Kersee Says a Split Was Inevitable : Coach Disputes Some of Sprinter’s Reasons for Leaving

Bob Kersee, coach of the World Class Athletic Club, said Wednesday that his recent split with sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner was inevitable and that he could foresee it as early as last October.

For those without a copy of the Griffith-Joyner-Kersee family tree, that was the month that Griffith married Al Joyner, who is Kersee’s brother-in-law. Kersee is married to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, world record-holder in the heptathlon.

“This is really not surprising to me,” Kersee said of Griffith-Joyner’s decision last week to leave the World Class Athletic Club and train full time with her husband. She has trained with Kersee for much of the last eight years.

“Al and Florence always have their own opinions and do their own things. They have the right to decide who manages them and who coaches them. That doesn’t bother me. It’s not an ego thing with me.

“If Florence is going to be successful on the track and off the track, that’s my dream for her.”

But Kersee said that some of the reasons Griffith-Joyner gave in an interview at her Van Nuys apartment last Thursday for leaving the club are “false and misleading,” resulting, he believes, from a lack of communication.

“All of the reasons she gave, none of them did she ever discuss with me,” Kersee said. “I wasn’t even aware that a lot of these things were serious problems. She came across as a person who has been holding all of these things inside.

“It has always been tough for me to communicate with her. She won’t communicate with you if something is bothering her.”

Still, Kersee said he was hurt when Griffith-Joyner went public with her criticisms before first speaking to him.

“After eight years, I felt she owed me that,” he said.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Kersee and Griffith-Joyner had not spoken since a “Good Morning America” television appearance in New York on July 25, two days after the U.S. Olympic track and field trials ended in Indianapolis, where she broke the world record in the 100 meters and the U.S. record in the 200.

The next day, back in Los Angeles, Griffith-Joyner signed a management contract with Gordon Baskin, also a financial adviser to hurdler Edwin Moses, and said that she will move her training base from UCLA to UC Irvine.

She said that attempts to contact Kersee beforehand were unsuccessful. He was out of town until Tuesday night on vacation and did not return phone calls. Now that he’s back at his Long Beach home, he said that he hasn’t been able to get beyond Griffith-Joyner’s telephone answering machine.

“I would like to clear things up,” he said. “If we can agree, or even if we agree to disagree, the family will have as pleasant a Christmas dinner as we had last year.”

At the source of Griffith-Joyner’s disenchantment with Kersee appears to be a decision he made shortly before the family sat down to that Christmas dinner last year. When Al Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple jump gold medalist and a potential world-class hurdler, asked Kersee last November to coach him, Kersee refused.

According to Joyner’s explanation, Kersee does not coach athletes unless he also manages them, and Joyner said he didn’t want to be managed by Kersee. So when Griffith-Joyner decided that she no longer wanted to be managed by Kersee, she realized that she also would have to give up his services as a coach.

Griffith-Joyner said that one of the reasons she doesn’t want to be managed by Kersee is the 18 1/2% cut that she said he receives from all track-related income, including shoe, apparel and endorsement contracts. Track and field managers generally take 10% or less.

Kersee said Wednesday that Griffith-Joyner did not understand the arrangement. He said that she was managed by World Class Management, not by him.

World Class Management, he said, is operated by two associates, one of whom is his sister.

He admitted that it’s a fine line.

“From the very beginning, it’s been hard for me to explain to the athletes the separation between the World Class Athletic Club and World Class Management,” he said. “I’ve even had discussions with Jackie about this, and I’m married to her.”

But in Kersee’s mind, the separation is apparent. Although he said that he acts as a consultant to World Class Management, he is not paid for it. He said that his only income comes from his job as the women’s track and field coach at UCLA and from his wife’s endeavors.

“The only time I took any money from the athletes was for a period of time in late ’85 and early ‘86, when I charged a coaching fee ($600 a month),” he said. “The only reason it was so high was because the athletes had agreed to put money into the club and pay back loans that I had made to them when they weren’t making any money prior to the 1984 Olympics.”

He also defended World Class Management’s 18 1/2% fee, saying that most of the money is funneled back into the club.

As for his policy of coaching athletes only if they are also managed by World Class Management, he said that is not engraved in stone.

In Griffith-Joyner’s case, for example, he said it would be possible for him to coach her while someone else handled her finances. But Kersee also said that he would have to control her schedule.

“It would depend on what say-so I have,” he said. “I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about overall management. If I feel it’s better for an athlete not to run in a certain track meet but that athlete has a management group that doesn’t agree with my philosophy, then it really takes away from my coaching of that athlete. There’s no need for me to coach an athlete if I have no say-so.”

In Griffith-Joyner’s case, how ever, it’s probably a moot point because she also was critical of Kersee’s coaching.

That stung Kersee, much more than did the business questions she raised.

She said that, between his UCLA and World Class teams, he had too many athletes to give her the individual attention that she needed.

He said: “All my athletes were doing pretty well at the trials, so something was happening right. Florence set a world record and an American record. Jackie set a world record. Pam Marshall, Roy Martin and Gail Devers made their first Olympic teams. I don’t see where anybody was being slighted.”

She said that Kersee had told her she would receive a prepaid ticket to Eugene, Ore., during the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. meet in June so that she could work out with him and other World Class athletes, but that he didn’t deliver and then wouldn’t return her phone calls.

He said: “There was a lack of communication between me and Florence about if she was going to come and when she was going to come. I was in the heat of battle with my UCLA team and I had limited time.

“But when I finally did get ahold of her, it had started to rain in Eugene. I told her she was better off staying in L.A. I’m not a baby sitter. The athletes are capable of working out on their own.”

She said that Kersee had encouraged her to run the 200 and the 400 at the trials, even though it was obvious that the 100 was her best event. She said that she believes it was because he already had two women in the 100, Devers and Jeanette Bolden, and wanted to display the depth of his World Class team.

He said: “I told her at the beginning of the year that, considering the competition, it might be easier for her to run the 200 and the 400. But after she ran a couple of 100s, I felt it was logical for her to go with the 100 and the 200.

“I changed her workouts from 350s and 480s to 30s and 70s. It was apparent that Jeanette and Gail were doing the same workouts. So I don’t see how that I was discouraging her from running the 100 if I was giving her the same workouts as my other 100-meter runners. I think I’ve got the right to say we decided this together.”

As for Griffith-Joyner’s assertion that she already was working out three days a week with her husband and only two days with Kersee, Kersee said: “Whether Al was working with her three days a week, I don’t know. I have nothing against that. But I do know that she was out there more than two days a week with me.”

Considering that this is the second family dispute within a year, Kersee said it perhaps is better that the two couples, at least professionally, go their own ways. He said he had the family in mind last year when he refused to coach Joyner.

“Al and I didn’t see eye to eye as far as his overall competition schedule and his training situation were concerned,” Kersee said. “We just weren’t getting along. With him being my brother-in-law, it was hurting our relationship.

“I sat down and talked with Al and Florence. I guess that Florence was hurt by it, but she never told me. I knew it was going to be a touchy situation. I said, ‘Let’s separate our personal lives and our business or the situation is going to get worse.’ ”

Caught in the middle is Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who has a very close sibling relationship with Al.

Will that be affected?

“I don’t see this as a problem between the Joyners,” Kersee said. “Nothing comes between them. I see this as a problem between Griffith and Kersee.”