunk's coming down on my face, and she's sitting there talking to me about the penultimate stride in the long jump."
Gradually they eased into a new relationship; now she jokes about the remnants of the old one: "Even when I just want to go out and get a regular workout, he wants to coach me like I'm training for the heptathlon! I don't want to run no 600!"
He loves to travel; her idea of a vacation is to stay home, clean house and scarf Old Vienna barbecue potato chips. She loves getting dressed up for a party and bubbles with conversation; he wears the same tux every time and speaks as few words as possible. But Joyner-Kersee understands, as most wives wouldn't, why her husband has to spend so much time in L.A. training young athletes. "I know what it means to have your coach there," she says simply. "You can't do it by fax." She's sick of all her travel, for the sponsorships and speaking engagements that are keeping the center afloat, but she still flies out to be with him, and he calls on her to give young athletes what he can't. "Michelle injured her leg — will you talk to her and let her know it's going to be OK?" he might ask. "I can coach them, but you have lived it."
"People think I'm shy. I'm very outgoing," Joyner-Kersee protests. Steptoe suggests "reserved": "She waits for people to come to her on their own terms. But once she gets to knows you, you are just enveloped. I've heard her on the phone with girlfriends from her college days, and they just scream and cackle, laughing about everything. Then she speaks at the Women's Sports Foundation, and it's all very prim and proper."
Prim and proper started when she was a little girl, watching her mother slip on immaculate white cotton gloves and pin a hat in place. Fennoy, deeply respectful of the "little women" he coached, also urged deportment. Kersee continued the message.
"Bobby taught us about being ladies, how we carry ourselves, the company we keep," she recalls. "For some reason as athletes you felt like the more rugged you looked, the tougher you looked. He said, 'Comb your hair.' And all those things you didn't think mattered did matter, as you started to progress. You got a TV interview now, go put some clothes on."
At Lincoln High, jocks like Jackie were shunned by the debutante crowd — but she yearned for glamour. Now she's the one putting on long gowns and twisting her hair up in elaborate French rolls. When she and Kersee moved into their Ballwin house, her Barbie dolls got their own room. Her trophies, which until then she'd refused to display at all, went downstairs in Kersee's game room. She had a field day decorating. "At one point I had all mauve" — she snickers at herself — "carpeting, but I ripped it up and put wood floors down. Better for the asthma."
Asthma also inspired a new ambition (and potential revenue source): her own clothing line. "I'd been working on this sports bra," she confides, "because I always needed a pocket in my bra for my rescue inhaler. People who don't have asthma, they don't understand when you can't breathe." Turns out she also designed the crisp red-and-white baseball jersey she wore to play kickball.
What would she do for evening? "Hmm. I like body-conscious things, but not painted on. Fitted here and then flared out," she says, smoothing her hands from waist to hip. "Something with a lot of pastel colors, chiffon so when you walk, it flows. And I've always liked the princess look, too." She starts cracking up. "Maybe a tiara."
"Jackie's at peace with being out of the limelight," Steptoe observes. "Some athletes cannot let go of it. But she's perfectly fine — happy, content, fulfilled."
Joyner-Kersee shrugs. "Athletics is just athletics. Some people get lost in their own clippings."
If anything, she errs on the opposite side of arrogance. Steptoe thinks "her skin might be a little too thin" — and she spreads herself too thin, too. "It grows out of this need to please. It's 'I can do that!' Maybe it comes from being afraid that if she says no, people won't ask again. Because this is what she worked so hard for, and after growing up with so little and dreaming so hard, to have achieved it! For a black woman her age! You can't turn anything down."
Actually, she did turn down Dancing With the Stars. "She's still clumsy," Ward chuckles. "If you put on a song, her fingers are poppin' to one beat and her step to another. And she'll just be walking, and she will fall. She'll do a line dance, but a waltz? Oh, no no no no no no."
"She's constantly talking about being embarrassed," Steptoe says. "'Did I say that OK?' 'Was that done right?' She prepares for everything she does, feels responsible for everything she's involved in."
And she does it all ... except raise kids. "I wanted them, and time just went by," she says, "and I thought, 'OK, I'm not going to have kids.'"
Fennoy chuckles. He swears she'd have 'em, if there were a physical alternative to labor. "Jackie doesn't like pain!"
"Well, after the asthma and the workouts and the injuries ..." I start to say.
"Nah, even before all that stuff. In high school, she broke her arm spiking a volleyball, and you could have heard her half a mile away."
To save money, Kersee's had to drop 15 or 20 boys from the center's football program. "That's 15 or 20 kids on the street," he adds grimly. "This is about more than football."
When the kids took the quiz this summer, Malloyd's last question was "How many children do Jackie have?" They yelled various numbers, but the right answer was the first choice on their handout: "Too many to count."
"You're all my children," she informed them afterward. Some of the boys looked away, shrugging it off; the older girls glowed. The conversation moved on to academics, strength of character, the forthcoming treats and how snacks did not mean trash on the floor. Later, Malloyd said, "OK, tell me something you didn't know before you took the quiz."
A little girl's hand shot up like a flare.
"That we were all her kids," she said, her voice as loud as it'd go.
I type the quote but delete it immediately — too schmaltzy. I stare at the screen for a minute, then undo the deletion. It's true.
