Regal Masters Of Olympic Versatility

By Tom Callahan

She is the standard this time. The Olympics will be considered a success if the course of international sweetness and light runs and jumps and generally glides along as smoothly as Jackie Joyner-Kersee. A third of a second late in 1984, she had to wait four full years for her time to come, to go flying leglong into Seoul like a streamer of confetti.

Dashing, racing, hurdling, hurtling, heaving cannon balls, slinging spears -- long jumping on the side -- Joyner-Kersee has at last reached the station her grandmother foretold 26 years ago in naming her after a First Lady of the U.S. Momentarily, Jacqueline means to be the First Lady of the world, not only in the heptathlon and the Olympics but in women's athletics entirely.

As Daley Thompson has been the natural heir to Jim Thorpe, she would be the Seoul beneficiary of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Joyner-Kersee and Thompson, the two-time Olympic decathlon champion, puffing for three, embody all the basic wonders of the Games and encompass almost every grade of emotion. One is just arriving at a place the other has been straining to maintain. She's the blur; he's the mist. They have a "special understanding," as he likes to put it, and a few things to say.

She comes from East St. Louis, Ill., which is more than just seven miles removed from St. Louis. In rapid order, she was the second of four children born to children, Alfred Joyner and Mary Gaines, 14 and 16 the day they wed. When Jackie says she's preoccupied lately with thoughts of "all the people who dedicated themselves to helping a young girl dream," she starts with a family huddled several generations strong in either the coldest or the warmest ( house on Piggott Avenue, across the street from a tavern, down the block from a pool hall, around the corner (blessedly) from a playground.

The boy-father started out shining shoes, mowing lawns and "watching cars" in that estimable neighborhood. When he eventually found formal work, ultimately as a brakeman on the railroad, it carried him far from home for considerable stretches. With a willow switch, Mary took charge. "She applied some disciplines just for discipline's sake," recalls Jackie, "like making us wear our clothes back-to-back. 'Why the same thing two days in a row?' I'd plead. 'Can't I stagger them?' 'No,' she'd say. 'This is the rule of the house.' "

There are cheerleaders and there are athletes. Nearly no one but Jackie was both. "From being a cheerleader at the youth center, I knew at the age of nine that I could jump. That's when I started running and jumping off my porch." A firemen's brigade of siblings used a potato-chip bag to "borrow" sand from the center and install a landing pit off the porch. Jackie's main co-conspirator was her older brother Al, whom she could beat at everything. "I didn't have a big brother," Al says. "I had Jackie." Through a fluttering porch-side window shade, enjoying the sounds of plotting, their father heard 14-year-old Jackie announce one evening that someday she was going to be in the Olympic Games.

Nino Fennoy, a saintly coach of the kind these neighborhoods always seem to inspire, steered her through a series of Junior Olympics championships and a busy career of basketball and volleyball at Lincoln High. An admirer of the great Tennessee State track coach Ed Temple, Fennoy had been keeping an eye out for his own Wilma Rudolph. The pigtails, the skinny legs, the scraped knees were not his signal. "It was the smile," he says. Coach Fennoy required her to keep journals on the teams' small road trips and monitored her syntax and spelling. "Where you're going," he told her, "you'll need to express yourself with more than your legs and arms."

The girls' basketball team at Lincoln went 62-2 her last two years, and Jackie was All-State. Escorted by her father, the man who had finished high school with an armful of babies, she went to UCLA on a basketball scholarship. She would make the Bruins' all-time list in practically every category: fourth in rebounds, eighth in scoring, tenth in assists. In 1981, in the middle of Jackie's freshman season, Mary died of meningitis after an illness that lasted one day. She was just 38. "Her determination," Jackie says, "passed to me." Leaning on a UCLA assistant track coach, Bob Kersee, Jackie began to point toward the 1984 Games.

By that time, Kersee was coaching both her and Al, and on a remarkable August night the two schemers from Piggott Avenue made history. Al had all but won the triple jump when Jackie took her mark in the 800-meter run, the finale of the heptathlon. If she could stay within about 15 yds. of the Australian Glynis Nunn, Jackie's lead under the weighted point system would hold up. But her left leg was bound with a hamstring wrap that crippled her confidence more than her stride.

As Jackie reached the final turn, Al was suddenly alongside her, running in silhouette on the grass. By .33 sec., just about a step, she lost the gold medal. Totaling 6,385 points to Nunn's 6,390, Jackie came off the silver stand almost directly into Al's arms. "It's O.K.," he comforted her, and she smiled. "I'm not crying because I lost," she said. "I'm crying because you won." That night in East St. Louis, the streets filled up the way they used to in Detroit after a Joe Louis fight. Everyone came out to sing.

Noticing how careful Jackie was not to emphasize her injury and cloud Nunn's moment, Kersee started looking at her as more than just a sublime athlete. Since their marriage in 1986, she has overwhelmed the field with the only 7,000-point performances on record -- four of them. He says, "At times I feel she's possessed by athletics. She can go on and on." With a sigh she agrees, "I don't know what it is about that extra second or inch. I expect so much out of myself." She always aches but never minds. "Ask any athlete: we all hurt at all times. I'm asking my body to go through seven different tasks. To ask it not to ache would be too much."

Eight tasks, actually. Against her coach-husband's resistance, she insists on long jumping with the long jumpers as well as the heptathletes. When she jumped 24 ft. 5 1/2 in. to equal the world record last year, Kersee was the one who wept. "I always cheer for my athlete, never for my wife," he says. "As soon as the husband starts to worry 'That's my wife out there in pain,' the coach has to say 'Shut up and get back in the stands.' But you can't always separate them. She's fun to coach when she's not in one of her rebellious moods, but that tenacity is what makes her the world's greatest." In other words, if she wants to jump, she jumps.

. "Jumping has always been the thing to me," she says. "It's like leaping for joy, but of course there's more to it than that. Galina Chistyakova ((U.S.S.R.)) has just done 25 ft., Heike Drechsler ((G.D.R.)) is on the runway and I'm behind her. You have to respond here and now. It lets you know what you're made of." Throwing things never thrilled her quite as much, but she says, "I've learned to enjoy it all, even the 'big man's' events."

At 5 ft. 10 in., 153 lbs., Joyner-Kersee is a streamlined strong woman who puts no one in mind of a weight lifter. "I wish I could take Babe Didrikson's arm," she says, "and put it on mine." Jackie smiles at, but endorses, her sister-in-law Florence Griffith Joyner's frilly expressions of track and pulchritude, and favors lipstick shades that outblush fire engines. "I don't think being an athlete is unfeminine. I think of it as a kind of grace."

She doesn't object to the compliment, but she doesn't really think of herself as the greatest woman athlete in the world. "It's just a phrase," she says. In the Olympic trials, when Griffith Joyner upstaged her steady dominance with the flash of a record 100 meters, Joyner-Kersee had a way to smile at that too. Flo is Al's wife, and he's her coach now. Al just missed repeating on the team, but he won't miss the Games. Jackie might have felt a little old and left behind without him.

Enduring athletes often look back in amazement at how long they have remained. But Great Britain's Daley Thompson, the second decathlete to win two Olympic gold medals, the first in all history to covet a third, set out to stay. At Montreal in 1976, when he was 18, Thompson observed Bruce Jenner's triumph from the shade of 18th place and had an outlandish notion. Even before his 1980 victory in Moscow, he confided it to the 1948 and '52 champion Bob Mathias. "I got a postcard from Russia," Mathias recalls. "All it said was 'I'm going for three.' "

In Los Angeles four years ago, Thompson was a loud and wonderful cinch. But the going has not been as easy lately. His nine unbeaten summers ended at last year's world championships in Rome, when he more than surrendered his world title to the East German Torsten Voss. Out of fettle because of an early season groin pull, Thompson stubbornly pressed on when he might have dropped out, and finished a poignant ninth. Since then, he has entered only fragments of events, with desultory results, and in an incomplete exhibition last month looked down, if not done. Track & Field News had picked him in June to win the third gold, but is wavering now. Favoring Voss, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED failed to mention either Thompson or his historic foil, 6-ft. 7-in. Jurgen Hingsen of West Germany, among the likely top three in Seoul.

"I have an inordinate amount of faith in my own ability to do things," Thompson says crisply, though his voice and manner have softened since 1984. He is known for a charming braggadocio that runs to self-aggrandizing T shirts. And if asked how he is, he will probably still reply, "A little short of fantastic." But marriage last year to his childhood sweetheart settled Thompson noticeably, and the birth of a daughter twelve weeks prematurely jumbled his regimen. "My little girl weighed less than a bag of sugar. It was incredible how tiny she was. Yet she was perfectly formed." He stopped training long enough to help worry her through the crisis of her entry to life. Nine months later, everything but his reputation for invincibility is well.

"I have to win just to justify the amount of work I've put in," Thompson says. "I don't think of it as the work since the last success but as the work since the very beginning. To me, it's always been accumulative. But even to lose, I think I'd still do it. No matter how it's gone or how it goes, I wouldn't change anything. It fulfills me to be what I am."

Thorpe won his Olympic decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. "You, sir," declared King Gustav, "are the world's greatest athlete." To which Thorpe replied with touching simplicity, "Thanks, King." Thompson has often heard the description "world's greatest athlete" -- in fact, he has been called the greatest of all time -- but has never seriously proclaimed the title. "It's merely a tag," he says. He does feel akin to Thorpe though. "We're all his descendants -- Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Jenner, me. We've all shared something. It's passed down from one to the next. It's never anyone's property. It's only mine for the moment."

His square name is Francis Morgan Thompson. "Daley" is a corruption of Ayodele, an African endearment bestowed by his Nigerian father and mispronounced by his Scottish mother. It means "joy enters the house." "That was the only thing," in Thompson's bittersweet estimation, "that they got absolutely right." His London childhood was something out of Thackeray, not Dickens, though classic shadows like boarding schools were involved. "Since forever, I always thought I was going to be the best in the world at something. My school friends used to laugh at me, but I kept searching for the thing that would express who I am. There's only one key for every lock, you know. As soon as I found the decathlon, I knew it was me."

Though at first he resisted the idea of giving up sprinting, the perverseness of specializing in versatility appealed to his sense of justice and mischief. "In any walk of life, there'll always be a bloke more talented in this or that, who's smarter in some way, or richer, or faster, or just better suited. But can the thing that he was given be lined up against everything you've got?" At 6 ft. 1/2 in. and 195 lbs., much too thick and blocky for track, though not nearly brawny or flexible enough for the field, Thompson is ideally constructed for none of the ten events. "But I'm happy with my dimensions," he says. "I've got by so far. Would I change anything at all? Sure, I would. I'd take Paul Newman's eyes."

The Olympics stir Thompson. "As a concept," he says, "I think it's one of the most genuinely humanitarian thoughts that man has ever had. The youth of the world coming together to play -- it's a wonderful dream." He quadrennially skips the opening parade to save his legs from the speeches and his head from the pigeons, but partakes in all the casual camaraderie. "I'm a Village person. I like to go around and meet gymnasts and weight lifters, every kind of athlete. We share a special understanding. All sports are the same; it's just the rules that are different. Were ((the basketball star)) Michael Jordan and I to meet, I honestly think we could communicate without sentences, with just the start of words, maybe with knowing nods alone. At the Olympics, I love watching almost anything at all that's special, as long as it doesn't have a horse in it."

For someone who pulls down hundreds of thousands sipping soft drinks on billboards, Thompson sounds suspiciously like an amateur. "I like to think of myself as one of the last true amateurs," he says, "but I can only be an amateur because I can afford to be. Inside, though, that's exactly what I am. I love the occasion and I can't help showing it. At the end of the day, I think that's the real reason why the public doesn't enjoy Carl Lewis. He never looks to be having a good time."

Thompson frequently trains in California and is a student of the U.S. "It's | nice to get away from the English ambience. If you're at all aggressive -- gung ho -- it's really kind of frowned upon. Whereas, in America, they appreciate that. In fact, it's a prerequisite to getting around. For everybody on the street, every day is a competition." One national trait troubles him: "People in the U.S. tend to value a sport or a sportsman exactly according to how much money is involved. In adjacent arenas, if Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson were running for a $1,000 prize, and six monkeys were racing for $10 million, which place do you think would be filled? Honestly, if Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe were around today, I wonder if as many people would have heard of them."

On practice fields at UCLA or the University of California, Irvine, he has encountered Joyner-Kersee now and then. "A very pleasant girl," he says, "and a beautiful athlete." She recalls that at every encounter he would brush her with a dare or nudge her with an insult. "He was the one who challenged me to go over 7,000. 'Why not be the first?' he'd say. Or he'd go the other way: 'Nobody will ever jump 24 ft. in the heptathlon. Give me a break.' I knew what he was doing."

Neither of them talks about the prize or seems to care about the benefits. "The medals don't mean anything," says Thompson, "and the glory doesn't last. It's all about performing well, and feeling deeply about it." Joyner- Kersee says, "The rewards are going to come, but my happiness is just loving the sport, loving sport, period." Zaharias and Thorpe are around today, honestly, and everyone has heard of them.