See How She Runs: Marion Jones & the Making of a Champion

Rapoport followed Marion Jones, the sprinter and basketball player, from meet to meet at the 1999 world championships, tracking her progress and meeting the key players in her life. The profile of the potential first ever winner of five gold medals in track at the Olympics?.

Excerpt

In 1983, when Marion Jones was eight years old and had graduated from T-ball toLittle League, she found herself not only competing against boys, but beatingthem. Once, with a runner on second base, Marion hit the ball beyond theoutfielders and, pigtails flying, raced around the bases so quickly she overtookthe boy ahead of her by the time he had reached third.

"Don't pass him!" her mother called from the stands, and Marion slowed down andimpatiently ushered the runner ahead of her, all but pushing him toward homeplate. Her team nearly always won.

Marion enjoyed playing baseball, which pleased her mother; she had been lookingfor an outlet for her spirited daughter. Then one day, as her mother tells it,she came to bat late in a game she had dominated.

"Hit her between the eyes!" a parent of a player on the opposing team calledout.

"Bean her!" another adult called, and soon a number of the spectators, grown menand women, were yelling at the pitcher to throw the ball at the girl standing atthe plate with a bat in her hand.

"If this keeps up, somebody is going to prison here," Marion's stepfather, IraToler, told her mother. "We have to find something else for her to do."

Marion was enrolled in a gymnastics class the next week, and never playedbaseball in an organized league again.

*****

On Saturday mornings, Marion's brother, Albert, would try to sneak out of thehouse early and alone, but he seldom made it. Marion, who was five yearsyounger, was almost always waiting for him to go meet his friends.

Dolls? Marion never wanted one. Dresses? Girlfriends? Marion had littleinterest. It was Albert she cared about. Albert, his friends, and their games.All their games. Baseball, basketball, bike riding, hide-and-go-seek, everyvariation of tag?they were all part of the weekend routine, and Marion didn'twant to miss any of it.

"I was really quite annoying," Marion said of those early-morning forays withAlbert into their neighborhood in Palmdale, a high-desert community in theAntelope Valley north of Los Angeles. "He's trying to hang out with his friendsand his little sister is with him. He'd say, ?Mom, does Marion have to come?'and she would say, ?Just let her tag along, she's not going to be in the way.' Iwas in the way, of course, but I think he got used to it after a while."

Albert got used to it when he and his friends discovered that even though Marionwas playing with boys, some considerably bigger than she was, she could morethan hold her own.

"Even when she was six years old," said Albert, a real estate appraiser in thePacific Ocean community of Oxnard, "she could compete with my friends and me.She could dribble a basketball, run races with us, ride bikes with us. She couldthrow a baseball, and hit one. When it came to games, she didn't have anygirl-like qualities. It was almost like having a brother."

As for any of Albert's friends who might grumble about playing with a girl, thepoint soon became moot. There was little any of them could say after Marion hadwon another game of 21, or another race around the block.

"Hey, my sister is beating all you guys," Albert would crow after Marion had wonanother game of pickle, a game in which a runner would try to avoid being taggedout by players throwing a baseball back and forth between two trees.

After a time, Marion's playtime presence among the neighborhood boys was nolonger unusual. Soon, she was among the first chosen when they divided intoteams, and, no matter what game was being played, Albert made sure he was acaptain so he could choose his sister. "She was strong, almost as tall as mostof my friends," he said, "and she never, ever quit."

Marion's greatest triumph in Palmdale came when Albert and his friends made aballot box and conducted a neighborhood vote for their whiffle ball All-Starteam. Marion, who was seven, was among those chosen.

"That was one of the most exciting moments of my short life," she said, grinningat the memory.

  It was soon clear that Marion would not be able to enjoy sports, or to getbetter at them, unless she played against boys exclusively. She was the tallestgirl in her kindergarten and first-grade classes and simply too fast and strongfor the others.

"When they put her in a girls race at school, she smoked them," Albert said. "Itwas just no competition. When most girls are growing up, they play with othergirls, and if they get into sports, that's who they compete against. WithMarion, it was different. She competed against boys because she had to."

"Little girls were too soft for her," Marion's mother said. "She had to playwith the boys."

But just playing with boys wasn't enough; very early, Marion discovered how muchshe liked beating them. She liked how it felt being on the winning team,crossing the finish line first, coming home from school or youth-group play dayswith medals. And if winning meant working even harder, fine. When Albert showedher how to shoot a jump shot, she stayed out on the court practicing until hermother insisted she come inside. In gymnastics class, when she saw older girlspracticing back flips, cartwheels, or handstands, she asked an instructor todemonstrate and, within a month, she was doing them as well as the older girlnext door, who had been practicing for years. Not long after that, she was doingthem almost as well as the instructor.

Marion's capacity for learning a skill or technique, and then practicing untilshe had mastered it, was one she never lost, and one that never failed toimpress her coaches in high school, college, and beyond.

Once, Marion asked Albert how he ran so fast, ignoring the fact that he wasthirteen and she was eight. He had been copying what he saw on television,Albert told her, and soon they were both down on the ground practicing thesprinter's crouch and starting burst. Neither of them knew precisely what theywere doing, of course, but they did know there was more to running than simplyletting their legs fly. Marion ran from a crouch from then on.

Another quality Marion began to develop at a very young age is one she considerscrucial to her athletic success. Sylvia Hatchell, her basketball coach at theUniversity of North Carolina, calls it focus, the ability to concentrateexclusively on the job at hand, and says Marion possessed it to an extraordinarydegree. Marion calls it living in the moment.

"I was never really interested in boys, but I didn't have girlfriends, either,"she said. "I was always interested in whatever we were doing at the time. Iremember certain moments of hide-and-go-seek. I remember certain moments ofplaying pickle. I remember falling when I was climbing down from the elementaryschool roof and scraping up my leg and lying to my mom, telling her I'd fallenoff my bike. But I can't really remember one specific moment with a friend. Ireally can't. Not as a child."

There was something else Marion possessed at a young age, and the memory of itstill amazes her mother and her brother. From the very beginning, she had anextraordinary sense of confidence.

Watching the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer on television in 1981,she was fascinated by the pomp and ceremony that attended the royal couple.

"Why do they roll out a red carpet for them?" she asked.

"They roll it out for very important people," her mother replied.

"Well, when I go places," Marion said, "why don't they roll it out for me?"

Amazing, Albert thought. She was only five years old, but already she wasenvisioning greatness for herself.

Soon Marion's neighborhood games gave way to more organizedactivities?basketball, T-ball, volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, track, ballet,tap dancing, the Brownies. Her mother and stepfather saw her passion for playand made the most of it. By the time Marion was seven, she was a veterancompetitor in the 100-yard dash and the 400 at organized track meets. To Marion,these meets were little different from running around the block with Albert andhis friends. The feeling of winning a race was very much like the feeling ofbeating her brother to the base, or outrunning a throw.

Still, there were certain things even a seasoned, supremely confidentseven-year-old had to get used to. At one meet, Marion won her heat in the 400and waited to be crowned the winner. Then it was announced she had finishedthird. Marion ran crying to her mother and stepfather in the stands. She had wonher race, she told them as the tears ran down her face. She had done what theytold her to do. Her stepfather took her down to the track and asked one of theofficials to explain that winning the heat didn't mean winning the race, whichwas based on best overall time.

"They explained it but it didn't make me feel any better," Marion said. "Ididn't get the gold that day. I'll always remember that, and I'll alwaysremember running in these big high-top shoes. They felt like they went up to myshins and I was just running and running.

"I was always on the move, always on the go. I had to be doing something. It wassuch a wonderful time of my life. There were no pressures and I had my familyaround me. That was the best part. I had such a loving family."

Copyright © 2000 Ron Rapoport. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-56512-267-4