Very Fancy, Very
Fast
U.S. sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner is certainly
eye-catching—if, that is, you can catch her
by Kenny
Moore
Issue date: Sept. 14, 1988
One Sunday morning in July of 1987, on the way home from
church, Al Joyner and Florence Griffith took her young
niece and nephew, Khalisha and Larry Wiggs, to a Chuck E.
Cheese's restaurant in Los Angeles. There the kids played
carnival games and fired
impatient looks at the adults, heightening an air of
exquisite
tension
''You can't keep him waiting,'' whispered Khalisha to
Griffith. ''Do you know what it took for him to
ask?''
''Khalisha, you're 10 years old,'' said Griffith. ''I know
what he went through, but you
don't.''
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At the U.S. Trials, Griffith Joyner legged it out in both the 100 (above) and 200.
(George Tiedemann)
| Ah, but Khalisha and eight-year-old Larry knew a great
deal. Their fascinating, beloved aunt, the world and
Olympic 200-meter silver medalist, was a woman of
independence and beauty. They knew these gifts had served
her well in sports, in poetry, in
fashion, in every aspect of her life save one: the finding of a
good, true
man.
But this man Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple jump champion
and the older brother of heptathlon world-record holder
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, was as warm and comfortable as a pair
of custom-made Adidas. ''He was patient,'' says Florence,
28. ''He was honest.
He was too honest sometimes, but the longer we knew each
other, the more common cares and interests we
found.''
What's more, the 28-year-old Joyner, aptly nicknamed
Sweetwater since his lifeguard days in East St. Louis,
found unusual favor with the vast clan that constitutes
Florence's family. Griffith is one of 11 children and has,
at last count, 30 nieces and
nephews. None could be bolder than Khalisha and
Larry.
''You're good for her,'' they had said earlier to Al.
''You've just got to ask her to marry you. Here, we'll tell
you what to say.
...''
Because Joyner harbored precisely those feelings for
Florence, and is an easy, coachable guy, he actually
followed their advice. He did ask. And Griffith, ever wary,
ever thoughtful, didn't give him an answer, or say when she
would. Joyner sensed that
this too was a test, so he steeled himself to wait. And that
was how things stood when they hit Chuck E. Cheese's that
Sunday.
For playing Skee-Ball, Larry won a prize, a little yellow
rubber charm in the shape of the word
Yes.
Khalisha grabbed it and took it to her aunt. ''This is
perfect!'' the girl hissed, trembling. ''Just give him
this.''
Florence slowly smiled and took Al's hand under the table.
He looked up. She curled his fingers around the charm. He
stared at her with curiosity and opened his palm. And there
was his
answer.
He sagged with
happiness.
''It's about time!'' cried Khalisha, throwing herself at
the lovers. ''You're lucky he still wants you, making him
wait that
long!''
On Oct. 10, 1987, Florence Delorez Griffith and Alfrederick
Alphonzo Joyner were married in Las Vegas, an event
recorded in dozens of pictures and albums in the Joyners'
apartment in Van Nuys, Calif. But only now, almost a year ;
later, do we see their
full debt to Khalisha and Larry. After her marriage Griffith
Joyner began to completely relax, to ultimately
bloom.
She seems a paradox: shy but bravely immune to ridicule.
''I was very quiet, always,'' she says in her velvet
contralto. ''But in kindergarten I would braid my hair with
one braid sticking straight up. I'd go all day like that,
and when kids teased me,
I'd just laugh with
them.''
The family lived in the projects of L.A., and at age seven,
Florence started attending the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth
Foundation's sports days there. She raced and beat the
boys. But when she met Sugar Ray himself, she says, ''I was
too shy to ever look
him in the
eye.''
Her father, Robert, was an electronics technician; her
mother, for whom she was named, was a seamstress; her
grandmother Gertrude Scott, a beautician. ''I learned
crocheting, knitting, hair and nails,'' says Griffith
Joyner. ''I'd do the hair of all the
kids in the neighborhood. My mother frowned on watching TV,
so I read. Poetry was my favorite. I always kept a
diary.''
Encouraged in all her interests by her mother, Florence
grew up a natural eccentric, different not for the sake of
being different, but for the sake of being herself. While
in high school, tired of the family dog and its fleas, she
got a boa constrictor
and named it Brandy. ''I bathed her and lotioned her,'' she
says. Her tone is fond. ''Every week or two I'd go down to
the pet shop and get a couple mice or rats and feed them to
her. When she shed, I saved all of her skin and painted it
different
colors. She got to be five feet long. I got put out of a mall
once for having her around my neck. They said people were
afraid.''
After graduating from L.A.'s Jordan High in 1978, where she
had set school records in the sprints and long jump, she
went to Cal State-Northridge. But she couldn't afford to
return for her sophomore year, so she worked as a bank
teller until a young
Northridge sprint coach named Bobby Kersee helped her apply for
financial
aid.
When Kersee took an assistant's job at UCLA in 1980,
Griffith reluctantly followed him to Westwood. ''I had a
3.25 GPA in business [at Cal State- Northridge], but UCLA
didn't even offer my major. I had to switch to psychology.
But my running was
starting up, and I knew that Bobby was the best coach for me.
So—it kind of hurts to say this—I chose athletics
over
academics.''
By 1982 she was NCAA champion in the 200 with a 22.39, and
showing talent in the 400. ''The team at UCLA was so much
fun,'' she says. ''We'd always get together for Bobby's
birthday. We'd pitch in to buy him a suit, to make him
presentable for the
indoor
season.''
Griffith was way beyond presentable. When she let her nails
grow into rainbow talons, it affected one teammate much
like a squeeze from Brandy might have. "She said, 'We
all know you're different,'" Griffith Joyner recalls.
"'Why do you have to show
it?' That went in one ear and out the
other."
In 1984, running with long and intricately decorated
fingernails, she placed second to teammate Valerie
Brisco-Hooks in the Olympic
200.
There followed a couple of quiet years, in which she worked
as a bank secretary and developed a clientele for her
fiendishly elaborate masterpieces of hair-braiding. ''Four
to six hours is average,'' she says. ''But it can take up
to 13 for the jobs
with all the tiny individual braids.'' Depending upon the
style, she charges $45 to $200. ''Remember, they last five
months,'' she
says.
She drifted away from hard training and grew a little
plump, but a scolding from Kersee got her across the
mid-Olympiad hump. And Al Joyner began paying her his eager
attention. ''He devoted so much time to me I was
overwhelmed,'' says Florence. ''He's
so positive. He's the guy I dreamed
about.''
She took second in the 1987 World Championship 200 in Rome,
and contributed a decisive leg to the U.S.'s victorious 4 X
100-meter relay team. That gold medal soon found its way
around Al's neck, and they were married a month
later.
Their new life was maniacally full. Last winter her typical
day included four hours of clerical work in
Anheuser-Busch's employee relations department in Van Nuys;
a workout, supervised more often by her husband than by
Kersee, including an hour and a
half in the weight room; a sprint home to cook her famed
shrimp creole for dinner; then a braiding job, or her own
painting and writing in the
evening.
She finished each day with another workout, either a run or
some rugged sets of leg curls on the hamstring-leg
extension machine that takes the place of their kitchen
table. This work strengthened the gluteal and hamstring
muscles that blast her out of
the blocks. She was becoming a 100-meter woman as well as a
200-meter
one.
And looking wilder all the time. Griffith Joyner asserts
that, for her, form assists function. ''Colors excite me,''
she says. ''Sprinting is excitement." By accident,
Griffith Joyner came up with the one-legged look. ''I was
trying for a new idea,''
she says, ''and had cut one leg off some tights, and happened
to look in the mirror and said, 'That might
work.'"
It worked revealingly, in more ways than one. It made each
leg distinct and helped delineate the length and lift of
each stride, which are impressively long and high. And it
worked at the Olympic trials in Indianapolis in July, when
she wore a stunning
succession of one-legged and two-legged bodysuits that
included a lacy outfit that she called an ''athletic
negligee.'' She broke Evelyn Ashford's 100-meter world
record of 10.76 by the equivalent of 2 1/2 yards, with a
10.49. That time is still causing
aftershocks. Clocked by hand, the old-fashioned way, it
would be better than 10.3, or a 9.4 for 100 yards. An older
generation knows what that means. O.J. Simpson was a 9.4
sprinter.
The idea that a beautiful woman in lingerie can run as fast
as all but a handful of men in the NFL has stirred such
interest that the Joyners have been besieged, and Florence
is not one to pass unrecognized. ''That woman had an
unbelievable face, and
that speed!'' breathed a waiter at Spago, the fashionable L.A.
restaurant where Florence and Al dined after returning from
the
trials.
In one respect the Joyners moved with alacrity. They
employed the posttrials period to end her coach-athlete
relationship with Kersee. Well, he'll still be family, but
Al is the coach now, and Edwin Moses's agent, Gordon
Baskin, will bargain for races
and sponsors. Also, Al and Florence are moving to a new
apartment in Orange
County.
The training life will continue after Seoul, at least for
Al, who just missed making the Olympic team in the triple
jump and is determined to make the 1992 team as a high
hurdler. But anyone expecting to see Florence racing in
peel-away snakeskin
knickers for four more years should poke around the Joyners'
apartment.
''I'm building my hope chest,'' says
Florence.
''Hope room,'' says Al. ''It's like a wall of Toys R
Us.''
It's one more astonishment: a room piled to the ceiling
with dolls, balls, baby shoes, blocks and games, all in
their boxes. The closet is stuffed with baby clothes, boys'
and girls'. ''We get things on sale,'' says Florence.
''Most of the clothes are
from
Europe.''
''The styles will all have changed by the time we have
kids,'' says her husband jubilantly. ''They'll look
different in all this stuff. No one else will have
anything like
it.''
Thus are more eccentrics brought into this hidebound world.
Thank goodness they'll have cousins Khalisha and Larry to
guide
them.
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