FLOJO 1959-1998

Al Joyner insisted it was love at first sight when he met Florence Griffith during the 1980 Olympic trials. Upon returning to Arkansas State, he called sister Jackie in Los Angeles, where she was a training partner of Florence’s, and said, “I’m going to get that Florence Griffith.”

Jackie laughed. She couldn’t imagine her gangly, late-blooming older brother beside a woman with leading-lady looks.

Al was undeterred. When he moved to Los Angeles six years later, he called Florence and asked for a date.

She was too busy training, she said. An Olympic silver medalist in the 200 meters in 1984 at the Coliseum, she had become discouraged somewhere along the road to the ’88 Olympics in Seoul, taken a job as a secretary in a bank and gained 15 pounds. Now she was trying to come back. So Al, the triple-jump gold medalist in ‘84, offered to train with her.

Their relationship flourished, although training remained a priority. On the night in 1987 that Al planned to propose to her, he made a reservation at a fancy restaurant, arranged for a violinist to play at their table and ordered a limo. When she was hours late because of a workout, he canceled everything but the limo. As the chauffeur drove them around, Al dropped to his knees and asked Florence to marry him.

She became Florence Griffith Joyner later that year. For the next couple of years, no visitor could escape their home until Al showed off the wedding album.

To the end Monday, when Florence died in her sleep at their Mission Viejo home, I believe Al loved everything about being married to her.

“She’s the smartest, sweetest, most beautiful woman in the world,” he told me about 100 times over the years. “I can’t believe she married me.”

Whenever I thought of FloJo, I tried to see her through Al’s eyes.

Because of the nature of this business, I also was compelled to see her through others’ eyes.

Griffith Joyner was the world’s fastest woman, but she could never outrun the rampant rumors in track and field that she used banned performance-enhancing substances such as anabolic steroids and human growth hormones.

The suspicion was fueled by her vast improvement in the months before the 1988 Summer Olympics. She was a good sprinter before, good enough to add a 200-meter silver medal in the 1987 World Championships to the one she had won in the ’84 Olympics--but not good enough to merit more than two lines in the International Amateur Athletic Federation’s 1988 yearbook.

Suddenly, she was not merely breaking world records but putting them out of sight.

Athletes are as subject to jealousy as anyone else, maybe more so because of their competitiveness, but they also are keenly aware of the limitations of the human body. Their instincts usually tell them when someone is achieving the unachievable.

A Brazilian middle-distance runner, Joaquim Cruz, said in Seoul what so many others were whispering.

“She must be doing something that isn’t normal to gain all those muscles,” he said.

Al said his wife cried herself to sleep after hearing that, only to return home to more indignity. Although she became the Sullivan Award winner as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete, the former Los Angeles Jordan High and UCLA star wasn’t even voted the best track and field athlete for 1988 by the sport’s Southern California association.

Griffith Joyner defended her honor, volunteering to submit to a drug test any time, anywhere for the rest of her career. Then she mysteriously retired, never competing again after 1988, even though she seemed to be at the peak of her sprinting and earning potential.

In 1989, a former quarter-miler, Darrell Robinson, told a German magazine, Stern, that Griffith Joyner had paid him $2,000 for 10 cubic centimeters of human growth hormone the previous year.

She subsequently appeared with Robinson on the “Today” show and called him “a compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic.”

Not much was heard from her after that, not even after Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) warned about the proliferation of drugs in sports and implied that “before” and “after” photographs of Griffith Joyner were evidence.

But when she experienced heart spasms two years ago during a flight to St. Louis, the questions resurfaced. Her family asked the hospital not to release the records. When I next saw Al, he wouldn’t discuss it.

After learning of Florence’s death, I called Dr. Robert Voy at his sports medicine clinic in Las Vegas. He was the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief medical officer for four years until forced out in 1988 for his candidness with the media about drug use by athletes.

He wrote a book a few years later, “Drugs, Sports and Politics,” that included examples of premature arteriosclerosis and enlarged hearts in athletes caused by steroid use.

He cautioned Monday that no one should draw the conclusion from Griffith Joyner’s death at the young age of 38 that she used performance-enhancing drugs, emphasizing that she never tested positive. An autopsy, he added, will provide no evidence.

“But,” he said, “it would be very helpful for those of us involved in sports medicine to know the true nature of something like this. The premature death of an elite athlete is something that taunts us.”

If drugs contributed, he said it would be particularly valuable information because of the recent publicity surrounding Mark McGwire’s use of androstendione.

“That really has me concerned because we don’t know the long-term effects,” he said. “Yet, the sales of it are piling up, particularly among young athletes. This is a confusing time for them.”

Whether or not Griffith Joyner used drugs, God rest her soul.

But if she did, and Al knows it, it’s time for him to step forward. Maybe he could prevent another beautiful love story from ending tragically.