A Tiger’s Tale : Marion Jones Remains Focused, Bolstered by Legacy of Forebears

Marion Toler remembers the phone call. A rather frantic voice on the other end of the line was informing Toler that her daughter was missing from grade school.

“What do you you mean, missing?” Toler said, calmly.

Well, we can’t seem to find her, the school official said. She’s not in class, she’s not roaming the hallways. And you know, she was here a minute ago.

Mom didn’t panic. Things like this were not unusual. Her daughter, Marion Jones, never could sit still.

The kid hunt began.

A few minutes later, before anyone had to dial 911, they found Toler’s daughter running around on the athletic field.

Gee, hard to believe. In retrospect, it seems such a logical place to have begun the search.

“She was out playing with some friends at recess,” Toler said. “She didn’t hear the bell.”

Even then, Jones worked at playing. Took it very seriously, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Nothing’s changed.

“Sometimes, after a race, I don’t remember when the gun went off,” Jones said. “I don’t remember my start or anything.”

This week, she answered the bell for the final time when she graduated from Thousand Oaks High after a brilliant four-year career in track and basketball.

Of course, she will play another day, at the University of North Carolina, in fact. She’ll probably be the belle of that ball too.

Though Jones, 17, sometimes can’t remember the beginning of her races, she’ll not forget the ending of her last one.

Last Saturday, she was asked to make a curtain call at the state track and field championships at Cerritos College. Jones, who won an unprecedented ninth individual state title a few minutes earlier, jogged a farewell lap before more than 5,000 appreciative fans.

Accolades were piped over the stadium’s public-address system. The announcer, gushing, tossed out comments such as, “We’ve been very privileged today to watch Marion Jones for the very last time. . . . Marion Jones, the greatest high school sprinter ever. . . . Show your thanks for the many thrills, chills and spills.”

Fans ate it up. Every word.

Overheard in the grandstands were a couple of track old-timers who verbally jousted as Jones cruised past and waved to the admiring crowd.

“Sure gonna miss watching her,” the first one said.

“Hard to believe it’s been four years already,” said the second.

“I don’t think she ever lost a race, did she?” asked the first, scratching his chin.

“Not that I can remember,” said the second.

“Yeah, but you can’t remember anything,” said the first.

“I’ll remember this,” he said.

*

A black cloud hovered overhead. Jones moped. She was downright glum, if not worse, and not very pleasant to be around.

She had suffered a broken left wrist in a basketball game during her junior year and missed several days of school. Jones, an honor student, had fallen way behind in her schoolwork.

“She definitely suffered from depression,” Toler said.

Jones was idle. In neutral. No more fifth gear for a while. She watched from the bench as Thousand Oaks rolled up the victories.

“It was terrible,” Jones said. “I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do. It was bad.”

Furthermore, she had been catching heat for playing basketball in the first place. After the mishap, track aficionados from all over the nation offered this consensus unsolicited opinion: With her track credentials bordering on world-class, playing basketball was wacko.

Nuts to ‘em all, she countered.

“I do what I want to do,” Jones said. “I choose to play basketball and I understand the risks. I understand the risks involved with any sport.”

Jones was determined to recover in time for the playoffs--even though the injury wasn’t completely healed. The cast was off, and she wanted to cast off.

She talked her doctor into giving her permission to play. She could barely move the wrist and pain shot up her arm, but it was nothing compared to the agony of sitting still.

“I remember the first day I got my cast off, I begged the doctor to sign the release,” Jones said. “I gave Coach (Chuck) Brown the notice and said, ‘OK, I’m ready to play.’ ”

The doctor advised Jones that she was running the risk of rebreaking the bone. She played anyway, with a brace, and was fine. The wrist is history: Jones helped lead the Lancers to a Southern Section title.

For Jones, nothing’s worse than watching the world pass by. Which is one of the reasons she passed on a chance to join the U.S. Olympic team last summer. Jones, at 16, finished fifth in the 100 and fourth in the 200 meters at the Olympic trials in New Orleans, earning the right to join the team as an alternate on the 400-meter relay team.

She declined. Didn’t make sense. Go all the way to Spain, just to watch other people run? Heck, no.

Even the heartiest sports fan might not understand Jones’ commitment to athletics. There’s only one rule, really: Everything else comes second. Bank on it.

Some found out the hard way. Last winter, while again leading the Lancer basketball team into the section final, Jones was asked by a couple of suitors to attend the senior ball. She gave the thumbs-up to one.

However, after taking a look at the calendar, she realized that the dance was scheduled for the middle of the playoffs. She warned the young man that he better have a contingency plan in place.

Not surprisingly, Thousand Oaks kept winning, which meant her would-be date came up on the short end. It seems that his family had shelled out hundreds of dollars for a tuxedo and all the trappings. The boy’s mother, angered to the extreme, phoned to complain.

“I told him,” Jones said. “Me of all people, you’d think they’d know that I’m gonna play in the game. Basketball came first before anything.”

*

L ow mileage.

Driven by little old lady on Sundays only. Primo condition.

Not a scratch anywhere.

Marion Jones’ wheels have plenty of dings and dents. She goes from 0 to 50, ASAP. Nothing but stop-and-go traffic too.

For a girl with million-dollar legs, she sure doesn’t take very good care of them. Jones can give you the boo-boo by boo-hoo rundown if you’re interested.

“My friends are always saying, ‘Don’t you want to have nice legs when you’re older?’ ” Jones said. “I don’t care about that stuff.”

Anyway, Jones rarely stops moving long enough for anybody to notice. Truth be told, she was a tomboy of the first order while growing up and was a major pain in the backside of her brother, Albert, six years her senior.

“She made his life a living hell,” Toler said, chuckling. “I would get home and he’d say, ‘Mom, we need to talk. This little girl is getting on my nerves.’ ”

Poor Albert. His scabby-kneed little sister had no interest in playing with the other girls. No dolls, no playing house, which for him meant life was no tea party.

“His friends did all the fun stuff,” Jones said. “The people I was supposed to be hanging out with were doing all the dumb things. I wanted to run around and have fun.

“He didn’t see me as a nuisance all the time. Well, sometimes, maybe.”

As soon as Albert and his chums lined up for a game, any game, Marion wanted in. They couldn’t shake her, and not for a lack of trying. Mom said the conversations went something like this. . . .

Boy: You can’t play with us.

Marion: I’m better than you.

Boy: Oh really, at what?

Marion: I’m faster.

Boy: Yeah, right.

Yup, right.

“She’d charm them into racing because they had egos,” Toler said.

Eventually, the darndest thing happened. “Get outta here” begat “Get over here.”

Her brother’s friends fueled her competitive fire. She was reckless, and at times, practically brainless.

While playing hide and seek at age 7 or 8, Jones climbed onto the roof of a nearby elementary school. She took a header while climbing down and tore open a knee.

Mom confronted daughter, who knew her days of running with the big boys were over if Mom heard the truth.

“I, uh, fell off my bike,” Jones said, hopefully. Mom gave daughter the evil eye, but let it slide.

“I didn’t hear the real story until about five years later,” Toler said. “You just don’t dare her to do anything, because she’ll do it.”

Little Marion’s derring-do was well-established even before the rooftop incident. When Marion was 3, Albert got into a shouting match with another boy his age. The two squared off.

As Albert and the boy went nose to nose, a pint-sized interloper prepared to throw a few haymakers into the guy’s kneecaps.

“She got into the young man’s face and said, ‘You want to fight? Then hit me!’ ” Toler said. “She was never afraid. She backed down to no one.”

She wore the same face that opponents now see on the track. Steely-eyed determination. Jaw set. All business.

“I remember I was wearing these little thongs,” Jones said. “I flip-flopped over there and stood up all tall--as tall as I could get.”

No fear. Never had it. Never will.

Last summer in the Olympic trials, Toler saw the competitive scowl again. Jones stood in a lane alongside the best sprinters America has to offer, Gwen Torrence and the like, yet didn’t bat an eyelash.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s the Olympic trials or against Billy Joe Bob,” Jones said. “You still have to run your race.”

Jones kept her mother running around in circles for years. Toler enrolled Jones in every activity imaginable. Tap dancing, ballet, baseball, gymnastics, the school band, the school choir.

At around age 6, Jones signed up for Girl Scouts. Jones’ highlight? The photo of her with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck. Gasp.

*

The tiger, big as life, stalked out of the tangled undergrowth and sat in front of the house. Marion Toler, a youngster of 6 living in Central America in the 1950s, watched with hypnotic fascination from the parlor.

Perhaps the tiger smelled lunch--Toler believes to this day that it caught a whiff of the family’s new puppy--but nobody is quite certain what the beast wanted. Heck, Toler might even have been the intended main course.

They made eye contact.

“It came up from the bank of the river and sat right up in front of me,” Toler said. “He wasn’t afraid and I remember not being afraid.”

This is not a track one-liner: It runs in the family.

Toler was born and raised in Belize, located south of Mexico’s tropical Yucatan Peninsula. The family of four lived on a riverbank. Her father was a farmer who labored every day to provide a little bit extra for his two children.

It cost 50 cents a week to send Toler and her brother to private school. Somehow, her parents found the money and made the necessary sacrifices.

“Most people would say we were poor,” Toler said. “But I can tell you this: I was very rich then and am poor now.”

Toler’s mother was an accomplished seamstress. Toler is proud of the fact that her mother never worked for others.

“Put this in perspective,” Toler said. “My mother was born in 1915, and back in those days, can you imagine a black woman not working for somebody?

“All her sisters worked for somebody, cleaning kitchens or something along those lines. My mother made up her mind that she was never going to do that.”

The seed of independence was sown. Toler is cut from her mother’s cloth, and so is granddaughter Jones. Fearless and confident, Toler and daughter are mirror images in more than first name alone.

Then, innate toughness is nothing compared to what is learned in life’s classroom. Toler divorced Marion’s father, George Jones, when Marion was in diapers, and later remarried. There was another jolt down the road.

One day, when Jones was in the sixth grade, Ira Toler began complaining of a headache. He went to the doctor, but the pain persisted. On the afternoon that he was scheduled for a follow-up exam, he suffered a stroke at the family home in Palmdale. He went into a coma and died a few days later.

Mother, daughter and son were forced to strike out alone.

“It took me a good two years to get through that (emotionally),” Toler said.

That summer, the family moved to Sherman Oaks, where Jones enrolled in a private junior high school and first began participating in organized basketball and track. Toler, a legal secretary, scrimped to give her kids what they deserved. She made sacrifices.

This was nothing new. The family moved to Palmdale from West L.A. when Marion was 4 because the Tolers thought the environment was better suited to raising children. Mom nonetheless continued to commute to her job in Beverly Hills. Ira Toler’s death merely strengthened their resolve.

“We stuck together,” Jones said. “We were like a team. We got closer, definitely.

“Economically, it was rough for a little bit. But my mom, she’s tough. She got two jobs when she needed to.

“She sent me to summer camp. She let me do all the things that I wanted to do and tried to act like it was no big deal, even though I knew it was.”

It’s all a matter of priority, said Toler. Kids come first, which was pounded into her head at an early age. She was baptized at the riverbank.

“I can remember huge matriarchal women, sitting around washing a big bowl of clothes to make enough money to send their children and grandchildren to private school,” Toler said.

There are some who don’t understand why Toler is sometimes suspicious of outsiders. You see, on the national track and field scene, Jones is the reigning princess, a butterfly. As such, she attracts flakes like moths to a flame.

“People don’t know why she’s so protective,” Jones said. “When you have people from all over the country wanting to talk to a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girl, if I was a mother then I’d be the same way.”

Those seeking Jones’ attention better expect to be given the quick once-over by mom. Expect her to question the intentions, determine the motives.

If something is amiss, Toler becomes a lion protecting her young.

Or, perhaps, a tiger.

“That’s when I’m really crazy,” she said. “That’s when I’m not even human anymore.”

There was the time last summer in New Orleans when Toler heard from three different sources that someone had been passing himself off as Jones’ agent and coach. Or the time a track club in Minnesota claimed Jones as a member to boost its credibility.

The pair learned long ago that there are plenty of people out there seeking to climb aboard what Toler dubbed “the Jones Bandwagon.”

“The only time I go out of my way to protect Marion is in track and field,” Toler said. “Track and field is a dangerous thing. It’s worse than you can ever imagine.

“It’s very exploitative. Track people are possessed and obsessed.”

Perhaps it stems from the top. Over the winter, Jones received word from USA Track and Field (formerly The Athletics Congress) that she had been suspended from national track and field competition for four years. Jones had missed a drug test, the notice said.

The controversy in a nutshell: USATF, attempting to inform Jones that a random test had been scheduled, mailed the notification to Jones’ sprint coach, Elliott Mason, in San Pedro. A co-worker of Mason’s signed for the letter, the coach never received it and Jones missed the test.

Toler said she spent several thousand dollars in legal fees. Finally, months later, the decision was reversed by a 2-1 vote. Coincidentally or not, USATF overhauled its system of informing athletes about impending tests.

“Craziness,” said Jones, who flew to New York for the National Scholastic Indoor championships during the legal wrangling only to be told she wouldn’t be allowed to run because the meet was sanctioned by USATF. “They don’t care at all about the athletes.”

*

Toler definitely cares, and she realizes that she may have raised the eyebrows and blood pressure of some folks along the way. Jones’ well-publicized transfer from Rio Mesa High to Thousand Oaks two years ago put both mother and daughter squarely in the spotlight. The transfer was largely precipitated by friction between Toler and Rio Mesa co-Coach Brian FitzGerald, Toler said.

In short, it boiled down to a difference of philosophy, and Toler cast the only vote that counted: Mother knows best.

“It drove him crazy that I was so involved with Marion,” Toler said.

Make no mistake, however. Big Marion and Little Marion may share a name, but the latter is no Marionette.

In this respect, Jones is the typical teen, attempting to get away with bloody murder if at all possible. Mom cuts daughter slack, to a point.

Ask Toler about Jones’ athletic abilities: “She has lots of energy, is strong-willed, very bold, confident, tough and brazen. All the adjectives.”

In fact, Toler adds a few more adjectives, such as “opinionated, stubborn and obstinate.”

“She’s a pain in the butt,” Toler said, grinning. “She’s rebellious. She challenges me, she dares me. Does that surprise you? What teen-ager isn’t?”

Around her peers, Jones is remarkably level-headed. On the track, she talks no smack.

“She’s cool,” said Jeremy Fischer, a high jumper from Camarillo who has competed in several meets with Jones. “It would be so easy for her to be conceited. That just makes her the great athlete that she is. She’s not cocky at all.”

How easy it would be for the cranial swelling to occur. So many accomplishments at such a young age.

“She’s so modest, she just wants to be another teen-ager,” said Jen Bockus, a senior and one of Jones’ best friends. “She’s just very blessed.

“Marion’s not like most people. It was just meant to be. She handles it all so well, so who better to give that kind of gift to?”

Before we have Jones fitted for a halo, she warns that she is no angel when she loses her temper.

When Thousand Oaks, ranked No. 1 in the state at the time, lost to Buena in the Southern Section Division I-A basketball final last season, Jones took her runner-up medal and smashed it against the wall. She left it on the floor.

“The better team did not win,” said Jones, who called the defeat the toughest of her athletic career.

A male student recently made the mistake of angering Jones in the classroom. She let him have a verbal blast and he slinked back to his seat.

“I have that side,” she said. “It’s bad. I get real quiet and give you the silent treatment. And when I give it to you, it’s venom.”

Mainly, she’s poison to the opposition. She has three times been named Gatorade’s national high school female track athlete of the year. She holds the national high school record in the 200 meters (22.58 seconds) and is second in the 100 (11.14) and long jump (22 feet 1/2 inch).

In basketball, she averaged 22.8 points and 14.7 rebounds last season and was named the state Division I player of the year. Most people consider basketball her second sport, but she doesn’t look at it that way.

She will play at North Carolina on a basketball scholarship, and in fact, enjoys both sports equally.

Thousand Oaks was 60-4 in Jones’ two years on the basketball team. Her coach now possesses a gym bag full of memories.

“It was like a Hollywood movie,” Coach Chuck Brown said. “Except that everybody but her is in slow motion.

“Any time she stepped on the floor, it was for one reason--to win.

“I got spoiled.”

So will Jones’ college mentor, more than likely.

“You can’t guard her in the open court,” said North Carolina Coach Sylvia Hatchell, whose team advanced to the round of 16 in March and finished 23-7.

“She’s a great athlete. She’ll fit in so well here.”

*

Whump, whump, whump. Swish.

Other than the sound of wafting waves and the chirps of sea gulls overhead, the bounding ball was all that could be heard. At least, for the next few minutes.

Jones, visiting relatives in Belize two years ago, was shooting baskets at a seaside court when the most amazing thing happened. Amazing even by Jones’ unsurpassed yardstick.

A little boy caught a glimpse of her shooting around, and moments later, she was surrounded by children, who had never before watched a girl do such things with a basketball. You had to see it to believe it, her mother said.

“Within 20 minutes, we had approximately 200 kids out there,” Toler said. “They were just in awe. It was beautiful to watch them, to see their fond appreciation.”

Jones has that effect on many adults too. But kids, you see, don’t expect much in return. Their affection is unqualified, unconditional, and Jones returns it.

Earlier this month at the Golden West Invitational in Sacramento, a little boy worked up the nerve to ask Jones for an autograph. No big deal, Jones has been signing them for years. Later on, though, Jones noticed that the lad was still following her.

Jones, who knows a little something about following older kids around, played along. She waved, winked and generally made the little guy feel 10 feet tall.

“After it was over, I gave him one of my (meet) numbers,” Jones said. “I signed it for him, and I wrote, ‘Dear . . . ‘ “

Her voice trailed off. Jones stopped dead in her tracks, a rare occasion, indeed.

“What was his name?” she said. “He told me, ‘Never forget me,’ and I already forgot his name! Arrrgh.”

It’s doubtful he’ll ever forget hers.