Content area
Full text
Bob Kersee, coach of the World Class Athletic Club, said Wednesday that his recent split with sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner was inevitable and that he could foresee it as early as last October.
For those without a copy of the Griffith-Joyner-Kersee family tree, that was the month that Griffith married Al Joyner, who is Kersee's brother-in-law. Kersee is married to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, world record-holder in the heptathlon.
"This is really not surprising to me," Kersee said of Griffith-Joyner's decision last week to leave the World Class Athletic Club and train full time with her husband. She has trained with Kersee for much of the last eight years.
"Al and Florence always have their own opinions and do their own things. They have the right to decide who manages them and who coaches them. That doesn't bother me. It's not an ego thing with me.
"If Florence is going to be successful on the track and off the track, that's my dream for her."
But Kersee said that some of the reasons Griffith-Joyner gave in an interview at her Van Nuys apartment last Thursday for leaving the club are "false and misleading," resulting, he believes, from a lack of communication.
"All of the reasons she gave, none of them did she ever discuss with me," Kersee said. "I wasn't even aware that a lot of these things were serious problems. She came across as a person who has been holding all of these things inside.
"It has always been tough for me to communicate with her. She won't communicate with you if something is bothering her."
Still, Kersee said he was hurt when Griffith-Joyner went public with her criticisms before first speaking to him.
"After eight years, I felt she owed me that," he said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Kersee and Griffith-Joyner had not spoken since a "Good Morning America" television appearance in New York on July 25, two days after the U.S. Olympic track and field trials ended in Indianapolis, where she broke the world record in the 100 meters and the U.S. record in the 200.
The next day, back in Los Angeles, Griffith-Joyner signed a management contract with Gordon Baskin, also a financial adviser to hurdler Edwin Moses, and said that she will...