He knew of no candle that burned out more
quickly than that of the high school athlete.
Friday Night Lights
They rejoiced when Javon Francis took the baton at the world championships in Moscow and, with talent, guts and determination, dragged Jamaica to a silver medal.
They despaired a few months later when, at Champs, he broke down. There was outrage at the decision to put him in the final of the 200 metres just a couple of hours after his beating of Bolt’s record in the 400 metres. He had collapsed to the track, at one point being helped on to a stretcher before staging a Lazarus-like recovery.
To see him pull up injured, his face a picture of agony, was heartbreaking. It became a huge talking point throughout the country, even warranting a solemn editorial in the Jamaica Observer: ‘This newspaper was jarred by the perception that student athletes are being overworked in pursuit of glory.’ To underline the seriousness of the matter, he was ‘Mr Francis’ throughout. Noting that after the 400 metres he ‘had to be helped off the track’, the article continued: ‘It seemed logical that, given this hiccup, Mr Francis would be pulled from remaining competition. Not so. Less than three hours later – with Calabar holding an unbeatable points lead in the race for the boys’ championship title – Mr Francis was on the track lining up for the 200 metres final.
‘To the utter dismay of most of us watching, Mr Francis pulled up, grabbing his hamstring 20 to 30 metres from the finish line. Jamaicans will be keeping their fingers crossed that this athlete, among this country’s most promising, wasn’t badly hurt.’
Francis grew up in Bull Bay, nine miles along the coast from Kingston, where children play on the beach and catch fish in the river. To call the dwellings of this community modest would be an understatement: many are no more than shacks with wooden walls and tin roofs.
He went to St Benedict’s Primary School and dreamt of becoming a footballer. But in Jamaica, football comes second to athletics. His football coach, seeing his speed, took him aside one day. ‘You know, Javon, you have good potential – have you tried track and field?’
‘No, sir,’ said Javon. ‘I don’t want to try track and field. I want to be a great footballer like Ronaldinho.’
‘But you can be the next Usain Bolt or Herb McKenley.’
‘OK, coach, I give it a shot.’
The Javon Francis who relates all this, grinning as he recalls the exchanges, is nineteen and about to turn professional. He sits in the grounds of Calabar High School, where he still trains with his old coach, Michael Clarke, and speaks with an endearing sense of innocence, giggling and opening his eyes wide to convey wonder.
At his sports day, after the eleven-year-old lined up against the school’s fastest sprinter, and beat him, it was the turn of the athletics coach to have a word. ‘Bwoy, you really fast! Footballer, come to track and field.’
‘Sir,’ said Javon, ‘I am going to sit down and decide what I want to do.’
He talked to his father. ‘Whoa, dad, it’s hard. I want to be the next Ronaldinho.’ His father told him it was up to him. ‘Then I go round,’ says Francis, ‘and ask lots of questions, make people tell me how it feels to do track and field. My cousin used to do track and field and he said to me, “Well track and field, it’s nice, but the training is very hard. But you can go to places, the Penn Relays, the Miami Classic.”
‘“Wow! Those places? Cuz, if you go on a plane, how does it feel?”
‘“Well, it’s nice, you go up in the air, look down.”’
That was it, says Francis. ‘I make up my mind. Track and field is what I’m going to do: be a superstar. But my first day, training hard, I throw up. And say, whoa, this is hard.’
While Francis talks, his guardian, Andrea Hardware, gazes at him and smiles, swatting flies and mosquitoes as they land on him. Beside her is Noel Facey, who recruited Francis. Facey and Hardware are both parents of Calabar pupils or former pupils; Hardware, director of human resources at Digicel (who sponsor Bolt and now Francis too), also manages the school’s athletics team.
Facey recalls the moment he spotted Francis. He was sitting watching a meeting with Clarke. ‘Michael Clarke has an eye for talent. Not for the winner. He’ll look at the boy who comes third or fourth, looking at stride pattern, muscle build-up. I don’t question Michael. I was beside him when Javon ran and he said, “Facey, this is the boy I want.”’
Facey’s job then was to recruit him for the school. ‘It’s a whole lot of work,’ he says, ‘but everything we do is with the head coach. He picks them out, and my job is to go and get them. I talk to the parents, tell them about the programme. I generally sell Michael: his track record. But the parents have got to say yes. Javon’s parents said yes.’
Omar Hawes had stressed how humble Francis’s upbringing was. Francis himself mentioned that the first time he ran the 100 metres, he was in his stockinged feet. ‘His parents are not well off, but they’re trying to make sure he gets the best out of life,’ said Omar. Unusually, his parents are still together. ‘Most of the athletes who have talent here in Jamaica, you find they come from broken homes. Most of them have a reason to excel in whatever strength they have. To help the family out and help themselves.’
Francis’s father is a fisherman, while his mother, says Hardware, ‘does anything she can find herself to do to make a living’. Javon is the youngest of six children: five boys, one girl. Which is interesting. An extraordinarily high proportion of top male sprinters seem to be late-born, or youngest, in their (often large) families: Usain Bolt (youngest of three), Ben Johnson (youngest of five), Carl Lewis (third of four), Asafa Powell (youngest of six), Calvin Smith (sixth of eight), Yohan Blake (seventh of eleven), Justin Gatlin (youngest of four), Maurice Greene (youngest of four), to name just some.
This phenomenon was discussed by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code. ‘History’s fastest runners were born, on average, fourth in families of 4.6 children,’ writes Coyle, who argues that ‘deep practice’ is the key to sporting excellence (excellence in any field, for that matter). The pattern of late-born sprinters suggests, he asserts, ‘that speed is not purely a gift but a skill that grows through deep practice, and that is ignited by primal cues. In this case the cue is: you’re behind – keep up!’
In a nutshell, speed is honed by younger children trying to keep up with their older siblings.
There may be something in that. Or perhaps not. David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, notes that the leading female sprinters are nearly all first- or second-born in the family. Is it because females are less competitive, less ego-driven? Again, maybe. But Epstein doesn’t think that’s it. ‘To me,’ he writes in an email, ‘when you see a male/female disparity – handedness, dyslexia, etc. – it often points to a prenatal effect.’
The Coyle theory, that the social effect is the determining factor, is also slightly undermined by the fastest man of all time. Bolt was third-born, but didn’t really grow up with his older siblings (a brother and a sister). In fact, several of the youngest-born sprinters mentioned above, including Gatlin, did not grow up in the company of their siblings.
Epstein carried out his own informal survey into the phenomenon and considered that the gender of the older siblings seemed to be significant. ‘We know that the environment of the womb changes with each successive boy birth, but not each girl, and my survey found that the boys particularly had lots of brothers. So in my opinion, the weight of evidence is for a biological effect, not a social one.’ (Although being a good scientist, he is reluctant to draw any firm conclusions, given the limitations of such a small sample.)9
So Francis may have got off to the best possible start in his athletics career by being the youngest in his family, especially by having four older brothers.
Although he started out running all the sprint events – the 100, 200, 400, 4x100 and 4x400 – he found himself gravitating towards the one-lap race, or the quarter-mile as people still call it here, in which Jamaica has such a strong tradition – on which the island’s reputation was originally built. ‘The 400 is an event I love with a passion,’ Francis tells me. ‘I go out there in Moscow or at Championships, and say, Hey, I want to make a big statement out there, so everyone say: “Young Javon Francis is coming up.”
‘I wish my idol, Herb McKenley, was alive to sit and talk to,’ he continues. Francis was thirteen when McKenley died, and never met him, so presumably he is only aware of his reputation through attending Calabar. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says. ‘I hear that Herb McKenley is a great guy and I look up to him.’
When he first started at Calabar, he commuted from Bull Bay by bus: a journey of between forty minutes and over an hour each way depending on the Kingston traffic, on roads that, in the miles close to Bull Bay, deteriorate terribly. It took its toll on the fourteen-year-old. ‘Training finishes at six o’clock,’ says Hardware, ‘so that would get him home pretty late. The affordability was a big challenge for his parents. They’re very proud. They wouldn’t ask for help and they could only afford public transportation, not a taxi. So he was getting home late. And for development meets at weekends it became a big challenge for them to afford those. So he’d be missing those, and those meets are important; they’re where you get ready for Champs.’
Hardware was already acting as a mentor to Francis. ‘Each year we take in a cadre of boys. About fifteen of us manage the team and each of us gets two or three boys to mentor. Javon was my mentee.
‘We realised that coming to Calabar, he needed all kinds of support: educational support, financial support, and through our committee and myself that was provided for him,’ she continues. ‘But I got very concerned when I got a call telling me he’s coming to school late, he’s sleeping in class, he’s not keeping up – that sort of thing. Mr Facey said, “You have to do something more for this boy.”’
‘After Javon came to Calabar,’ Facey interrupts, ‘Andrea loved him so much she let him move in.’
Hardware nods in agreement. ‘It was very easy for me to say, “Come, Javon, stay with me.” My sons both went to Calabar, but they were away.’
When she spoke to Francis’s parents, ‘They were immediately open to the idea. I remember the conversation I had with his mother. She said, “Thank you, God bless you. I know he needs the support and I can’t do it for him.” She was very, very appreciative.’ Francis has lived with Hardware in her home in Kingston for the last four years. She treats him like one of her own sons, and he looks on her as a second mother. ‘He calls me Mum,’ says Hardware. ‘But when I get angry at him he calls me “Andrine”. He’s part of our family; they all get along very well. He’s quiet, so they pull him out of his shell, take him places.’
There is an innocence about Francis that makes him difficult to read, particularly when he can be such a showman on the track. It’s hard to reconcile the quiet, diffident boy with the pumped-up extrovert who appeared in the mixed zone in Moscow, announcing: ‘A super donkey just did it!’
‘That’s just him,’ says Hardware. She means the sweet, innocent boy who has jogged away to start training, leaving with a handshake and a ‘Thank you, sir.’ ‘That’s who he is,’ she says. ‘It’s one of the qualities he has that really endears him to me. Because he’s so humble, so appreciative. I don’t think he’s aware of the immense talent he has.’
Later, I speak to Michael Clarke, the head coach, who I had met in Moscow at the senior world championships. In smart shirt and trousers, with obligatory baseball cap, he strolls slowly around his athletes as they go through their drills, sometimes pulling them aside to have a quiet word. Then he peels off to speak to me, also very quietly – and with a Zen-like calm. Clarke went to Calabar in 1973, having been recruited by Herb McKenley; then, in 1980, he was among the first batch of students to be trained in sports coaching at the new G. C. Foster College. For the last thirteen years he has been head coach at his alma mater.
The first time he saw Francis run, he recalls, ‘he didn’t do anything spectacular. He was third, beaten by some distance. He ran 52.7. But I wanted 400 athletes and what struck me was his build: he was tall, sinewy, lanky, but he had some speed. He was sought after by a number of other schools, in fact.’
Clarke can reel off Francis’s times, illustrating his improvement once he joined Calabar: ‘First race he ran here was 49-something, then he was in the 50-range, then he did a 48, then a 47.’
It was Clarke who took the bold decision to select an eighteen-year-old for the anchor leg of the 4x400 metres in Moscow. Francis, when he found out, went straight to his guardian, who was on the team bus, travelling to the stadium. Hardware recalls how the conversation went: ‘Mum, me coach make me anchor for the race!’
‘What?’ said Hardware.
‘Mum, I’m going to run the race, I want to win a medal.’
‘If you win a medal, I get you a car,’ she told him. (‘I still haven’t got him that car,’ she admits.) ‘He said he didn’t have a race plan,’ Hardware tells me. ‘He said he just wanted them to give him the baton in the pack. I was standing in the stand, and when I saw him blaze out, I was like, “No, Javon, you’re going too fast!” I was literally shouting, “You’re going too fast! You’re running too fast!” But when he came off of that third bend, I knew he was going to finish it. He maintained his composure; such a mature thing for him to do at eighteen.’
Now Clarke tells me that he chose Francis for the anchor leg because of the heart he’d shown at the Penn Relays earlier in the season. ‘He was coming off chickenpox, and he ran down a guy, Delano Willliams, from a twenty-metre lead. I said, “Wow.” It was an outstanding time: 44.6. He has the record for Penn Relays.
‘He has something special,’ continues Clarke. ‘He’s a chaser. He displays an intellect on the track that belies his real intellect off the track.’ Expanding on this, Clarke explains: ‘He’s a simple youngster: simple, jovial, very candid about things. He has tremendous charisma.’
He can see similarities with Bolt, as everyone can. They have been looking for the next Bolt or Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce: another athlete who can dominate at world level. But so many athletes who seem poised to do just that don’t make it, often because they break down with injury. On the comparison with Bolt, Clarke says: ‘Both are candid. They both have charisma. They like to perform. Javon is not as eloquent yet, but he’s getting there. We’re trying to help him. But he has personality. Now in Jamaica when we go out in public everybody – kids, adults – they flock around him. People recognise him, they are endeared to him.’
I was still coming to terms with the quality of the facilities at the centre of world excellence that is Calabar High School. I had asked Omar Hawes how many other coaches there are at the school. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, and began counting on his fingers. ‘There’s a coach for the throws, horizontal jumps, vertical jumps, hurdles, quarter-mile programme, sprints, distance . . . That’s seven. And Mr Clarke is overall coach.’ Eight dedicated athletics coaches. But what I only learn later is that they are all volunteers – parents of pupils, or old boys, like Omar. In his day job, I discover, Omar is a policeman.
There is a darker story I want to ask the coaches about. Demar Robinson was a Calabar schoolboy who in 2013 – within weeks of leaving the school – tested positive at the Jamaican national championships for androgen receptor modulator (SARMS), a steroid. Robinson was a high jumper who captained the school at Champs in 2012. He was given a one-year ban: a light sentence for such an offence, but the rumour (unconfirmed by Jamaica’s anti-doping agency, because his hearing was in camera) was that he had offered useful information. Robinson is now at college in Kansas.
When had Omar last seen him? ‘It would have been at Champs. He came to say hi to the youngsters.’
Omar told me he didn’t know why Robinson had tested positive, and hadn’t spoken to him about it. ‘He had his lawyers. I wish him the best. It was an unfortunate situation. I don’t know how that got into his system.’ He did speak to him at Champs, but didn’t discuss the positive test. ‘I asked him how he was dealing with the pressure. He said “All right.” It sounded like he wanted to return.’
I want to ask Michael Clarke about Robinson too. It seems like a blot on the Calabar name, and indeed has fuelled a certain amount of suspicion. At another school I visited, Cornwall College, in Montego Bay, the head of sport, Gregory Daley, was critical of what he described as the ‘win-at-all-costs’ mentality that prevails at some schools. ‘It is hard to say, but I am going to say it anyway,’ he said. ‘Schools like Calabar, KC, JC [Kingston College and Jamaica College] will always have the best athletes. They will do things we won’t do or we can’t do. There are schools who will come to a parent and say, “The boy can run, and I want him to come to our school – here’s a fridge.”
‘Most often these boys are from the, I don’t want to say ghetto, but they are from the lower strata of the financial scale. So the parents will always say, “What? Fridge? Stove? Yeah, man,” and the boy’s gone.’
On this specific point, Noel Facey, who recruited Javon Francis, says it’s not common practice. ‘I can say that’s a rumour for Calabar. Everything at Calabar is for the boys, not for the parents. So we cannot give the parents this.’
Daley said he had personal experience of Calabar’s recruitment policy. When he was at another school, Herb McKenley came for one of the most talented young athletes he had ever seen: Ali Watson. ‘Herb McKenley came for him at Grade 4,’ said Daley. Watson was eight years old. ‘The father and myself, we’re very good friends, he came to me and said, “Grade 4? Why’s he want a Grade 4?” The fella went to Calabar and in Class 3 at Champs he won the 100, he won the 200, he won the 400 in record times.’ Class 3 is the youngest age group. But it was as good as Watson got; he never won again.
As for drugs, Daley said he had not encountered any at schools level. ‘But I doubt if it does not exist.’
Clarke says he believes that doping is unlikely to exist in schools, mainly because of the cost. ‘Those performance-enhancing drugs are expensive, very expensive, to get initially, and to sustain it is even more expensive. The coaches can’t, I certainly can’t [afford it]. And even if I could, I wouldn’t, because it is unethical.
‘I’ve been coaching for thirty years and I don’t think any one boy should risk putting thirty years on the line,’ Clarke continues. ‘For me that’s a no-no.’
Nonetheless, he admits that the Robinson case did leave a cloud over Calabar. ‘He had just left school. You hear a lot of discussion about it in terms of what the real truth is; I don’t know what the real truth is. But given his humble beginnings, it would be difficult to think that he could afford it. So obviously somebody must have given it to him in ignorance, from what I gather.’
He looks reflective. He is still Zen-like. ‘That left a bit of a blemish, yes,’ he adds. ‘I guess we can hide behind the clouds and say it wasn’t during his time at Calabar.’
Now Clarke is coaching not just high school athletes but professionals too – the latest being Javon Francis. Given the positive tests there have been in senior athletics, and rumours that the sport has a serious doping problem at international level, is Javon going to have to make a choice at some stage?
‘Well, he listens to me attentively, and to his guardian,’ Clarke says. ‘We discuss whatever supplements he takes. He doesn’t like taking pills, doesn’t like taking these things, but he needs to. I get them checked out. We don’t push anything. He follows my instruction where that’s concerned.’
*
There were other questions for Francis – and for Clarke. I kept hearing about Jamaican athletes who had been high school stars – Ali Watson, Daniel England – only to fade away as seniors. It brought to mind another passage from Friday Night Lights, concerning the father of a teenage star who ‘saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but also saw an inevitable danger in adults living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.’
There were so many examples of this happening to athletes in Jamaica, I was learning. And it was bound to get worse. The achievements of Bolt, Yohan Blake, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Asafa Powell and others only intensified the pressure on the young stars of Champs: the stakes were higher than ever. At Calabar, as Omar Hawes suggested, it was hoped that Francis’s success could help the school get better facilities, perhaps even a new track. Bolt, in his minor school in the backwater of Trelawny, had had it easy; he was protected, wrapped in cotton wool, by Devere Nugent, Lorna Thorpe and his parents.
Would Francis be the next Bolt or an Ali Watson? Perhaps the season stretching out in front of us would offer some clues. I said to Francis, just before he joined Clarke for training, that I would be returning to Jamaica in a few months and hoped to see him again. ‘Yes, sir,’ he nodded.
More immediately, I had another appointment, with somebody at the other end of the age spectrum. I had been told about him repeatedly at the National Stadium during Champs. His name was the answer most frequently suggested when I asked the question: ‘Who is responsible for all this?’ He was yet another Calabar man, and the original Herb McKenley protégé, and he was known throughout Jamaica as ‘DJ’. As Mark Ricketts, the economist and writer, told me: ‘Without DJ, there would be no Glen Mills and no Stephen Francis’ – the two leading coaches. ‘And without Mills, you don’t have Bolt,’ added Ricketts.
Could he put me in touch with Dennis Johnson? He gave me Johnson’s number. I called and asked if I could come and hear his story. ‘Yes, man,’ said a voice at the end of the line. ‘Come on Sunday at eleven o’clock,’ he added, and hung up.
9 Epstein adds something else: Actually, there’s at least one other very well known effect of older brothers, and it doesn’t matter at all if the younger bro grows up with his siblings, only that they once occupied the same womb.’ This is the ‘older brother effect’: the more older brothers a man has, the greater the possibility that he will be homosexual. Again, there is no equivalent correlation with women. It’s thought to be connected to the hormonal conditions in the womb; as Epstein explains, the idea that ‘the mother’s body has an immune response only to male fetuses, and there’s some imprinting of it with each successive boy’, is scientifically unproven, but ‘gaining conceptual strength’. A logical follow-up would be to ask: how many leading male sprinters are homosexual? Not many – at least publicly.