LOCKER ROOM: More than most who have done the crime, Marion Jones has actually done the time
MARION JONES spoiled it for me and Usain Bolt. I went to the Beijing Olympics and never even bothered going to the Birds Nest stadium when he was running. Everybody said ‘but this guy, so easy going and happy, he’s a sprinter we can really believe in’. But I’d sat in press conferences gazing dreamily at Marion Jones’ perfect smile and lovely skin and thought “this woman is a sprinter we can believe in. Isn’t she? She must be.”
Instead she went, as a newspaper said at the time, from wearing gold medals to an orange prison jump suit. Of all the drug cheats to have besmirched and tainted their sport she was the best at it, the one with the most gall and the most balls and the hardest neck.
It’s hardly two years, is it, since Jones left a Texas prison after her six-month stay for lying to federal investigators as she became the poster girl for the Balco scandal. How long is it since that press conference when she blubbered that all the threats of legal action against good journalists and all the talk of her good name had been high-stakes bluff. She was a conwoman and she had conned the entire audience for the Sydney Olympics. How gullible we were.
Even when her husband CJ Hunter was found to be a walking talking pharmacy, we belived that Marion had never even looked in the medicine cabinet and had her eyes sullied by whatever CJ was taking.
And now she is coming back to big time sport. Thirty four years of age, mother to three children and selling herself as a girl returning to the game she once loved, just a kid going back to play some hoops.
It chills the bones but yet you have to give her the second chance. More so than many who have taken the steroids, the EPO, “the clear” or whatever, to do the crime, Marion Jones has gone and she has done the time. Her fall was spectacular (even if we have grown so wearily cynical about modern sport that we scarcely noticed or cared in the end).
She talks in the land of second chances about getting a second crack at professional sport which made her a millionaire before her ruin and, when you look at her still grinning away, you realise that part of what she is talking about is a second chance for her ego and her image.
Because once upon a time – before even she got Johnny Cochrane to defend her on cheating charges as a teenager – Marion Jones must have been a genuinely sweet young girl with incredible potential. And a huge part of the lie she told herself over the years of drug cheating must have been that the drugs were just copperfastening her genius, that she was just safegaurding the margin her natural talent gave her over a ravening pack who would take anything or do anything to catch her.
And in the end when she was stripped bare and whatever rationalisations she had comforted herself with were gone, all she was left with was wondering about what had given her her identity and image and ego in the first place. Her talent. She hadn’t supplemented it. She had betrayed it. But one more go. Just to see what might have been? That must be in her head.
The fairly meagre wage of the WNBA isn’t enough to rebuild the life of a woman who commanded millions in endorsement deals but to go back and play sport clean and just to see how good you could have been if you had honoured your talent. Well, as she says, it is a second chance and she can’t be denied or begrudged that chance.
“I missed competitiveness,” she said a few months ago when she went back to start working out at basketball in a little court in a church. “I missed the challenges of participating in sports.” And you can understand that. A woman driven enough to cheat and lie just to win a race draws a lot of her self-definition from victory and competitiveness. That, more than anything, is a habit hard to kick.
Wherever all the millions have gone from the deals and wherever the medals are gathering dust the hell of being Marion Jones is the not knowing how good she really was or might have been.
So, in a grim and sour way, you find yourself wishing her well on this second journey. If she fails, if she is merely ordinary, it is something else to live with. If she fails she does so in front of a cynical old world who wouldn’t mind seeing her fall flat on her face. Her last connection with basketball was when they lowered her retired jersey in dishonour at her old college after the Balco case broke open. She attended North Carolina on a basketball scholarship, a college where the game is a religion. She helped lead the women Tar Heels to a national championship in her first year there back in 1994.
She put a lot on the line to be a lousy cheat. She is putting a lot on the line to be reconciled to herself. “There isn’t a day I don’t reflect on some of the bad choices I made,” Jones told the New York Times a few months ago “But I’m not going to crawl up in a corner. I know that anytime I’m involved there is going to be criticism, skepticism and naysayers. But I know I’m on the right path now. This is just another little bit of the challenge.”
Redemption is a bigger challenge than sin. Marion Jones screwed us all over and she did so with style and panache. She is back now and you have to admit there is some style and panache to her style.
“I’m not about redemption” she says. “It’s not in my vocabulary” Maybe not. Maybe not. But she won’t know for sure till she has redeemed her potential in her own eyes if she wants redemption in ours. A story to follow.
