Raising the Roof

It is her monument, better than any medals or trophies, better than awards or honors or tributes.

The money was raised by her foundation, the building was built by her foundation, the computers and tutors paid for by the money her name attracts.

But Jackie Joyner-Kersee giggles and says shyly that she can’t quite figure out how often to visit the new community center in her hometown of East St. Louis, Ill.

“You don’t want to show up all the time and seem like some big shot,” she says. “But you don’t want to show up so little that the kids are all asking each other who that woman is. I’m still figuring this out.”

She is 39, has six Olympic medals (three gold, one silver, two bronze), has a world record that still stands and two collegiate records that still stand, yet Joyner-Kersee doesn’t want to be too much or too little. She still seems surprised at her place in the world.

On Monday, Joyner-Kersee was honored as the top female collegiate athlete of the last 25 years as part of the Honda Awards program. She was chosen based on her performances as a track and field athlete and basketball player at UCLA.

The other nominees--UCLA basketball star Ann Meyers, Old Dominion basketball star Nancy Lieberman, Florida swimmer Tracy Caulkins, USC basketball star Cheryl Miller, UCLA softball star Lisa Fernandez, North Carolina soccer star Mia Hamm and Tennessee basketball star Chamique Holdsclaw--all are gracious, graceful champions. Some are groundbreakers in their sports. All are stars.

But as an athlete and a person, none is more deserving or important than Joyner-Kersee.

Of all her athletic accomplishments--her world-record 7,291 points in the heptathlon at the 1988 Summer Olympics; her back-to-back heptathlon Olympic gold medals, a feat of tremendous endurance and consistency; her brave bronze-medal long jump at the 1996 Atlanta Games when her hamstring was near popping and the pain nearly caused her to withdraw--what still excites Joyner-Kersee the most, she says, is something she did in a UCLA-USC dual meet in 1985.

“It was the first time I long-jumped seven meters,” she says. “And it came against USC, which was our biggest meet of the year. I was so excited. I always liked long-jumping the best of anything and this proved to me that I could be good at it.”

Jackie Joyner went to UCLA on a basketball scholarship. She was painfully shy and tremendously lonely. The world of UCLA, where many students came from wealthy families, where the streets outside campus were filled with million-dollar homes and people drove cars worth more than entire blocks of her hometown, could have intimidated her. She could have felt out of place and gone home.

But the athlete in Joyner wouldn’t let that happen. The athlete in her knew the girl was special.

East St. Louis was one of the most distressed, poor, scary places in the country. Whole neighborhoods burned down. Gangs, not teams, ruled the streets. Joyner’s mother, Mary, was 16 when Jackie was born. Her father, Al, was a year younger.

What Joyner-Kersee has accomplished came from a muscular body forged from hard work, pride and a spirit of both toughness and vulnerability. That spirit came from her parents.

From her mother, Joyner-Kersee learned that honesty, dependability, accountability were the most important things in life. Mary, who died at 38 of meningitis when Joyner-Kersee was a freshman at UCLA, wanted Jackie to be a lady.

“She wanted me to learn to cook and clean,” Joyner-Kersee says. She giggles again. “But she also wanted me to be a good, important person, and she accepted my sports side.”

It was her father, once an accomplished prep track athlete and football player, who encouraged Joyner-Kersee in her pursuit of running, jumping, shooting a basketball. In the great evolution of female athletics that has come from Title IX, we forget sometimes that there are so many fathers who have been most proud of a daughter’s strong legs, sculpted shoulders, blinding speed and mysterious strength.

“What I saw is that when Jackie was playing sports, she came out of her shell,” Al says. “It gave her confidence. In our city, which had so many troubles, sports gave Jackie a real purpose. It did that for her brother, Al, too, but Jackie was a shy girl who stayed in the background too much until she got involved in sports.”

Her brother won the family’s first gold medal, at the 1984 Olympics.

“But I always knew Jackie was the real star,” her brother said two years ago.

We know how Jackie married her college coach, Bob Kersee. We know that she was a four-year starter for the UCLA basketball team and that she has battled asthma all her life. We watched her handle with stoicism and deep disappointment the accusations by a Brazilian runner in 1988 that she and Florence Griffith-Joyner, Al’s wife, were both using steroids. Not until years later did Jackie say how diminished she felt her heptathlon world record was by that unfounded charge.

We saw Jackie be strong for Al when Florence died in her sleep three years ago. We watched Joyner-Kersee try a pro basketball career after the 1996 Olympics.

“Not great, I was too old,” Joyner-Kersee says of her time with the Richmond team of the short-lived ABL.

What Joyner-Kersee doesn’t give herself credit for is bringing girls to the arenas where they played. They came to see Joyner-Kersee the Olympic star, and some left filled with enthusiasm for women’s basketball.

What we haven’t seen since Atlanta is Joyner-Kersee the fund-raiser and philanthropist. The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation raised $12 million to build a community center for East St. Louis. The raising of the money and the supervising of the planning and construction of this center, which celebrated its first anniversary last month, has been the consuming passion for Joyner-Kersee.

“I think Jackie is more proud of that center than anything else,” Bob Kersee, her husband, says. “As much as anything, that center shows what kind of person Jackie is, how much she cares about making things better.”

Her father says, “Jackie was exposed to a lot in our neighborhood. She saw all kinds of people and problems. To many people, Jackie seemed like a wallflower. She’d go to a school dance, Jackie’d be up against the wall. But she also had a tough streak and would take charge. She would take all the kids on the block, selling popcorn balls, candy apples, whatever, and it would be Jackie at the front.

“When her mother and I saw those qualities in Jackie, we wanted her to go to UCLA. We sat down as a family and told Jackie as much as it would hurt to see her leave, we wanted her to go out and get that competitive edge on the world.

“I told her mother that if Jackie came home for Thanksgiving her freshman year and then went back, she’s going to make it. She made it.”

That is the message Joyner-Kersee wants to offer the boys and girls of East St. Louis. She wants them to see that no matter how hard life seems in the town where things aren’t much better than when Jackie grew up, it doesn’t matter.

“I don’t want kids to see me as some kind of big shot,” Joyner-Kersee says. “I want the kids to see me as a person just like them, who came from where they are.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.