By Billy Watkins
News of people dying hit us all in different ways. This one slammed into me with the force of a freight train.
Tori Bowie, the world class sprinter from the Rankin County community of Sandhill, was found dead Tuesday in her home in Orlando, Fla, . She was just 32. No cause of death has been revealed.
My mind flashed back to 2016 when a “welcome home” celebration from the Rio Olympics was held at her alma mater, Pisgah High School. I will never forget watching her walk from the parking lot. This is what I wrote for The Clarion-Ledger:
“This must be what the wind looks like.
“Tall and strikingly graceful, long and lean, a calm whisper that in a moment’s notice could erupt into a force capable of making the world gasp.”
Longtime sports writers see a lot. Our “wow” meters don’t often go off, but Tori Bowie had mine on full-blast siren and blinking red.
She had a friendly manner about her, a comfortable calm. But you knew deep inside there was a sleeping lion. Competition would awaken it, and her opponents paid the price.
She signed dozens of autographs that day — her 26th birthday — many of them for children.
“I want to be a role model for them,” she said.
She brought something to show them: The gold silver and bronze Olympic medals she won. She ran the winning anchor leg in the 4 x 100 meters, finished second in the 100 meters and third in the 200 meters.
Yes, she was one of the fastest women in the world. And she was a vocal advocate of cleaning up the doping mess in Olympic sports.
“I honestly believe the cheaters will get caught eventually,” she told me prior to leaving for the Olympics. “And I want them caught.”
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Bowie’s short life could be a movie.
She and her sister, Tamarra, were left in foster care by their biological mother. The girls were born 11 months apart. Their grandmother, Bobbie Smith of Sandhill, gained custody of them. She raised them, same as she raised her five children before that.
“I did what I needed to do,” Smith said to me during an interview at her home soon after the 2016 Olympics. “But I also did what I wanted to do.”
Smith and her five siblings had been raised by their grandmother.
Smith loved the fact that no matter how far Bowie traveled — Switzerland, Germany, England — she longed to be on that patch of ground she grew up on.
“She wants to come and sit right here on this porch, and laugh and talk and cut up,” Smith said. “She’ll want me to cook. She wants potato salad, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, peas … ”
Smith laughed. “She might break my neck for telling you this one, but she loves chitlins. So I’ll fix them, too.”
While Tori made headlines around the world, Tamarra was creating a successful path as an attorney. She has her own law firm in Jackson and was named the 2022 Young Lawyer of the Year, given by the Mississippi College School of Law.
Bobbie Smith did good.
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The craziest thing about Bowie’s success in Rio was that she was still raw as a runner. She had only been concentrating on sprinting since 2014.
“She’s a baby compared to the people she was running against,” said her mentor Charlie Floyd. “Tori is till working on coming out of the blocks properly — and she’s already beaten the best in the world.”
Floyd was the track coach at Southwest Community College when he first saw Bowie at Pisgah High. He noticed her fast-twitch muscles and acceleration.
“But then I watched her walk,” he said. “She had that walk that every great sprinter has, a little pep in her step. Track coaches can tell that a mile away.”
Floyd recruited her, knowing he had no chance of signing her. Bowie dreaded telling him that she was going to the University of Southern Mississippi, where she would win NCAA indoor and outdoor national championships in the long jump. When she finally informed Floyd of her decision, he told her to call him anytime she needed help or advice.
They talked often. He was the first person she called after winning one of her medals.
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In 2017, she won the 100 meters and anchored the winning 4 x 100 team at the World Championship in London. But her career seemed to stall after that. In 2019, she finished 22nd in the 100 meters in the World Championship in Doha, Qatar. She retired from international competition later that year.
Track and field is a lonely road. It’s you against the world. The more successful you are, the more your competitors are striving to outwork you, beat you.
It takes its toll. The workouts, the travel, the lonely days and nights on the road … and in Bowie’s case, the longing for the simple comforts of Sandhill.
I remember asking her that day at Pisgah High if she would compete in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
She was taking it a year at a time, she said. And then added: “(Let’s) see how I hold up physically and mentally.”
And now she’s gone.
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