Demonizing Marion Jones

When track star Marion Jones surrenders March 11 to serve a six-month jail sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan near Austin, Texas, a parade of journalists will line up to write the “serves her right” story. From the instant she confessed in October to doping before the Sydney Games in 2000, the disdain for her has been loud and animated, with references to Jones as the “disgraced Olympian” or the “fallen superstar.” A column by the New York Times’ George Vecsey was witheringly titled “No Sympathy Here, and That’s No Lie.” Even the judge who sentenced the 32-year-old mother of two seemed ticked off. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas tersely rejected leniency and instead explored imposing a jail term longer than what prosecutors recommended.

In baseball, as the recent congressional hearings have shown, the approach to handling cheaters has been much different. Former Sen. George Mitchell called out the illegal performance-enhancing drug users in his historic report but strongly urged Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to forgo punishment, saying that it would do no good now. “Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades -- commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players -- shares to some extent the responsibility for the steroids era,” Mitchell said. “There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on.”

Which leads to the question, what makes everybody so eager to damn Marion Jones for all time? Her transgressions were also in the past, and unlike the majority of baseball players implicated in the Mitchell Report, she has confessed to her wrongdoing. “What value is there in locking her up in prison when she is already serving a sentence of humiliation witnessed by people across the world?” asks a well-respected Austin-based blogger who reports on the state’s criminal justice system. “What value is there, other than revenge?”

The demonizing of Jones is a troubling, hard-to-watch affair. At the time of her sentencing in January, a writer for the Nation of Islam Sportsblog -- yes, there is such a thing -- defended Jones, saying that the media’s aggression was because she served the stereotype of the cheating athlete, “the cheating Negro athlete.”

It’s an explosive, radical charge, but one that demands a closer look -- especially when you take into consideration that Jones eventually did the right thing: she confessed. Jones pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in the BALCO lab case in 2003 about her steroid use and about an unrelated financial dealing. She asked for forgiveness, she has accepted her punishment ... and yet she has been almost gleefully targeted in the sporting media. One reporter went to the trouble of going to the University of North Carolina, where Jones was on the national championship women’s basketball team, to ask the athletic director if the school had considered removing her basketball-playing image from the fieldhouse walls.

Historically speaking, the champion black athlete has always worn a bulls-eye. Heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, for one, experienced the whipsaw effect of a fickle public. His arrest in 1920 because he allegedly violated the Mann Act -- transporting his white girlfriend across state lines for the “purpose of prostitution and debauchery” -- made Johnson Public Enemy No. 1. The Police Gazette denounced him as the “vilest, most despicable creature that lives.” His subsequent one-year jail sentence at Leavenworth was hailed in several press accounts as sweet justice.

Even early black athletes who were squeaky-clean role models suffered. In the course of researching my book on the champion cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor -- arguably the first African American sporting superstar -- I came across slighting references to the fact that he never drank alcohol, didn’t gamble and refused overtures to secretly team with other riders in violation of the rules. Taylor’s upstanding behavior wasn’t a show, it was genuine. But his thanks were ridicule and hatred from promoters, rivals and cynical newspapermen. He reminded those who raced against him that they fell far short of the virtuousness of a black man who was the son of Kentucky slaves.

Marion Jones is not blameless. She doped, and she tried to cover that up with years of angry and arrogant denials. She responded the way backed-into-a-corner pro athletes do: She took the offensive and played to win. It is a popular tactic, devolving into a he said/she said fight that an athlete wins 9 times out of 10. Roger Clemens too opened his first news conference in January by glowering at those in the room, an attitude not unlike Jones’ former swagger.

Jones was in deeper than most, however, and in 2006 it all came crashing down. She confessed to perjuring herself before federal prosecutors and has since lost everything, including her five Olympic medals, her athletic livelihood, and, as of March 11, her personal freedom.

Jones has young children and has made several emotional appearances where she laid herself bare, showing remorse but also admirable strength for somebody who has lost so much. After she left the White Plains, N.Y., courtroom last month, she said she hoped her self-destruction would be a cautionary tale. She said she worried about what she would tell her children. “I respect the judge’s order, and I truly hope that people will learn from my mistakes,” Jones said.

She didn’t openly wonder why sympathy was so hard to come by and forgiveness seemingly out of reach. But I do.