No Limit to What He Can Do

By Tom Callahan

What he does is so simple, and how he does it so complicated, that Carl Lewis is a basic mystery. How fast he runs, how far he jumps, may serve to establish the precise lengths to which men can go. Gentler than a superman, more delicate than the common perception of a strong man, Lewis is physically the most advanced human being in the world, and about to become the most famous global sports figure since Muhammad Ali.

At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, 48 years after Jesse Owens won gold medals in the long jump, the 100, the 200 and the relay, Lewis is favored in the same four events. Amid the bedlam of track's athletic circus, only he makes everything else come to a stop. His body is hard, like mahogany, but carved in unusually clear detail, including ropelike muscular definition. He is full-faced, rather babyfaced, but otherwise trim: 6 ft. 2 in., 173 Ibs. As a 100-meter sprinter, Lewis has registered the third-fastest time ever, 9.97 sec. In the 200 he is the second-fastest man in history and gaining. He holds the long-jump record indoors. Among the ten best jumps outdoors, nine are his. And he is far from finished. "There are going to be some absolutely unheard of things coming from me," he says.

Lewis talks of his running in much the same manner as baseball's Reggie Jackson, who refers to himself in the third person proper. "When I run like Carl Lewis," Lewis says, "relaxed, smooth, easy, I can run races that seem effortless to me and to those watching." But he would have them know it is not effortless. "Everyone thinks it just happened one day, that the earth opened up and out came Carl Lewis. Everyone acts like I just stepped on the track and I was No. 1."

His life may be found too ordinary for his glory: born 23 years ago in Birmingham, he was raised in Willingboro, N.J., and trained in Houston. Where Lewis is a standard of physical strength, Jesse Owens was a symbol of human struggle, against not only poverty and bigotry but tyranny as well. Owens' father was a sharecropper, his grandfather a slave. Carl's father and mother coach track. "Jesse was the greatest thing to me other than life's breath," says Bill Lewis, a fit and handsome man in a cowboy hat, who prizes a photograph of Owens posing with ten-year-old Carl and a cousin. Visiting a small meet, Owens told young Lewis to have fun, advice Carl has use for now.

Bill and Evelyn Lewis met at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute: he was a sprinter, she a hurdler, both of them long jumpers. Evelyn, especially, loved floating in free flight. With slim legs tucked tightly under her in the fashion of the day, she sailed over 19 ft. at college and was bound for the Helsinki Games in 1952 until a hurdle injury interfered. Evelyn had to stop competing at 20, and all these years later, some incomplete feelings linger. There are no spectators in the Lewis family, but the varied athletic directions of the children suggest a reasonable tolerance for individuality. Mackie, 30, enjoyed track, football, baseball, almost all games in season. Cleve, 28, played soccer at Brandeis University, even professionally for a time. The third son, Frederick Carlton Lewis, was slower in developing distinctive tastes and style, and just plain slower in developing. Though he is more than two years older than Kid Sister Carol, she quickly shot past him in height and bearing. Pointing to the indisputable calibrations of an upstairs door jamb, she assigned him the nickname "Shorty."

When Bob Beamon long-jumped 29 ft. 2 1/2 in. at Mexico City in 1968, and people said that nobody alive would ever break this record, Carl Lewis was seven. No one had ever jumped 28 ft. before, and Beamon would never manage even 27 ft. again. Whatever it is that allows mothers to lift automobiles to save their babies launched him nearly 2 ft. beyond the record. "But it's impossible. I can't believe it," he said, sliding to his knees. "It's madness, I tell you. I'm going to be sick."

If Lewis heard of Beamon's jump then, it was not until Carl had turned ten that he took exact measure of the distance in his front yard, and thought, "This doesn't make sense. How could a human being do this?" He meant to find out. By 16, Lewis had old headlines pasted up on his bedroom wall, amended with his own name: CARL LEWIS, KING OF THE 27-FT. JUMPERS. From the age of two, he had grown up in Willingboro, where his parents had moved to avoid desegregation troubles in Birmingham and to pursue graduate studies and teaching jobs. Young Carl and Carol were the only ones with no memory of Alabama.

As disparate as their personalities and interests would always be, each furnished the fundamental relationship in the other's childhood and young adulthood from the days when the long-jump pit of Evelyn's team served as their sandbox. There might have been no Carl without Carol. In high school she was a force, a varsity diver and gymnast who played recreation-league softball, ran track, waved pom-poms and wished she could do more. Carl attempted hail-fellow sports like baseball, but as a coach of that period remembers, "he was always picking daisies in centerfield." For Lewis, track became a comfort station, a self-sufficient arena where the contestants are allowed to be withdrawn. "I was never a fighter when I was young," he says. "I was shy, so I always found another way of getting around a tough situation. I stayed calm."

Typically, the bubbling girl who also played piano, French horn and violin turned her scattergun full bore on track and field, and won a national junior pentathlon. Meanwhile, the shy boy who played the cello gravitated to the feats that involved no props, just a quiet self. By 3 in. on the door jamb (6 ft. 2 in. to 5 ft. 11 in.) and 2 yds. in the sand pit, Carl eventually passed Carol but never left her behind.

Lewis has never been a wild person or talent: he is as calculated as the parabolic geometry of long jumping. While a high school senior, he broke the nation's prep long-jump record three times, achieving 26 ft., a foot and a half past his contemporaries. Having spent the quota of free trips in the college recruiting process, he paid his own way to the University of Houston, where Track Coach Tom Tellez was said to dabble in physics.

Tellez admired almost everything he saw in Lewis, but his curiosity most of all. The coach continues to regard him as a private testing ground, even though academic deficiencies during Lewis' sophomore year have made his position on the Houston track team unofficial. He did not enroll for his senior year last fall, though he continues to work out with the Cougars while also representing Joe Douglas' Santa Monica (Calif.) Track Club.

Perhaps some academic credit should have been arranged for the research project Tellez and Lewis make of sprinting and long jumping. In British Runner Harold Abrahams' day, 60 years ago, a 100-meter racer concentrated on the report of the pistol and the texture of the tape. "When you hear the one," his coach advised, "just run like hell until you break the other." Now it is a science inspiring biomechanical studies and employing stop-action film. In a list that takes longer to read than the race does to be run, Tellez breaks down the factors by percentage of importance: reaction time out of the blocks 1%, clearing the blocks 5%, efficient acceleration 64%, maintaining maximum speed 18%, limiting deceleration 12%. As Lewis likes to say, "Everybody decelerates from about 60 meters to the finish line--everybody." But he least of all.

Long jumping appears to owe even more to slide rules. There is a 2-to-1 ratio of horizontal to vertical velocity. The center of gravity forms around a jumper's hips. Once he leaves the ground, no amount of arm spinning or leg kicking can undo what has been set in motion. Says Tellez: "One reason Carl is so good is that he has the speed, but he also has an understanding." Pounding down the runway at 8 ft. per stride, 28 ft. per sec., 19 m.p.h., he has the same ambition as any kind of racer: maximum controllable speed. "It's controlled but uncontrolled," Tellez says. "It's on the edge." Lewis starts 171 ft. from the takeoff board, a distance enabling him to generate a speed few can control. On the next to last stride, the 22nd for Lewis, he turns into a jumper, straightens up and lowers his center of gravity. As he leaves that longest step, his hips begin to rise. Defying the human tendency to hold back, he ought not to be slowing down as he runs in midair. Performing two hitch kicks (Owens used one), Lewis stands tin-soldierly at the height of his jump, elbows crooked at right angles. He may flap a little, but just for balance.

"I say to myself, 'Stay relaxed.' It's a funny feeling because the only thing I really recognize when I'm on a jump is when I touch the board and when I land. In the air it goes so fast I really don't feel it. It's like boom, click, click, land. I don't feel the movements of the jump. I don't feel the action involved. Sometimes I even have to ask Coach Tellez, 'Did I do it good?' " Landing, he should swing his arms forward and back, extending his left leg and then his right straight before him. Usually the arms remain out in front, but if he could bring them behind on the splashdown, it might extend the jump 3 in. He is only 4 1/4 in. behind Beamon.

The Lewis streak of long-jump victories stands at 36, but he is not unanimously cheered. Last year at Indianapolis, not waiting until he crossed the finish line to celebrate the first triple victory (the 100,200 and long jump) at a national outdoors championship in this century, Lewis held up his arms and began to catch complaints. He is something of a showboat. "A little humility is in order," soft-spoken Hurdler Edwin Moses, undefeated in 102 races, has observed. Criticism from inside the sport wounds Lewis, and the scrutiny of the press worries him. "People are trying to say that I'm two different personalities, that I wear two masks. Outside the house, friendly and happy. Inside, cold, calculating, even evil. Sometimes I find this world baffling." His remedies for worldly tensions have included silent meditation sessions with Guru Sri Chinmoy and, more devoutly, a budding ministry with an athletic evangelical association called the Lay Witnesses for Christ. "It helped me to realize that I have a God-given talent." As for that day in Indianapolis when he may have tossed away a 200-meter world record by raising his arms, he says, "That was my way of showing the joy of what I do. When I compete, it's like I'm six years old. I'm in my own realm."

It is a high-rent district. He resides in an elegant Victorian house in Houston with his dog Sasha, a Samoyed. Signing off on his telephone-answering machine, he says, "And Sasha thanks you." A collector of silver and French crystal, he developed an appreciation for fine things on browsing trips with his mother during days off on the European track tour. He drives a white BMW equipped with a phone that makes no reference to Sasha. Although he rotates his omnipresent sunglasses by the frame color, and favors the gaudiest of the skintight warmup suits proliferating at track meets now, he is less colorful and more subdued than he looks. "He is not really part of the crowd," his father says. Carl says, "I let in what I want to let in."

Mansion-dwelling amateur athletes who collect crystal no longer occasion shock, though speculation regarding Lewis' income prompts curiosity. Estimates run to $1 million a year. Coach-Adviser-Agent Douglas is shy in discussions of how much money Lewis earns. But when the Dallas Cowboys spent a twelfth-round draft pick on Carl, trawling for another Bullet Bob Hayes, Douglas noted, "If he were to play professional football, he'd take a pay cut." After the N.B.A. Chicago Bulls also drafted him, despite the fact that he never played even high school basketball, Lewis observed archly, "They know talent when they see it." Regarding the N.F.L., he says, "If I wanted to, I could be All-Pro." Like most great athletes, he can be full of himself.

Just from the ankle down, Lewis is a six-figure property. Besides shoes and shams, other business income not siphoned through track's deft trust-fund system flows through a company called Athcon, Inc. Carl Lewis is president, Bill Lewis vice president, Carol secretary, Evelyn treasurer. Board meetings are seldom called.

Until Lewis, the long jump (or the broad jump as it was once called) has always had an aura of the unattainable, almost the supernatural. Irishman Peter O'Connor's record 24 ft. 11 3/4 in. stood for 20 years. Owens' 26 ft. 8 1/4 lasted 25. Other records advance like an army of inch-worms: baby-girl swimmers are lapping Johnny Weismuller. But generations of frustrated long jumpers have had to aim at unreasonable marks. Lewis intends to square things for all of them, including Owens, maybe especially Owens, who died four years ago of lung cancer at the age of 66. In his long career as an Olympic champion, he raced against horses and motorcycles at country fairs, neglected income taxes, delivered orations. After 40 years, his Hitler speech was as practiced as a one-man play. He delivered it like a preacher, with a loud timbre. But in a softer voice Owens once said, "That golden moment dies hard." More good advice for Carl.

"We want him to be known as Carl Lewis the athlete," Douglas says. "Carl Lewis the sportscaster. Carl Lewis the actor." He has studied acting at New York's Warren Robertson Theater Workshop, reading such parts as Gale Sayers' role in Brian's Song. "Great actors have a kind of vibrant containment, and Carl has that," says Robertson, who is Douglas' cousin. "There is a depth of vulnerability in Carl. A lot of athletes create a partition on their emotions. It's that masculine, fixed idea that men don't cry, don't show pain. It was not hard to get Carl to touch the more fragile interior." Lewis recently told the New York Times, "Men--athletes especially--have to be like King Kong. When we lose, we can't cry and we can't pout. We're not supposed to be touched. We have to be carved in a certain way just to be men--chest of steel and all. I think it's disgusting."

Although recognizing that few black athletes completely conquer the commercial barriers, particularly on television, Douglas extravagantly figures, "Carl Lewis will be as big as Michael Jackson." Lewis mulls it over and says, "Physically, definitely. I can't sing as well as he does, and I don't think he can run as fast as I do, so I don't fear him, and there's no reason for him to fear me." He laughs, but then he adds seriously, "When you have money, you have a lot of freedom. It's no big deal, but I understand its value." Regarding the relationship between money and freedom, as between celebrity and privacy, Lewis' understanding is sure to increase. He is about to jump feet first into all of them.

--By Tom Callahan. Reported by Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles