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Nino Fennoy, a saintly coach of the kind these neighborhoods always seem to inspire, steered her through a series of Junior Olympics championships and a busy career of basketball and volleyball at Lincoln High. An admirer of the great Tennessee State track coach Ed Temple, Fennoy had been keeping an eye out for his own Wilma Rudolph. The pigtails, the skinny legs, the scraped knees were not his signal. "It was the smile," he says. Coach Fennoy required her to keep journals on the teams' small road trips and monitored her syntax and spelling. "Where you're going," he told her, "you'll need to express yourself with more than your legs and arms."
The girls' basketball team at Lincoln went 62-2 her last two years, and Jackie was All-State. Escorted by her father, the man who had finished high school with an armful of babies, she went to UCLA on a basketball scholarship. She would make the Bruins' all-time list in practically every category: fourth in rebounds, eighth in scoring, tenth in assists. In 1981, in the middle of Jackie's freshman season, Mary died of meningitis after an illness that lasted one day. She was just 38. "Her determination," Jackie says, "passed to me." Leaning on a UCLA assistant track coach, Bob Kersee, Jackie began to point toward the 1984 Games.
By that time, Kersee was coaching both her and Al, and on a remarkable August night the two schemers from Piggott Avenue made history. Al had all but won the triple jump when Jackie took her mark in the 800-meter run, the finale of the heptathlon. If she could stay within about 15 yds. of the Australian Glynis Nunn, Jackie's lead under the weighted point system would hold up. But her left leg was bound with a hamstring wrap that crippled her confidence more than her stride.
As Jackie reached the final turn, Al was suddenly alongside her, running in silhouette on the grass. By .33 sec., just about a step, she lost the gold medal. Totaling 6,385 points to Nunn's 6,390, Jackie came off the silver stand almost directly into Al's arms. "It's O.K.," he comforted her, and she smiled. "I'm not crying because I lost," she said. "I'm crying because you won." That night in East St. Louis, the streets filled up the way they used to in Detroit after a Joe Louis fight. Everyone came out to sing.
Noticing how careful Jackie was not to emphasize her injury and cloud Nunn's moment, Kersee started looking at her as more than just a sublime athlete. Since their marriage in 1986, she has overwhelmed the field with the only 7,000-point performances on record -- four of them. He says, "At times I feel she's possessed by athletics. She can go on and on." With a sigh she agrees, "I don't know what it is about that extra second or inch. I expect so much out of myself." She always aches but never minds. "Ask any athlete: we all hurt at all times. I'm asking my body to go through seven different tasks. To ask it not to ache would be too much."