Speed: the sequel
Carl Lewis’s first job was ‘the greatest athlete who ever lived’. But in the city where he had his most spectacular success, at the 1984 Olympics, Andrew Anthony finds the controversial sprinter still struggling with his second act
Sunday September 30, 2007
Observer Sport Monthly
Setting out Carl Lewis’s achievements in athletics is rather like documenting Shakespeare’s literary highs or Einstein’s contribution to physics: impossible to summarise in a sentence. He won nine Olympic golds across no fewer than four Olympics and four different events. He also won eight world championship golds. He was unbeaten in the long jump for 10 years, from 1981 to 1991. He broke the 100metres world record in 1991. He was the first athlete to become a millionaire from competition alone, and in 1999 he was voted athlete of the century by, among others, a Unesco panel, the International Olympic Committee and Sports Illustrated. And it would be fair to say that the athlete of the 20th century would not find too much competition from previous centuries. So let’s make that of all time.
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By contrast, Lewis’s career as a film actor, which he began pursuing seriously five years ago, is a little easier to thumbnail. After all, he has hardly set Hollywood on fire. Alien Hunter, Atomic Twister, The Last Adam, F*ck You Pay Me!: it is safe to say that when the history of the 21st-century cinema is written, neither these titles nor the actor who appeared in them all are likely to loom large.
That old, exhausted line from F Scott Fitzgerald about there being no second acts in American life has been confounded too often. But the question remains: where do you go from being the greatest? How do the greatest deal with being less than great? As Lewis’s inspiration, the great sprinter and jumper Jesse Owens, observed of the aftermath of his success: ‘That golden moment dies hard.’
On a brilliant, late summer morning in Pacific Palisades, a spotlessly affluent suburb of Los Angeles, it has to be said that the golden moment looks very much alive and in the rudest of health. Lewis lives in a sprawling house on top of a hill overlooking the Pacific. Outside in the drive there is a black Maserati and a vintage Mercedes convertible. The garage is stocked with expensive wines. The architecture could be described as Mission-style, but really it’s Mission Statement, and the statement is: I am rich.
Right from when he was a boy, Lewis was concerned with money. He had his first bank account aged 10 and he not only mowed lawns to earn cash but also rented out his mower to earn still more. It was this unstinting focus on the bottom line that upset a number of people in athletics during the Eighties and Nineties. The sport was experiencing the birth pangs of professionalism, but while administrators seemed uncertain of when or how hard to push, the young and impatient Lewis was off and running to the bank. Other athletes looked on enviously at the large appearance payments he negotiated. There were complaints that the supremely gifted sprinter and jumper was out for himself. ‘A little more humility is in order,’ cautioned Ed Moses, the extraordinary 400metres hurdler and the very embodiment of the noble sporting ideal.
Lewis rejects the notion that he ever took an unfair share. ‘There is no such thing as a piece of pie. You raise the pie. If Carl Lewis comes in and gets more money, I’m not taking money out of the pie, the pie gets bigger. That was the problem they never really understood when I competed. I wasn’t taking a piece of the pie: I brought my own money into the sport.’
I meet him in his office, which is a five-minute drive down the hill from his house. In the basement of the office, there is an impressive gym with state-of-the-art machines, all bearing his name. On the walls, there are covers of Sports Illustrated, Time and Newsweek, all bearing his face. There’s the famous Pirelli ad in which he crouches at starting blocks in red stilettos, and also official freeze frames of his victorious final strides in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic 100m and 200m finals.
The man himself is in sleek condition, though slightly more muscular than the rangy sprinter of 20 years back. His hair, once the most famous flat-top on the planet, is now short and characterfully grey. He’s 46 and, though he works out most days, he hasn’t run in earnest for years. But he still carries himself with that almost balletic grace that suggests you would come a long way second in any race to the street corner.
When he was a runner, Lewis had a reputation for being aloof. This was partly because he made it clear that he had little time for competitors who weren’t ‘clean’, which is to say those runners who used steroids and proscribed stimulants. But it was also a legacy of childhood shyness allied to a single-minded determination to be the best.
His manager, Joe Douglas, famously compared Lewis to Michael Jackson, which was seen as a mark of overweening arrogance. This lack of clubability, or surplus of superiority, depending on how you saw it, meant that he also alienated sports reporters. Moreover, at the LA Olympics, where the 23-year-old managed the astounding feat of winning gold in the 100m, the 200m, the long jump and the 4x100m relay, Lewis actually appeared to go down in the public’s affection. While it is clear that he gained the sport’s and nation’s respect, it is debatable whether he ever received their love.
One of the unspoken subtexts of all this, the shortfall in the public’s affection, the aloofness, the Michael Jackson comparison, even the red stilettos, was the question of Lewis’s sexuality. Some fellow athletes spread the story that Lewis was gay. He denied the rumour, but, whether by coincidence or not, Coca-Cola withdrew an advertising deal and Nike stopped using him in the States after the LA Olympics. One Nike executive was quoted as saying: ‘If you’re a male athlete, I think the American public wants you to look macho.’ The high jumper Dwight Stone perhaps hit the mark when he said: ‘It doesn’t matter what Carl Lewis’s sexuality is, Madison Avenue perceives him as homosexual.’ Lewis himself later said: ‘They started looking for ways to get rid of me. Everyone was so scared and cynical, they didn’t know what to do.’
Times and attitudes have changed. While the nature of Lewis’s sexuality remains a private matter, he appears much more at home with himself. The man I meet is relaxed and approachable, even warm. He engages and jokes and listens. In a word, he’s empathetic. As I follow him around Los Angeles from his local high-school track to a meeting with television executives, and finally to a celebrity party, I see a character who has learned to laugh at the world and, more significantly, himself. Though he would dispute his former characterisation by the press, he acknowledges that he has changed, and much of the change he attributes to acting.
‘An athlete and actor,’ he says, ‘are really two different temperaments, night and day. As an athlete you really keep things out and as an actor you really bring things in. When I retired and moved here to LA was when I understood it a lot more. I found the emotion that as an athlete you block out, and it really helped me to understand myself as a person. I’m a really emotional person and it helped make me a better person.’ Highlights of what has so far been a subdued film career include playing a tabloid reporter in last year’s Material Girls, which also featured Anjelica Huston, and himself in Speed Zone!, a comedy with the late, great John Candy.
He has also come to terms with his sporting setbacks. One of the ironies of Lewis’s peerless career is that it is almost as well known for its few defeats as its many successes. For 10 years, Lewis remained unbeaten at the long jump. During that time, he came close but could never beat the freakish world record that Bob Beamon set at high altitude in a once-in-a-lifetime leap at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Then at the 1991 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, where Lewis set a world record at the 100m, he passed the 29-foot mark - exceeded only twice before, by Beamon and by Lutz Dombrowski - only to see Mike Powell break Beamon’s 23-year-old record. It was as though the script had been doctored by a vindictive hand.
‘It just wasn’t mine. I think that was divine intervention and Mike Powell was the right one. He deserved it because we competed so many times and he never won the gold medal, and he would have won every other gold medal but he happened to be in my period. It was only two-and-a-half inches. Very close. I could beat myself up about it but I don’t. I’ve got too much work to do.’
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Lewis finished second in arguably the most infamous race in history. The man who beat him was the pit-bull Canadian Ben Johnson, who broke the world record. Three days later the world discovered that Johnson, yellow-eyed at the race, was pumped up on steroids. Lewis had been saying as much for the previous year. Johnson was stripped of his gold, which was passed, second-hand and tarnished, to Lewis.
‘I wasn’t angry at him for the drugs, please,’ he says with almost camp horror, as if the very idea was too vulgar to entertain. ‘But my father had passed away. And I promised him that I’d win the medal. I wasn’t angry that I lost, I was disappointed that I didn’t win.’
This is a typical Lewis distinction, which sounds more profound than it is, and is slightly undermined by the fact that a few seconds later he says: ‘It’s not about winning. That’s where people get lost.’ His argument is that it’s about doing your best, but what that means is a question that in sprinting, as in cycling, has become inextricably and destructively bound up with the issue of drug abuse and blood-enhancement agents.
The week before I met Lewis, the Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell lowered the 100m world record to 9.74 seconds, an extraordinary time, but it caused barely a ripple. Since Johnson tested positive, a whole host of sprinters have also been caught and world records cancelled. As a consequence the idea of the fastest man on Earth no longer captures the public imagination. Leroy Burrell, Donovan Bailey, Maurice Greene, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin - none of the successors to Lewis have managed to burst through the cloud that hangs over their sport.
Lewis seems to have little time for their efforts. Of the recent spate of record-breaking, he says: ‘Some of them are dirty. I think drugs are not going to get out until the athletes do something about it and the athletes are wimps. Most of them are clean but they sit around, say nothing but complain. They know who’s on it, they know who’s dirty - do something about it. They called me a tell-tale but two years later I was a prophet,’ referring, presumably, to his pre-Seoul warnings of steroid use among his fellow competitors.
In 2003, Dr Wade Exum, the US Olympic Committee’s director of drug control during the Nineties, claimed that Lewis had tested positive for banned stimulants three times before the 1988 Olympics. The USOC decided that they were taken unwittingly and it also appears that the levels were beneath the level required to register as an offence. Either way, Lewis dismissed the allegations as the vindictive workings of former officials and the press.
Down at the Pacific Palisades High School, Lewis watches the building of a new track that will be named after him, and outlines his vision of how track and field can recapture the glory days of the Eighties. He plans to return to sports as a sort of organiser-cum-entrepreneur. ‘Right now it’s not a very good business model. Organisers are fighting over athletes that no one wants to pay.’
Lewis’s idea is to create an athletics academy with a huge nationwide membership that would generate enormous image-rights revenue. And while it would target top talent, it would also nurture mass participation. His academy or club is called CL Athletics, which he envisages becoming a coveted logo on sportswear.
‘The reality is that I have to do exactly what happened 30 years ago, which is I have to go out and do it and then everyone can copy it anyway.’ He talks at speed about corporate sponsorship, community links and specialist coaches, while shaking hands and chatting with the constructors who are bringing the school track to life. The school draws its students from right across the city, with a large African-American intake, very few of whom are from the wealthy environs of Lewis’s neighbourhood.
Born Frederick Carlton Lewis, he was raised in a middle-class community in New Jersey by his schoolteacher parents. His sister Carol was also a long jump Olympian, finishing ninth in 1984. He never came from the ghetto, but nor does he intend to turn his back on it. He says that he makes sure to visit places such as Compton, the crime-ridden area of south central LA, so he doesn’t become ‘jaded’. Unfortunately he gives me a rather Hollywood example of the word. When he visited India, which was ‘incredibly spiritual’, he says, he bought a lot of art work with his manager Joe Douglas. ‘He bargained it down to $20 from $30 and I said, “Joe, this is worth $200. Give him the $30.” And it reminded me: let’s not get jaded.’
None the less, Lewis inhabits a complicated yet telling position in American culture. He is a staunch capitalist who is aghast at the economic inequality he sees in America. ‘Why do we have 47 million people without health care? Because America has become about “me”. What’s happened to “we” as a people? I believe in that and that resonates to most people.’ Many Americans may find it disconcerting to hear a Lewis lecture on selfishness and the lack of solidarity. Especially as he makes no secret of his material ambition. ‘My goal is to not have to take my shoes off when I go to the airport,’ he tells me. ‘So that means I want my own plane. That’s what I’m working on.’
Another key aspect of the Lewis persona is that he is a black man who neither plays on his ethnic identity nor seeks to hide it. His parents left Birmingham, Alabama, when Lewis was two, after his mother saw her husband hosed down at a civil-rights march. He summarises his position on race in America thus: ‘My parents dealt with that. My mother said one time, “We marched, you do.” You get jobs, you hire people, you make things happen. That’s where I get it. But I understand there’s still issues.’
One of the film projects he would most like to develop is the story of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two black American athletes who raised their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony for the 200m at the Mexico Olympics in 1968. ‘They didn’t hurt anyone but they stuck to what they believed in. And they knew the repercussions and they suffered the rest of their lives. That’s a story of hope and determination. And all the people who stayed quiet in the background, they benefited from it but they weren’t hurt.’
It is time to visit the E! Channel offices in west Hollywood, where Lewis has a meeting with executives about a family drama series he’s trying to sell. The place is full of young, hip-looking people, many of whom weren’t born when Lewis won his first gold medal. We look like a delegation from Squaresville. I ask him if I can sit in on the meeting.
‘Wow,’ he says, a broad smile illuminating his face, ‘that would be crazy.’
Crazy good or crazy bad?
He nods thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, crazy bad.’
About an hour later he emerges with his small entourage, including his assistant and constant companion Jerrell Chesney, one meeting further along towards the elusive green light. Lewis puts a positive spin on the outcome, but like nearly every meeting in Hollywood it was inconclusive. ‘Next time,’ says his agent, ‘we really need to speak to the people who sign the cheques.’
Not for the first time, I wonder how it will be possible for Lewis to make a career for himself as an actor, and as a producer, while also attempting to transform track and field into a 21st-century business phenomenon. So I ask him. ‘I put together a team,’ he says, ‘and let them do the job.’ He also says he is not fussed if the acting fails. He is lined up to play a part as a sarcastic short-order chef in a small independent film called 62 Pickup. Apart from that, there’s not much else.
‘Most people want to become movie stars and I just want to be in the business. I already was a star. If I get the part of a lifetime and it blows up, then that’s wonderful. But if the acting doesn’t work, fine. I’ll just be a producer. And if the producing doesn’t work, fine. I’ve got a lot of other stuff. But I feel I can be successful and I’m going to put 100 per cent into it.’
We all head back across town to a ‘swag’ party. It’s the week of the Emmy awards, television’s Oscars, and there are a lot of people in town who are eager to give free gifts to celebrities. The old-fashioned way of doing this was to send goody bags to them, then some bright spark had the idea of getting the celebrities to come to collect the goodies, so that they could be photographed with them. It’s all about ‘raising brand profiles’.
The club where it’s held is decked out like Aladdin’s cave. Lewis is greeted with breathless excitement and, because I’m standing next to him, I also get to ‘feel the love’. Inside it becomes apparent that Lewis is the only genuine celebrity in the building, though I’m reliably informed that a couple of bodies propping up the bar used to be in a daytime soap.
Lewis seems unfazed. Instead he enters into the spirit of the event with uncynical gusto, going from table to table, unfailingly polite and interested as he is informed of the provenance of each gift, from chilli sauce to jewellery. It seems bizarre that a seriously wealthy person would bother to drop into such a place, solely to receive the kind of free gifts that are destined to rot in a cellar or be given away in turn. But as his agent so succinctly puts it: ‘Rich people like free stuff.’
Indeed they do. Lewis and his friends are drinking mojitos and horsing around. He looks across at my bemused expression and encourages me to join him in a drink. ‘Welcome to my crazy world,’ he says, laughing out loud. The golden moment may have taken on some kitsch lamé trimmings, but it’s still glowing. And now it’s time to have fun. This isn’t the Olympics. This is Hollywood.
Carl Lewis: the golden years
1961
Born in Alabama. His parents move to New Jersey when he is two.
1980
He qualifies for the US Olympic team in the long jump and the sprint relay, but never makes it to Moscow after the American boycott.
1983
Wins 100m, 4x100m relay and long jump gold at the inaugural world championships.
1984
Emulates Jesse Owens by winning Olympic gold in the 100m, 200m, sprint relay and long jump, in Los Angeles.
1987
Finishes second behind Ben Johnson in the 100m at the world championships. Also in that year, he makes his acting debut in the TV series Dirty Laundry
1988
Finishes second again behind Johnson in the Olympic 100m in Seoul, but the Canadian is banned and loses his Olympic and world golds after he is found to have used anabolic steroids. Lewis’s time of 9.93sec is a new world record.
1991
Wins world championship gold in the 100m and sprint relay, but is beaten to the long jump title by Mike Powell, who sets a world record.
1992
Claims the Olympic long jump and relay golds again, in Barcelona. A year later he takes the 200m bronze at the world championships.
1996
Wins the Olympic long jump at Atlanta.
2002
Appears in Atomic Twister. He has since acted in another five films.