Читать книгу The Book of Awesome Women - Becca Anderson - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAwesome Athletes: Leveling the Playing Field
Greek mythology tells us of the first female Olympian, Atalanta of Boetia. Born to Schoeneus, she cared not for weaving, the kitchen, or for wasting her precious time with any man who couldn’t hold his own against her athletic prowess. Her father, proud of his fleet-footed Boetian babe, disregarded the norms of ancient Greek society and didn’t insist on marrying his daughter off for political or financial gain, and supported her decision to marry the man who could out-run her. Her suitors were, however, given a head start, and Atalanta “armed with weapons pursues her naked suitor. If she catches him, he dies.” She was outfoxed by Hippomenes who scattered golden apples as he ran, slowing down the amazonian runner as she stopped to pick them up. Well matched in every way, they were happy together, even going so far as to desecrate a shrine to Aphrodite by making love on the altar! For this, the Goddess turned Atalanta into a lioness, where she ruled yet again with her wild and regal spirit.
In real life, women athletes have been crushing barriers and high jumping their way to fame since the nineteenth century. In 1972, they got a bit of help from the federal government in the form of Title IX. Although President Richard Nixon signed the law stating, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” it is still hotly debated as to whether this legislation is enough to give women parity. Since the passage of Title IX, statistics have shown a seven percent increase in the ratio of women athletes in high school. Although this is a definite improvement, there’s still a long way to go to reach the 50 percent mark.
Even without full equality in funding, sports is an arena where women can compete with men openly again now, thanks to such sheroic trailblazers as tennis star Billie Jean King, who went up against Bobby Riggs in the heavily hyped match of 1973. Riggs, with preening braggadocio and banty-rooster crowing, declared that he would exhaust King because men were “stronger” and “better tennis players.” Telecast from Houston’s Astrodome, the world watched while Billie Jean King beat the shorts off the chauvinist Riggs and leveled the playing fields (and courts!) for every woman and girl on that herstoric day. Like King and today’s stars, Venus and Serena Williams, the sheroes portrayed here have bucked the odds with passion, pure guts, and sheer ability to make it to the top of their games.
Suzanne Lenglen – She Ruled the Court
Before Venus and Serena or even Chris Evert, there was Suzanne Lenglen, a flamboyant, brandy-loving Parisian trendsetter named “La Divine” by the French press, who in her brief life transformed women’s tennis. Suzanne was born in Paris in 1899; as a child, she was frail and suffered from many health problems including chronic asthma. Her father decided it would benefit her health if she built her strength up by competing in tennis. Her first try at the game was in 1910, on the family’s tennis court on their property. The eleven-year-old liked the game, and her father continued to train her, with training methods including an exercise where it is said he would lay a handkerchief in different parts of the court and have Suzanne hit the ball towards it. Only four years later, at age 14, Lenglen made it to the final of the 1914 French Championships; she lost to reigning champion Marguerite Broquedis, but later that spring won the World Hard Court Championships at Saint-Cloud on her 15th birthday, making her the youngest person in tennis history to this day to win a major championship.
At the end of 1914, most major tennis competitions in Europe were abruptly halted by the onset of World War I. Lenglen’s promising career was on hold for the next five years. The French championships were not held again until 1920, but Wimbledon resumed in 1919. Lenglen made her debut there, taking on seven-time champion Dorothea Douglass Chambers in the final. The historic match was played before 8,000 onlookers, including King George V and Queen-Consort Mary of Teck. Lenglen won the match; however, it was not only her playing that drew notice. The media squawked about her dress, which revealed her forearms and ended above the calf; at the time, others competed in body-covering ensembles. The staid British were also shocked by a French woman daring to casually sip brandy between sets.
Lenglen dominated women’s tennis singles at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Belgium. On her way to winning a gold medal, she lost only four games, three of them in the final against Dorothy Holman of England. She won another gold medal in the mixed doubles before being eliminated in a women’s doubles semifinal, and a bronze after their opponents withdrew. From 1919 to 1925, Lenglen won the Wimbledon singles championship in every year except 1924, when health problems due to jaundice forced her to withdraw after winning the quarterfinal. No other French woman won the Wimbledon ladies singles title again until Amélie Mauresmo in 2006. From 1920 to 1926, Lenglen won the French Championships singles title six times and the doubles title five times, as well as three World Hard Court Championships in 1921-1923. Astoundingly, she only lost seven matches in her entire career.
Lenglen sailed to New York City in 1921 to play the first of several exhibition matches against the Norwegian-born US champion, Molla Bjurstedt Mallory, to raise reconstruction funds for the parts of France that had been devastated by World War I. She was sick the entire storm-ridden voyage, which was delayed, arriving only one day before the tournament. When she arrived, Lenglen was told they had announced her as a participant in the US Championships. Due to immense public pressure, she agreed to play even though she was quite ill with what was later diagnosed as whooping cough; she was only given a day to recover as a concession. When another player defaulted, Lenglen ended up facing Mallory in the second round as her first opponent. She lost the first set, and just as the second set began, she began to cough and burst into tears, unable to go on. Spectators taunted her as she left the court, and the U.S. press was harsh. Under doctor’s orders, she cancelled her exhibition match and returned home in a despondent state. But at the Wimbledon singles final the following year, she defeated Mallory in only 26 minutes, winning 6–2, 6–0, in what was said to be the shortest ladies’ major tournament match on record. The two faced off again later in 1922 at a tournament in Nice where Lenglen completely dominated the court; Mallory failed to win even one game.
In a 1926 tournament at the Carlton Club in Cannes, Lenglen played her only game against Helen Wills. Public attention for their match in the tournament final was immense, with scalper ticket prices hitting stratospheric levels. Roofs and windows of nearby buildings were crowded with onlookers. The memorable match saw Lenglen scraping by with a 6–3, 8–6 victory after nearly losing it on several occasions. It is said that her father had forbidden her to play Wills, and since Lenglen had almost never defied him, she was so stressed out that she was unable to sleep the whole previous night. Later in 1926, Lenglen seemed to be on course for a seventh Wimbledon singles title; but she withdrew from the tournament after learning that due to a mixup about the starting time, she had kept Queen Mary waiting in the royal box for a preliminary match to begin, which was seen as an affront to the English monarchy by the aristocracy.
Suzanne Lenglen was the first major female tennis star ever to go pro. Sports promoter C.C. Pyle paid her $50,000 to tour the U.S. playing a series of matches against Mary K. Brown, who at 35 was considered past her best years for tennis, though she had made it to the French final that year, only to lose to Lenglen, having only scored one point. This was the first time ever that a women’s match was the headliner event of the tour, even though male players were part of the tour as well. When it ended in early 1927, Lenglen had won every one of her 38 matches; but she was exhausted, and her doctor advised a lengthy respite from the sport. She decided to retire from competition and set up a tennis school with help and funding from her lover, Jean Tillier. The school gradually grew and gained recognition; Lenglen also wrote several tennis texts in those years. Many criticized her for leaving amateur tennis competition, but she fired back, “Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular—or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?”
In 1938, Lenglen was suddenly diagnosed with leukemia and died only a few weeks later at age 39 near Paris. But her talent, verve, and style had changed women’s tennis forever; before the arc of her brilliant career, very few tennis fans were interested in women’s matches. The trophy for the Women’s Singles competition at the French Open is now the “Coupe Suzanne-Lenglen.” She was also inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and many hold her to be one of the best tennis players ever.
“I just throw dignity against the wall and think only of the game.”
- Susanne Lenglen
Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Greatest
Babe (real name Mildred) Didrikson always strived to be the best at any activity she undertook. Insecure, she figured sports was a great way to build up herself and her self-esteem. She got that right! She excelled at every sport she tried: running, jumping, javelin throwing, swimming, basketball, and baseball to name just a few. In her prime, she was so famous that she was known around the world by her first name.
Babe had a supportive home environment for the sporting life; her mother, Hannah Marie Olson, was a figure skater. Babe’s family was loving, but they had a tough time making a living in the hardscrabble Texas town from whence they hailed. As a youngster in the twenties, Babe worked after school packing figs and sewing potato sacks at nearby factories, but somehow she still found time to play. No matter what the game, Babe was always better than the boys.
In high school, Babe tried out for basketball, baseball, golf, tennis, and volleyball; her superior athletic skills created a lot of jealousy among her peers. A Dallas insurance company offered her a place on their basketball team; Babe worked at the firm, finished high school, and played on the team. In her very first game, she smoked the court and outscored the other team all by herself. Fortunately for her, Employers Casualty also had track, diving, and swim teams. Track held a particular lure for Babe; she set records almost immediately in the shot put, high jump, long jump, and javelin throw. In 1932, Babe represented the Lone Star State as a one-woman team, and out of eight competitions she took awards for six. In 1932, Los Angeles was the site of the Summer Olympics; Babe drew the eyes of the world when she set records for the eighty-meter hurdles and the javelin throw. She would have won the high jump too, but the judges declared her technique of throwing herself headfirst over the bar as unacceptable. There is no doubt she would have taken home even more gold except for the newly instated rule setting a limit of three events per athlete.
For Babe, making a living was more important than the accolades of the world. Unfortunately the options for women in professional sports were extremely limited in the 1930s. She made the decision to become a professional golfer; although she had little experience, she took the Texas Women’s Amateur Championship three years later. In typical Babe Didrikson style, she went on to win seventeen tournaments in a row and also took part in matches against men, including a memorable match against the “crying Greek from Cripple Creek,” George Zaharias, whom she married in 1938. Babe quickly saw the need for equality in women’s golf and helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Babe died at forty-three, after making a stunning comeback: winning the U.S. Open by twelve strokes less than a year after major surgery for intestinal cancer. She is thought by many to have been the greatest female athlete of all time.
“It’s not enough to swing at the ball. You’ve got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it.”
— Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Halet Çambel: Her Sword Was Mightier
How many people can say they dissed Hitler? Halet Çambel, an Olympic fencer, was the first Muslim woman ever to compete in the Olympics as well as an archaeologist. She was born in 1916 in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of a former Grand Vizier to the Ottoman sultan. When her family moved back to Istanbul, Turkey, in the mid-1920s, Halet was “shocked by the black-shrouded women who came and visited us at home.” Having survived bouts with typhoid and hepatitis as a child, she decided to focus on exercise to build her strength and health. In an interview, she said, “There were other activities like folk dancing and other dances at school, but I chose fencing.” Halet eventually rose to the level of representing Turkey in the women’s individual foil event at the 1936 Summer Olympics. The 20-year-old had grave reservations about attending the Nazi-run Games, and she and her fellow Turkish athletes drew the line at a social introduction to the Führer; she later said, “Our assigned German official asked us to meet Hitler. We actually would not have come to Germany at all if it were down to us, as we did not approve of Hitler’s regime,” she recalled late in life. “We firmly rejected her offer.”
Upon returning home after the Games, Halet met communist poet and journalist Nail Çakırhan and fell in love. Her family didn’t approve of his Marxist ideas, so they were married in secret; their marriage endured for 70 years until his death in 2008. She studied archaeology in Paris at the Sorbonne in the 1930s before earning a doctorate at Istanbul University in 1944, then became a lecturer in 1947; that same year, she worked as part of a team excavating the 8th century Hittite fortress city of Karatepe in Turkey, which was to become her scholarly life’s work. She spent half of each year there for the next 50 years, working with others to achieve a deeper understanding of Hittite hieroglyphic writing and other aspects of their culture. In 1960, Halet became a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Istanbul University and founded its Institute of Prehistory, achieving emeritus status in 1984. She lived to be ninety-seven.
Alice Coachman: Running for Her Life
Boy, could Alice Coachman run and jump! Because of World War II, however, national competitions were as far as an athlete could aspire in the forties, and the young African American athlete held the national titles for the high jump for twelve consecutive years. Her chance to achieve international recognition finally came in the 1948 Olympics; Alice was thought to be past her prime, but she decided to go for it anyway. Her teammates lost every race; finally it was Alice’s turn for the high jump. She took the gold, defeating an opponent who towered above her in height, to become at age twenty-four, the first black woman to win Olympic gold and the first American woman to go for the gold in track and field.
Alice was warmly welcomed back to America with an invitation to the White House, a victory motorcade through her home state of Georgia, and a contract to endorse Coca Cola. Not surprisingly, the racist and sexist America of the forties didn’t fully embrace Alice as it should have. She was, however, lionized in the black community as a favorite daughter and truly was the trailblazer for every black woman athlete to come after her.
Althea Gibson: Never Give Up
From the ghetto to the tennis court, Althea Gibson’s story is pure sheroism. At a time when tennis was not only dominated by whites but by upper-class whites at that, she managed to serve and volley her way to the top.
Born in 1927 to a Southern sharecropper family, Althea struggled as a girl with a restless energy that took years for her to channel into positive accomplishments. The family’s move to Harlem didn’t help. She was bored by school and skipped a lot; teachers and truant officers predicted the worst for Althea, believing that she was a walking attitude problem whose future lay as far as the nearest reform school.
Although things looked dire for Althea, she had a thing or two to show the naysayers. Like many sheroes, Althea had to bottom out before she could get to the top. She dropped out of school and drifted from job to job until, at only fourteen, she found herself a ward of New York City’s Welfare Department. This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Althea—a wise welfare worker not only helped her find steady work, but also enrolled her into New York’s police sports program. Althea fell in love with paddle ball, and upon graduating to real tennis, amazed everyone with her natural ability. The New York Cosmopolitan Club, an interracial sports and social organization, sponsored the teen and arranged for her to have a tennis coach, Fred Johnson. Althea’s transformation from “bad girl” to tennis sensation was immediate; she won the New York State Open Championship one year later. She captured the attention of two wealthy patrons who agreed to sponsor her if she finished high school. She did in 1949—and went on to accept a tennis scholarship to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
Althea’s battles weren’t over yet, though. She aced nine straight Negro national championships and chafed at the exclusion from tournaments closed to nonwhite players. Fighting hard to compete with white players, Althea handled herself well, despite being exposed to racism at its most heinous. Her dignified struggle to overcome segregation in tennis won her many supporters of all colors. Finally, one of her biggest fans and admirers, the editor of American Lawn and Tennis magazine, wrote an article decrying the “color barrier” in tennis. The walls came down. By 1958, Althea Gibson won the singles and doubles at Wimbledon and twice took the U.S. national championships at the U.S. Open as well.
Then, citing money woes, she retired; she just couldn’t make a living at women’s tennis. Like Babe Zaharias, she took up golf, becoming the first black woman to qualify for the LPGA. But she never excelled in golf as she had in tennis, and in the seventies and eighties she returned to the game she truly loved, serving as a mentor and coach to an up and coming generation of African American women tennis players.
Through sheer excellence and a willingness to work on behalf of her race, Althea Gibson made a huge difference in the sports world for which we are all indebted.
Martina Navratilova: Always Herself
One of the all-time tennis greats, Martina Navratilova was a Czechoslovakian native who defected to the United States so she could manage her own career, rather than having the Czech government tell her what to do and where to go. During the eighties, she was the top-ranked women’s tennis player in the world with a career record of seventy-five straight wins. She approached her career and training as serious business, a pure athlete in the truest sense. One of the first openly gay celebrities, Martina has been linked amorously with Rita Mae Brown, who penned a novel about their affair and was sued in a “galimony” suit by another lover, Judy Nelson, who went on to share a bed with Rita. Opines Martina, “I never thought there was anything strange about being gay.”
The All-American Girls Baseball League: Backward and in High Heels
For the briefest time in the 1940s, women had a “league of their own.” And while it was not intended to be serious sports so much as a marketing package, the All-Girls Baseball League stormed the field and made it their own. The league was the brainchild of chewing gum magnate Phillip K. Wrigley, whose empire had afforded him the purchase of the Chicago Cubs. He came up with the concept of putting a bunch of sexy girls out on the field in short skirts and full makeup to entertain a baseball-starved population whose national pastime was put on hold as baseball players turned fighting men.
He was right—the gals did draw crowds, enough to field teams in several mid-sized Midwestern cities. (At the height of its popularity, the league was drawing a million paying customers per 120 game season.) A savvy businessman catering to what he believed were the tastes of baseball fans, Wrigley had strict guidelines for his “girls”—impeccable appearance and maintenance, no short hair, no pants on or off the playing field. Pulchritude and “charm” were absolute requirements for players. Arthur Meyerhoff, chairman of the league, aptly characterized it as: “Baseball, traditionally a men’s game, played by feminine type girls with masculine skill.” For Meyerhoff, “feminine type” was serious business and he kept a hawkeye on his teams for the slightest sign of lesbianism. He also sent his sandlot and cornfield trained players to charm school to keep them on their girlish toes.
Although the rules seemed stringent, the players were eager to join these new teams called the Daisies, the Lassies, the Peaches, and the Belles because it was their only chance to play baseball professionally. Pepper Pair put it best in the book she and the other AAGBL players are profiled in, “You have to understand that we’d rather play ball than eat, and where else could we go and get paid $100 a week to play ball?” After the war, men returned home and major league baseball was revived. However the All-Girls league hung on, even spawning the rival National Girl’s Baseball League. With more opportunity for everyone, teams suddenly had to pay more money to their best players in order to hang on to them, and both leagues attracted players from all around the U.S. and Canada.
Penny Marshall’s wonderful film, A League of Their Own, did a credible job portraying the hardship and hilarity of professional women athletes trying to abide by the rules and display feminine “charm” while playing topnotch baseball. Ironically, the television boom of the fifties eroded the audience for the AAGBL as well as many other semi-pro sports. The death blow to the women’s baseball leagues came, however, with the creation of the boys-only Little League. Girls no longer had a way to develop their skills in their youth and were back to sandlots and cornfields, and the AAGBL died in 1954.
“The fans thought we were the best thing that ever came down the pike.”
— player Mary Pratt
Joan Joyce: Perfect Pitch
Joan Joyce should be a household name. In the words of a tournament umpire who watched her pitch a game, she was “one of the three best softball pitchers in the country, and two of them are men.” Joan ended up in softball when she was blocked from playing baseball in the fifties. She recalled in an interview in Sports Illustrated, “I started playing softball at eight because my father played it and because it was the only sport open to me at the time.” By her teens, she was astounding players, coaches, and parents alike with a fast ball clocked at 116 miles per hour. At eighteen, she joined the Stamford, Connecticut, all-girl team, the Raybestos Brakettes, and pitched the team to three consecutive national championships. Soon, the Brakettes were the force to be reckoned with in amateur softball, winning a dozen championships in eighteen seasons. Joyce’s record was an unbelievable 105 no-hitters and thirty-three perfect games.
Joyce’s reputation as an “unhittable” pitcher led to a challenge in 1962 between Joyce and Ted Williams, then a batting champion with a .400 average per season. A roaringly appreciative crowd watched her fan thirty pitches past the bemused Williams. He managed only a few late fouls and one limp hit to the infield. On that day, Joan Joyce showed she was not only just as good, but better than any man!
Wilma Rudolph: La Gazelle
Runner Wilma Rudolph’s life is the story of a great spirit and heart overcoming obstacles that would have stopped anyone else in their tracks, literally! Born in Bethlehem, Tennessee, in 1955, Wilma contracted polio at the age of four and was left with a useless leg.
Wilma’s family was in dire straits with a total of eighteen children from her father’s two marriages. Both parents worked constantly to feed the burgeoning brood, her father as a porter and her mother as a house cleaner, and it was more important to feed Wilma and her siblings than it was to get the medical attention Wilma needed to recover the use of her leg. Two years later circumstances eased a bit, and at the age of six, Wilma started riding the back of the bus with her mother to Nashville twice a week for physical therapy. Although doctors predicted she would never walk without braces, Wilma kept up her rehabilitation program for five years and not only did the braces come off, but “by the time I was twelve,” she told the Chicago Tribune, “I was challenging every boy in the neighborhood at running, jumping, everything.”
Her exceptional ability didn’t go unnoticed. A coach with Tennessee State University saw how she was winning every race she entered in high school and offered to train her for the Olympics, which Wilma hadn’t even heard of. Nevertheless, she qualified for the Olympics at sixteen and took home a bronze medal in the 1956 Summer Games for the 100-meter relay. Still in high school, she decided to work toward a gold medal for the 1960 games.
Well, she did that and more. The three gold medals she won in the 1960 Olympics in Rome—in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and the 4 X 100 relay—turned her into a superstar overnight. Wilma was the first American woman ever to win triple gold in a single Olympics. People were stumbling over the top of each other to find the superlatives to describe her. The French named Wilma “La Gazelle,” and in America she was known as “The Fastest Woman on Earth.” Wilma was everybody’s darling after that, with invitations to the JFK White House and numerous guest appearances on television. The flip side of all the glory was, however, that Wilma received hardly any financial reward for her public appearances and had to work odd jobs to get through college.
One year later, Wilma again set the world on fire by breaking the record for the 100-meter dash: 11.2 seconds. Unpredictably, Wilma sat out the ’64 Olympic Games and stayed in school, graduating with a degree in education and returning to the very school she had attended as a youngster to teach second grade. In 1967, she worked for the Job Corps and Operation Champion, a program that endeavored to bring star athletes into American ghettos as positive role models for young kids. Wilma herself loved to talk to kids about sports and was a powerful symbol with her inspiring story.
That Wilma touched the lives of children is best evidenced in a letter writing campaign taken up by a class of fourth graders in Jessup, Maryland, who requested the World Book Encyclopedia correct their error in excluding the world-class athlete. The publisher complied immediately! Wilma has also been honored with induction into both the Olympic Hall of Fame and the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. A film version of her autobiography Wilma starring Cicely Tyson was produced to tremendous acclaim. Her death from terminal brain cancer took place shortly after she received an honor as one of “The Great Ones” at the premiere National Sports Awards in 1993.
“I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women will have a chance to reach their dreams.”
— Wilma Rudolph
Evelyn Ashford: The Power of Persistence
“(Wilma Rudolph) inspired me to pursue my dream of being a runner, to stick with it,” says runner Evelyn Ashford, whose incredible athletic staying power in a sport with a high burnout rate was notable. She participated in Olympic games for nearly twenty years, returning to pick up a gold medal in 1992 as a thirty-five-year-old mother of one. Evelyn was always gifted at sports, but never took herself seriously until a male coach noticed her speed and issued a challenge for her to race his male track team. When she beat the “best guy” on the field, Evelyn suddenly got the attention and positive support that spurred her on.
By 1975, she had earned a full scholarship to UCLA. One year later, she was a member of the Olympic team, but had to wait for the next games four years later to make her mark. In 1980, in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter made the choice to boycott the Summer Olympic games. Along with her peers, Evelyn Ashford’s chances to win were dashed. But her persistence paid off in spades; she came back after the terrible disappointment and won a gold medal for the 100 meter sprint and another gold medal for the 400 meter relay in the 1984 Summer Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. Renowned as the perfect model of a good sport, on and off the field, she takes enormous joy in running with fellow champions Alice Brown, Sheila Echols, and Florence Griffith-Joyner, and promoting track and field as a sport. There’s no doubt that Wilma Rudolph would be proud of Evelyn Ashford’s accomplishments.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee: Queen of the Field
Arguably the greatest cross category track and field star of all time, Jackie Joyner-Kersee has a string of firsts to her credit and keeps racking them up at an astonishing rate: she’s the first U.S. woman to win gold for the long jump, the first woman ever to exceed 7,000 points for the heptathlon, and the first athlete, man or woman, to win multiple gold medals in both single and multiple events in track and field. Since her debut in the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Events, Jackie has been at the top of her game.
Along with her athletic prowess, Jackie’s charisma and style made her an overnight sensation. In addition, she has a policy of giving back as good as she gets to the community she’s from. She has a strong desire to nurture athleticism and scholarship in urban settings where access to a place to run and play is the first of many challenges ghetto kids face. Her foundation, the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center Foundation, is currently developing a recreational and educational facility for kids in East St. Louis where area kids will have access to a computer lab, library, ball fields, basketball courts, and of course, indoor and outdoor tracks.
Like several other outstanding athletes, Jackie comes from poverty, an alum of the poorest part of East St. Louis. Fortunately, Jackie received encouragement from her family to participate in sports. She discovered track and field at the Mayor Brown Community Center, and her Olympic dreams started when she saw the 1976 Olympics on television. Jackie quickly emerged as a veritable “sporting savant” and started breaking national records at fourteen, excelling at basketball and volleyball while maintaining a super grade point average. Soon she was courted by many tantalizing college scholarships, ultimately deciding to attend UCLA, where Bob Kersee would be her coach.
Bob Kersee, whom she married in 1986, convinced both Jackie and the powers-that-be at UCLA that Jackie’s career lay in multitrack events. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine Jackie anywhere but in the event where she is the best in the world. Jackie’s forte is the seven-event heptathlon, a previously overlooked event in which athletes earn points by running a 200-meter dash, compete in both high and long jumps, throw both the javelin and shot put, run the 100-meter hurdles, and complete an 800-meter run, all in two days. These herculean challenges alone call for super-sheroism, and Jackie has not only made the heptathlon her own, but through her prowess made the event a track and field favorite.
