RUNNING OR JUMPING, DEVERS A HIT AT 100 : HER GOAL IS GOLD

Gail Devers is thankful for her name.

“I’m glad my mother gave me a regular name instead of one like hers, Alavee, or like my brother, Parenthesis,” said Devers, a UCLA junior who is a product of San Diego’s Sweetwater High School.

Devers is making a name for herself as a multitalented Bruin track star. In a recent meet against USC, she won five events, and she already has qualified to compete in the NCAA championships in the 100, 200, and 400 meters, 100-meter hurdles, long jump, triple jump, and 400 and 1,600 relays.

Her coach, Bob Kersee, thinks Devers could gain international recognition in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Devers is planning to run the 100 meters and the 100-meter hurdles in the Olympic trials and may try to make the U.S. team in either the 200 meters or the 400 relay events.

“The ’88 Olympics would be her first major international experience, and that would be more of a limitation than her ability,” Kersee said. “By 1992, when Gail will be 23, she will be very difficult to beat in several events.”

Devers hopes to become the first woman athlete in history to win Olympic gold medals in the 100 meters and the 100-meter hurdles.

That’s assuming she decides to specialize in those two events next year at UCLA. She will make the decision in conjunction with Kersee--with additional advice from Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the coach’s wife and Devers’ friend.

Although Devers hasn’t identified a favorite event, she doesn’t think competing on such a broad spectrum has limited her development.

Her main concern is ensuring that track remains fun. “I’ll quit the day I don’t have fun,” she said.

“I try not to put any pressure on myself. I don’t feel I have to win every race. And when I win a race, I don’t think I’m the best. I don’t put myself on a pedestal. That’s when you start messing up.”

Kersee takes a somewhat different approach. Devers says he believes all his athletes should set higher goals.

“He thinks everyone can do better than they believe,” she said. “He was telling me two years ago I could be the best in the world, but I’d say ‘no’ to myself.

“I do want to set higher goals, and I want to be in the Olympics. Jackie has really encouraged me. I think it can still be fun even at that level. I know I’ll have to work harder, but I’m willing.”

Kersee said he has no trouble motivating Devers. “She doesn’t need that from me,” he said. “She has that herself. I think I know talent pretty well, and with Gail, I just try to keep her level-headed and loose.

“She’s only now starting to think about what her capabilities are. And, like Jackie, she has so much talent that she doesn’t understand a lot of things she does. So I always question her, ‘What did you feel?’ in that race, or ‘What did you do?’ going over the hurdles.”

Kersee said he has tried to prevent Devers from being mentally scarred by pressure during her undergraduate days.

“I don’t want to be overly protective,” he said. “I just want to make sure she gets enjoyment out of what she is doing. She’s a real worker, and she knows she has a disciplinarian coaching her. And she’s going to be one of the greatest female athletes in the United States, if not the world.”

Kersee clearly has attempted to maintain a balance between pushing Devers and allowing her to have fun.

Her fun-loving approach to track was shaped by her mother, an elementary school teacher, and her father, a minister.

“They would never try to make me keep on if I didn’t want to,” she said. “They’ve never pressured me in any way.”

Other than winning a few playground races while in elementary school in San Diego, Devers never suspected she had any athletic ability. Her brother persuaded her to go out for track at Sweetwater, where her career was almost as varied as it has been at UCLA.

“People used to say I was crazy for using her in so many events,” Kersee said, “but everything is monitored and controlled. There’s nothing she enters that she can’t succeed at.”

Devers, who is engaged to Ron Roberts of the Santa Monica Track Club, says her private life is quiet.

“We go to a lot of movies,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re pretty much home bodies. My teammates don’t ever ask me to go anywhere because they look at me like I’m already married.”

Devers adheres to a fairly strict diet to maintain her weight at about 115 pounds. She eats no beef or junk food, sticking to a Kersee-prescribed regimen that includes fish, chicken and complex carbohydrates, meaning a lot of pasta and pancakes.

“Every once in a while, I’ll be dying for a hamburger and a slice of pecan pie,” she said. But she overcomes the urge with granola bars.

“The thing I just can’t give up is ice cream. I have to have it once a week.”

Such sacrifices are relatively easy compared to the mental juggling she must do to accommodate the expectations of others with her own goals.

“People are always after you to go for it,” she said. “But I push myself harder than anyone else could.

“I have to take (outside pressure) and try to make people’s thoughts into reality. I have started to look at myself more closely this year. I’m doing well academically, my times are dropping and I’m finally understanding what Bobby (Kersee) wants from me.”

They spend time analyzing videotape of practice and actual competition, and they also dissect what she was thinking and feeling at a given moment.

For example, Devers described how Kersee has taught her to divide a 100-meter race into three zones, consisting of the first 40 meters, the second 40 and the closing 20.

“I will walk in long strides down the track before I run so I can pick out something to help me identify where each zone ends,” she said.

“In the first zone, I’m trying to get out of the blocks and really accelerate. In the second 40 meters, I concentrate on keeping my knees up and settling in, trying to take control of the race. I try to relax and keep my shoulders from hunching up, which makes me too tight. In the final zone, I want to think about having quick feet and a shorter stride as I get to the finish line.”

Devers said that sometimes in practice, she balks at a Kersee suggestion, perhaps because she doesn’t understand precisely what he wants.

“He teases me and says I’ve got a case of the jaws,” she said, meaning that Kersee can see from the tension in her jaw that she is angry or opposed to what he wants.

“I get frustrated when he makes me do things over and over, but I am learning to see what he wants after nearly three years here. I’m so happy and easy-going, it really takes a lot to get me upset. I think it would definitely affect my performance if I wasn’t so happy.”

The Olympics could make her happier still, but she has postponed thinking seriously about 1988. Her potential is something for others to contemplate, at least until the start of her senior year, when she will begin to focus on Seoul.

For now, she takes consolation from the knowledge that she never has run a perfect race.

“I think that’s very encouraging,” she said. “I know I can still get faster if I get everything just right. It’s exciting, knowing I can go faster in the 100 meters if I improve my start, and I can do better in the hurdles if I improve my technique. A lot of people have better form than me.”