Playing Through

Photo by Errolo Anderson

David Halberstam once wrote that in his 40-odd-year career as a reporter, nobody had ever been "so gratuitously rude" to him as Joe DiMaggio. When I read that, I thought: Apparently Halberstam never met Marion Jones.

In 1999, I was assigned to write a profile on Jones for The New York Times Magazine. I was a fan of track and field and of Jones and flew down to Raleigh, N.C., where she trained with coach Trevor Graham, happy to write a puff piece in anticipation of the upcoming Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Jones was smart, attractive, engaging, and brimming with talent. What could I possibly say that would be negative?

A lot, it turns out.

Last month, after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators about taking performance-enhancing drugs, Jones, who now lives in Austin with sprinter Obadele Thompson, had to return her five Olympic medals from the 2000 Sydney Olympics (three of them gold). Annulling her records, track's governing body also demanded last week that she return over $700,000 in prize money. In January she'll likely be sentenced to hard time in prison. In the coming weeks, she is scheduled to testify against her former coach Graham in the Balco steroid case, a case which has also finally laid the mighty Barry Bonds low.

Eight years ago, steroids never crossed my mind. That must sound terribly naive, but sports fans are naturally trusting. We invest immense faith in athletes. We know they're not perfect. We accept their egoism. We forgive their failures. We keep believing in the historically hapless, in teams like the Chicago Cubs – or, anyway, we admire those who do.

The one thing we cannot tolerate in sports is fraudulence. In other parts of our lives we're used to BS. We even accept it as a condition of living. People get breaks they don't deserve. They learn to posture and pretend. It's not that they go through life lying and cheating (though some do); it's that we all, like it or not, live in a world where "image is everything," as Andre Agassi used to say.

Agassi would repudiate the ad line for Canon. He knew that in sports, image is ultimately nothing. In the end, no matter how famous, the athlete still has to do something real, and nobody or nothing can do it for him. Otherwise, sports are just like everything else, an elaborate con. In which case, why bother?

In 1999, after I met Jones, I wasn't thinking any of these thoughts. I just knew that she was a grade-A jerk. Fifteen minutes into a benign interview, she cut off the conversation. A guy from Nike, sent from Oregon to babysit their golden girl, reamed me out for trying to get a few more minutes with her. Her husband at the time – a surly shot-putter who would end up crying like a little girl when he was later busted for steroids – wouldn't even shake my hand.

Only later, only after the rumors and allegations began to emerge, did the obnoxiousness start to make sense. Knowing full well that she was full of shit, Jones and her handlers just didn't want anyone getting close enough to get a whiff of it.