TAMPA - When Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner Kersee was a child, she was invited to play on basketball teams at the Boys Club in East St. Louis, Ill. It was before the national organization became the Boys-&-Girls Club.
"I was always on the outside looking in, but friends selected me for the teams," Kersee, 55, told several hundred guests Tuesday at the Great Futures Breakfast benefiting the Boys-&-Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay.
She said her neighborhood was "infested with drugs and violence. I was told by that by the time I was 14, I would be pregnant."
Instead, she said, she started attending a community center as the Boys Club had closed. There a volunteer showed her the importance of education, community service and goal setting.
So by the 1980s, she was a UCLA student on full scholarship and looking at participating in the Olympics in long jump events and the heptathlon, a track-and-field event comprised of seven separate events, including the 200-meter run, 800-meter run and 100-meter hurdles.
She won six Olympic medal (3 of them gold medals in 1988 and 1992) and four world championship titles. She is the first African American woman to win an Olympic Medal in the long jump and the first woman to score 7,000 points in the heptathlon. She also played professional basketball for a short time.
During that time, she said she always wanted to give back to her community, to be sure all children have access to high quality after-school programs, have safe recreational places and caring adults are there to guide them.
She formed the Jackie Joyner Kersee Foundation and raised more than 1 million, was chaired by Lisa DeBartolo and Julie Weintraub. Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and his wife, Penny, donated use of the Amalie Arena and all parking to the event.
Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister presented a check for 100,000.
Hal Steinbrenner, chairman emeritus of the Boys-&-Girls Foundation, told the guests that the Tampa Bay clubs continue to grow. That about 10 years ago there were less than 10,000 members and in 2017, there are almost 20,000 members.
"We teach life skills to create contributing members of society," he said, adding the areas of focus are health and nutrition; community service (with members contributing 55,000 hours of volunteer service last year); and academics.
Contact Lenora Lake at hillsnews@tampabay.com.