Joyner’s Year of Happy Living : Heptathlete Has Returned for Final Basketball Season

Even with the UCLA women’s basketball team trailing Louisiana Tech by 25 points in a recent game, Bruin forward Jackie Joyner ran off the Pauley Pavilion court in the second half, laughing.

And even though UCLA has dipped to a 13-8 record after a promising 8-2 start, Joyner is calling this her most enjoyable basketball season.

The ups and downs that have accompanied the Bruins this year haven’t bothered Joyner. Lopsided losses don’t get her down. Marginal basketball seasons don’t depress her.

“Why shouldn’t I be smiling?” she said. “I have no reason to be frowning. No one has slashed my face or anything like that. Life is treating me pretty well.”

Actually, life couldn’t be better for Joyner, who is in the last year of a four-year basketball scholarship at UCLA. She returned to the team after spending a year away from school to train for the Olympics, where she won a silver medal in the heptathlon last August.

The two-time, defending NCAA heptathlon champion will complete her college track career this spring, then will spend the rest of the year training and traveling around the world to various meets. Her track club, World Class, will provide her training and traveling expenses.

Considered one of the nation’s best female athletes, Joyner hopes to cash in on the endorsement contracts and modeling revenues that are illegal under NCAA rules but considered fair game by The Athletics Congress.

She will continue to train with Bob Kersee, UCLA women’s track coach, for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and says she hasn’t even approached her potential in some of the heptathlon’s seven events.

Beginning to get the picture? The basketball gig at UCLA is sort of temporary. She’s dedicated to the game--enough so that she came back for her final season, even though Coach Billie Moore said she didn’t have to.

But track is her first love. It’s where she will earn her living for the next four years. It’s where her future is--where she thinks the big money will be.

That’s why Joyner doesn’t put the kind of pressure on herself in basketball that she does in track. She’s able to relax and enjoy a season that has frustrated most of her teammates. While others press to get out of shooting slumps or fight the emotional doldrums, Joyner continues along her merry way.

“She doesn’t have moods,” Moore said. “She’s always very up and very sensitive to other people’s needs. If she sees someone down, she’s the first one there to pick her up. As quality an athlete as she is, she’s just as outstanding an individual.”

That Joyner leads the Bruins in rebounding with 8.1 a game, and is third in scoring with a 12.4-point average is credit as much to her character as to her athletic ability. She could have slacked off or just concentrated on having a good time, but she has put forth the full effort.

“I don’t want to just go out there and be happy go lucky,” Joyner said. “I play basketball for the enjoyment of the sport, but I also want to get something out of it. I love winning, too.”

Joyner is all competitor. At Lincoln High School in East St. Louis, Ill., she was the captain of the volleyball team and an all-league selection. In basketball, she averaged 21 points and 14 rebounds, was a three-time, all-state selection and a two-time, high-school All-American. As a senior, she led the team to the state championship.

In track, Joyner was the state champion at 400 meters and in the long jump, she ran on the mile and sprint medley relay teams, and led the team to three consecutive state championships.

Joyner takes pride in all of her sports. Her efforts with the UCLA basketball team this year are evident, and Moore has called her the Bruins’ most consistent performer.

But her success in athletics is not the only reason for her contentment. Living in a Culver City apartment, Joyner has come a long way from her ghetto upbringings in East St. Louis. Life is no longer the struggle it was when she was growing up, and the future looks good.

“There were people there who would stop you from being successful if they could, but I was a strong-minded person,” Joyner said. “My boyfriend didn’t want me to come to UCLA, but that was his problem. I couldn’t deal with that, so we decided to go our own ways.”

Joyner describes East St. Louis as a rowdy, ghetto city. She was eager to leave, but she still refers to home as “good ol’ East St. Louis.”

Now, she and her brother, Al, a gold medalist in the triple jump, are idols to many people there. About 7,000 turned out last August for a parade in their honor.

At a ceremony at City Hall Plaza afterward, area businessmen gave the siblings new cars. Later, their aunt was given the keys to a house that will be built across from a park, which was named after the Joyners.

Joyner believes that she has a responsibility to those admirers.

“It’s up to people like us, the successful athletes, to go back and bring something into the community,” Joyner said. “My silver medal proved that dreams and goals can be accomplished. That’s what I stressed to the kids there--that drugs and alcohol are not a way out, that athletics can be a way to a better life.”

A lot of fun, too.