Easy Doesn’t Do It : Joyner-Kersee Got Good Advice in Bad Neighborhood and Turned It Into Leadership on and Off the Track

After the East St. Louis High girls’ basketball team won the Illinois state title, a man approached the star player, extending his hand. The girl responded by smiling and reaching out.

The fan shook young Jackie Joyner’s hand, but in her grip she felt something. Could it be a bill, money? Joyner didn’t bother to look. She turned and walked away from the man and his money.

Joyner the young athlete--now Joyner-Kersee the heptathlon world record-holder and Olympic gold medalist--had already learned the lessons that would carry her through sport and life: Expect nothing, ask for nothing and do for yourself.

She had already been warned about those who would take advantage of someone as guileless and honest as she. Her mother warned her, and the men at the corner shack warned her: “Get an education, don’t be like us,” they would say.

“We had this shack where I lived where the men just sit out and drink,” Joyner-Kersee said. “Now, every time I drive by my old house, I go through there and it’s the same thing. They are older. They are still drinking. The good thing is, they try to hide it, out of respect for me.”

Joyner-Kersee--with her own youth foundation and her corporate contracts and her nice house in the San Fernando Valley--believes that if not for her mother’s warnings about the wrong life, she might have lived it. If not for eating all the mayonnaise sandwiches, she might not have worked so hard to keep from being hungry.

That neighborhood on Piggott Avenue took the measure of Jackie Joyner-Kersee and molded her. She, like her town, is tough but yielding. She is frequently underestimated. She is counted out.

Joyner-Kersee knows this and uses it. When she begins the heptathlon competition Aug. 1 at the Barcelona Olympics, she will be defending her title from the 1988 Games. Same thing in the long jump. Others will know this, but they will look at how she laughs and smiles and somehow think she’s too nice, not as strong as they are. That she doesn’t want to win enough.

They will be wrong. Joyner-Kersee wants to win. That is her secret. Let them think she has had the easy life, always laughing. She knows where she has been and where she wants to go.

The mirth comes from somewhere inside Joyner-Kersee and it is a thing to watch as it rises. If she is seated, she will lean forward from the waist and her laugh--full and throaty--bubbles up. Her head will bob, teeth will gleam and eyes flash.

During a conversation with Joyner-Kersee, no matter the topic, this happens every few minutes. It is this shy habit of smiling and laughing, more than anything, that has affected how Joyner-Kersee is perceived, particularly in business dealings.

“It’s always very interesting to me to see how corporate people respond to Jackie,” said Bob Kersee, her husband and coach. “She’ll go into a meeting with a sponsor or company that she’s working with, and they begin by asking if she has any ideas. She always does, and they don’t expect that.

“Their first response is ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ But she has kept believing in and pushing her goals. Now, these companies treat her with respect and understand that she’s coming to them on a professional level and that she has professional people working for her. Her ideas are not just from an athlete in a dream world, but a business person who is an entrepreneur. It’s entertaining for me to watch them underestimate her.”

Joyner-Kersee, 30, says that she has only lately felt as if she’s getting sincere respect, both on the track and off. Has the world’s greatest female athlete been underestimated?

“I get a sense of that,” she said. “Maybe because I’m a black athlete. I used to hear, ‘She’s not going to be good because she’s not going to discipline herself to learn the technique events.’ That’s the thing--Bobby sat me down early in my career and told me the key to my career in the heptathlon would be becoming a better hurdler and high jumper.

“So I went to work. When I was at UCLA playing basketball, if I didn’t have a morning class, I would come out to the track to learn how to high jump. I learned.”

Remarkably, even with her titles and records, Joyner-Kersee says her competitors sometimes reveal a lack of respect. Perhaps they misread her friendliness as a lack of competitiveness.

In the bygone days of the Cold War, East European athletes would work together to try to disrupt or annoy opponents. On the track, East European teammates would run side by side to block an inside lane and force others to expend energy by running outside to pass.

In the field events, more subtle methods were employed. Joyner-Kersee says she has watched high jumpers move another athlete’s important positioning marks. She remembered a high-jump competition against East Germans in which one would walk in front of her mark, in this case a shoe, every time Joyner-Kersee was ready to jump.

“They play a lot of games,” she said. “I let them go the first time they did it. But then they would remove themselves when everyone else jumped, so I knew they were doing it to me on purpose. The next time I went up to them and said, ‘Will you please move?’

“Then they played the game like they didn’t understand English. They understand--just move out of the way.”

Another time Joyner-Kersee was singled out was during a long jump competition, again, against East Germans. There were parallel runways, one for warm-ups and one for competition. Every time Joyner-Kersee stood at the end of the runway in preparation for her jump, she noticed an East German would begin to jog and bound on the next runway.

Joyner-Kersee tried glaring at the athlete, but she ignored the message.

The distraction continued. Finally, another East German put a stop to the gamesmanship.

“When I go in, I’m ready to compete. I don’t need anything to boost me,” Joyner-Kersee said. “I don’t have to hate people to want to beat them. I show my competitors respect. But when that kind of thing happens, it only makes me concentrate more.

“But I don’t feel that athletics should change you. You know what you have to do, but there are people who feel that, ‘I can’t talk to you today,’ because they are competing. Then, after a race that takes 12 seconds, all of a sudden they want to be buddies. You can throw away a lifetime of friendship because of a 12-second race.

“I respect that some people are like that, that they need to act like that. I can see that they don’t want to talk, and I leave them alone. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people. But don’t walk over me and don’t do something bad to me, because I’ll change that.”

Joyner-Kersee was mad. Really mad. She had gone to the Bruce Jenner track meet in San Jose and discovered that because banned runner Butch Reynolds was entered, if she competed, she would risk losing her eligibility. She had to learn that from other athletes.

The world and Olympic champion was amazed that a meet official did not notify her so she could make an informed decision whether to compete.

Her anger boiled over after the meet, even after the threat of suspension had been lifted. It was a remarkable sight: unassuming Joyner-Kersee, representing the McDonald’s Track Club, was holding court with reporters, calling for track and field athletes to unite and form a union.

“The time has come,” she said. “We have no power. We are just like puppets on a string.”

Kersee said that when he read a news account of the meet in the paper the next day, he did a double take. Could that be Jackie saying all of those things?

“Usually, I don’t have a lot to say, unless I see an injustice being done,” Joyner-Kersee said recently. “I have to say something when that happens. I think those of us who have been in the sport a long time have an obligation to do that.”

Joyner-Kersee was among only a handful of athletes who spoke up on behalf of Reynolds at the U.S. Olympic trials earlier this month at New Orleans. The U.S. Supreme Court granted Reynolds the right to try out for the Olympic team, but his presence in the 400 meters put other runners in jeopardy.

Many athletes at the trials thought Reynolds was being selfish to pursue his right to run, if it meant harming others. Most wished Reynolds would simply go away.

Joyner-Kersee didn’t agree. She has more endorsements than most Olympians, her image didn’t need any controversy. But Joyner-Kersee answered all questions regarding Reynolds, supported him and even appeared on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” discussing the need for athletes to regain control of their sport.

In her quiet, discreet way, Joyner-Kersee is becoming one of the sport’s most respected leaders. Because of her success at attracting sponsors, other athletes approach her and ask advice on such matters.

Her power within the sport is strong. At the New York Games in May, the long jumpers had a choice of using one of two pits. One runway went straight into a head wind, the other had a stiff tail wind. The women wanted to jump with the wind at their backs. Joyner-Kersee looked up from her warm-ups to see much of the long-jump field gathering around her.

“They wanted me to go to the officials to get the pit changed,” she said.

Kersee tells similar stories of his wife’s subtle powers. A common scenario: Joyner-Kersee will ask someone in her foundation to do something; the person will go so far, but have trouble getting a corporate executive to return phone calls.

Joyner-Kersee will ask the employee why the task isn’t accomplished. She will be told why. Then she will say: “Why is it so hard to get this guy on the phone? I’ve been in dozens of meetings with him.” Joyner-Kersee will pick up the phone, call the executive and settle the matter. “See how easy,” she will say.

“Jackie doesn’t understand how respected she is or how powerful she is,” Kersee said. “She can get a lot accomplished with a phone call that the rest of us can’t make. In the foundation, we take things as far as we can, then she has to get on the phone. I tell Jackie that I’m glad I’m not her, because if I was, I’d definitely abuse my power.”

Are you a better athlete because you grew up in poverty?

Joyner-Kersee is not one to respond by saying, “What a stupid question,” as she might want to. Instead, she politely listens, nods, then smiles. “I think the reason I’m a strong person is because of my upbringing in East St. Louis. I was exposed to seeing people do drugs, getting killed. You see people drinking too much and they’ve got a beer belly, and how they are destroying their lives.

“These people were doing things we considered to be bad, but never once did they influence us. It was always, ‘You kids go on, get your education. Don’t end up on this corner.’ They didn’t want us to be like them. People grow up like this and they think the only way things will get better is if the white man comes in and takes over. Instead of them trying to stay positive, instead of them trying to make a difference for themselves.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘How do you stay positive, seeing this every day?’ I will say to them, ‘Believe me, it’s not like that.’ You have got to really believe that you want something from life. You have got to want to travel and see different parts of the country and see they are worse off than East St. Louis. You are not the only one who is struggling.”

Joyner-Kersee lives part of the year in East St. Louis, and she runs her business and her foundation there. She lives in East St. Louis because it’s her home and because it helps her to remember what made her. That is her strength.

Joyner-Kersee has been competing all her life, racing against her friends and wanting to win more than anything. Striving to get away from Piggott Avenue. Trying to stay true to herself, when, by now, she could have become a snob, the kind who wears gold medals while grocery shopping.

But she didn’t change that way.

“I just wanted to be an Olympian,” she says quietly. “In my dreams I never envisioned people asking for my autograph, going to the White House, being able to travel the world, meeting different people. Or being able to have a house or car or whatever. Pretty much if I want it, I can get it. I never thought I would live like that. It’s been a blessing, because I keep in mind how I got it. Not to take anything for granted. It all stuns me at times.”