Jackie Joyner-Kersee is reason enough to put up with an Olympics, reason enough to have field as well as track. She has been the heptathlon as long as there has been a heptathlon, which is sports talk for sweating seven ways.
She seems to have as many names as she has sports, or relatives. Wife, sister, sister-in-law, long jumper, javelin thrower, hurdler, sprinter, multiple-medalist. She just can`t do anything in ones.
Her family tree looks like the official Olympic elm. Coach Bob Kersee is her husband, Olympic triple jumper Al Joyner is her brother, and the once and astonishing Florence Griffith Joyner is her sister-in-law.
What she really needs is a good nickname like Flo-Jo has. Jack Jo-Ker?
It doesn`t play.
She`ll just have to get along with talent, which she has in such variety that she has won the last 14 heptathlons she has finished, including Sunday`s Olympic collection, waxing the rest of the world for the second Olympics in a row.
”She is one of a kind,” said her teammate and competitor, Cindy Greiner. ”A Michael Jordan.”
I haven`t lately seen Michael throwing a javelin three times the length of the basketball court.
Bruce Jenner, once a multiple athlete himself before becoming a TV prop, stopped Joyner-Kersee near the end of her victory visit, a lap around the Estadi Olimpic. She carried the obligatory American flag and chatted with the puddles of Americans who stayed late to witness her triumph. Jenner said, ”My heartiest congratulations to the greatest athlete ever,” gave her a kiss and a hug and later said he meant man or woman.
This is the sort of exaggeration she deserves. While any half-trying college decathlete could beat Joyner-Kersee at every sport, in fact her high jump Saturday would have won a gold medal in the first five Olympics. The men`s gold medal.
This is not about male vs. female. This is about what is possible vs. what will be settled for.
”The challenge,” she said, ”is to try and beat myself.”
That is because she has never had any other opponent. She lost the first heptathlon in 1984 by only five points because she was injured. In 1988, she set the record that still stands. Sunday night, she could have trotted home in her last event, the 800 meters, and still beaten Irina Belova, whose name Joyner-Kersee couldn`t even remember later.
Instead, Joyner-Kersee came pounding to the finish line as if each second she saved she could use the next time.
”She could have run a 2:20 and won the gold medal,” Bobby Kersee said,
”or she could have gone under 2:14 and given these people a 7,000-point heptahlon.”
This is significant only in that Joyner-Kersee is the only woman to ever total 7,000 points.
When she started at this, women were allowed to be good at only five sports. Now it is seven. Joyner-Kersee has been so splendid at all of them, maybe they`ll eventually go metric like the men, to a nice round 10. I suspect she can pole vault with most shot putters. Who does anything in sevens except crapshooters?
(My suggestion is to just add the triathlon, which wants in the Olympics badly and is already endured by women, to the heptathlon. If my Greek math is right, a hept and tri equals a dec.)
Her jewelry collection, the important stuff, is now at three golds and a silver, from Los Angeles to Seoul to here, from the City of Angels to the city of broken escalators. This doesn`t count the other gold that could still be coming in the long jump or the assorted treasures from the World-Pan-Goodwill Games.
”Her performances are like great opera,” Kersee said. ”I feel I should be wearing a tux when I watch them.”
She will do this, they both say, again in 1996 in Atlanta, when she will be 34.
”I started this in America, and my motivation is to end it there,” she said.
When she was 9 years old, her mother treated little Jackie to dance lessons at the local community center. ”The teacher felt that one day I could be on Broadway,” she recalled.
He had no idea.
