What Is Kevin Young Running From? : The L.A. Track Star, Olympic Hero and World Record Holder Now Lives in Georgia, Where He Muses on His Past and Future. Are the ’96 Olympics Just a Pipe Dream for Him?

Kevin Young can trace his lineage back to West Africa and the Blackfoot Indians of North America. His more immediate ancestors were slaves in the Deep South. He himself grew up in Watts. His heroes were athletes like Jesse Owens, Dr. J. and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He became a successful track athlete. He won an Olympic gold medal. He made money. Then he stopped competing. At the age of 27, he left Watts, his family, his friends, his coaches and his track world and moved to Alpharetta, Ga., about 30 miles from Atlanta.

He bought a sprawling ranch home on 13 secluded acres for $359,000. On his screened porch he put the wooden statue of an Indian chief. There is dried corn on a coffee table and in one corner a light fixture made out of arrows. His kitchen is decorated with posters and figurines: Uncle Remus syrup. Sambo chocolate milk. Aunt Jemima Breakfast Club. An old black servant in a red waistcoat. In his living room are three life-size carved ebony statues of West African fertility figures, women with big bellies and pendulous breasts. He has a zebra skin rug and a statue of a horse carrying Chola, an Afro-Cuban goddess. He has a shrine to Mamma Kalunga, a black mermaid, who symbolizes death in West Africa.

His office is bare except for a computer and, alongside it, the only reminder of his track successes: a photo collage of his triumphs at various track events. A newspaper headline is woven through the collage: “Overachiever Young Beats Own Record.” The Olympic medal is nowhere in sight.

“I was an inner-city kid,” Young says, standing in the heat of the day beside a pond surrounded by pine trees. “I fell in love with the pines, this property. It’s private. People don’t drop in unexpectedly. I only see my neighbors when I go on the street.” Those neighbors live in faux antebellum homes and raise horses for equestrian shows. They are white. He doesn’t socialize with them. He prefers to stay home, “like Thoreau,” he says, “and look at my pine trees.”

On those rare occasions when he goes out to dinner at a restaurant, he is usually the only black person there, except for the busboys. The other diners try not to stare at him, but they do. “They know I’m not an average African American,” he says. “They know I must be an athlete.” Once, a white female bodybuilder came up to him at the post office and said, “I know you. You’re an Olympic athlete.” But she didn’t know which one.

It was at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, that Kevin Young set a world and Olympic record of 46.78 seconds in the 400-meter hurdles. It broke the existing record of 47.02, set in 1983 by Edwin Moses, considered by some the Babe Ruth of American track. Young’s record still stands. Hailed as the “new” Moses, Young had crashed through a seemingly impenetrable barrier that some compare to Sir Roger Bannister’s breaking the four-minute mile in 1954. Young achieved that record with effortless grace, his long legs striding over the track, then floating, suspended a moment, over the hurdles.

“It was nice,” says Young, remembering that race. “Effortless. In the past, I died at the eighth hurdle, but at Barcelona I hit another gear. I was running on air, flying, an almost perfect race. It was a moment in time that will never be duplicated. I was so sure of myself that when I approached the finish, I was trying to decide what hand I should put up in victory.”

Young calls that race “the pinnacle of my athletic achievement.” He talked track with Prince Albert of Monaco on the French Riviera. He met the King and Queen of Sweden at a formal dinner in Stockholm. “The women wore these big dresses,” he says. “I was sharp, too.” He laughs. “Me, a skinny little kid from Watts.”

But three years later, Young, now 29, sits on the porch of his Georgia hideaway with very little besides those memories to show for the world record. He has only desultory ideas about training for the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta. He is estranged from his longtime coach, UCLA’s John Smith. He isn’t working with anyone else, or even by himself. He has one minor Atlanta-area endorsement deal; his latest sports agent dropped him because potential sponsors didn’t remember who he was. And he has simply stopped competing, both here and abroad, where he was wildly popular on the European professional track circuit. His major sponsor, Nike, lost interest in him, and gradually Young’s income has dwindled to almost nothing.

In an age in which Olympic heroism is handsomely rewarded and the track and field world has figured out how to support its competitors with appearance and prize money, what happened to Kevin Young?

“What plagued Kevin was expectations,” says Smith, who lost touch with Young when the hurdler moved to Georgia last year. “Before he set the record he was chasing [one]. Then he was the record. People expected more of him every meet. Money and fame were not the problem with Kevin. Something was missing in him. He has nothing to prove.”

On his spread in rural Georgia, Young doesn’t do much except cut his grass, stare at his pine trees and dream. He dreams mostly of ways to make money to support his L.A. home (now in foreclosure), this house, his Mercedes-Benz, his Lexus SC 300 and his Honda. He dreams of becoming a corporate spokesman for some big Atlanta company, like Coca-Cola. “Why not?” he says. “I’m good-looking, I have a college degree, I’m not an idiot.” Most mornings he “plays with my computer,” designing his own line of clothing. “Do you want to invest in it?” he asks a rare visitor. “I’m only pushing T-shirts now, but you’d be investing in my name. I’m in the history books, you know.”

*

One could say Young is partly the victim of bad timing. After his Olympic triumph in August of ‘92, Young signed a $100,000-a-year contract with Nike and then continued to race in Europe for two weeks, where he was paid appearance fees of about $10,000 per meet. Most other American Olympians returned to the States, where they met with President George Bush and were honored with parades. “By the time I got home,” Young says, “the hype was over. There was no shoe sponsor, nothing. I should have been making money. I expected sponsorships to be taken care of by Nike. Maybe I was complacent. Barcelona affected me emotionally but not financially.”

Keith Peters, public relations director for Nike, says, “We worked with [Young] after Barcelona, and then he just disappeared. When you sign someone who’s not cheap, you have reasonable expectations. But he stopped competing, and the athelet’s value is tied to his current competitive value in his sport. It’s a shame.”

Still, Young earned $200,000 in 1992. He made $80,000 the following year, mostly in Europe, where, he says, “I’ve always been well-received.” He won the ’93 International Amateur Athletic Federation World Championships with the year’s best time of 47.18.

But then, over the winter, he began to despair, to lose heart under the pressure of sustaining his success. He virtually stopped running in ‘94, when he was rated only the 40th best 400-meter hurdler in the world. He claimed a knee injury this year and has raced only five times, rarely finishing higher than seventh. (He recently had knee surgery to repair torn cartilage.) He has made almost no money in the past two years. His only sponsor is Harry Blazer, CEO and founder of Harry’s Farmers’ Market, a gourmet grocery chain headquartered in Alpharetta, which pays him “chump change,” according to an Atlanta Constitution sportswriter. When pressed about the sponsorship, Blazer says, “It is a modest amount, but I think he was very much surprised by the generosity. It will help him get through financially.”

Brad Hunt, a track and field agent, says of Young, “I have athletes who have not won Olympic titles or set world records who earn $1 million a year. Kevin has done both.”

But Smith, his former coach, says, “No track star makes money off one medal anymore. Now you have to sustain a career over years to make money. Consistency is what corporate sponsors are looking for. Moses was the first track star to get a big corporate sponsorship, $500,000 from Adidas, but that was only after a sustained career.”

After Young moved to Georgia in the summer of 1994, Young signed with Atlanta agent Bob Pelletier, but after a few months they parted ways. Young claimed Pelletier had too many clients and wasn’t giving him the proper attention. But Pelletier says simply that no sponsors were interested in Young because he was too distant from his Barcelona triumph. Pelletier had to start all over again “educating people as to who Kevin Young was,” he says. “His not competing was part of the problem. I guess after ‘92, Kevin thought it would all fall at his feet, and it didn’t. Why he stopped running, I’m not sure.”

*

Kevin Young grew up in a house in Watts with four sisters and his mother. His older brother left early in Young’s life to live with an aunt, and Young’s father, whom he says he has “fond memories” of, left the family when Young was 6. “No one in my family but me saw the world,” he says. “They’ve been in the inner city all their life.”

His mother, Betty, a social worker, moved the family from Compton to Watts when Young was 7. “We didn’t live in a project,” he says “There were not gutted-out buildings. I always thought the East Coast projects were a lot worse than Watts.”

As the new kid on the block, one with a skateboard (“The brothers used to say, ‘What you doin’ with a skateboard? You ain’t white’ ”), Young was beaten up daily. He’d go to the basketball courts, where boys his age and older were already drinking beer and smoking dope, and try to join the basketball games. All they wanted from him, however, was his basketball. When he refused to surrender it, they’d chase him home.

“It was either run or get punched out,” he says. “I started hurdling early, over cars on the street, running from a gang. After a while, they accepted me. I was the lookout for their drug deals. There was always a lot of peer pressure to sell drugs and join a gang. It was easy, but it wasn’t a challenge. Besides, the brothers were like rats. They were always turning on one another, busting each other in the head with bottles.”

The biggest influence on his life as a boy, he says, was his sister Carmen, seven years older. “Carmen was my big brother,” he says. “She was totally street. My mother always had us in church, and Carmen was my break from that. She’d steal things for me. I was always her little brother, but she was tough on me, too. When I got into a fight and came home crying, she made me go back out and fight the kid. She followed me with a butcher knife to make sure the fight was fair. The other kid was older, he beat me senseless, but she didn’t jump in.”

As the oldest child in a house without a father and with a working mother, the supervision of the younger children fell to Carmen. “She never had an opportunity to be a child herself,” Young says. When he was 3, Carmen had to take him to school with her to watch him. To make it easier, she put him in a gray dress and passed him off as her little sister.

In fact, Young says, he spent so much time with his sisters, in a house without “a male influence,” that he often joined in their little girls’ play. When they sewed dresses for their Barbie dolls, he sewed outfits for his G.I. Joe. By the time he reached the seventh grade, Young thought it would be “cool” to take a sewing course. When his mother had to approve his course selection, and she saw what he had picked, she was furious. “Ain’t no son of mine gonna take a damned sewing course,” she said. Young responded, “But Ma, why? I’m not a sissy. Do I have tendencies? I just wanna make my own clothes.” But she wouldn’t bend, and Young describes himself as “totally devastated.” He switched to a gym course instead, which was the real beginning of his athletic career.

Between the beginning of eighth and ninth grades, Young grew from 5 foot 9 to 6 foot 3, and his fate was sealed: He was to be an athlete. First he was a basketball player, and then, when he discovered a distant male relative had been a hurdler, he switched to track. He was a natural runner, though at 15 he still had the ungainliness of a young colt not yet grown into its legs. By his senior year at Jordan High School, he was the third-best hurdler in the state, but he still couldn’t get a college track scholarship. The best he could get was a $1,000 check from Coca-Cola, awarded to “Future Olympians,” to help defer his expenses at UCLA.

“Leaving Watts for UCLA?” he says, smiling. “Total culture shock. All these white girls and frat houses. I said ‘Where are the sisters?’ But they had to go home on weekends to work. I was pathetic my first year. Shy, insecure. I suffered all kinds of social illnesses, so I kept to myself.”

As a freshman hurdler, Young didn’t even figure in his coach’s plans. By his junior year, however, the late developer had grown into his long, stringy, lightly muscled physique and had become one of the best collegiate hurdlers in the country. John Smith, who would become his Olympic coach in Seoul and Barcelona, described him as “poetry in motion.”

Young held the state and collegiate 400-meter hurdles record by the time he graduated from UCLA in 1988 with a degree in sociology. He was hailed as America’s brightest hope in the Seoul Olympics, where he finished a “merely respectable” fourth in the medal round. By 1990 he was ranked sixth in the world, and at the Barcelona Olympics he was not one of the favorites to win a gold medal. Which is why the headline running through his collage describes him as an “overachiever” for winning it.

*

After Kevin Young left Los Angeles for Georgia, the rumors started to fly: He was having problems with his coach, John Smith. He was spooked by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which destroyed his Reseda condominium. He was injured. He’d lost his competitive fire. He had drug problems. He was involved in a religious cult. But no one knew for sure why he turned his back on every influence he’d known for a life of seclusion in the Deep South. “One day I was in L.A.,” Young says. “The next, Georgia. People wondered, ‘Why’d he go?’ ”

Young didn’t know much about his ancestors until, at the age of 12, he visited his grandmother in the small Mississippi Delta town of Brookhaven. She told him about his slave ancestors from West Africa and his Indian ancestors from the Midwest. She took him with her as she sold fish to poor families living in shacks deep in the woods.

“We pulled up in the car and everyone would scatter and hide,” Young says. “Then you’d see some movement, faces peeking out, and then they’d come out from hiding. I remember one day I was eating a candy bar and all these little kids dressed in burlap stared at it. I began to cry and gave them my candy. I realized how lucky I was. I’d always thought I’d had it bad in Watts until I went to Mississippi.

“I remember going with Grandma to repay a debt she owed a white man. He was much younger than her, and yet she called him, ‘Mr. this’ and ‘Mr. that.’ I realized then why my Mama left the South for L.A. But I also had a greater respect for my Grandma, too, still dealing with it.

“I enjoy the true nature of the South. If a redneck calls me ‘nigger,’ it’s OK. It’s out of ignorance come down from a hundred years. If they call me a racial slur in L.A., it’s meant to be nasty, to hurt me. I set a world record in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and people never acknowledged my contribution. I’m in the history books, but in L.A., they didn’t value what I’d done. It was a slap in the face. I never got a ticker-tape parade in Watts. I never got respect. All my records and no one knows my name. So I left.”

He talks softly, without rancor, until his attention drifts off toward one of his pine trees. He picks a white beetle out of the bark and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. “Pine beetles,” he says. “They’re destroying my pines. It’s gonna cost me $3,000 to cut down the bad trees and I don’t have the money. [His phone was recently disconnected.] So I’m trying to get speaking engagements.”

It is late afternoon at Young’s house. He is sitting outside on a deck off the screened porch, staring at a small statue of an old black man wearing a fedora hat. “I could stare at that statue all day,” he says languidly. And then, as his talk often does, he returns to his sister Carmen. “You know, she taught me to drive when I was 11. Mama’s brand new car. I was petrified, but Carmen was laughing.” He smiles, then says, “Carmen died of a hemorrhage at 31. Probably related to her drug use. She was high on angel dust the last time I saw her. She said no one loved her. I cried and said I loved her, but I wouldn’t give her any money for dope. The next week she was dead and I was paying for the funeral. I was devastated.”

Carmen died in 1990, two years before Young won his gold medal. When he stood on the podium in Barcelona, Young remembers saying to himself, “Man, I sure wish Carmen was here,” He got down on one knee and prayed to her. “Your little brother, K.K., did it,” he said. “You always knew I would and now you saw it.”

A man comes from inside the house to the deck, and says to Young, “Can I get you something, Kevin?” Young asks for an iced tea and the man returns to the house. Hayes Mcleod, who is in his forties, is a dancer from New York City. He lives much of the time with Young, who refers to him as “my godfather.” When pressed, Young admits that Macleod is not really “my godfather, but I made him my godfather.” Mostly, Mcleod acts as Young’s Sancho Panza. Early this morning, he stood outside and waited anxiously for the tree man to arrive and give him an estimate of the cost of cutting down the blighted pine trees. When a man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts drove up, Mcleod immediately asked him for an estimate. When he found out the man was a reporter, he said, “Oh, I just assumed. So few people ever come here. You’re the first reporter Kevin has let see his house.”

McCleod returns with iced tea and goes back into the house. Young sips his tea, and staring out at his blighted pines, says, “I wouldn’t trade this for anything. I have no social life. I just play my rap music. In L.A.. . . I’d go to the track eight hours a day. I never stayed home, never smelled the roses. Now that I’ve escaped that cycle, people say I’m on drugs or in a cult. They say I’ve been weird the last two years because I ain’t chasin’ no women or no butt. I done all that and realize it’s dangerous. Someone told me they heard I was on drugs, and how sad it was. But that’s because I never really made it clear why I left. They can’t fathom that I love to cut the grass now.”

He stares off at his blighted trees. “Damn! $3,000.” He shakes his head in despair. “Man, I need someone to support me. When I was on top it was easy to get USOC money. Now it’s a struggle. I mean, why?”

But Young doesn’t make it clear why he left L.A. and his track world. He says his life was “unbalanced,” the track world was “mundane,” with too many “clingers on.” He wanted to “grow as a person.”

“It bothered me to see the same people day in and day out,” he says. Which people? “The people who got more exposure than me. It was all so insular.”

One of the more concrete reasons explaining Young’s flight from Los Angeles was the 1994 earthquake. It destroyed Young’s condominium, and he doesn’t have the money to rebuild it. According to Young, “it shook my ass up.” He saw the quake as an omen, the end of the world as he knew it, so he took flight.

Young comes across as sensitive, easily spooked. He likes to think he’s mystical in a religious sense. He believes in African religions because they teach him “discipline,” an odd word for a man who seems to be drifting aimlessly in Alpharetta. He’s learned from his Indian ancestry to “respect the land and all the elements we came from.” That’s why, he says, he always cocks an ear to listen to the hawks in the trees. From his old, black Pentecostal Christianity, he learned that “God is God, which is why he doesn’t want a man to be broke down and poor, or a fool either.”

Yet Young sees personal slights everywhere. “People have never noticed me,” he says. “I try and I try and I get nowhere.” He points as proof to a conversation he had with a Sports Illustrated writer before the Barcelona Olympics.

“I asked him what I had to do to get on the cover of S.I.,” Young says. “He said all I had to do was break the world record set by Edwin Moses. I put that in my head. I busted my ass in Barcelona and set the world record and still didn’t make it on the cover of S.I. that week. They put Gail Deavers on the cover because she fell in the race after mine.”

Young complains that people don’t notice him because he’s “too amiable. I’m not an a - - hole. S.I. puts Dennis Rodman on the cover because he’s got purple hair. Why do I have to dye my hair to be on the cover? I gotta do something outrageous or illegal. I’m too nice, respectful. You got to show your ass to get respect. But that’s self-defeating. It’s a waste of energy. I don’t hype myself. Only the worst succeed.”

*

Maybe, in the end, it has nothing to do with shaken nerves or magazine covers or hangers-on. Maybe it has everything to do with the often emotional relationship between an athlete and coach. In Young’s mind, one discovers after hours spent ruminating on the deck, John Smith is the real reason why he abandoned L.A. and his track life. He claims Smith “tried to control me, to focus all the attention on himself. When [I] won, he’d say, ‘I’m a great coach,’ rather than, ‘I’ve got to hand it to Kevin.’ He said things behind my back to make his stuff look good. There was tension between us on the track.”

Most of that tension had to do with money. Like many track stars, Young says he paid Smith 10% of his earnings as both his manager and coach. But since Smith also worked for Nike, Young felt he had a conflict of interest whenever Young had a complaint about Nike.

“How could he serve two masters?” Young says. “So I told him he couldn’t be my manager anymore, and he took offense. It all became an issue of money.” Young still paid Smith a percentage of his earnings, but after Young didn’t earn anything from 1994 through 1995, he says Smith told him he wanted a flat fee to coach him. “Since I wasn’t making much, he wanted his money up front.”

Young says he refused. Not only did he not have the fee, he didn’t have the $80,000 a year it costs an athlete to train seriously. When Smith turned his attention to other, more productive track stars, it hurt Young’s feelings.

Smith says he never solicited contracts for Young, acting only as a coach and adviser. He says Young always paid him a flat fee because he was not allowed to receive a percentage of profits under rules governing college coaches.

Smith does allow, however, that Young “found fit to do some things for me, but there was never a demand. After a certain point, things were not to my liking.”

Tension arose, Smith says, when the pair reacted differently to the attention they received after Young won the gold. Things turned from bad to worse when Young hired sports agent Lon Rosen who, Smith says, excluded him from deciding on the track meets that Young would attend. (Rosen, who is Magic Johnson’s agent, represented Young from March of ’92 to March of ’93.)

“I used to approve everything Kevin was doing,” Smith says. “After he won the gold, he began getting advice from other people outside my influence. I’d have practice at 1 p.m. and Kevin would show up at 2:30 p.m. That doesn’t fit in with John Smith’s schedule. He wasn’t meeting me halfway. Finally I said I’d make a special time for him, and he didn’t want that.

“I love Kevin. But all I hear from him in the media is about my ego. He said I didn’t have time for him. That’s bulls- - - . He’s the world record holder. I’ll make time. I had coached him for free. The problem was he didn’t want to do the work. When guys like Kevin become successful, they don’t want to do the work anymore, don’t want to do the same things that got them there. That’s his goddamned problem. When he was struggling on his way up, we slept on floors together. We ate half a hamburger each and saved a bit for dessert.”

Smith believes that Young’s drive to win dropped off after he set the world record. “You study to become a master, then you have to become a student again, humble yourself, to maintain being a master. I wanted Kevin to go back and do the things he did to win, but he didn’t want to.”

Young claims that one of the reasons he’s been overlooked in the track world is because he broke Edwin Moses’ records, that there was resentment over “some poor little skinny kid from Watts breaking Moses’ record.” Always, Moses looms over him. His record of 102 consecutive victories. His “mystique.” Moses is a shadow Young feels he can never shake, a shadow on his Barcelona achievement, his talent, his future.

“I can’t say I idolize him. He never showed me anything. I’m still trying to figure out the mystique of Edwin Moses.” Then, in the next breath, Young, unwittingly does explain the mystique of Edwin Moses. “Moses ran his ass off for years. Even if I won 140 races in a row, it would have no effect.”

And so, without the will to banish that shadow, Young prefers to look back, to try to get the world to remember his one golden moment. While he does, sitting alone in Alpharetta, his talent grows rusty with disuse. The longer he stays away from his talent, the more difficult it will be to recapture it. Even his gold medal has become devalued over the years.People who remember him now see his medal not as an example of Young’s shining achievement, but as a token of a winner who walked away.

So he sits on his deck in the summer heat, overlooking his pine trees and dreams. He says he’s planning to return to Los Angeles to train with Bob Kersee, the husband of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, because “it’s difficult to motivate myself to train by myself.” By fall, that plan was shelved. He speaks of competing in the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in California in early April and the Penn Relays in Philadelphia in mid-April and then the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in June. But he says all this the same way he talks about learning how to play golf. “I got me some golf balls and a bag,” he says, “but no clubs.” Without conviction.

He dreams, too, of getting a sponsor. But one reason why he has no major sponsors in Atlanta is that there are better hurdlers in the city, notably Derrick Adkins, who won this year’s IAAF World Championship, and Octavius Terry, who came in third at the USA Mobil Championships. He seems not to understand that sponsors will come to him only when he competes and wins again.

“Look at this,” he says, holding up a form request from the International Olympic Committee, asking him to speak to schoolchildren. “No mention of a check in here.” He tosses the letter on the ground, which is strewn with mementos and newspaper clippings from his Barcelona triumph. An article from the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard begins with “Kevin Young is no Edwin Moses. Or is he?” The story, written in 1993 and already beginning to yellow with age, describes Young’s 23rd consecutive victory, a streak going back to May of 1992. After that victory, Young says, “I think I decided not to try to match Moses’ record for wins in a row.”

The last few paragraphs of that story refer to Young by his college nickname, Spiderman. Reminded of this, he perks up with a new idea to promote himself. “I am a superhero like Spiderman,” he says. “So I contacted Marvel Comics, to see if they wanted to use me as a conflicted hero, the bastard child of track.” Marvel passed.

Young is right. He is a conflicted hero. He is torn between his self-doubts and his confidence in his abilities. Only the latter has begun to wane as the former takes hold of him. Pelletier, his onetime agent, thinks that Young “blew the record away so far out of reach it could have disheartened him. Once you’re on top, it’s harder to stay there. You have to keep pushing yourself, and Kevin has not been working as hard as he should.”

“It’s still possible for Kevin to come back and make the Olympic team because he is such a skillful athlete,” Smith says. “He’s something like a genius. He has dexterity beyond belief. He can hurdle with either leg.”

But the way Smith sees Young’s career, “Basically, he’s retired. My thing is either retire, or go run, but don’t go telling everyone John Smith is such a bad dude. If you got your gold and no one recognized you, then that means you have more work to do.”

Young gets up from the deck and walks his visitor to the car. “I want to win the gold medal again in ‘96,” Young says. “I’m going to break my own world record. I’m going to run the hurdles in 45 seconds.”

He catches sight of his blighted pines. “Damn,” he says, “$3000.”

His visitor gets into his car and starts the engine. Young leans over and says through the window, “Do you think this story will help get me a sponsor? Do you think it will get my name out there again?”