A Costly Deficiency of Style

By Tom Callahan

When Carl Lewis received the Jesse Owens Award last week, for once no one strained to hear boos. The applause was pure. Ruth Owens, who could not accompany her husband to Berlin in 1936, told how especially touching it was for her "to see Carl out on the track there in Los Angeles. Jesse would have been proud." Lewis thanked her, and though he had not planned to say anything of the kind, declared for athletes generally, maybe for past Owens Winners Mary Decker and Edwin Moses particularly, "We are people too; we make mistakes. But we do our hardest."

In post-Olympics hard times, the three have been all over the track. Either Lewis is already the actor he aspires to be, or his inner conflict has been exaggerated. "I'm just a happy person," he says, a plain enough declaration. "I listen to my body," he adds, a more complicated matter. Lewis is probably the best athlete in the world, though definitely not the best liked. The problem is his disposition: people ask more of him than he requires of himself. He perplexed them last summer by prompting expectations he did not attempt to fulfill. That is, no heroic measures were taken or, even for the sake of decency, feigned. All he did was win four gold medals.

An expert and highly technical ignorance of track and field was involved. At the Olympics, a track writer is defined as a baseball writer with borrowed binoculars. Mysterious wonders on the order of Bob Beamon's 29-ft. 2 1/2-in. jump 16 years ago in Mexico City are preferable to bland details such as afternoon heats and evening temperatures in the congested regimen of a meticulous man listening to his body. "Looking back," Lewis says, "I think one trouble was just the fact that I had been No. 1 in my events for three years, and there was nothing new to say about me. When you can't find something new, it's time to find something wrong."

The fault found in Decker also had to do with style. That flinty and fragile , 15-year-old who flung batons in charming anger simply seemed less wholesome and attractive at 26 throwing brickbats at Zola Budd. Before a poster of Decker tacked tenderly to her bedroom wall, Zola had once been awestruck that "anyone could be so pretty." Now that the athletes have resumed running and jumping, a number have been reluctant to let Mary up. "Some of us," says Ruth Wysocki, "are relieved that the public knows the Mary we knew all along," the one whom Miler Steve Scott has called "a spoiled baby."

She is Mary Slaney now, wed the first day of the year to bulbous Richard Slaney, a British discus spinner. Last week she closed her indoor season unluckily with a pulled calf muscle, but in three races she collected another world record, her 16th. She runs like Mercury. "Some day I want to be a mother and do normal things," she says, "but for now I just want to get better, better and better. If the Olympics did anything for me, it renewed that desire." Her winter has been eventful. Several days after the fact was only casually reported to Oregon police, Mary described a melodrama in which she played Little Nell to a mugger of undetermined size and indistinguishable features who jumped from his bicycle and knocked her down almost in the fashion of Zola Budd, savaging the same hip. He threatened to kill her with a knife but she escaped to flag down the car of an elderly couple, whose names she did not get.

Once, when he was absolutely the best baseball player in the world, though the world seemed not to know it, Roberto Clemente described a chilling kidnaping that he had neglected to mention earlier; he was terrorized on a mountain of cloudy memory by abductors who were never found. The news was reported pretty much at face value, but the quality of pleading in his voice convinced some listeners who knew him a little that he must have been desperate to be seen as a sympathetic character.

Abundant sympathy has been extended to Moses, whose trial for allegedly soliciting an undercover policewoman begins this week in Los Angeles. By the grace of his dignified athletic past he has been readily believed and defended, although usually included in the admiring support is some wistful aside that even the finest physical clay is still human clay. Lewis supports Moses and contacted him to say so, though they have not been close. "It's a terrible thing," Lewis says with some basis of knowledge, "to be in the public eye." What else has he learned? "About egos, mine and others'. And about whether you control it, or it controls you. I haven't learned how to adjust to people's image of me, the way they want you to adjust, and will punish you if you don't. I've survived, though. I'm happy."

None of the three--Lewis, Slaney, Moses--have gained the corporate ground charted last summer: their faces are absent from TV screens and billboards. While the international take of eminent track athletes remains bountiful, Gymnast Mary Lou Retton might be called the domestic Olympic champion, the natural heir to Bob Richards and Bruce Jenner on the Wheaties box. Lewis' business manager, Joe Douglas, has not despaired. "It's turning around. A lot of positive things are happening. I think you will still see Carl in commercials." A lovely phrase has occurred to Douglas. "Carl is back at his sport. It's better than a path of gold."

They all can share in the pensive wisdom of a more conventional loser. Greg Foster, a hurdler who missed his gold medal by a .03-sec. blip on the radar screen, has consoled himself this winter with a world record and a soothing thought. "Track has given me a lot," he reflects, "a new home, a new car, a new truck, a new wife." He and Olympic Sprinter Florence Griffith are engaged. Asked if their children are apt to be hurdlers or sprinters, Foster considers the question before answering wistfully, "Hopefully, golfers."