Me and Mrs. Jones

"There is nothing stopping me... except me." - Marion Jones

The thing that I remember first, always, is that crooked little smile.

Such a discordant note. A little goofy, frankly, a kid's artless grin. The smile of Marion Jones was so completely unlike the rest of her: the relentless athletic machine; the crafted and classic beauty; the hard-eyed embodiment of ambition; the ubiquitous agent of consumerism. The rest of the Image. And Jones was indeed ubiquity personified in the months leading up to the 2000 Games in Sydney; you couldn't turn around without seeing her somewhere, everywhere.

Magazine covers, advertisements, television. She was outsized and omnipresent - and even that in itself came to be seen as epochally important:

To some, the fact that Nike created a big budget campaign before Jones even competed in her first Olympics is of great significance. It showed that society is at last ready to revere and reward female jocks as much as their male counterparts.

"It's the final validation for women sports," says Ron Rapoport, a veteran sports reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of Jones' new biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin Books, 2000). "It used to be parents didn't encourage their daughters to participate in sports," Rapoport says. "Girls did girl things, boys did boy things. All that has changed during Marion's [career]. Both the public and corporate America is waiting for someone like her. We're ready for this. We're hungry for this."

You don't really talk about individual people like this, do you? This is the kind of superlative language reserved for Berlin Walls falling or apartheids ending, not for one person, one athlete. And yet, this is just how we described Marion Jones - larger than life - because this is how she was described to us by the media, and how she described herself.

Her goals were outsized, outlandish. Five gold medals in Sydney. The New York Times dutifully gushed along with the rest of us: "At Long Last, Her Golden Moment."

I didn't want any part of it, thanks. I scoffed at the advertising, the megalomania, the Image. I sneered at the blatant orchestration, the push to follow the quest that would "play like a miniseries on NBC." It was all empty, of course, all in vain; I was hopelessly smitten with Mrs. Jones. How could I resist? She was beautiful - Good Lord, did you see her? - and she was determined and she was all but inevitable and she was Every. Fucking. Where.

The Image triumphed; the outcome was never in doubt, really.

And the rest of the story, the plummet from grace, just seemed to write itself after that. First the allegations of steroid use against her husband (somehow immediately believable), then similar allegations against Jones herself - also believable, damnably so, not just in spite of her righteous and vehement denials but in some way because of them. I can't explain how that works; I only know what I knew bone-deep and right away about Marion Jones, just as I knew it about my town's Mark McGuire once I read that first inconvenient report of androstenedione in his locker. I knew it was true, and I knew there was more to come. And every subsequent joy or sadness or vicarious thrill associated with McGuire, with Jones, would be tainted by that knowledge.

So the big news about Marion Jones isn't news, not to me. Increasingly, this is how these stories end. And the world just gets a little smaller, and being jaded is the best defense, and trust is a suckers game, and so on and so forth.

But I still feel a little sorry for Mrs. Jones. I have to, precisely because I feel a little sorry for myself, left with nothing but the Image...which is really all I ever had, come to think of it.

(Cross-posted.)