older brother and three older sisters were the exact opposite, so they teased me a lot and embarrassed me even further by pointing out how I would do anything to avoid embarrassment. They thought that was pitiful. I didn’t care what they thought. I just knew that I didn’t like the feeling of being humiliated.
Unfortunately as a youngster that happened to me fairly consistently. When I was seven years old I had a friend named James who was the same age and lived two houses down from me. We played a lot, but whenever he didn’t like something that I did he would hit me. Each time that happened, I cried and slunk back to my house. When we moved to a new neighbourhood a year later, a kid named Keith, who was exactly like James, took over the role of friendly bully. We played together a lot, but it bothered him that I was better at sports than he was. So whenever he wanted to show me that he was better than me at something, he would want to fight me, because he knew I didn’t like to fight. So he would hit me. Once again, I would slink back home instead of retaliating.
My brother and sisters didn’t like that at all. Determined that I shouldn’t go on embarrassing the family by allowing myself to get beaten up, they tried to teach me how to fight. But I just didn’t like fighting. This went on for about three years. One day Keith took my bicycle and wouldn’t give it back. When he finally stopped and threw my bike down, I was so angry I punched him in the face. He tried to hit me back but I pushed him down and jumped on top of him and beat the crap out of him. ‘Don’t stop,’ yelled my brother and one of my sisters, who happened to be present at the time. ‘How many times has he hit you? Hit him back for every time.’ Eventually they pulled me off him and he ran home. After that we played together for years, without a single fight. I had evened the playing field and claimed my own sense of power. I felt good about myself after that and knew I would no longer have to live with that fear and embarrassment of not being able to take care of myself.
Although I could best Keith in sports, I wasn’t great in that department. Of course, that’s a relative statement. At the informal knockabout games at the park that defined my afternoons and weekends during elementary school, I’d get chosen first by my buddies for soccer and (American) football because of my speed. I was not as good at basketball. Not being considered one of the best didn’t sit well with me. So after finishing my homework or in the summers when school was out, I would take the basketball my grandfather had given me and go up to the court to practise shooting baskets. That was the only way I would learn to play better and get chosen first in that sport as well.
Even though I loved playing all sports, I loved experiencing the sensation of speed the most. I loved to run – and run fast. I would ride my bike fast. I had a skateboard and I would ride my skateboard fast. I would find a hill and ride my bike down the hill still pedalling fast, or I would run down the hill because I discovered that I could go faster if I was going downhill.
I was fast from the beginning. I think I first realised that I was fast at age six while playing with a few kids in my neighbourhood. About ten of us had decided to have a race at the park near my house. My friend Roderick who was also six was there, along with some older kids. One of them, Carlos, was my sister Deidre’s age, so he had to be about ten or eleven years old. We all lined up and we were running about 50 yards to a football goalpost. One kid called the start. He said, ‘On your marks, get set, go!’ and by the time he said go half the kids had already taken off. Even though I was late on the take-off, I managed to catch everyone, including the older kids, and won the race. ‘I didn’t even start on time, and I had to catch you all and I still won,’ I screamed to all the other kids. Of course, I had been playing sports with these kids for a while and always got to the ball first. So it was no surprise to anyone that day that I was fast – except me.
Even then, however, there was a difference between outrunning someone on the football field while trying to score a goal, or trying to prevent someone else from scoring a goal, and the lack of any subjectivity or complication in a foot race between me and others. The simple nature of a foot race was appealing to me. There was no skill or technique required at that point. It was simply a question of who was fastest. I wanted to be that person. And most times I was.
I was always very proud of winning. Every year in elementary school we had field day, a competition among all the kids in the school with events like the long jump and 50-yard dash. That was the only event I was really interested in and I won some blue ribbons. I remember one particular field day my mother had come up to the school to watch me participate. I won the race and looked over for her reaction. She was clapping and smiling as she nodded her head to me in approval. Having my mother there to watch me felt really good. I couldn’t wait to get home to hear her tell me how proud she was.
After school was over I ran home with my ribbon. I showed it to her as soon as I burst through the door. She looked at it, told me I had done a good job, then told me to get started on my homework and do my chores. That was the balance my parents showed. They were happy for me to participate in sports if it made me happy, but they never got carried away with it.
In addition to the school field days I also participated in a parks and recreation summer track programme called the Arco Jesse Owens Games. Every neighbourhood had a park, and in the summer kids from all the parks would come together and be grouped by age so they could compete against one another in different track and field events. I competed in the 50-yard dash and 100-yard dash. The first summer my sister Deidre and I participated in the Arco Jesse Owens Games, I had been the fastest in my age group at my park but finished in the middle of the pack at the Games. I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t even know the other kids. I didn’t know if they were better than me. I just knew that I wanted to win and I had a strong belief that I could win. I told myself I would try harder the next time I had an opportunity to race. I honestly didn’t know what else I could do in the face of defeat.
Winning races had come easily to me up to that point. Looking back on that day, I think I was just so accustomed to winning the races I had run in my neighbourhood and at school that I expected to win. I knew I was fast and I liked the feeling of winning. I liked being good at something and I liked the attention I got from being fast.
Of course, I didn’t share that with anyone.
FAMOUS PERSONALITIES
‘If you look at most sportspeople – and this is the trend, not the absolute – they tend to be more introverts,’ says Sir Steven Redgrave, five-time gold medallist in rowing. ‘They tend to be more interested in what they’re doing – very quiet from that point of view.’
He speaks from personal experience. Like me, Steve was shy when he was growing up. ‘As a kid and even as a teenager, I wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ he says. Heavily dyslexic, Steve, who had two older sisters, struggled with schoolwork. Sports – any kind of sports – became his outlet. ‘Even if I wasn’t that good at it, I still enjoyed doing it, because it was like freedom in some ways.’ So he played, in his words, ‘a little bit of football’ (or soccer for you American readers) for a team that was good enough to have a couple of its players go on to apprenticeships at professional clubs. ‘Little’ was the operative word since as reserve goalkeeper he sat on the side most of the time. He also ‘messed around’ with rugby week in and week out, playing on a team that needed volunteers from the football team to make up the 15 players required for a match. And as a competitive sprinter during junior school, he was one of the fastest in his home county of Buckinghamshire.
His sports escape routes broadened when the head of the school’s English department introduced Steve to rowing. ‘Our school was mainly a soccer school. Because he had a love for rowing, he used to go around and ask a few individuals if they’d like to give it a go. I hated school, so being asked to go out on the river in a games lesson once a week was a no-brainer from my point of view. The only problem is after two or three weeks we started going down every day after school. He asked 12 of us from my year. Within two weeks there were only four of us left that were committed
