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When an aging American track superstar gave pro basketball a shot
🕑 Added 2025-09-29 16:00:25 +0000 UTCIt's Seth again! From Secret Base! Recently I did this Big Deal episode about Nikki McCray and the American Basketball League. In my research for that one, I dove down a deep rabbit hole about the formation of the ABL in 1996 and, specifically, the league's successful recruitment of Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
It's hard for me to prove if you weren't sentient in 1996, but Jackie Joyner-Kersee casually deciding to play pro hoops in her mid-30s was a wild turn of events. She was one of THE faces of American Olympic competition in the late '80s and '90s, and she still holds world records. It was pretty fascinating for her to suddenly, intentionally become an extremely famous yet relatively less-accomplished participant in a nascent league in a different sport.
This moment in time presented a really cool nexus of two familiar but rarely-intersecting processes: 1. Starting a pro sports league from scratch and 2. Balancing various athletic pursuits when you are good at everything.
So, yeah, I made Will and Ryan listen to me barf up all that research since I was so excited about it but it didn't make it into the Big Deal episode.
Enjoy, and let us know if you can think of one single time Brad Pitt didn't play Basically Brad Pitt in a movie. (And, you know, fuck that guy.)
Comments
Secret Base
she injured her hamstring before the '84 Olympics. best citations i can find are paywalled but this alludes to it https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/jackie-joyner-kersee-letter-to-my-younger-self "In 1984, you’ll make the team but will be plagued by hamstring injuries. This may sound odd now, but physical injuries are not what will hold you back. It will be the mental strain of knowing those injuries exist." '91 as well https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-27-sp-1622-story.html -s
PsyMar
Okay the getting it in the contract she could still do track is cool. The only other athlete I can think of who had a contract letting them miss games to do another sport is Bo Jackson.
PsyMar
EDIT: turns out I'm wrong ORIGINAL COMMENT: As far as I can tell, Jackie Joyner-Kersee did not injure her hamstring in the 1984 olympics where she got silver in the heptathlon. She *did* injure her hamstring in the 1996 Olympic trials, and withdrew from the Olympic heptathlon, but recovered enough by the Olympic long jump to win bronze.
