A Kind of Grace (21 page)

I'd experienced similar problems during basketball practice. But I hid it from Coach Moore by running to the back of the line or crouching down behind my teammates until I caught my breath. Knowing what a stickler she was for conditioning, I didn't want her to think I was out of shape.

Bobby had to drive me to the student health center several times when my chest tightened up and the breathing problems became serious. The doctors there told me it was bronchitis and walking pneumonia. Bobby said there was no such thing as walking pneumonia. He kept nagging me to see a specialist.

“These aren't ordinary colds or pneumonia or bronchitis attacks, Jackie,” he said one day on the track as I struggled to catch my breath. “I don't care what the doctors at student health say. You've got a serious respiratory problem. The same thing happens to Jeanette Bolden and she's a severe asthmatic. You need to go to a specialist and have it checked out.”

I ignored him. I'd hated hospitals ever since my mother died. Also, I thought he was overreacting. I was an athlete in peak physical condition. How could I possibly have a severe health problem? I'd never had breathing problems or asthma attacks in high school. I ran for miles at a time with ease. Besides, I had other things to think about, like the 1984 Olympics.

To get a taste of intense international competition, I competed in the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. I was at a distinct advantage going in because there was no pressure on me. I was an unknown. All eyes were on the East Germans and Jane Frederick, the veteran American heptathlete.

The crumbling of the Iron Curtain was still years away. Germany was still a divided country and American athletes viewed their counterparts from the Communist state of East Germany with suspicion and frustration. The East Germans dominated swimming and many track and field events, including the women's long jump and heptathlon.

“Just go out there, learn as much as you can and enjoy the competition,” Bobby told me on the flight to Europe. He didn't want me to get wrapped up in the pressure and mind games. “Above all, don't be intimidated by the East Germans. They do their best to psych people out and American athletes fall for that stuff all the time. Don't look at them like you're in awe of them.”

It was good advice. I wasn't thinking about the East Germans. I was just doing my own thing, taking care of my own business. They say ignorance is bliss and for me at those World Championships, it was. I was going up against the world record holder, Ramona Neubert of East Germany, but thanks to my own naïveté and Bobby's coaching, I was treating it as just another meet. It was only my second trip abroad and my eyes were as big as saucers, taking in all the foreign sights.

In each of the first-day events I set personal records, which means I turned in my best performance ever. After four events I was in fourth place and on pace to break the American record. Andre Phillips, Florence Griffith and Jeanette Bolden made the trip, along with Al, who was training with us. Valerie Brisco and Alice Brown, two athletes Bobby had coached at Cal State–Northridge but who hadn't transferred with him to UCLA, were also part of our group. Back at the hotel after the competition, we were all ecstatic about the way things were going for me. The hotel served the most delicious ice cream and we celebrated my success over bowls of vanilla ice cream.

But I could feel that something was wrong the following morning. “My legs feel funny,” I told Bobby at the track during warmups. I was lying on my back with my right leg extended straight in the air. He was standing in front of me, pushing the leg back toward my head to stretch out my hamstring muscle. Al and the other athletes in our group were out, warming up and practicing.

“Look how flexible this leg is,” he said as he continued pushing the leg back, against my resistance. “It's okay.”

I was still worried. “No, something just feels strange.”

As the minutes passed, the leg continued to tighten, as if someone had wrapped the area between my knee and my hip with an Ace bandage and then kept rewrapping it tighter and tighter.

My leg just wouldn't relax, even after I warmed up and stretched some more. By the time I was ready to jump, the stiffness was bothering me. There was no pain. Just tightness. It tightened to the point that I couldn't move it freely. Jogging was difficult and I wasn't able to stretch it very much.

I tried to forget about the leg and focus on just going full blast down the runway as I stood at the line for my first attempt. I ran down the runway as hard as I could, but before I got to the board, I felt a jolt of pain in the back of that same leg. Then it gave way. The sensation made me scream.

I grabbed the back of my leg and stopped running. My hamstring was throbbing now and I couldn't put any pressure on my leg without feeling excruciating pain. Bobby and Al ran toward me. They slipped their shoulders under my armpits and supported me as I limped over to the first aid tent. I was crying and moaning, “Oh, it hurts … it hurts.”

Through tears, Bobby kept saying, “I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't know.”

Al was crying because he thought I'd seriously injured myself and because he was disappointed that I had to withdraw when things were going so well.

The three of us were quite a sight. Brooks Johnson, the Stanford track coach, came over to us to make sure everything was okay. No one who's involved in sports likes to see an athlete go down during competition, because they always fear the worst—that the injury will be career-ending.

Aside from bad shin splints in high school, I'd never been seriously injured. So I had no idea what was wrong. A physical therapist massaging the log-sized legs of decathlete Mark Anderson, who was laid out on a stretcher, came over and looked at my leg. He gingerly poked around the tender area and diagnosed it as a pulled hamstring. He introduced himself and said his name was Bob Forster. He started kneading the back of my leg to get the hamstring to relax and soften. It hurt each time he touched it. The pain from his poking and prodding was almost as bad as the pain shooting up and down my leg.

Afterward, he said it wasn't a serious pull and that if I strengthened the muscle I would be okay in a few months. Eventually, Bob became my full-time physical therapist and accompanied me to every competition. Unfortunately, we'd replay that scene too many times in the years to come at major competitions.

My withdrawal from the heptathlon marked the end of my first World Championships. It was a sad ending, but it taught us some valuable lessons about preparation. Just a few weeks before the Worlds, I'd competed in six events at the NCAA Championships to help the team rack up points and win the national championship for a second straight year. Looking back on it, Bobby said my leg was probably fatigued from that, as well as from the strain of the first day's competition.

After my experience at the Worlds, he paced all of us better during the year. He didn't push any of his athletes too hard during the collegiate season if it might jeopardize their chances of competing at an upcoming World Championship or Olympic Games.

Just as the Junior Olympics in Yakima had, the World Championships proved to me that I could hold my own against the best athletes. Bobby was even more optimistic, though. He estimated what he thought I could score in each event at the Olympics if I maintained my pace of workouts and steered clear of injuries. One morning before practice, he handed me a sheet of paper from his clipboard showing the calculations.

The big number circled at the bottom was 7,000! My eyes practically jumped out of my head when I saw it. No woman had ever scored 7,000 points in a heptathlon. It was unheard of. The world record at the time was 6,836. I was scoring in the 6,200- to 6,400-point range on a good day. I wasn't sure I could add another 700 points to that in a year's time.

Strategizing for the heptathlon is a complicated process. The judges set performance standards in each event and assign points to those standards. I earn points by meeting the standard, and extra points by exceeding it. The better I perform, the more points I earn.

The first phase of strategy involves accurately estimating how I'll do against the standard in each event and calculating the points I'll earn, taking into account my strengths and weaknesses in each event, as well as fatigue and weather conditions.

Second, I have to at least consider what my competitors' point totals will be to assess how the rest of the field will stack up. I have to set targets in each event that will allow me to get more total points than all the others. From there, I go to the track and try to make it all come together.

The way Bobby figured it, I had the ability to run the hurdles in less than 13 seconds. “I don't see how that's possible, considering that I'm running 14.6 now,” I said, pointing to the number at the top of the column of figures.

My best high jump was 5′ 8″ but Bobby saw me going 6′ 0″, 6′ 1″ or even as high as 6′ 6″. I pointed to that number and shook my head in disbelief.

“You haven't gotten close to your potential in that event because your technique is so bad,” Bobby said confidently. “When we correct it, you'll be jumping 6 feet easily.”

Before I could question the rest of his figures, he said, “The same is true for the hurdles, javelin and shot put.”

Then he launched into a detailed description of what I was doing wrong in each event and how much minor corrections would improve my results and how that translated into points. By the time he finished breaking it down for me, my head was spinning. It was difficult to imagine. Yet, I was starting to believe I could do it. I wanted to go for it.

I took the 1983–84 school year off to concentrate on the Olympics. My day began at 8:00
A.M.,
when I left my apartment in Culver City and hopped on the Venice Boulevard bus and took it to Sepulveda Boulevard, a long thoroughfare running north and south alongside the 405/San Diego Freeway. Bobby wanted me to jog to UCLA each morning to our sessions. From the bus stop on Sepulveda, I had to run the four to five miles to the UCLA campus in less than thirty minutes. For a while it took thirty-five minutes. After a couple of weeks, I shaved it down to thirty-two. The morning I ran it in twenty-eight minutes I felt like celebrating. It was a tough route; I dodged traffic, waited at stoplights and inhaled exhaust fumes while I ran uphill and down. Getting the time down was significant. It was a signal to me that I would be stronger and faster in the 800 meters, the event that might determine whether I got a spot on the team.

From 8:00
A.M.
to 8:00
P.M.,
I worked six days a week. I sprinted up and down and around one half of the track stadium, trying to climb every step before the hand on Bobby's stopwatch reached the five-minute mark. Then I lifted weights, working each body part. In the afternoon, I worked on the heptathlon skills.

I had never worked harder at athletic training. My palms were decorated with calluses from weightlifting. As I limped off the darkening track at the end of each day, my calves ached, my buttocks were tight and my feet screamed for a pail of warm water. But I saw the rewards every time I looked in the mirror. My arms and legs were lean and sinewy. My body fat count was in the low single digits. My stomach was as stiff as a washboard. The results showed on Bobby's clipboard. I was throwing the javelin and putting the shot farther. The seconds were disappearing from my 800, 200 and hurdle times. I was jumping farther down the sand and the high-jump bar was moving up.

17

The Carnival

T
here's always a carnival atmosphere at track and field events. Athletes in the multi-events suffer more than others because our competition goes on for such a long time. Just as you're about to start your approach to the high jump, the crowd starts to roar about something that's happening on the track. Or they start playing the music for an awards ceremony and throw your concentration off when you're in the middle of crouching for the shot put.

During the Olympic Trials, however, the carnival takes place inside a pressure cooker. The media and the people involved in the event make it hard to stay calm and focused. Journalists love to play up the fact that the Trials are an athlete's one and only shot every four years to make the Olympic team. Athletes get spooked by such talk and start thinking, “Oh my God, I gotta be ready, this is it.” Some put too much pressure on themselves, overtrain and get injured before the meet. Or their nerves just get the best of them.

And then there are all the requests for interviews and photographs. Here you are, trying to prepare for the biggest event in your life, and suddenly you're bombarded with attention. Of course, the exposure, interest and publicity are exciting and flattering. They're what you've worked for and it's hard to turn down a chance to savor some of the benefits. But I always remember what Mr. Fennoy told me when I went away to big meets in high school—take care of business first and reap the rewards afterward.

I think track and field athletes are more easily seduced by the limelight than, say, football or basketball players, because, normally, we attract little publicity or fan interest. Some of us act like the reporters are on the last train leaving the station and if we don't get on board, we'll miss our one and only chance at celebrity. I wish our sport was covered more consistently and that officials who govern track and field would do a better job of promoting the sport so that people would be interested in covering us year round rather than just every four years. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Some say the solution is to change the system for selecting the Olympic track team. They think U.S. athletes who hold world records should get automatic spots on the Olympic team. Others say the team should be made up of athletes who win the most competitions during the previous four years.

I believe that the system in place now, which uses results from the Olympic Trials to determine the makeup of the track team, is the fairest, most objective way of doing it. Every athlete knows the rules—that the Trials are where the decision is made. All of us should have to get out there and perform when the time comes. That's the only way to level the playing field for veterans and newcomers. Doing it any other way is just asking for trouble. It would be an invitation for mischief by unscrupulous agents, promoters and sponsors who could help certain athletes build up their records while avoiding tough competition.