Pepsi Is a Challenge, But Jacobs’ Goal Is Seoul

At age 4, Regina Jacobs was a real pest.

The Baldwin Hills kid figured she was pretty hot stuff when it came to racing people down the street and she just couldn’t wait to show it. So she challenged people. Anybody. Everybody. She didn’t win very often, but she never lost confidence. She even took on her 18-year-old cousin, a high-school football player, in a race and lost. She was 7 at the time.

“I was like a gambler who just has to bet,” she says. “I tried other sports, but I was only so-so at them. That was just not me. I liked to race people.”

Eighteen years after she starting issuing challenges, Jacobs is still at it. The competition is a lot tougher these days, but so is Jacobs. She’ll be running in the 1,500-meter event in Saturday’s Pepsi Invitational track meet at UCLA and hopes to keep running all the way to Seoul, Korea for the 1988 Olympics.

“My goal is to do something in the Olympics,” she says, “not just make the team.”

If she does, she’ll be right on the schedule set for her almost a decade ago by Chuck Debus, her coach.

Debus still remembers the first time he saw Jacobs. She was 13 and a student at the Argyll Episcopal Academy For Girls in North Hollywood. Because Argyll didn’t have a track team, Jacobs’ parents allowed her to join the L.A. Track Club, where Debus is the coach.

“I knew right away she had exceptional talent,” he says. “She had a combination of speed and endurance and moved across the ground effortlessly. But she had poor mechanics. She had a Volkswagen body, but a Cadillac engine. If you have a Cadillac engine, you have the potential to be world class.”

After a month of watching Jacobs run, Debus called in her parents.

“I told them their daughter could be a world-class athlete, but that I didn’t believe she’d reach true world-class status until the age of 25.” Debus says. “Not because she didn’t have the physical skills, but because she didn’t have the mental maturity to match. Some kids are not sheltered and have to learn to cope with difficulty at a young age and that makes them more aggressive, more competitive. That was not the case with Regina. On the world-class level, mental toughness--the ability to handle pressure--is just as important as the physical.”

Debus told Jacobs’ parents he foresaw a long-term project, that he would work her just three days a week rather than the six or seven many athletes labor, that he would require her to train only four or five months a year.

“I did not want her to get burned out or injured,” Debus says. “America is notorious for beating up its athletes physically and mentally. There is a junk-pile in this country of great athletes who are superstars as teens, but get burned out by age 20.”

At the L.A. Track Club, Jacobs was still challenging people, but these were not exactly the kids on the block. She found herself running and training with Olympic athletes such as Julie Brown and Jane Frederick.

She couldn’t beat them, but, at 13, she did set an age group national record of 2:09 in the 880-yard run, smashing by three seconds the standard set by Mary Decker Slaney. Jacobs’ mark still stands nine years later.

She was a finalist at 1500 meters in the Olympic trials for the 1984 Games, but failed to make the team.

Now she’s back with Debus after spending four and a half years at Stanford where she became more of a long-distance runner. She finished second at the cross-country nationals last season. When she graduated and moved back to the Southland, Debus was shocked at what he saw. In his opinion, the Cadillac needs a tuneup.

“I thought the race plans they had for her in college were unrealistic,” he said. “They wanted her to lead races. She would crush the competition to win the prelims, but then she’d bomb out in the finals. When somebody challenged her, she’d just crumble.”

The folks in Baldwin Hills would find that hard to believe. They still talk about the 4-year-old phenom who wanted to challenge the world. Anybody know whatever became of her?