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Bill and Evelyn Lewis met at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute: he was a sprinter, she a hurdler, both of them long jumpers. Evelyn, especially, loved floating in free flight. With slim legs tucked tightly under her in the fashion of the day, she sailed over 19 ft. at college and was bound for the Helsinki Games in 1952 until a hurdle injury interfered. Evelyn had to stop competing at 20, and all these years later, some incomplete feelings linger. There are no spectators in the Lewis family, but the varied athletic directions of the children suggest a reasonable tolerance for individuality. Mackie, 30, enjoyed track, football, baseball, almost all games in season. Cleve, 28, played soccer at Brandeis University, even professionally for a time. The third son, Frederick Carlton Lewis, was slower in developing distinctive tastes and style, and just plain slower in developing. Though he is more than two years older than Kid Sister Carol, she quickly shot past him in height and bearing. Pointing to the indisputable calibrations of an upstairs door jamb, she assigned him the nickname "Shorty."
When Bob Beamon long-jumped 29 ft. 2½ in. at Mexico City in 1968, and people said that nobody alive would ever break this record, Carl Lewis was seven. No one had ever jumped 28 ft. before, and Beamon would never manage even 27 ft. again. Whatever it is that allows mothers to lift automobiles to save their babies launched him nearly 2 ft. beyond the record. "But it's impossible. I can't believe it," he said, sliding to his knees. "It's madness, I tell you. I'm going to be sick."
If Lewis heard of Beamon's jump then, it was not until Carl had turned ten that he took exact measure of the distance in his front yard, and thought, "This doesn't make sense. How could a human being do this?" He meant to find out. By 16, Lewis had old headlines pasted up on his bedroom wall, amended with his own name: CARL LEWIS, KING OF THE 27-FT. JUMPERS. From the age of two, he had grown up in Willingboro, where his parents had moved to avoid desegregation troubles in Birmingham and to pursue graduate studies and teaching jobs. Young Carl and Carol were the only ones with no memory of Alabama.
As disparate as their personalities and interests would always be, each furnished the fundamental relationship in the other's childhood and young adulthood from the days when the long-jump pit of Evelyn's team served as their sandbox. There might have been no Carl without Carol. In high school she was a force, a varsity diver and gymnast who played recreation-league softball, ran track, waved pom-poms and wished she could do more. Carl attempted hail-fellow sports like baseball, but as a coach of that period remembers, "he was always picking daisies in centerfield." For Lewis, track became a comfort station, a self-sufficient arena where the contestants are allowed to be withdrawn. "I was never a fighter when I was young," he says. "I was shy, so I always found another way of getting around a tough situation. I stayed calm."