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She Stands AloneU.S. Olympic sprinter Gwen Torrence may be the fastest woman on earth, but she's slow to make friends and even slower to give credit to her competitionby Rick Reilly
Do not go up to Gwen Torrence at a McDonald's and say something like Gwen Torrence eats at McDonald's? It makes her so mad. "Why can't I eat at McDonald's?" she will snap. You're here, aren't you?" Also, do not walk up to her at a mall and say, "You shop here?" Somebody did that the other day at the mall near her home in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, and it made her livid. "Why do I have to go to Buckhead to shop?" she will grumble, referring to the yuppie enclave. "Why can't I shop here? I live in DeKalb County. It's black, but we have money too, you know." It is especially unwise to go up to her in a restaurant and ask, "Aren't you Gwen Torrence?" Never looking up from her plate, she will mutter, "No."
"Why do you do that?" her mama, Dorothy, will ask.
"Mama!" Gwen will reply. "You don't know what people are gonna do to you!"
You can't trust 'em, not at first. They will try to cheat you, take what's yours, embarrass you in front of everybody. They did that to Torrence in Tokyo in 1991. They did it in Barcelona in 1992 and in Goteborg, Sweden, in 1995 and right here in Georgia the same year. No. You keep your head down and give away nothing.
Besides, she's not lying when she denies who she is, not really. In her mind she isn't Gwen Torrence. She never asked to be that Gwen Torrence. She never wanted to be the World's Fastest Woman. She never dreamed of being Hometown Girl Makes Gold. You know what she really wanted to be? She really wanted to be a hairdresser. Get a little chair in a nice department store and maybe someday run her own shop. Weaves, colors, perms.
But two Olympic gold medals, three world championships and eight national titles later, it looks as if there is no going back. Torrence, 31 on June 12, is the fastest, most versatile, most accomplished female sprinter in the world. The 1996 Olympics are headed straight for her backyard -- "God sent them here to make up for what happened to me in 1992," she says -- and there is nothing for her to do but run in them and star in them. But that doesn't mean she has to like it.
"It's just not the same anymore," she says, flipping back and forth between Jenny Jones ("Talking with a Parent about One's Sex Life") and Gordon Elliott ("Sexiest Stud Competition") as she sits in her living room. "I don't want to be the person society wants me to be. I don't want to be a celebrity, I know that. I don't want to be a star, walking on eggshells, afraid to do this, afraid to do that, with people who don't even know me automatically making me a role model for their kids! I don't want the pressure of trying to be a perfect person. It's always, If you win in Atlanta. If. Well, why can't doing my best be good enough? If you're my fan when I win, why can't you be my fan when I lose?"
Torrence may be the fastest woman on earth, but she's slow to make friends and even slower to give credit to her competition.
photograph by Greg Foster
This is going to be a tough sell, forcing fame and fortune past a frown. Still, everybody tries. LeRoy Walker, the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, came in just to try to get her pumped up. "These could be your Games, Gwen!" he said. She was not moved. Her husband, Manley Waller Jr., tells her every day how fast she is going to run, how many world records she is going to break, how many medals she could win (four) and how the world treats a winner of four Olympic medals (like a returning astronaut).
Torrence isn't geeked up about any of it. "My husband tends to think I can break the world record in the 100 meters [10.49 seconds, held by Florence Griffith Joyner]," she says, staring straight at Ricki Lake ("How to Break It Off"), "but I don't see myself running that fast. I'd be the first one to faint."
Besides, what if she actually did win the 100, which she's favored to do? And win the 200, which she's also favored to do? And run the scorched-track anchor leg that she always runs in the 4x100, which the U.S. is favored to win? And run her electric leg in the 4x400, which the U.S. would be favored to win if she ran, because she is one of the world's fastest women in the 400, even though she rarely runs that distance because, as she used to tell her coach, "it makes my booty lock up"? Can you imagine what a pain all that would be? "When you start winning, that's when it stops being fun," Torrence says, flipping to Rolonda ("Men Who Want to Pose for Playgirl"). "Pretty soon it's, 'No, I don't want to do this. No, I don't want to do that.' Oh, look at that man! Gross!"
It does seem terribly unfair, but what else is new? Torrence was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and she has fought the world ever since. "They didn't let me see my precious child for five days," says Dorothy. "And when they did, there was a strange look in her eye that I never saw in any of my children." At eight months Gwen was walking. At three years, running. "You'd set her down, and shoooosh, she was gone," says Dorothy.
Gwen remembers herself as the "ugly, skinny, big-nosed kid," and she can hardly remember a week when she did not have to whip somebody's butt to keep him from noticing. One time, when she was about nine, a boy hit her with a softball, and she ran home, got two butcher knives and chased that boy through the neighborhood. It was only later that somebody got close enough to tell her the ball had hit her by accident. "Lord, Gwen," the boy said later. "You sure are quick to fight."
Quick to run, quick to fight -- that would be Gwen. Her mama had a quick temper too. There wasn't anybody, boy or girl, whom Dorothy didn't whip in her one-room schoolhouse in the little town of Norwood, Ga. "Couldn't nobody say anything to me," Dorothy says. Except her first husband. Charlie Torrence gave her a black eye, and she left him. Just took the five kids and left. Gwen, the baby, was four. They moved into a place in Decatur with no stove, no refrigerator and not much heat, stayed a year, then moved into a Decatur project called East Lake Meadows, which became so thick with gang members and drugs and killing that it was soon known as Vietnam.
As a child Gwen spent most of her time at a neighbor's house where there were 16 kids, most of whom she beat up and befriended, in that order. Her brother Charles almost died in Vietnam; he was carrying the football in a street game one day in 1972, and when he was tackled by several players, he flipped and broke his neck. He hasn't walked since that day. The next year their father died of a stroke. "When you seen the things I've seen," Gwen says, "you can't help but be like this -- aggressive."
And so the little girl with that strange, hard look in her eye grew up as cold and hard as her old kitchen floor. Every girl in the neighborhood learned to be scared of Gwen, and plenty of the boys learned too. "I'd find myself fighting and not know why," Gwen says. One time she beat up her best friend because she heard people were more scared of the friend than they were of her. And then her best friend's bigger, older sister told Gwen to meet her after school. Gwen was scared. "I remember closing my eyes and going for it," she says, "just arms flying, head down, wham! And I won!" It was only years later that she really understood the older sister. Gwen saw her at a public gathering, and they had a talk. "And she was so nice," Gwen remembers.
It was funny that someone so soft-looking could leave so many welts. At Columbia High in Decatur, Gwen was voted Best Dressed. She always had on the flashiest outfits, even if her mama had to borrow money to buy them. She had a gift for fashion and hairstyling and makeup. But the hands in those matching white gloves always seemed to be in a ball. In fact, it was Gwen's temper that first revealed her speed.
She was a sophomore at Columbia High when the fastest guy on the football team, Fred Lane, teased her one day and then playfully snatched her pocketbook and took off. Well, you just don't mess with Gwen's accessories. Running in patent leather pumps, tight jeans and a short jacket, she chased Fred and caught him 70 yards out on the football field and snatched the pocketbook back. This is the same Fred Lane who went on to play flanker at Georgia in the mid-1980s.
Columbia's track coach, Ray Bonner, happened to be watching Gwen and Fred that day. He was thunderstruck. "She walked Fred Lane down!" Bonner recalls. "We thought Fred Lane was the fastest thing since sliced bread, and she walked him down!"
But Gwen did not want to run track. She did not want to run track mostly because she thought gym clothes were ugly, and she didn't want people to see how skinny her legs were. Bonner went after her and kept after her. He insisted she run the 220 in gym class. She set an unofficial state record -- in those patent leather pumps. To get Gwen to run on the school team, Bonner had to drive to her house after practice, drive her to the track, coach her privately and then drive her back, even after she joined the team. In exchange she brought him the state championship in 1983, winning the 100 and 200 and anchoring two victorious relay teams.
"She'd be so frustrating," Bonner remembers. "She'd be doing her hair and getting her little mirror out of her pocketbook right before a race, while everybody else was getting ready. But then she'd step up and run fast and kick everybody's butt." Gwen realized that those were the two things she loved about track: running fast and kicking everybody's butt.
Age only seemed to make her meaner. At Georgia, where she enrolled on a track scholarship in 1983, Torrence tried to beat up a 6'2" female Swedish volleyball player for patting her on the rear. She went right up to the Swede, eyes to chin (Gwen is 5'8"), and said, "Nuh-uh. Here we don't do that. I'll whip your ass, girl." It was only later, when the girl was able to get close enough to explain that butt-patting is just a friendly thing they do in Sweden, that Torrence understood. "We kinda became friends," she says.
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