Will More Gold Make Carl Lewis a Winner?

Carl Lewis can run, but he can’t hide.

Therefore, he runs into people who just want to look at him, check out his funky clothes, stare at his punky hair, just plain watch him move, as happened in the marketplace the other day, when people “came by just to watch me shop, watch me walk to the car, watch the car leave,” Lewis said.

“You can begin to feel that you’re bigger than life, and I’m not that.”

He also runs into people who want to take his picture--photojournalists, tourists, anybody with a camera, which is just about everybody in the Far East.

“I stepped off the plane, and 30 or 40 photographers just rushed me,” Lewis said. “There were no security guards to hold them off, no Olympic officials to tell me where to go. People just charged us. We were almost physically knocked to the ground, more than once.”

Some of those very same people later claimed that Lewis threatened to turn around and return to America if they didn’t leave him alone. Lewis insists: “I never said a word.”

Winner of 4 gold medals in track and field at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, seeker of 4 more at Seoul, Carl Lewis, 27, must wonder what everybody wants of him, expects of him, finds wrong with him.

He considers himself polite, accommodating, patriotic. He waves the flag when he wins. He visits sick kids in hospitals. He loves his mother and misses his departed father. He even sits Evelyn Lewis at his side at a crowded news conference and grins sheepishly when she tells all the world that her son “has my unconditional support, no matter what he does.”

Carl has come to terms with some of the stuff that happened to him in Los Angeles--the shots he took from U.S. teammates such as long jumper Larry Myricks for seeming totally self-involved, the abuse he took from the media after his manager suggested that Carl might become as mega-big as Michael Jackson, the agitation he sensed from 100,000 spectators in the Coliseum who watched him refuse to jump anymore into a soft pile of sand for fear of hurting himself, before a very short footrace to be held 2 days later.

Lewis came to South Korea honestly believing that he could either shake himself of all such cobwebs or ignore them entirely, putting his best foot forward, same as he does on the track, and reminding anybody willing to listen that he cares not what anybody thinks of him, that “the one thing I have been able to do is persevere.”

Do people know the real Carl Lewis?

“I don’t know if too many people really know anyone,” he said. “I’m not an easy person to know. I’m not one-dimensional. I’m multifaceted.”

Lewis is absolutely determined not to be drawn into a controversy, particularly with Saturday’s 100-meter blast-off against Canada’s Ben Johnson and the rest of the world’s fastest humans so close at hand.

In conversations and interviews he uses the word focused about as often as Ronald Reagan uses the word well, and he dodges direct questions--such as whether he will go after Bob Beamon’s long-jump world record this time no matter what--with roundabout responses, rather than promises to do 30 feet or die trying, which is obviously what some people are dying to hear.

Nevertheless, controversy comes to Carl Lewis like moths to a flame, leaving both him and his public uncertain if somebody is out to get him, or if he deserves whatever he gets.

Does everybody invent everything ever said about Carl Lewis? Did somebody, out of thin air, fabricate a direct quote from U.S. sprint coach Russ Rogers that if Lewis did not stop meddling in the relay-team selection process, he would soon own sufficient rope with which to hang himself?

Maybe. Rogers denies saying it now, so, Lewis says, case closed.

There is certainly nothing visibly distasteful or off-putting about Carl Lewis. Even if your taste does not run to his loose muscle shirts and zebra-striped pants, or even if you find him to be as precious as the Waterford crystal he collects back home, or even if you find him kind of boring, with his diplomatic approach, addressing yes-or-no questions with I-don’t-knows, I-can’t-says, I’m-just-glad-to-be-heres, nobody can say that Carl Lewis is an ugly American, in any way, shape or form.

Lewis cannot help it if a German journalist rises at a standing-room-only news conference to ask: “Carl, I heard a Korean astrologer say the other day that she foresees you having a hard time here at the Olympics, and that you should have no sexual contacts while you are here. What may I ask do you think about this?”

Carl handles it, best he can.

“Is this the same person who talked to Nancy Reagan?” he asks.

Nor can Lewis help it if a Turkish journalist rises at the same session to tell him that a gold-medal Turk weightlifter considers Carl the greatest athlete on the globe, so, with a grateful nod and a tongue in cheek, Lewis says, “Thanks, and tell him he said exactly as he was supposed to say, and that his check is in the mail.”

Lewis goes so far as to thank all the media for being “tremendous” this time around, and again, some of those present think how nice this young man seems, while others, more cynical ones, recognize this as “working the room.”

All of which makes Carl Lewis a winner who can’t win. All he can do is keep trying. All he can do is believe that because people compliment him wherever he goes, he must be doing something right, even if Wheaties never does put his face on a box, even if Fuji and Mizuno and Suntory and Sagawa ask him to sell their products while American-based companies hire someone else.

All he knows is that in Zurich, for instance, running against Johnson, there was “a kid in my fan club, and he watched the meet in Zurich on television, and he wrote me and said, ‘I was so happy you won your race, I jumped up and down and screamed until I was hoarse.’ ”

To Lewis and some of his listeners, this is a touching story. To others, it is Carl reminding us that he has a fan club.

See? He can’t win.

Or can he?

“Sooner or later, we all move on to the next phase,” Lewis likes to say, and says it more than once. “I’m ready to move on.”

He may not get there first, but he will get there fast. He will spread his arms wide when he gets there, and maybe this time, Americans will be there with open arms for him.