Who's In?

Marion Jones said she was sorry. And that she had behaved stupidly and was ashamed. I almost like her even more now.

It is more than so many others in her shoes have done.

I really didn’t want to believe that she had artificial help in achieving her amazing athletic goals. I loved her apparent joy in the process and like everyone, her apparently genuinely nice persona. She was beautiful to watch compete and you knew, drugs or not, she trained wicked hard. Plus she had braces as an adult at the same time I did.

The waste of her career, and her genuine efforts, that came from that little extra edge she got from outside rather than inside herself, is tragic in the classical sense: Hero brought low by one fatal flaw.

Marion Jones in the spring prior to the contentious Olympics. (Sports Illustrated)

She takes full accountability herself, which I admire. But you can’t overlook the pressures on her. Not only from her coach or whomever, but from all of us as well, wanting her to win, wanting a superchampion, and the corporate world rewarding that mightily with cash.

There’s a tunnel-visioned aspect of elite competition which gives it a certain beauty but also a potentially inaccurate accounting of reality. I remember it from years striving toward world championships on the U.S. rowing team. I believe American rowing, at least back in the day, was clean. The most unspoken-of drug I ever witnessed any U.S. rowers take was Ex-Lax. But we had the single-mindedness of purpose, the deep desire, and a sense of the self’s virtue that comes with incredibly hard work toward a respected goal. If “supplements” had been dangled in front of any of us (and if (a big hypothetical if) there had been any significant money to be made by winning rowing competitions), would we have remained so pure, albeit irregular? You can always make an exception for yourself, it seems. I suspect these little things (and I would posit that given all the issues across the globe, these are little things) don’t seem a crime when up close and personal.

An unrelated radio story today on All Things Considered discussed a very similar tale in the world of business. It was much shadier to begin with, a guy making millions off of inflated stock trading. But the key thing was that the guy, Jordan Belfort, who spent 22 months in prison on fraudulent trading charges, said that in the thick of his greed being positively reinforced, he stopped seeing certain actions as wrong or criminal. Actions which now, and well before his trading days, he would have thought were completely unacceptable. He too, like Jones, is contrite.

We inheritors of the Puritan tradition love contrition, I think. It makes a good story (which Scorcese has optioned the rights to, incidentally, in Belfort‘s case). And good stories often contain redemption.

The redemption in Jones’s case will come from her acquiescence to be brought so low. Ron Rappaport wrote in the L.A. Times (good article; he wrote a book about her) that she has thrown out her chance to go on to be a respected spokesperson or even announcer for her sport or advocate for women’s sports generally. I disagree. Puritan proclivities aside, I think we (as in We, the People) are pretty good at forgiving in some cases. (Or am I just being cynical about the seriousness with which the country views doping, all lamentations about disappointing role models to the contrary? (Though ESPN’s Jemele Hill might say gullible rather than cynical.)) Especially in cases where a personally appealing individual is truly remorseful, we want to forgive. (I’m not sure people would re-embrace a fallen Barry Bonds as enthusiastically, for example.) I hope Marion does not disappear after her expected six month prison sentence, though about now I bet she would like to. I think she could still have a lot to offer. I am still rooting for her.