The final event of Carl Lewis’ farewell tour took place Saturday afternoon in Houston, when he and three running teammates made a ceremonial relay tour of the track at halftime of a forgettable college football game.
Sad as it seems, that was not an inappropriate way for his own country to mark the career end of the greatest Olympic athlete since World War II.
Lewis, 36, leaves track and field at a time when it has become an afterthought in the United States to not only a Houston-Pittsburgh football game but also dozens of other major and minor events. He leaves with his recent burst of recent scattershot criticisms echoing emptily. He leaves having fulfilled the pledge, “None of you will ever know who I really am.”
Nearly three weeks ago, in the Berlin Olympic stadium where Jesse Owens won four gold medals in 1936, a crowd of 56,000 gave Lewis a standing ovation after he anchored a Dream Relay including three men who have held the world record in the 100 meters. That sendoff befitted the way most of the sporting world sees the Lewis who had equalled Owens.
The man known as King Carl from Berlin to Bangladesh remains a pretender in his own country. His achievements have been treated with relative indifference at home because he let his aloofness and peculiarities create a gap that kept the public from warming to his intelligence, loyalty and good intentions.
“He was a god, a genuine track and field god,” said Pete Cava, longtime spokesman for a U.S. track federation with which Lewis was generally at odds. “He was the Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth of our sport, but I’m not sure whether Carl will have the legacy of either.”
From the moment of his greatest triumph, the four gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, to the moment of his most dramatic triumph, in the long jump at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Lewis came across as haughty, manufactured and distant. Perhaps, as John Updike wrote of Ted Williams’ farewell, gods do not answer letters.
To be fair, Lewis also suffered from outdated perceptions. He was part Deion Sanders, part Dennis Rodman in an area, the Olympics, much of the public still sees as romantic amateurism. With his ever-changing hairstyles–this year’s is Rasta braids with headband–and eccentric competitive costumes, Lewis pushed the envelope like Rodman and Sanders, but he was met with a clucking tut-tut instead of a chuckling wink, wink, nod, nod.
“Carl deserves credit for leading the sport from the shamateur era to the professional era,” said Craig Masback, the new executive director of USA Track & Field.
Yet in last week’s edition of a German newsweekly, Lewis called the man who effected that change, international track federation chief Primo Nebiolo, “a dictator.” Lewis also said recently he had no intention of working with the U.S. federation to help the sport. He continued to make wide-ranging accusations about drug use without naming names or providing evidence, trying to make himself seem like the last clean athlete in track and field.
Most ridiculous was his broadside at athletes like Michael Johnson who enter big-money match races because their “egos need fulfilling.” Lewis had vainly tried to arrange just such events matching himself against Ben Johnson in the 100 meters and Mike Powell in the long jump.
“I don’t agree with everything he has said historically or recently,” Masback said, “but I feel Carl Lewis has an important role to play in the future of the sport in the United States.”
That is among the reasons why Masback wanted to be in 20,000-seat Robertson Stadium for the Lewis farewell. Another is Masback’s respect for the record of “the greatest track and field athlete in history, if not the greatest athlete in history”:
– Lewis won nine Olympic gold medals, matching Finland’s Paavo Nurmi for the most in track and field. Lewis won four straight in the long jump, an event in which no one else has more than one.
– He won a record eight outdoor world championship golds.
– Fourteen men have accounted for the 166 long jumps of 28 feet and longer. Lewis has 71 of them.
– Lewis has the third longest jump and is tied for the third fastest 100 and the sixth fastest 200. Not since Owens has one man figured so prominently in those three events.
– From 1983 through 1992, when the world record in the 4 x 100-meter relay was broken six times and tied once, Lewis anchored six of the record relays.
Beyond the numbers is a Lewis who may have been the most harmonious body in motion of any runner in history. His anchor leg on the sprint relay at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics always will be testimony to physical perfectability.
Never has such a fleeting moment, a run of barely nine seconds, created a more captivating picture of the human machine. That such grace could be mixed with such lapses into gracelessness was the more disconcerting.
There was nothing wrong with his lobbying on CNN and NBC to run the 4 x 100 relay after winning the long jump last year in Atlanta. The effort turned sour only when Lewis denied the obvious intentions of his actions.
Several years ago, Lewis became actively involved in an organ donor program after the sister of his amanuensis, ex-journalist Jeffrey Marx, needed a liver. Lewis’ energies helped another person stay alive.
Lewis might be able to do the same for the sport that helped him become a multimillionaire. This is not a matter of repaying a debt. It is a matter of ensuring that his legacy will be more than numeric hieroglyphics from an ancient sport for which he should be both touchstone and Rosetta Stone.
