Notebook : Still Recovering From Knee Surgery, Slaney Looks Ahead to 1988

Still recovering from Achilles’ tendon surgery on June 2, Mary Decker Slaney has been told she can begin serious training Aug. 29. That date already was circled on her calendar because it also is the day the world track and field championships begin in Rome.

Noting the irony, she said, “I wish I could just ignore the championships.”

That may be impossible. If an agreement can be reached, she will work in Rome as an analyst for a Japanese television network.

It would not be a new role for her. She will serve as an analyst for CBS during the Pan American Games track and field competition, which begins today.

As for returning to competition, Slaney, 28, said she would like to run two road races and two indoor races next winter before beginning outdoor track training for the 1988 Summer Olympics.

She still plans to enter the 3,000 meters, the event she could not finish in the 1984 Games because of her collision with Zola Budd.

“I feel the scenario is incomplete,” she said.

But the surgery has caused her to revise her post-Olympics plans.

“Originally, I was thinking of running in ’88 and then taking ’89 off and having a playmate for Ashley,” she said. Ashley, who celebrated her first birthday this summer, is Slaney’s first child.

“But because I’m missing this year, I don’t want to take ’89 off. I want to concentrate on the 800 and 1,500, which is what I had planned to do this year. I still think the American records in those events are soft.”

Slaney holds both records.

She also said she believes she can break the world record of 8:22.62 in the 3,000 held by the Soviet Union’s Tatiana Kazankina.

“Whoever wins the Olympics next year will have to run 8:20,” she said. “The reason I say that is because I don’t think it’s inconceivable for me to run under 8:20.”

Does that mean she will set the pace instead of becoming involved in a tactical race as she did in 1984?

“I’m just going to go for it,” she said. “I’m not going to get caught up in a pack. If somebody beats me, it’s going to be because they ran faster. There’s nothing wrong with getting beaten in that fast a race. Then you leave the stadium with your head up.”

Valerie Brisco, who won three gold medals in the 1984 Summer Olympics, is here as a member of the U.S. track and field team but will compete only in the 4x400-meter relay.

She failed to qualify for her best individual event, the 400 meters, when she finished fourth in the national championships two months ago in San Jose.

She had a comfortable lead in that race until she heard the public address announcer call out her 200-meter split at 22.4.

That is considerably faster than the 22.8 she wanted to run.

“I’m used to hearing my coach (Bob Kersee) call out my split,” she said. “He always calls out 22.8 or 22.9.”

Even if that’s not what she actually has run?

“Maybe,” she said with a smile.

So when she heard 22.4, she said she panicked.

“I slowed down,” she said. “Then when people started catching me, I tried to turn it on again, but I couldn’t. When I got passed, I started telling myself, ‘Well, maybe I can still finish second.’ I should have been telling myself, ‘Relax, be easy.’ That’s what I usually tell myself.”

Diane Dixon and Denean Howard will run the 400 for the U.S. team here.

“I should be out there,” Brisco said.

Ohio State’s Butch Reynolds, who has the three fastest times in the world this year in the 400 meters, has withdrawn from the Pan Am Games, claiming fatigue. His finals were scheduled here on Thursday.

Showing a sudden burst of energy, however, he will run the 400 meters two days later in a meet at London’s Crystal Palace. He said it has nothing to do with the fact that he will be paid to run in London but not in Indianapolis. He said that he will have to run only one time in London but that, including trials and finals, he would have had to run as many as three times at the Pan Am Games.

Reynolds said that because of his long indoor and outdoor college seasons, he needs to conserve energy now so he will be ready for the World Championships Aug. 29-Sept. 6 in Rome.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was concerned about overdoing it before the World Championships, and said that she would skip the Pan Am Games. But when she learned that there will not be enough long jumpers her to require trials, she decided to compete in that event.

She also qualified for the heptathlon, but did not want that much of a strain during her training for Rome.

Her husband, Bob Kersee, who is also her coach and who is on the staff here, said, “Her training is coming along real well. She’s going after it in Rome. . . . She’s starting to put some figures in her head.”

As for whether she is figuring on lowering the world record, Joyner-Kersee said, “I don’t think no athlete should go in saying ‘I’m going to set a world record’ because that just opens the door for the devil to step in and say, ‘I’m going to play games with you.’

“My concern is to win first, and if the record is there, it’s there.”

Pressed for some numbers, Joyner-Kersee said that she would like to score 7,230 in the World Championships. And asked what number she thought represented her best possible performance, she said, “If I do everything right, I think 7,400. But I don’t want to do that just yet. I don’t want to get ahead of myself and hurt myself.”

Cindy Brown, an All-American forward from Cal State Long Beach, will miss the Pan Am Games after injuring her left knee Wednesday night in a scrimmage at Austin, Tex. She returned to Long Beach Thursday.

The U.S. squad has been training for the last two weeks at the University of Texas, home court for U.S. Coach Jody Conradt.

Brown is the second member of the 1986 world championship team to have to withdraw. Last April, USC graduate Cheryl Miller suffered a knee injury in a pickup game. It required surgery and put her out for a year.

Brown averaged 27.8 points and 9.9 rebounds for Long Beach, which had a 33-3 record and was a Final Four team.

The chief of the Venezuelan sports delegation ordered 53 of his athletes to skip the Opening Ceremony in exasperation over housing problems in the athletes’ village.

Fernando Romero, president of the 200-athlete delegation, said the scramble for beds left his athletes tired and in need of rest, but he denied a CBS-TV report that Venezuela will pull out of the Games.

The athletes--members of the baseball, fencing and table tennis teams--arrived in Indianapolis Thursday and were told there was no room in the village and sent to a hotel. The next morning, they were brought back to the village and stayed there seven hours before being ordered to a hotel again.

“We want to be very understanding but we also want to get a solution,” Romero said.

Theodore Boehm, chairman of PAX-Indianapolis, said he was aware of the housing problems and was working to correct them.

Jim Abbott, the pitcher from the University of Michigan who carried the American flag at the opening ceremony, was saying during a morning press conference that on a trip to play baseball in Cuba, he met Fidel Castro. He said, “It was really something. He has such a presence, and then you think about his history and everything. It was quite an experience.”

Asked what Michigan football Coach Bo Schembechler would think of his meeting Castro, Abbott paused and then said, “There’s a very similar presence between the two men.”

The starting pitcher for the U.S. in its game against Canada today will be Gregg Olson of Auburn.

Times staff writer Randy Harvey and sports editor Bill Dwyre contributed to this story.