COMMENTARY : Al Joyner Is Guilty Only of Being Black

On April 29, the day the Rodney King verdict was announced, the night the rioting began in Los Angeles, 1984 Olympics gold medalist Al Joyner and his wife, 1988 Seoul superwoman Florence Griffith-Joyner, could not have been further removed from being victimized by the racism that rips apart America: They were dining at the White House with George and Barbara Bush.

Nine days later, on a sunny Friday morning in Los Angeles, a terrified, uncomprehending Al Joyner was ordered out of his car and forced to his knees on a crowded West Hollywood street, his hands handcuffed behind him as 10 white cops pointed pistols and shotguns at his head, while pedestrians stopped and stared.

The Los Angeles police didn’t bother to ask Joyner if he’d enjoyed his dinner with the president. Although he offered no resistance and was not charged with any violation, they didn’t even bother to ask to see his driver’s license until he was cuffed and cowering.

At the belated age of 32, naive Al Joyner, one of the nicest, sweetest, law-abiding people you could ever meet, was learning the same frightening lesson Boston Celtics rookie Dee Brown learned (in 1990) while he sat in his car opening his mail at the Wellesley, Mass., post office, that Los Angeles Raiders running back Marcus Allen learned while driving his Ferrari in his very own neighborhood, that baseball Hall of Fame inductee Joe Morgan learned while minding his business walking through the Los Angeles airport.

Without provocation, all of them were stopped and hassled by the police. Except for Morgan, all were surrounded at gunpoint.

Why? Because they were so obviously guilty.

Guilty of being black.

Joyner, a spectator at these U.S. track and field trials, sat having lunch at his New Orleans hotel Thursday, fervently hoping the horrifying incident would not change him.

But how could it not? Barely able to eat after the May 8 incident, in one week he lost 14 pounds from his already slender 6-foot-1, 180-pound frame.

Sleep? At first, every attempt ended in nightmare, with Joyner waking up screaming, dreaming that the police were shooting at him as he approached the hurdles or the triple jump, blasting him with their bullets, leaving him lying there, to die.

“I see myself,” Joyner said, “in a pool of blood.”

Compete in the trials? Are you kidding? He became such a zombie he couldn’t even practice. Couldn’t concentrate on his business, his wife or their beloved 19-month-old baby girl.

All he could do was cry, and despair at the pathetic paranoid he had become.

“I felt like (the police) had taken something from me,” Joyner said. “I felt like I was violated. I felt like I was raped.”

As Joyner speaks, the rage erupts in him like a volcano, just as the psychologist he visits to try to deal with the incident said it would. His diaphragm swells, his body visibly tenses as he expels the words, poison to his gentle nature.

Al and his more famous sister, heptathlete Jackie, the only brother-and-sister act to win gold medals in Olympic history, grew up in one of America’s worst ghettos, East St. Louis, Mo., on the same mean streets that spawned the Spinks brothers.

But there was nothing mean about the parental teachings in the Joyner home. Only this cornerstone: The only way to judge people is by whether they’re good or bad, never by the color of their skin. Al calls it “the content of a man’s character.” It’s the same phrase the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used in his “I Have A Dream” speech.

It was because of his devotion to this belief that Al Joyner, while not exactly ignorant of the world around him, was in for the shock of his life while driving Flo-Jo’s 1984 candy-apple burgundy Nissan 300SX down Sunset Boulevard at about 10:15 a.m. on May 8.

When he first saw the police car behind him, Joyner said, he thought nothing of it. But when he saw the blue light revolving in his rearview mirror, he pulled over.

Knowing he’d done nothing wrong, Joyner said, he ordinarily would have jumped out of the car to ask the police what was up. He was driving with his front windows down, obviously not hiding anything. But knowing the tension that still gripped Los Angeles because of the riots the previous week, Joyner said he obeyed an inner voice that told him to sit in his car, not moving.

“If I didn’t have a cool head,” he said, “you wouldn’t be here talking to Al Joyner.”

The police were not cool. When Joyner opened his door after hearing the megaphone order to get out of the car slowly, he saw 10 officers barricaded behind their vehicles, their guns targeting him from every angle.

He was ordered to walk to the curb. “The longest walk of my life,” Joyner said.

As a cop put the steel bracelets on him, Joyner, on his knees in front of a tuxedo store, asked, “Why are you handcuffing me?”

“Shut up,” he recalled the cop saying. “Don’t you feel safe?”

The license plate on Flo-Jo’s car is a special Olympics license plate. It reads “LA TRACK.” Joyner said the police mistakenly called in “TRACK” and said it belonged on a truck and must therefore be a stolen plate. Only when they found out the car was registered to Flo-Jo did one of them realize this was Al Joyner they were holding.

Only then, Joyner said, did the police ask for his driver’s license. Still handcuffed, he somehow fished it out of his back pocket.

The police let him go -- without apology.

You think that’s amazing? It gets worse. Shaken, Joyner drove two more blocks on Sunset, when lo and behold, the police pulled him over again. The same cops.

This time, Joyner jumped out of the car to ask what was going on. Joyner says the cops told him they were looking for a black man wearing a baseball-style cap driving a burgundy RX7 who’d been involved in a hit-and-run accident.

Now, an RX7 is a Mazda, not a Nissan 300 SX, and for Joyner to have driven to the spot in Los Angeles where the hit-and-run allegedly took place and make it back to West Hollywood, he would have had to have been Superman, but that bit of logic didn’t bother the police. He was, after all, a black man wearing a baseball-style cap, and you know how rare those are in a metropolitan area of 10 million people.

And besides, said one cop, where did you get this dab of paint on your back bumper?

Said Joyner: “What did I do, run over the guy backwards?”

They asked for his license again. They let him go again.

They didn’t apologize -- again.

“I think if they had apologized to me, I’d be OK about it,” Joyner said. “But they made me feel like I was a piece of trash. Why do (black people) always have to prove our innocence when we haven’t done anything? The police will say that doesn’t happen. But you go to any inner city and ask kids how many times they get stopped (just) for walking.”

After hearing of his humiliation, Joyner said former president Ford wrote him a letter, apologizing for the outrage. At a celebrity get-together in Hawaii, actors John Forsythe and Lloyd Bridges expressed similar sentiments.

But from the police, Joyner says, he has not heard a word.

“It says on the side of the (Los Angeles police) car, ‘To protect and to serve,”’ Joyner said. “But who are they protecting and who are they serving?”