Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Calallen's Acuff puts heart, body into promoting her sport

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Sunday, June 13, 1999

Calallen's Acuff puts heart, body into promoting her sport
Athlete-model wants maximum exposure for track and field with calendar
By Jenny Strasburg
Caller-Times

More conservative photographs of athletes in uniforms and warm-ups, their muscles and authoritative contours mostly concealed, would not have caused the kind of sensation one gets from showing skin, track and field marvel Amy Acuff says.
   The Corpus Christi native has been causing a sensation for most of a decade.
   At age 23, this year she hatched a new idea for promoting her sport.
   Then she ran with it.
   Amy Acuff, the former Calallen High School high-jumping, sprinting and basketball-playing wondergirl and national high school record-setter - later Amy Acuff the UCLA standout and Olympic high-jump contender - is eyeing this year's national and world championships and the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. She intends to clear a 6'8" bar in 1999 to tie the American women's high-jump record.
   "Practice is going really, really well right now," Acuff said by telephone last week from her Los Angeles apartment, near the UCLA track where she trains while she's in town.
   "I think that 6'8" is realistic."
   Off the track, Amy Acuff the part-time model with the magnetic, unpretentious personality most recently has been turning heads with revealing photographs and generous bursts of exposure in Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated magazines.
   Her trademark confidence emanates from 6 feet and 2 inches of lean, lithe power under a stunning, full-bodied blond mane.
   And people who know Acuff say her sense of personal style is what guided her to her latest project: A year-2000 wall calendar that Acuff says celebrates her often-underappreciated sport and pays homage to the strength and validity of the female athletic physique.
   The soon-to-be-released calendar, which was Acuff's brainchild, features nude and nearly nude American female track and field athletes in artful, black-and-white photographs.
   It has been enthusiastically endorsed by USA Track and Field, the sport's official umbrella federation.
   "I think Amy, in addition to being a great athlete, has already shown herself to be an extraordinarily insightful entrepreneur," said Craig Masback, chief executive officer of USA Track and Field.
   "Track and field athletes are not well known outside the track world,'' he continued. "The sport, quite frankly, has lacked both the vision and strategy for spreading the word about the sport and its athletes.
   "That's what's going to make this interesting. This calendar is going to prompt discussions."
   Consider the discussions started.
   Mom approves
   On another front just as important to Acuff, the calendar also has been endorsed unconditionally by Acuff's mom.
   Jackie Acuff said she felt some unease at her daughter's initial mention of possible nudity in the photographs.
   At first, she told her only daughter: "Well, you know, there's a certain segment of the population that would like a calendar of the wholesome, role-model" kind of images - smiling, healthy, clothed.
   But, Jackie Acuff said, she was unable to know at first how elegant and professional the photographs would turn out.
   After witnessing the calendar photo shoot in L.A. in April, she shed her concerns.
   "A real conservative, cute calendar, or something in that vein, might not have attracted this kind of attention," she said. "It would be like, 'Who cares?' "
   Jackie Acuff will remain involved in her daughter's calendar project. While Amy Acuff travels the European track and field circuit this summer, her mother will fill mail-order requests as they arrive at a post office box in Corpus Christi.
   Featuring one athlete per month, the calendar will cost $19.95 plus tax.
   Throwers, high jumpers, distance runners, hurdlers, pole vaulters and discus throwers all are represented in the calendar- all types of bodies, each beautiful in its own right, featured on slick, quality paper, Amy Acuff said. Fifteen thousand copies of the calendar are expected to be available in a week or two.
   Heart and body
   Amy Acuff threw her heart and body into the project.
   She posed as a model, spurring high-profile mentions of the calendar in Sports Illustrated and on nationally televised track and field events.
   Acuff said her photo, which was not obtainable for newspaper publication, shows her standing tall, her arms high above her head grasping an American flag, which billows in the artificial breeze of a studio wind machine.
   Acuff is facing the camera. Her hips, she said, are turned strategically to the side, in profile, avoiding full frontal nudity.
   Her breasts are covered in body paint, in a stylized rendition of the American flag.
   Acuff said she is proud of the artistic work in her photo and the calendar in general.
   "If some young girl sees it, it's more harm for her to pick up a Vogue (magazine) and see some exposed images in there than to see this. Looking at this, she can gain some idea of, 'Well, these are real women who work hard.'
   "It has been proven. Women pick up the fashion magazines to look at images of women; there are no men in there. (Women) are developing their idea of a good body image. . . . The images in this calendar are very healthy. You're not looking at a heroin addict."
   Good cause, Good message
   Acuff plans for the athletes who appear in the calendar to contribute significantly to several important causes.
   Omni-Lite, an engineering firm that makes ultralight composite materials for track spikes, is sponsoring the calendar.
   Half of the proceeds will go to the Flo Jo Foundation, named in memory of three-time Olympic gold medalist, the late Florence Griffith Joyner. The foundation supports athletic programs for underprivileged children.
   The other half of the proceeds will go toward competition and travel expenses for the dozen female track athletes featured in the calendar, Acuff said.
   But another motivation propelled this calendar to its skin-exposing style.
   Too often and for too long, Acuff said, girls and young women have been taught to believe that strength and athletic prowess are manly, that such qualities are unfeminine and unappealing.
   Magazines preach the message in silent images, while movies and television add volume, Acuff said.
   She believes she and other athletes can chip away at the notion that strength and independence are negative traits.
   "I think (that notion) keeps a lot of girls out of sports," Acuff said. "That bothers me because there's so much good that comes from athletics. It gives me such joy. It's not only about health. It's the confidence. It's the practice of setting goals and achieving them."
   Comments from home
   Acuff said that while criticism wasn't her main concern, and she doesn't expect to hear much of it, she did consider how friends, fans and the general public back home in Texas would react to the skin factor in the calendar. Her parents still live in the Coastal Bend.
   "I did kind of, I guess, cringe a little bit at the thought of the old ladies I knew (back home) - what would they say?" Acuff said with a light laugh. "I don't go home all that often, but I know people are really conservative there. Some people are going to have a hard time with it."
   Acuff has experiences to back this up.
   After she graduated from Calallen in 1993 and went away to California for college, she returned numerous times to Texas for track meets. At least once, she said, she was admonished in her home state for showing what some considered too much flesh during competitions.
   She recalled one time when an older woman told Acuff her two-piece track uniform, because it revealed her midriff, was too racy.
   Different parts of the world have different senses of propriety, Acuff said.
   She said she believes honesty and integrity about human bodies finally have surfaced in recent media blitzes of athletic bods - in slick, artistic Nike advertisements, for example, and in the Life magazine spread that celebrated Olympic-caliber physiques in timing with the 1996 Atlanta Games.
   Acuff said her calendar simply carries the torch other athletes already have lit - athletes such as Gabrielle Reece, a volleyball player and model who has posed nude for statues and photos.
   And Acuff, in the interest of publicizing the calendar, certainly hasn't been doing herself any harm.
   Rolling Stone feature
   In the June 10 issue of Rolling Stone magazine - behind a cover featuring actor Mike Myers of "Austin Powers" fame - Acuff practically leaps from pages 80 and 81 in a full-color, 14-inch-wide, flesh-filled profile photograph of her lying stomach-down on a locker room bench.
   Except for running shoes and knee-high socks with bold black-and-white stripes, Acuff is nude.
   Judging from the dazzling smile photographer Mark Seliger captured - and the effortlessness with which Acuff discusses the shot - she is absolutely at ease with the image and her place in the photographic art form.
   "I mean, I wanted to be real careful," Acuff said of the Rolling Stone project, which was an entirely separate project from the calendar. "But this photographer, he's really world-famous. It's not like they sent out some schmo. This guy does really great work."
   The invitation to be in the Rolling Stone feature was a surprise, Acuff said.
   The magazine's call came within weeks of her shooting for the track and field calendar.
   This particular issue of Rolling Stone vanished from Corpus Christi newsstands at the speed of an Olympic track star. News of the calendar has spread in a flash, too.
   Laura Holloway, Acuff's high school coach, now coaching high school tracksters in Pryor, Okla., said she was watching Acuff compete in a recent meet televised on CBS when Holloway heard the sports announcers chatting about the calendar.
   Knowing high jumpers are famous for free-spiritedness, and knowing how ambitious and industrious Acuff is in particular, Holloway said she was not so much astounded as she was proud.
   "My immediate reaction was, I guess, 'That's Amy.' It's not that I would totally expect something like that from Amy, but I wouldn't not expect it.
   "Amy is just totally unique, and of course, living out in L.A. - that world is totally different from Calallen and Corpus Christi."
   Acuff's motives will be appreciated by almost everyone, if not everyone, in track and field, Holloway said.
   "I think it's neat in that it's bringing attention to her sport. I think that's what Amy wants to do. She's proud of what she does. She's going about it in maybe a more drastic measure. But let's face it: In this society, bodies are what we think about and look at.
   "And track and field athletes, I think they have the most gorgeous bodies of anybody."



Staff writer Jenny Strasburg can be reached at 886-3779 or by e-mail at strasburgj@caller.com

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