A Kind of Grace (36 page)

From there I went to the Regal Riverfront Hotel, the site of the dinner, to do a TV interview. During the taping, I started making whistling sounds every time I took a breath. I knew it was a signal that the wheezing would be next. I apologized and told them I had to leave because I was getting sick. On the way home, I remembered I had to go to the mall to buy some presents for the people who helped me plan the dinner. I devised a plan. I would go home, take some medicine and then drive to the mall. I don't know what I was thinking.

When I walked into the house, I said hello to Bobby, Monica and her father, who'd just arrived from the airport. Even then, I could feel the attack coming on. I ran into my bedroom to take some medicine, all the while telling myself, “Okay. It's gonna be all right. Just stay calm.”

I was preparing to walk out of the bedroom when my chest tightened suddenly, without warning. I screamed for Bobby. Everyone came rushing down the hall. I was sitting on the bed gasping for air. He found my inhaler and handed it to me. It wasn't helping. Monica and her father looked scared to death. Bobby was calm, though. He lacked familiarity with the St. Louis roads, so he asked me how to get to the doctor's office. Shaking my head, all I could manage was a breath to say, “No time.”

He picked up the phone and dialed 911 and told them it was an asthma attack, an emergency. I just lay on the bed, staring at Bobby and holding his hand. I was terrified. My chest was heaving violently, but I was only getting tiny bits of oxygen. My air supply was practically shut off. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I thought I might be dying.

“The ambulance is on the way. Just take it easy,” Bobby said. He went to the bathroom and came back with a syringe and needle and a bottle of adrenaline, just in case I lost consciousness.

Monica kept asking him, “Can I do anything? Is she going to be all right?”

The ambulance arrived within minutes. The paramedics brought in oxygen and placed the clear plastic mask over my mouth. I started breathing better. One of them checked under my fingernails. He looked at Bobby and said, “It's a good thing we got here when we did. The skin beneath her nails had started turning blue.”

They lifted me onto the stretcher and wheeled me out of the house. All I thought about was Monica, who was still recovering from the trauma of her stabbing seven months earlier. I hated the fact that she had to go through this because of me. I was so embarrassed. I kept apologizing to her and her dad. She was crying as the medics wheeled me out the door. I told her not to worry.

I was terrified of that ambulance. They'd put my mother in one the morning she died. When the attendants opened the doors and began pushing me inside, I became hysterical. I screamed for Bobby. “I don't want to die, Bobby,” I cried. “I don't want to die in here!”

He climbed in with me and sat next to the stretcher. When the door closed, I panicked again. I felt claustrophobic. “Oh, my God, I can't breathe! I can't breathe!”

The attendant working on me was so nice. He kept telling me everything was going to be okay. But I was a basket case. I was still convinced I was dying.

At the hospital, the nurse gave me an injection of epinephrine to open my lungs. But after several hours and several tests of my lung activity, the results weren't satisfactory. Dr. John Best, the pulmonary specialist who treated me for asthma, said they had to admit me.

“Oh, no!” I said. “I have to be ready by tomorrow because I have my dinner for my foundation. I can't have a dinner and not be there. Monica Seles came all the way here for it and she's at my house—”

“You must be kidding!” he said, listening to my pleas. “After what you've been through? You have to be hospitalized.”

“Will I be out by tomorrow?”

“I don't see how that will be possible.”

As I started to cry, Bobby and Dr. Best looked at me incredulously.

Several hours before, I'd been nearly unconscious, with blue fingernails, fighting to breathe. But with the seizure past and my normal breathing restored, I was already putting it out of my mind. Just that quickly, I'd shifted my focus away from my health problem. I know now that it was a dangerous attitude. But at the time, I couldn't help myself. It was an instinct, a bad, bad defense mechanism I'd developed.

As I lay in the hospital bed that night, I reviewed the day's events. I kept seeing the terrified look on Monica's face. She and I had become very close friends after knowing each other for just a few months.

Her father was a track and field fan and he asked her agent to contact Bobby about helping her train. Monica was the number one ranked player at the time, but she wanted to improve her conditioning. She was trying to become more fit, more agile and stronger. She and Bobby arranged to meet after the Australian Open in 1993. She came to California and worked out with me on the track and in the weight room at UCLA for about a week. Her father told me he liked having me out there with her because some of the strength work for the heptathlon would be beneficial for her in tennis. Bobby put her through the wringer. She started out with a warmup run, short sprints and then longer endurance runs. In the weight room we lifted, did squats and rode stationary bikes together.

We bonded very quickly, comparing our experiences as female athletes. She, too, had been stung by critical stories in the press. It upset her when writers called her shallow or talked about her weight. I didn't think she was shallow at all. With great insight and compassion, she talked about the cultural differences in America and Eastern Europe, and about the political and racial strife in the former Yugoslavia, where she was born and raised.

She worked as hard on the track as most world-class track athletes. I most admired, though, her ability to concentrate for long periods of time. I understood how she'd become the best tennis player in the world. You could see the determination in her face as she ran those sprint drills and struggled with the heavy weights. It was really hot out there and it was hard work, especially with Bobby breathing down her neck. But she never complained, never asked to take a break. I think she's a first-rate athlete.

She's a first-rate person as well. She enjoyed her workout in California so much that she invited us to Florida for more workouts the following month. Her assistants had set everything up for us in Sarasota. But when she reviewed the arrangements, she said, “Oh, no that won't do!” She took over the job, driving around the area and personally evaluating the hotels. She told me that we'd been so nice to her in L.A., she wanted to make sure we had the best of everything. She put us up at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort, a swank resort on Longboat Key, near Sarasota.

A few weeks later, in April, Bobby was driving to the airport to pick me up when the news bulletin aired on the radio: Monica had been stabbed at a tournament in Germany. We were both shocked into silence on the drive home. We cried while watching the report on the news later. Bobby tried contacting her through her agent, but Monica was already on her way to Vail, Colorado. We finally reached her there and had a long, tearful conversation. During her recuperation, we kept in touch and arranged another workout.

She and Bobby worked together several times during that period. There were plenty of stories in the papers and magazines suggesting that she didn't really want to come back. They were dead wrong. Monica was working diligently toward her comeback. She was very committed to returning to tennis. At the time, I don't think anyone, not even I, could comprehend what she must have been going through.

The hard part wasn't physical, she told me. She recovered from that fairly quickly. The mental aspect is what took longest, which I understood completely. To be in the place where you think you're safe—the arena where you do what you enjoy and where people enjoy and appreciate what you do—only to have someone attack you, is the most frightening thing I could ever imagine. I thought about how easy it would be for someone to do the same thing at a track meet and how it would traumatize me. It was a horrible ordeal for Monica to have to go through. For people who didn't know anything about it to speculate and conclude that she didn't want to come back was insensitive. It took a lot of courage and strength to come back from something like that.

I was so excited when she accepted my invitation and agreed to travel to St. Louis for my dinner so soon after the attack. It showed me how comfortable she was around Bobby and me. I didn't want anything to happen during her stay to upset her—like my collapsing and having to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital! Fortunately, the doctor agreed to release me the next morning, in time to host my dinner and spend time with Monica and my other friends. But he gave me a long, stern lecture before he did. He told me I could have died that day in my house. If I didn't start taking the disease seriously and taking better care of myself, he said, it probably would kill me. That got my attention.

Then Bobby sat on the side of the bed to talk with me. He'd been calm the day before at our house and in the emergency room. But now he was upset. He told me he couldn't keep going through episodes like that. It was too frightening. “You've just had a very close call, Jackie,” he said. “Now, do you realize your attitude is putting your life in danger?”

I did. I finally did. I knew I had to take the illness seriously or there would be serious consequences. I started thinking of the asthma regime as part of my training. I had to attack it with the same commitment and discipline. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to run or long-jump. I viewed it as a threat to my ability to continue competing in athletics. I wasn't going to lose the ability to do what I most enjoyed just because I was stubborn. I had to learn to control the disease, instead of letting it control me.

When I talk to asthma sufferers, I try to help them understand what it took me too long to learn—asthma won't keep you on the sidelines if you follow doctor's orders and take your medicine properly. But if you don't, the condition will take you out of the game—permanently.

31

The Lesson

F
or many athletes the word “farewell” might as well have four letters. They see it as the end of their glory days, of their turn in the spotlight, of their very lives. I don't have that attitude. I've always known that my time on top would end someday, that someone would come along and eclipse me. I wanted to prepare myself for it and, to the extent I could control it, start walking away before being pushed aside.

The moment I decided the 1996 Games would be my last Olympics, I started planning the next phase of my life. After the Games ended, aside from selected long-jump competitions and personal appearances on behalf of my sponsors, my calendar would be virtually empty. For the first time since I was ten, the bulk of my time would be spent on something other than running, jumping and competing.

Suddenly, a world of opportunities was available to me. I wanted to dive into the unfinished work at my foundation, including raising the remaining $6 million to start the first phase of construction on the youth center in East St. Louis. I also was eager to focus more on my personal life. Since our wedding day, I've been buying baby clothes and stashing them away inside a drawer until Bobby and I started a family. Biologically speaking, it's time. In March 1997, I turned thirty-five. I'm ready emotionally, too. Bobby has been talking about having kids for years, but I wanted to wait until I could give our children my undivided attention. I know how single-minded I am when I'm training. To raise a child in those circumstances would have been unfair and irresponsible.

The night before the long-jump qualifying in Atlanta, still burdened with thoughts of whether I'd be risking grave injury by competing, I went to a women's basketball game between the U.S. and Japan at the Georgia Dome. Tara VanDerveer, coach of the U.S. team, sent me a note, asking me to help her fire up the women at halftime if they weren't playing well. But the Americans amassed a 15-point halftime lead and went on to beat the Japanese by the same margin. The Dome was packed, the crowd was enthusiastic and the U.S. women's team played so spectacularly, it was thrilling to be in the arena. I stopped by the locker room afterward, greeted my old friend Teresa Edwards, who played guard, and wished the rest of the team luck. “You've worked and sweated to get to this point—fifty-eight games without a loss,” I reminded the eventual gold medalists. “Just two more to go. It's what you've dreamed about. Go get it.”

The episode made me nostalgic. I'd made an almost identical speech to my basketball teammates at Lincoln High when we were undefeated and one game away from the state championship. It also shifted my thoughts briefly to overtures I'd received
before
the Olympics, from both the about-to-be-established National Basketball Association women's league and its competitor, the newly formed American Basketball League (ABL). Both organizations wanted me to trade in my track spikes for basketball sneakers. It was a tempting notion, particularly since I've always enjoyed blazing new trails, and since the existence of a financially healthy women's pro basketball league would give female athletes so many more options.

Eventually, after the Olympics were over, I would take the ABL up on its offer. But first, I had some unfinished business on the track.

It had been five days between my withdrawing from the heptathlon and leaving the stadium in tears, and my returning for long-jump qualifying. I was hoping to dispense with the preliminary round quickly, without unduly straining my leg, so that I'd be in competitive shape for the finals the day after.

What a relief it was to jump 21′ 11¾″ and make the finals on the first leap. I was on the field for less than thirty minutes. Someone walked up to me as I was putting on my warmup jacket and asked if I'd made it. “Yeah,” I said smiling. “Thank God!”

The afternoon of the long-jump finals, I could feel every single eyeball in the place when I walked onto the field at the warmup track. My therapist, Bob Forster, and I tried to rearrange the beige bandage on my right leg to make it more comfortable. Carl Lewis, who'd already won the men's long jump in spectacular fashion on his last attempt, came over and gave me a hug. “Come on,” he said. “Now it's your turn.” He flashed a thumbs-up signal as he walked off.