Off the Record

Of course Carl Lewis remembers the booing. How could he not?

He had soared 28 feet, one-quarter inch on his first long-jump attempt and fouled on his second try, and each of the four times he passed a chance to do better, the boos cascaded from the Coliseum stands. He heard them. He was neither superhuman nor unfeeling, his chiseled 6-foot-2 frame and aloof image to the contrary.

“I knew exactly why they were booing. It was because I wasn’t jumping,” he said. “You’re sitting there and people don’t understand the sport and they don’t realize I knew that the next-best jump was like 27-3 or something like that, and with the conditions, they probably wouldn’t jump that.”

He also knew his body was reaching its limit.

Monday, Aug. 6, was Lewis’ fourth consecutive day of competition. He’d gone through the heats, semifinals and finals of the 100-meter dash -- he won in 9.99 seconds -- as well as long-jump qualifying. After the 100, “I put the gold medal in a cabinet, had dinner and went to bed because I got back at 10:30 at night and had to long jump at 10 the next morning,” he said. “My Games, it was like I couldn’t even think of yesterday. I couldn’t celebrate yesterday.”

The long jump final was in the evening, hours after he ran two heats of the 200. The semifinals and finals of the 200 and the rounds of the 400-meter relay still lay between him and his goal of winning the four events Jesse Owens had won in 1936.

So while the crowd got caught up in the moment and hoped he might try to break the record of 29-2 1/2 that Bob Beamon had set in the thin air of Mexico City in 1968, Lewis had to conserve energy for the days ahead.

After the foul, “I said, ‘This is over. I’ve got to run tomorrow,’ ” said Lewis, who won 65 consecutive long jump finals between February 1981 and August 1991. “That was kind of my philosophy. It’s no different than a team that’s in a seven-game series and is up by 50 and you put everybody else in. I’m not a team. I can’t put someone else in, so I just rest.”

And even though his only legal jump would win by more than 11 inches, fans booed when he refused to take flight again. He was surprised, but not swayed.

“It was cold and it was windy. Those big stadiums, people don’t realize how windy it is,” he said. “Just imagine: Our run is between 45 and 55 yards. That’s what most approaches are. The wind is rarely blowing in the same direction and it’s never blowing the same direction for each jump. Most of the time it’s blowing four or five different ways during the same run, with the wind swirling like crazy.

“Then when you step up to the run that first time, it might be blowing in your face. You start going down and it’s going to one side, and so you make an adjustment. The next time you stand up, it’s at your back when you start. So when you get off a jump like I did, 28 feet on the first one, I said, ‘This is over. You can go home.’ I knew that was going to win.”

What stung was the wrath heaped upon him later by critics who said he cheated fans of seeing him break Beamon’s record.

“Carl Lewis came across as a package -- no more, no less -- bloodless, lacking the endearing humanity that drew us close to Owens,” Mike Littwin wrote in The Times.

Times columnist Jim Murray called him “a commodity.”

Lewis was baffled.

“Two days later I ran the 200 and the place went crazy,” he said, “and when I ran the relay, it was the same thing. We set the record. Everybody said, ‘The athletes hate Carl,’ but when I was standing at the finish line of the relay, every team’s athletes picked me up and carried me off like I was a Super Bowl coach. The next day it was like, ‘All the athletes hate him,’ and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. They just picked me up and carried me off and that never happened and never happened again.’ It was just amazing.

“It became an easy story. The thing is I look back at that and I feel honored in a lot of ways because I don’t know very many athletes who could put up with all the stuff I had to deal with for 20 years. They say the Lord doesn’t give you more than you can handle. He definitely knew how much I could handle. He challenged me.”

He blamed the booing on U.S. track officials for not making it clear why he didn’t jump again. He battled the track federation often, pushing for lucrative paydays for athletes and to rid the sport of performance-enhancing drugs.

“They let me down, they let the media down, they let the public down,” he said. “Because here we are, in a sport that 99% of the people watching it don’t understand because most people don’t watch track. It was our job to educate the public and they didn’t do that.”

Living up to the frenzied buildup he’d gotten before the Games -- he was on the cover of mainstream magazines “from something like January through August basically nonstop,” he won the 200 in 19.80 seconds and anchored the relay to gold in a world-record 37.83 seconds. In three subsequent Games he won five more gold medals and a silver medal, winning his last Olympic title and fourth consecutive long jump gold medal at Atlanta when he was 35 and jumped 27-10 3/4.

“It’s ironic that in ’96 I did the exact same thing,” he said. “I took three jumps and passed the last three and nobody said a word because you know what, here we are 12 years later, people had a much better understanding of what had happened because I know that jump would probably win.”

Now an actor, he has lived in Los Angeles the last five years, “The one place I said I’d never be is where I’ll probably spend the rest of my life,” he said. But he’s glad he’s here, because reminders of the 1984 Olympics are never far.

When he’s in the area of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, he’ll detour past the house he rented during the Games for his parents, Bill and Evelyn, his sister, Carol, and their brothers. He recalled that his father, who died in 1987, was upset by the long jump boos, but to Lewis, that was secondary to the family’s being together.

“At the end of the day, I came home and my mother had dinner ready,” he said, smiling. “I’d get up in the morning and she’d have breakfast ready. Then I’d go to the track and do my thing and come back and she’d have lunch. I said, ‘Mother, we can get somebody to cook,’ and she said, ‘No, this is the Olympic Games. I raised you to this point, I’m going to cook for you.’ I said, ‘OK, Mommy.’

“That’s what I remember most, and of course the competition and the races. That’s why here we are 20 years later, and that’s my fondest memory. That was the only Olympics our whole family spent together.

“Nothing athletically will ever match that. Even Atlanta, winning the last time, and I had all these family and friends there. Still, nothing will match L.A. for me.”

He doesn’t regret his decision in the long jump. “There are a million things I’d do differently in life,” he said, “but based on what I knew at the time, I felt that I did what I thought was right. And at the end of the day, now, nobody says, ‘You didn’t take that extra long jump.’ I guess in the long run that’s what really matters. History is what’s the most important part.”

He’s more intent on the future. After some frustrating years in which he turned down acting parts that would have called for him to essentially play himself, he appeared in “Alien Hunter,” released last year, and will be in the urban drama “Tournament of Dreams,” scheduled for September release. He’s also involved in a sitcom project and has enough money from his athletic career to be “a starving actor and live in the Palisades.”

He recently testified before a Senate committee about the Olympics and terrorism, and is busy with his foundation, which supports physical education for kids and voter registration.

And he has resumed following his sport, though he’s angered by the ongoing steroid scandal and said those who run track and field “fought a long time to get me out and now they have the sport they wanted.”

He joked about his advancing age -- he turned 43 July 1 -- but is finally comfortable with where life has taken him.

“I still don’t really grasp the concept of winning nine gold medals. It still doesn’t register,” he said. “Sometimes when I’m around other athletes, like a group, and they’ll announce, ‘So and so, an Olympic champion, has two golds and a silver.’ Or, ‘He won a gold medal.’ I say, ‘Wow.’ Then they say, ‘Here’s Carl Lewis and he won nine gold medals and I think, ‘Oh, my God.’ I don’t even know if I ever will grasp that because it’s just strange.”