Marion Jones wants you to know she’s sorry.
Not so much about the performance-enhancing drugs she took unknowingly, she says when she was the most famous and lauded track athlete in the world, a winner of five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, medals she no longer owns.
What Jones really wants you to know is she’s sorry for lying to federal investigators about her drug use. That, and her role in a check-fraud scam, are what landed her in prison for six months in 2008, during which she spent a month and a half in solitary confinement after fighting another inmate.
“I surely wish that I could go back and change certain things in my past, on one hand, but then I wouldn’t be who I am today, someone who I’m actually really proud of,” Jones said in an interview with The Associated Press, her gaze steady. “If I hadn’t gone through certain things, and because I had those six months or whatever just a lot of quiet time if I hadn’t gone through it, I don’t know if I would ever have that much time to reflect. A lot of people don’t.”
Jones also wants you to know how that self-reflection changed her as a person. Her priorities, her goals, the way she defines success, the way she makes decisions each day all are rather different now, due in part to what she says is her faith. She emphasized that repeatedly during an hour-long interview with the AP at a park near a school her children attend, and in her new book, “On the Right Track,” which comes out Tuesday and quotes several biblical passages.
“My story is unique, in that the first part of my life, my journey, I hit the pinnacle of my career, and it was a very public career, and then I made decisions that cost me all of that,” Jones said. “And so I was at that low point. But I didn’t give up. I kind of developed a way to get out of that, and I’m on my way back up.”
Sitting on a wooden bench facing the park’s pond, Jones, who turned 35 this month, still looks like an elite athlete. She played for the WNBA’s Tulsa Shock last season, but isn’t certain if she will be asked to return for another. One thing’s for sure: She can still flash that famous wide smile the one so familiar to anyone who followed her feats on the track a decade ago.
Her 213-page book, written with Maggie Greenwood-Robinson, is based in part on letters Jones wrote to her husband, Obadele Thompson, while she was in a federal prison in Fort Worth. The book contains a harrowing depiction of Jones’ stay.
“I didn’t have a sentence that was a slap on the wrist. I wasn’t sentenced to an institution that I kicked back in a hammock for my time there,” she said, punctuating that point with a chuckle. “It was tough.”
Jones writes about fearing her life was in danger during a five-minute tussle with a roommate. Jones says she emerged uninjured, but the other woman’s face “was bruised and bloody.”
In the interview, Jones called her ensuing trip to solitary confinement “probably the worst part of my life.”
“There were moments while I was there, where you just feel like you cannot go on: ‘How in the world can I make it to tomorrow?’” Jones said.
She writes in depressing detail about prison conditions and specific personnel; about inmates using empty toilet paper rolls threaded through toilets as a sort of telephone; about being chained to her seat during a “ConAir” flight with other prisoners on a trip to another jailhouse.
“What transpired during the period when she was incarcerated was both a crucible but also a wonderful opportunity,” said Thompson, who won a bronze medal for Barbados in the 100 meters at the Sydney Games and married Jones in 2007. “She’s not one of these people who’s bitter. She’s not spiteful. She’s not looking to get even with anyone. She’s just turned it into something positive. She’s used it to take the next steps in life, to rebuild.”
In doing so, Jones has written a book that can serve as something of a self-help manual.
In it, Jones describes her “Take a Break” philosophy, which she discusses when she visits schools around the country, something she first did as part of her probation and now does on her own.
“By helping people, it’s a form of healing for myself, because I hurt so many people. I know that,” she said. “I still struggle with knowing that I let a lot of people down. I disappointed a lot of people that love and care for me, worldwide, and when I think about that it kind of gives me the motivation to kind of keep going on.”
The gist of “Take a Break” is simple: Before making an important decision or taking an action you might later wish you hadn’t, force yourself to pause and consider what’s right. Jones did not do that on the day in November 2003, when she lied to an assistant U.S. attorney and federal agent Jeff Novitzky of BALCO fame about whether she had taken performance-enhancing drugs.
When she was shown a vial of liquid by Novitzky, she realized it was “the clear,” the designer steroid she’d taken before the Sydney Olympics. But she denied it.
“I made a decision that took less than 45, 30 seconds,” she said, snapping her fingers, “to lie, to lie to them. And that was my crime.”
Jones is repentant about the doping, too, but she’s sticking to her story: Her error there, she insists, was not being more skeptical of people around her, specifically her coach, and not finding out exactly what was going into her body at the time.
“Sure, it was my choice to take it without asking any questions,” said Jones, who publicly denied for years that she’d used steroids, “but it was never my intent to take it.”
Similarly, she writes, she endorsed a check she received from former husband Tim Montgomery, another track star, “without asking questions” and later “lied about my knowledge of the check and Tim’s involvement in the scheme.”
She’s so adamant about not detailing that part of her life nowadays that she didn’t name any names during the interview.
In the book, she writes: “Yes, I took a performance-enhancing drug and I can’t go back and undo any of it. What happened, happened. I’m not holding anyone responsible for the fact that I’m the one who put it in my body. … Nobody forced me.”
Jones does want to clear something up for people who think she went to prison for taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“That’s not the case,” she said. “I went to federal prison because I lied. That’s my crime. I could look back and I can say, ‘Gosh, I wish I wouldn’t have been so trusting.’ But I really wish I wouldn’t have lied. That’s my regret.”
Later, discussing her imprisonment, Jones said: “You talk about a tiny, little lie, and it gets you here. There’s nothing tiny about not doing the right thing. It can really have you land in some of the worst places you could ever imagine.”
She knows, of course, that her book would draw more attention, not to mention sell more copies, if it were filled with revelations about performance-enhancers.
But the book does not delve into those areas, and Jones is upfront about that in Chapter 2: “I should be clear about why I’m writing this book. If you picked it up looking for salacious details about doping and drug scandals, I guess you should put it back on the shelf.”
Jones was approached about telling a more sensational tale, but says she never considered doing so.
“When people look at this, they might think it’s a tell-all, it’s one of those books that you see celebrities or maybe athletes write after they have just done something horrible. It’s much different than that,” she said.
“It might temporarily help the author get paid,” she added, “but after a while, that story, your story, is not benefiting anybody.”
The book ends with a chapter entitled “Blessed,” and the final paragraph begins, “I don’t want to be remembered for the records I broke, the races I won, or the medals I lost. I want to be remembered for the very worst mistake I ever made and how I turned it into a life-affirming positive for the world.”
Asked to explain why she closed her book that way, Jones smiled.
“You can remember me winning races, winning medals, breaking records but how, then, is that going to help you in your day-to-day life?” she said. “By looking at me and looking my life and saying, ‘Oh, she made some bad mistakes, but then how did she turn that around? How did she make life better for herself and people around her? How did she really make a mark and make a goal of helping?’ That’s what I really want people to get from all of this.”
Marion Jones gets “On the Right Track”
by freelantz on Oct 25, 2010 8:01 AM EDT in WNBA
The offseason for WNBA rookie Marion Jones has been anything but typical. After completing the season with the Tulsa Shock, Jones has celebrated her 35th birthday, will be releasing a book tomorrow and is the subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary next week. The book, “On the Right Track” and the documentary “Press Pause” give a glimpse that few have ever seen into the life of Jones.
“What I’m most excited about these next few weeks with the doc and the book coming out is people are going to see a side, see some more of Marion, that they probably never had any idea about,” Jones said from her busy offseason unfolding in Austin, Texas. “This is going to show a side that - hey, I put my pants on like everybody else, and cut me and I bleed. I’ve been through struggles and it’s been a lot harder than people ever imagined, and I haven’t shared it.”
Until now.
In “On the Right Track”, Jones doesn’t ease the reader in with small talk and happy thoughts, rather she shares memories from the day she stood on the steps of the Westchester County Courthouse in 2007, crying as she read a statement of what had just transpired inside the courtroom - a guilty plea for lying to federal prosecutors. Jones recounts memories of the day four years earlier that led to the plea in the first place, the lie itself and how her rushed and unwise decision to be untruthful changed the course of her life.
In the pages that follow, Jones takes the reader through a childhood in California, where she learned she was fast by racing the boys as a 6 year old precocious child. The path winds through scenes of loss and grief of losing a family member and her coping mechanism that eventually was on display for the world - playing basketball and running track.
Jones talks of making Olympic teams and winning Olympic medals, reaching a pinnacle of the ultimate heights in the track and field establishment. And then, just as quickly as the highs had been reached, the lows of failed relationships and the BALCO scandal knocked her down, but not out. And this is the purpose of her book - to share her story of mistakes and miscues and how she’s learned to pick herself up and get on the right track.
“Most people wanted this nasty, salacious, tell-all, point fingers type of book that I just wasn’t interested in because all along I never think those type of things help anybody,” Jones said. "All along I wanted to make sure that whatever I do is going to benefit somebody, benefit a lot of people and particularly young people.
“I want people when they put the book down for it to have touched them.”
Instead of a quick buck and a few more minutes of fame while drudging up a story fit for a tabloid, Jones has a higher purpose in mind. To help pull people through their own struggles by seeing her own, no matter how big or small that struggle might be.
Jones chronicles her struggles of deciding to tell the truth, and accepting her punishment by the courts of a six month prison sentence. She takes the reader through arriving at her destination of Carswell Federal Prison, and becoming one of the seven hundred female prisoners housed there. Marion Jones-Thompson no more, just Federal Inmate Number 84868-054.
Jones recounts stories from the inside of being a baker in a bug-infested kitchen for 13 cents an hour. Of teaching women how to write essays so they could pass their GEDs. Of visits from her husband, Oba, and calls to her children. Of her fellow inmates and how they came to be incarcerated at Carswell. Of racism, conditions, and the harsh reality of being in prison. Of being in lockdown for 48 days.
She writes of a trip to California on Con Air to be a trial witness in the BALCO case, a trip that ended without her testimony even being heard. The emotions of missing her children’s birthdays, her style of parenting and letters she’s penned to her children. Later, about that day when she was able to run free from Carswell, into the arms of her waiting family. And intertwined throughout the book is her strong faith that guided her path through the dim days in Carswell to the brightness that now she now walks through.
“I made a vow to myself when I was in Carswell, when I was away - how can I change all of this, Marion? It’s your responsibility now,” Jones said. "You’ve had for however many years, all these people from around the world supporting you, loving you, caring for you, praying for you, and you let them down.
“Now how are you going to make up for it, Marion? And my decision then was this is how I’m going to make up for it. I’m going to constantly put myself out there, even if it’s hard sometimes, to try and make the lives of people better.”
Since her release from Carswell, Jones has been striving to fulfill that vow, and one such way is through the Take a Break program she discusses in-depth in the book. A program in which she speaks to youth about the merits of making good decisions.
“Slow down, take a step back, consult people who will give you proper advice and then make a wise decision,” Jones says she tells the youngsters she speaks with. “Take a break.”
Jones also touches on another way she wants to make an impact - by dedicating herself to seeing that much-needed reforms to America’s prison system take place, particularly with the resources given to prisoner education and true rehabilitation.
And she talks about how she’s moved on in her own life. A life in which not only is she a wife and mother to three, but now a WNBA rookie with the Tulsa Shock. A return to the highest level of competition in a sport she left after a successful collegiate career at North Carolina.
The book ends with reflections of blessings - those from living an “ordinary” day and those sent from God. Blessings that might be disguised to the eye of the beholder, but can blossom with faith and perseverance through the face of adversity.
“I’m putting myself out there,” Jones said. “I don’t have to do this, I don’t have to drudge up these memories and the stuff that’s hurtful. But I genuinely want to help people not make the same mistakes that I made.”
Follow her lead and get on the right track.
Stay tuned to Swish Appeal in the coming days for more on Marion’s basketball future, her Take A Break program and desires to help the prison system, and her thoughts on second chances
