Naked Ambition. Relentless Hype. After all the Talk, It’s Time for olympian Marion Jones to Just Do It

THE WORDS PRACTICALLY CREAK UNDER THE WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION. They’re printed on the back jacket of a biography of a woman who won’t turn 25 until October, who has yet to take her first competitive step in an Olympic Games, who has yet to set a world record in her sport, who is known by most Americans only as the mouth behind the microphone wanting to know, on behalf of Nike, if you can “dig it.”

The words belong to Craig Masback, the CEO of USA Track and Field, a man who needs this woman to help sell track and field to a country that isn’t interested 75% of the time, that still views his sport as a five-ring traveling circus that only unfurls its tent once every four years and then slinks away until the next Summer Games.

Marion Jones, according to Masback, “has the chance to be the first female international athlete to transcend sports. In my mind, only three people have done that: Pele, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.”

“Whoooaa,” says Jones as she cools her heels in the bleachers near the running track at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. She’s training there six days a week in preparation for September’s Olympic Games in Sydney, where she’ll primarily be concerned with transcending Inger Miller, Ekaterini Thanou and Zhanna Pintusevich in the women’s 100-meter final.

“When I read Craig’s quote, I had to look in the mirror. ‘You talking about me? Little ol’ me?’

“I’ve yet to set a world record. I’ve yet to win an Olympic gold. Yes, I have won world championship gold, but to even be considered in the same breath with the likes of Muhammad Ali and Pele and Michael Jordan, I think it’s a bit premature.”

Of course it is. It is far too much, far too early, but then, that’s been the story of Jones’ life. Everything about her--from her childhood predictions of greatness to her whirlwind basketball career at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to her mastery of the 100- and 200-meter sprints to her anticipated coronation in Sydney--seems to have been done in an unrelenting rush.

At 14, Jones already had been christened as the future of American track and field, having won the first of four California sprint titles while attending Rio Mesa and Thousand Oaks high schools. At 15, she was competing in the U.S. national championships, a high-school sophomore mixing with Olympians and professionals. She finished fourth at 200 meters, eighth at 100.

Now, at 24, Jones already is a two-time world champion at 100 meters, having covered the distance faster--10.65 seconds--than any woman other than the late Florence Griffith Joyner. Her best 200-meter time--21.62 seconds--also has been surpassed only by Griffith Joyner. In addition, she’s a 1998 U.S. champion and 1999 world bronze medalist in the long jump, giving her a multi-event arsenal with which she aspires--amid much hysteria within her sport--to win five gold medals in a single Olympics.

It has never been done in track and field, and the view throughout the sport is that it will never be done. The prevailing opinion is that the task is too rigorous; Jones would have to grind out three rounds of preliminary heats in both events just to reach the100- and 200-meter finals, on top of which she’d be running legs of 100 and 400 meters for the U.S. 400- and 1,600-meter relay teams, for which she is certain to be selected. And in between sprints, she would be long jumping--hurling herself down the runway and trudging out of the sand pit to try it again and again and again.

The skeptics use Jones as Exhibit A as to why it cannot be done. At last year’s world championships in Seville, Spain, Jones already had won gold at 100 meters and bronze in the long jump when she began an assault on the 200-meter final. She never made it through the semifinals. She crumpled to the track with an acute case of back spasms and was taken by stretcher out of the meet before the relay finals.

Additionally, Jones is a rookie to the pressures of Olympic competition. She qualified as an alternate for the U.S. 400-meter relay team in 1992, but as a 16-year-old high school junior, she figured she had little chance of actually stepping onto the track for a race in Barcelona. She elected to stay home. Then a broken foot sidelined her in 1996.

Sydney will be “my coming-out party,” Jones says.

Certainly NBC sees it that way, delaying all of Jones’ exploits--as well as the rest of its Olympic coverage--half a day or more so that they may be better consumed, in prime time, in living rooms across America.

*

BUT IN INSTANT-ACCESS, DSL-LOADED 2000, HISTORY CAN’T WAIT. U.S. track and field, desperate for the public relations transfusion Jones’ five-gold-medal quest represents, and corporate America, always eager to reserve seats on any passing red-white-and-blue bandwagon, already are packaging Jones for superstardom. Jones has become the hot-buzz IPO for these Olympic Games.

Jones and her coach, Trevor Graham, knowingly stoked the furor by announcing their intent to assail the unassailable: Griffith Joyner’s near-mythic 100- and 200-meter world records of 10.49 and 21.34, both set in 1988 and still cloaked in mystery. Did the wind gauge really malfunction when Flo-Jo ran her 10.49 in Indianapolis? Had Flo-Jo been enhanced with more than acrylic fingernails when she wiped out both records in a span of 10 weeks? Griffith Joyner never failed a drug test during her running career, but the records she set were so otherworldly that the rumors persist, even two years after her death at age 38.

“We’re going for the 100 and the 200, definitely, this year,” Graham says. “Marion has improved in the 100 every single year, so we’re pretty close now. I would say we’re definitely going to try to break it this year, possibly in Sydney. There’s really nothing else for her out there but to go for the world record and win Olympic medals.”

Should it happen, Jones acknowledges that her reputation as a runner--to this point untainted by drug innuendo--will be prey to the same kind of suspicion that hounded Griffith Joyner. Graham says he has prepared Jones for that.

“I think, yes, there will definitely be suspicion,” Graham says. “But when Flo-Jo ran there wasn’t a formula for running the 100, a strategy. There is now. Marion hasn’t mastered the strategy yet. That’s why I know she can do it.”

Assuming that, the star-making machinery will kick into an even higher gear. “If she wins the five gold medals and NBC anoints her and Nike continues to build advertising around her, I think she will get big and hot,” says Rick Burton, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon’s college of business. “There could be the potential for her to be another Mary Lou Retton.”

Masback sees loftier possibilities. “It’s a very simple opportunity,” he says. “No female athlete has ever transcended sports in the way that Michael Jordan did, that Muhammad Ali did, that Pele did. Where even the person that knew nothing about sports knew who they were. That’s mainly because very few women’s sports are played on a worldwide basis.

“Track is by far the sport that is practiced with the greatest frequency around the world. Women’s soccer is still in its infancy internationally. Here you have a sport practiced worldwide and a female who has already established an international reputation based on her world championship victories in ’97 and ’99. And she has the opportunity with these Olympics to do something that no athlete has ever done before.”

Right now, though, it’s all just talk. Forget the five gold medals; in Sydney, Jones’ main challenge will be running hard enough to catch up to the hype.

*

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THAT BETTER THAN Jones. As Jordan knew, and Jones has begun to realize, transcending the sports gig comes with a cost. Ali represented the social conscience of an entire generation. Pele was a tireless missionary spreading the word of “the beautiful game” to every corner of the world, including that soccer backwater known as the United States. Is Jones up for that kind of heavy lifting?

Perhaps not just yet. For example, at a June publicity function before the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore., Jones was among the meet’s stars offered to the press in a special interview room. She was there with men’s 100-meter world-record holder Maurice Greene and 1996 Olympic double gold medalist Michael Johnson.

Sportswriters moved from one end of the room to the other, asking a few questions, scrawling a few responses and going on to the next talking head. Jones handled the perfunctory Marion Jones queries--the five gold medals, her struggles with the long jump--when a European journalist wandered by to ask, in halting English, “Did you follow yesterday’s news about . . . the thing in Texas?”

“No,” Jones said, leaning forward, looking quizzical. She grinned and playfully asked the questioner to throw her a lifeline.

“The Graham thing,” he told her. “The Gary Graham. They put him to death.”

Jones’ smile evaporated and she stiffened in her chair. “Oh,” she replied, desperately searching for an escape hatch. “I didn’t hear. I was traveling yesterday.”

Politics and split times?

World records and global perspectives?

“You know,” Jones said later, “I’m still just enjoying competing and it’s that simple right now. I don’t want to have to think about anything . . . too important . . . if that’s the right thing to say.”

Sensing it might not be, she blushes and laughs.

“I’ll have time in my career to think about those kinds of things. I’m 24 years old. I don’t want to have to make a stand on the ozone layer.”

*

FOR THE MOMENT, JONES WOULD SETTLE FOR A LITTLE RECOGNITION on the track where she conducts her morning workouts. As she readies for another assault on the long jump pit, P.E. class students jog around her. Some look curiously at the slender woman in the navy tights and the large man with the rake in his hand who bends over every so often to smooth out the footprints she leaves in the sand--Jones’ husband, world-champion shot-putter C.J. Hunter. Others don’t even bother to glance, oblivious to the track and field royalty crouching 20 feet away.

“Every day,” Jones says with a bemused grin, “there’s a confrontation with somebody out here because they don’t know who we are. They think they have just as much right to the track as we do. And we’re not saying they don’t. Just [it would help] if they could move to the lanes on the outside. Every day there’s a confrontation.”

By October, the P.E. classes of North Carolina State will know better. The pre-Olympic hype machine is now running at full capacity, and before Jones settles into the starting blocks for her first preliminary race in Sydney, she will have been profiled by Vogue, Vibe, Ebony, Oxygen, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Sports Illustrated for Women, Glamour, GQ, Details, Newsweek, People, Teen People, Rolling Stone and TV Guide. She already has appeared on Letterman, engaging in some verbal fencing with the host when he asked how she has been able to win so many races.

“Run fast,” the cheeky Jones replied.

NBC sports chairman Dick Ebersol has said his network will cover Jones’ Herculean Olympic crusade “like a miniseries”--only more interestingly scripted because the Marion Jones off-track story seems made for TV. In Jones, NBC, with its hallmark soft-focus, up-close-and-personal anecdotal Olympic coverage, has hit the mother lode.

There’s the precocious message little Marion scribbled on her bedroom chalkboard as an 8-year-old enthralled with the 1984 Los Angeles Games: “I will be an Olympic champion.”

There’s the father who deserted Jones’ family when she was 2 and has since spurned several attempts by Jones to reconnect.

There’s the stepfather Marion adored, who died of a heart attack when Jones was 12.

There’s the strong-willed mother who emigrated from her native Belize to America when she was 22, who named her only daughter after herself and raised her and Marion’s half-brother, Albert Kelly, practically alone, who clashed mightily with Jones until the daughter graduated from Thousand Oaks High School and high-tailed it out of state to North Carolina . . . only to be followed to Chapel Hill by Big Marion.

There’s the basketball career at North Carolina--highlighted by Jones’ immediate command of a position she’d never before played, point guard, and a 1994 NCAA championship--which was truncated by Jones’ 1996 decision to quit the sport to concentrate on track. That choice left behind a disappointed Tar Heel coach named Sylvia Hatchell and a rift that has yet to be repaired.

There’s the romance and eventual marriage to Hunter, a wedding Jones’ mother initially opposed because Hunter was divorced with two children and an ex-wife who was suing him for back child-support payments.

There’s the in-a-blink ascent to the women’s world 100-meter championship in 1997, the undefeated sprint season of 1998 and the grueling eight months of rehabilitation following her back problems in Seville last August.

It’s all outlined in Jones’ biography “See How She Runs: Marion Jones & the Making of a Champion,” released in May. Jones says she agreed to the idea when Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Ron Rapoport approached her to collaborate because “I wanted people to know I didn’t have it easy.

“In a 100-meter race, people see the result, they see the final product. They don’t see the hours and hours that I spend out here [training]. It’s the same way with my life. People don’t know all the injuries I’ve gone through and all the things with my family. It just wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter. It has been a little bit difficult.”

*

MORE PRACTICALLY, THE BOOK ALSO WAS AN ATTEMPT BY JONES TO exert some control over the media monster she alternately charms and mistrusts. Jones does not grant one-on-one interviews easily--she agreed to sit for an hour for this article on the condition that it would appear in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, rather than the newspaper’s Sports section--and she is wary of what she considers journalistic sneak attacks, such as interviewing someone close to her whom she doesn’t want interviewed.

Jones is still incensed over a 1998 Sports Illustrated profile that quoted her mother commenting disapprovingly on Jones’ impending marriage to Hunter and her desire at that point to be closer to her daughter. Jones no longer speaks to the writer of the piece and has since taken pains to shield her mother from the media horde. Her mother is quoted in Rapoport’s biography--Jones granted him permission--and the book now serves as a first line of defense against reporters seeking a comment or two from her.

In the book, Jones says she resented her mother’s following her cross-country when she enrolled at the University of North Carolina. She felt she had been denied a fundamental rite of teenage passage--the right to go away, alone, to college. Today, she describes her relationship with her mother as “very good. Although we had times when I was in college that we didn’t speak for a while, there are times now when we don’t speak for a while. That’s not to say that it’s a bad relationship. People interpreted that totally wrong.

“Looking back now, I would want to go with my daughter and see her compete in athletics,” Jones says. “I would want to go and see the game. I’ve heard some say that she was a needy mom--and that’s not the case at all.”

Jones says she has resigned herself to the prospect of never having a relationship with her father. She tried to see him four years ago, pounding on the door of the Los Angeles Laundromat he owns, but received no response. The last time Jones saw him, she says, he was sitting in the stands watching her play a tournament game with North Carolina in 1995. Excited, she had hoped to talk to him after the game, but when she looked for him after the final buzzer, he was gone.

Of a possible reunion with her father, she says: “Things in my life right now are just how I want them, and I’m happy and I’m comfortable and things are going great. And so to throw something in the mix that really doesn’t belong anymore . . . it belongs in the past. It would spoil the soup.

“A lot of young kids and people around my age actually have never met their father, or met their father when they were 2 and he disappeared. So at least when you compare it to some of those situations, at least I got to see him and have a talk with him, things like that.”

More than one amateur psychologist with a press badge and a laptop has theorized that Jones’ marriage to Hunter was a byproduct of that broken relationship with her natural father. It’s an easy assumption: At 6 feet, 1 inch and 330 pounds, with a glower that can send strangers in the other direction, Hunter is often seen as The Great Wall That Protects Marion--part husband, part bodyguard, part bouncer. The European sports media, undertrained in the art of understatement, have nicknamed the couple “Beauty and the Beast.”

When Jones reads media profiles portraying Hunter as gruff, surly or, as in a recent ESPN Magazine piece, “an absolute ass,” she quickly assumes the role of protector. “C.J. might look like he’s protective, but I’m not the type that likes to be protected. That word has been thrown around a lot and been misused, I think.

“You know, I’ve had male figures in my life before--my stepfather. He stepped in and filled a void. But C.J. doesn’t, I don’t think, fill that father void at all. And unless it’s my father . . . if Mr. Jones himself comes back into my life, which I wouldn’t want at all right now, it will never be filled.”

Jones adds that her husband’s size and bluntness often intimidate people. “He’s gotten a bad rap. I think if you ask anyone who knows C.J., they love him to death. He’s very caring, very considerate, the biggest jokester you’ll ever meet.”

If you’re wearing a media credential, that’s a side of Hunter you will never see. Jokes? Not here, not with you. During an interview, Hunter is a man of few words.

What is Marion’s best trait?

“Honesty.”

Can you give an example?

“I see it every day. She is what you get. That’s her.”

And you?

“Same thing.”

Hunter, however, turns nearly loquacious when asked about his wife as a potential five-gold-medal Olympian. He’s an unabashed fan.

“You know the real reason I’m still throwing?” he says. “So I can go to her meets and watch her run.” And if Jones pulls off the unprecedented drive for five? “It will be the biggest thing that’s ever happened in the Olympic Games. It will be huge to the world, obviously.”

And to him?

“I couldn’t care less.”

Why?

“It’s not going to change how I feel about her. It’s not going to change us . . . I’ll be incredibly excited for her, but if she said today, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d say fine. Other than on a superficial level, it doesn’t mean a lot. It’s just a medal, you know. It’s just a race.”

Jones and Hunter currently live in the Raleigh suburb of Apex--Hunter likes Apex because “there’s not a lot of people there”--and are in the process of building a new home in Chapel Hill. Hunter’s ex-wife lives in the same neighborhood and the child-support claim has been settled. Now the kids stop by three times a week to hang with Jones and Hunter. Jones says she savors those moments alone with C.J. and his kids, with “Judge Judy” on the TV, away from the camera-and-notepad Inquisition.

“C.J. keeps me sane,” Jones says. “He makes me happy. You know, this could be a very stressful time in my life right now. I go home and he’s there, and he just makes the whole atmosphere very calm and relaxed and makes me laugh. Makes me feel special.”

*

IN 1996, THE WORLD’S biggest track meet came to America, to Atlanta, with a simple agenda: Put on a good show and Americans, lured away from their “Monday Night Football” and NBA jam-fests for two weeks, would come back to track. Finally, after years of mainstream neglect, U.S. track would have a captive audience again. Home soil, Old Glory, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the world’s fastest humans.

It was a recipe for recovery, especially after Michael Johnson obliterated the world 200-meter record and won the 400-meter title as well. And Carl Lewis, in an upset, won his fourth consecutive Olympic gold medal in the long jump to become only the fourth athlete in any sport to win nine gold medals during his career. All told, American track athletes won more gold medals--13--than any other nation.

But the recovery never happened. Within a year of the Atlanta Olympics, the best track athletes in the United States reconvened in Athens, Greece, for the 1997 world championships facing the same old story--ignored and unloved at home--but hopeful for a new solution.

Jones was designated The One before she took her first step in Athens. She did not disappoint, winning the 100-meter title in a time of 10.83 seconds, all the more impressive considering the weight upon her 21-year-old shoulders.

Savior of the sport? Three years later, Jones insists she never volunteered for the job. “It’s one of those things where you’re thrown into it whether you want it or not. I have no choice in the matter.” Her laugh is world-weary. “I’ll be the first one to promote track and field and get it out there and I’m hoping--people might think otherwise--that this quest for five golds does something for it. And, sure, it’s helping me out. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. But truthfully, I’m hoping it will help the sport out as well.”

But, she wonders, what about all those great American track stars who ran and jumped before her? “You’ve had people such as Jackie [Joyner-Kersee] and Carl [Lewis] and Florence [Griffith Joyner] and Evelyn Ashford, who were incredible athletes,” Jones says. “And I say to myself, ‘If they couldn’t rev up the sport, how is--once again--little ol’ me going to do it?’ You know? It seems a little weird.”

Burton of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center has a theory. “Some of it has to do with personality. You can’t have a fakeness. And I think there was an element of Carl [Lewis] where you weren’t sure you were getting the whole story.

“Michael Johnson’s just a fierce warrior. I don’t think people have had a chance to really see the relaxed Michael Johnson or the humorous Michael Johnson. Generally, they’ve seen this guy who wins the race and has this very competitive stare and this air of defiance. It’s almost like, ‘How dare you run against me, I am the best.’ Advertisers haven’t figured out yet how to bring him into play.

“Marion, I think, comes across as much more likable. The camera likes her face. She smiles well. She makes people relax. She can be a fierce athlete, but when you put her on camera, she has the composure and the ability to smile and to laugh--to at least be approachable. Those are the cues advertisers are looking for, and she has them. She’s the real deal.”

But there are pitfalls any time a sport builds too much of its universe around a single personality, as the NBA learned during the first painful months of its second post-Jordan era.

“What we need are a large group of recognizable stars,” Masback says. “We can’t predicate all our plans for the future on any given athlete. For all we know, Marion might go play for the WNBA next year.”

For the record, Jones insists that Masback need not worry. “I have a definite plan,” she says. “Without a doubt, the 2000 Games are the highlight this year. I’m looking forward to going to Athens in 2004 and then probably [the Olympics again in] 2008. I think it would take three major events, three Olympic Games, to do everything I’ve said I want to accomplish.

“Because the ultimate goal for me, and I think the ultimate goal for any athlete, is to be considered one of the greatest ever. It’s not just going to take my performance in Sydney, even if and when I do get the five golds, in my opinion. It’s going to take consistency over the years, perhaps touching close to some world records, things like that.

“Because once that’s done, I would sit down long and hard after the 2008 Games and reassess everything. If I’m not too beaten up by this sport, I would love to play a couple of years in [the WNBA], if they want me.”

Jones’ coach has mapped it out in finer detail. “We’re going for 13 medals,” Graham says. “After she gets five in Sydney, we might do it one more time. Her last Olympics, we won’t try to go for five. Just three. I think if we do it this time, we’ll go for it again--and then we’ll shut it down.” And if Jones falls short the first time out in Sydney? Say she finishes third in the long jump, a distinct possibility, and wins everything else. Four golds and a bronze--a monumental achievement in itself--but by setting her sights so high, and so loudly and clearly, hasn’t Jones set herself up for disappointment if she comes home with anything less than five gold medals?

Someone posed that question to Jones at the U.S. Olympic trials in July, moments after she had beaten Inger Miller for the women’s 100-meter title. Jones leaned back in her chair, sighed and said, “You know, if I had a penny for every time I heard that question, I’d be very, very rich.”

“You already are!” interjected Miller, seated to Jones’ immediate left.

The entire room convulsed with laughter, even eliciting an embarrassed grin from Jones.

“OK,” she said. “Maybe that was the wrong choice of words.”

Whether she wins five or not, Jones will arrive in Sydney with a built-in safety net: She’s only 24, four years younger than Griffith Joyner was when she set her world records. In a sport where legends are made by hundredths of a second, time is on her side.