It isn’t home, but it is close, as close as Jackie Joyner-Kersee can get to where she began the remarkable athletic career that has taken her to every corner of the world.
Joyner-Kersee, 36, ended that career Saturday night with a sixth-place finish in the long jump at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville stadium. That was as close to her native East St. Louis as a Grand Prix track meet could be held, as close as possible to the boys and girls who are growing up where she did. Three thousand of those children were brought to the meet.
Through her years as a champion, Joyner-Kersee always wanted to inspire others’ dreams of going far beyond the likes of East St. Louis, to places and things that seem extraterrestrial to children whose lives seem forever circumscribed by their environment.
At the end, as she moves into a life as a sports agent and marketing company president and foundation head, it has become more important than ever for Joyner-Kersee to revisit what she escaped but never forgot, a place often used as the most frightening example of urban hell.
Her late mother, Mary, was only 16 and her father, Alfrederick, 14 when they married. Three years later they had three children and were living with Jackie’s great-grandmother in a house where the oven frequently was the only heater. Joyner-Kersee and her brother, Al, the 1984 Olympic champion in the triple jump, saw people shot to death in a neighborhood she described in her autobiography as a “magnet for assorted winos, pimps, gangsters, ex-cons and hustlers.”
A 1986 fire destroyed the house she grew up in at 1433 Piggott St., where she long-jumped from the 3-foot-high porch into sand brought from a local park in potato chip bags. Many neighboring houses now are skeletons, burned out and boarded up, victims of the economic and social despair that haunt East St. Louis and leave its children with barely a ghost of a chance to succeed.
She spent nearly 15 years living in Southern California, then moved back to St. Louis before the 1996 Olympics. The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation is based in St. Louis, but much of its work has been 20 miles away, across the Mississippi River. The foundation has raised nearly $7 million for a September groundbreaking on a community center to replace the one where she played as a child. It has been closed 15 years.
“There are other cities with crime and poverty and dilapidated houses,” Joyner-Kersee said last week, before a dramatic victory at the Goodwill Games in her final heptathlon. “To me, East St. Louis is home. I don’t care what other people say or see, it will always be about taking care of home, about spending time with kids, about showing people if you believe and work hard, you can be successful.
“I never want anyone to think my success came only by me. It came (with the help of) people still in that community, trying to make a difference.”
What success it has been. Illinois prep titles in basketball and track. Collegiate stardom in basketball and track at UCLA. Fourteen national titles in three track and field events. Six Olympic medals–three gold, one silver and two bronze–from four Olympic Games. Four world titles. Four world records in the heptathlon, the women’s version of the decathlon. The six highest point totals in heptathlon history. The second- and third-best long jumps in history.
There would be only one regret: Her world-record victory in the 1988 Olympic heptathlon was tainted with unfounded accusations of drug use leveled by Brazilian runner Joaquim Cruz, a 1984 Olympic champion. Until last week, when she was asked to reflect on the highlights of her career, Joyner-Kersee never had revealed how deeply that had hurt.
“In my moment of triumph, it was like my performance was swept under the rug,” she said. “I hope no other person who achieves great things has to deal with innuendoes and accusations so that your performance doesn’t matter.”
That Olympic performance and many others in her career mattered a great deal in changing the American public’s attitude toward women’s sports. The pigtailed little girl in cutoff jeans and T-shirt who used to scamper across the railroad tracks after the boys and once was a cheerleader summed it up before the 1992 Olympics when she said, “They used to call you a tomboy. Now they call you an athlete.” At that Olympics, when she won the heptathlon gold for the second time, decathlon icon Bruce Jenner said of Joyner-Kersee, “Male or female, she has done what no one else has done.”
Since 1912, when King Gustav of Sweden called Jim Thorpe “the world’s greatest athlete,” that designation has been reserved for the Olympic decathlon champion. Jenner was among those who believed that title belonged as well to Joyner-Kersee, still among UCLA’s career leaders in rebounding. She and Babe Didrikson, the 1932 Olympic track and field champion who became the leading women’s golfer of her time, are the two finest all-around female athletes of this century.
Joyner-Kersee also was one of the first black woman athletes to be used in endorsements for major companies. Four of her contracts continue into her postcompetitive life.
“Jackie is the Aretha Franklin of track and field, its rhythm-and-blues queen, its soul queen,” said reigning U.S. high hurdles champion Reggie Torian of Markham. “Now that she is leaving, people will really start to realize what she has meant to the sport.”
The Aretha Franklin analogy is perfect in another way. Franklin’s signature song is “Respect.” That is what Joyner-Kersee has sought for women athletes.
She remembered first getting that esteem her sophomore year at East St. Louis Lincoln High School, after her track team won the state title. The next year, the girls practiced at 3:30 p.m. instead of 6:30, and Joyner-Kersee’s mother no longer had to worry about her going out so late.
“As women, all we ever wanted is to be respected for what we were trying to do, not criticized or looked at as if something was wrong with us,” Joyner-Kersee said. “I think that has come, but I do not take credit for it because there were a lot of people before me who fought for the same thing.”
Saturday’s hastily arranged meet, formally known as the U.S. Open but properly known as the JJK Farewell Meet, was a way for the sport to give credit where credit was due. There was also a tribute to Joyner-Kersee at New York’s Battery Park the day after she won the heptathlon.
“We’ll have the tribute and the meet and then if anyone wants to start talking to her about how to make babies, you can do that too,” said Bob Kersee, her coach of 18 years and husband of 12 1/2.
There had been talk of Joyner-Kersee competing once or twice more outside the United States before calling it quits for good. “This is it,” Bob Kersee said. “She is officially retired.” Her performance Saturday–topped by a jump of 20 feet 11 3/4 inches–already seemed anticlimactic after the Goodwill triumph.
Torian said he was “honored and flattered” to accept an invitation to compete Saturday, and he used it to win the 100-meter hurdles in an impressive 13.07 seconds. Many other athletes, including Marion Jones, could not come because of prior commitments.
“I grew up wishing I could be like her,” Jones said.
Jones, 22, is now the hottest star in track and field. In 1996, as a student at North Carolina, Jones was struggling to overcome foot injuries when she went to see Joyner-Kersee, then in her brief career with the Richmond Rage of the American Basketball League.
“I remember embracing her and telling her, `You are the one we should be reading about now,’ ” Joyner-Kersee said.
Jones won the 100 and 200 meters at the Goodwill Games. Joyner-Kersee still was the biggest story of the meet.
She had not completed a heptathlon since the 1996 Olympic trials. Many people believed she would not finish the Goodwill event, either.
“Throughout my life, it has been about challenges,” she said.
Joyner-Kersee staggered through the high jump and 200 meters, normally two of her strongest events. She stayed in contention with surprisingly good efforts in the shot put and the javelin and took a small lead into the last of the seven events, the 800 meters, Wednedsday night at the Mitchel Athletic Complex in Uniondale, N.Y.
Joyner-Kersee had loathed the 800 throughout her 18 years in the heptathlon. Now she had to run it one final time, and, if she wanted to win, she had to run it fast enough to stay within 3.5 and 4 seconds of two considerably better 800-meter runners. And she was dehydrated.
But she summoned the will that had brought her the long jump bronze medal in the 1996 Olympics, where her last jump on a leg so sore it had forced her out of the heptathlon took her from sixth to third place. She summoned the will that got her a second world heptathlon title in 1993, when her body was feverish and overheated for two days. She summoned the will that got her off the streets full of pimps and winos and gangsters.
“I didn’t let any doubt creep in,” she said.
Joyner-Kersee finished within 2 seconds of those pursuing her for first place. She won her final heptathlon, beating the reigning world champion earning $40,000 for her fourth-straight Goodwill Games title in the event. She gave her sport one more transcendent moment.
Bob Kersee wept in the stands. Jackie Joyner-Kersee was too exhausted to cry.
“The tears were starting to come as I was walking on the track for the 800, and the people were reaching out and yelling to me,” she said. “At that time, it dawned on me, `This was it,’ but I didn’t want to break down then.”
She was close, so close, just 2 minutes 17.61 seconds away, and then Jackie Joyner-Kersee had one more dream come true to bring home.
