First They Drag, Then They Brag

SACRAMENTO — I believed I wanted to see Jackie Joyner-Kersee compete again, just like I believed I wanted to see Orel Hershiser pitch again for the Dodgers.

In retrospect, I was wrong on both counts.

I don’t necessarily blame myself. To have believed otherwise would have forced me--prematurely, of course--to confront my own aging, even my own mortality. I didn’t become a sportswriter to do that.

You know what I really wanted?

I wanted to see Hershiser pitch again like he did in 1988. I wanted to see Joyner-Kersee compete again like she did in 1988, when she won Olympic gold medals in Seoul in the heptathlon and long jump.

I would have even settled to see her compete again like she did 10 years later, in 1998, at the Goodwill Games in New York. That was at what we presumed was the end of her brilliant career, after she had competed in four Olympics and won six medals, three golds, and set numerous world and American records.

Although she would compete again a week later in a hastily arranged farewell meet not far from her East St. Louis hometown, the Goodwill Games would be, she said, her final international competition. Fittingly, she gutted out the last--and her least-favorite--event of the seven in the heptathlon, the 800 meters, to win. Bob Kersee, her coach and husband, cried. She would have, she said, but she was too tired.

“Two years ago,” Kersee said Thursday, “was the right time to retire.”

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At 7:38 p.m. Friday, Joyner-Kersee, 38, stood at the head of the runway on the Hornet Field track at Cal State Sacramento and prepared to make her first competitive long jump since July 1998.

What was she doing out there?

The short answer is that she was attempting to qualify for the final in the women’s long jump at the Olympic track and field trials. She accomplished that, though not easily, and will compete Sunday against Marion Jones, Dawn Burrell and nine others Sunday for three U.S. berths in Sydney, Australia. Joyner-Kersee’s best jump was her third and final one, 20 feet 0 3/4 inches. That’s more than 4 1/2 feet short of her American record of 24-7 and a foot shorter than she jumped two years ago.

Here’s a better question:

What was she doing out there?

Knowing her, I’m sure she has been asking herself that question since March. One day that month she was loosening up, getting ready for her usual light workout, at the track near her home in St. Louis where Kersee was supervising conditioning drills for several NFL players.

Kersee asked if she would like to do a more serious workout, like she used to at the UCLA track when she competed.

She asked him if he was crazy.

After 14 years of marriage, it’s incredible that she still had to ask.

Not long after, about the same time that Hershiser shipped himself out to San Bernardino to find his control, the rumor began to spread that Joyner-Kersee was considering returning to competition. No one seemed sure, not even Joyner-Kersee, because it was also about that same time that she quit.

“You don’t need this,” Kersee said one day when his wife found the training especially frustrating.

“You’re right,” she said, walking away.

Apparently, she did need it because she came back, although she said as recently as late Thursday afternoon during a news conference here to announce her entry into the long jump competition that she was not making a comeback.

“Then what do you call it?” she was asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

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Joyner-Kersee, after learning Friday night that she had finished eighth among 26 jumpers to earn one of 12 berths in Sunday’s final, said she was relieved. Everyone who knew her was. Not even her competitors wanted to see her embarrass herself.

“We were all cheering for her,” Jones said.

It was only three years ago that Jones, 21 at the time, said she had never feared any foe until she met Joyner-Kersee in a long jump competition. Today, she is not so much feared as patronized.

That doesn’t mean that she’s no threat here. That says less about her, though, than it does the quality of her competition. No one here Friday jumped farther than 21-8.

“There’s one story here,” Kersee said. “Can Jackie at age 38 make the Olympic team? Beating Marion, beating Dawn, that’s not what we’re here for.”

That’s fine.

It’s just not Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

The Joyner-Kersee I remember was not about making the team. She was about beating Marion and Dawn and Heike Drechsler and anyone else in her path. This is the woman who set her first world record in the heptathlon in July 1986 in Moscow, then came back one month later in the oppressive, sweltering heat of Houston to break it again. Immensely talented, she also was the bulldog of her sport.

Having said that, I wish her well. She’s one of the most generous, most unaffected athletes I’ve ever met, and I was reminded of that Friday night when she asked her young niece, the late Florence Griffith Joyner’s daughter, Mary, to join her at the head table in the interview room.

It’s just that Kersee was right. Two years ago was the right time for his wife to retire. I prefer to remember her as the master of the house.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].