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Mansion-dwelling amateur athletes who collect crystal no longer occasion shock, though speculation regarding Lewis' income prompts curiosity. Estimates run to $1 million a year. Coach-Adviser-Agent Douglas is shy in discussions of how much money Lewis earns. But when the Dallas Cowboys spent a twelfth-round draft pick on Carl, trawling for another Bullet Bob Hayes, Douglas noted, "If he were to play professional football, he'd take a pay cut." After the N.B.A. Chicago Bulls also drafted him, despite the fact that he never played even high school basketball, Lewis observed archly, "They know talent when they see it." Regarding the N.F.L., he says, "If I wanted to, I could be All-Pro." Like most great athletes, he can be full of himself.
Just from the ankle down, Lewis is a six-figure property. Besides shoes and shams, other business income not siphoned through track's deft trust-fund system flows through a company called Athcon, Inc. Carl Lewis is president, Bill Lewis vice president, Carol secretary, Evelyn treasurer. Board meetings are seldom called.
Until Lewis, the long jump (or the broad jump as it was once called) has always had an aura of the unattainable, almost the supernatural. Irishman Peter O'Connor's record 24 ft. 11¾ in. stood for 20 years. Owens' 26 ft. 8¼ lasted 25. Other records advance like an army of inch-worms: baby-girl swimmers are lapping Johnny Weismuller. But generations of frustrated long jumpers have had to aim at unreasonable marks. Lewis intends to square things for all of them, including Owens, maybe especially Owens, who died four years ago of lung cancer at the age of 66. In his long career as an Olympic champion, he raced against horses and motorcycles at country fairs, neglected income taxes, delivered orations. After 40 years, his Hitler speech was as practiced as a one-man play. He delivered it like a preacher, with a loud timbre. But in a softer voice Owens once said, "That golden moment dies hard." More good advice for Carl.
"We want him to be known as Carl Lewis the athlete," Douglas says. "Carl Lewis the sportscaster. Carl Lewis the actor." He has studied acting at New York's Warren Robertson Theater Workshop, reading such parts as Gale Sayers' role in Brian's Song. "Great actors have a kind of vibrant containment, and Carl has that," says Robertson, who is Douglas' cousin. "There is a depth of vulnerability in Carl. A lot of athletes create a partition on their emotions. It's that masculine, fixed idea that men don't cry, don't show pain. It was not hard to get Carl to touch the more fragile interior." Lewis recently told the New York Times, "Men—athletes especially—have to be like King Kong. When we lose, we can't cry and we can't pout. We're not supposed to be touched. We have to be carved in a certain way just to be men—chest of steel and all. I think it's disgusting."