The Banker
Years ago
Marion Jones to Debut in WNBA
From Adelaide Now
"DISGRACED former sprinter Marion Jones will return to elite American sport at the weekend when she makes her WNBA debut with the Tulsa Shock.
The 34-year-old Jones is best known as the athletics star who won three gold and two bronze medals at the Sydney Olympics, only to lose them after testing positive for a designer steroid.
She also spent six months in prison for lying to federal prosecutors.
Jones is returning to her roots - she was a former point guard who won a national women's college championship at the University of North Carolina back in 1994 - and will turn out for Tulsa, the WNBA franchise that moved out of Detroit in the offseason.
"I've made the choice not to disappear, not to crawl up in a hole, not to be a hermit, but to put myself out there on the highest stage of sport again and have people judge me, criticise me, watch me and then hopefully it helps them in their lives,' Jones said.
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Jones was a superstar, among the world's most recognisable female athletes, but all that was washed away as she spent about six months in a Texas prison for lying about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and her role in a cheque fraud scam.
Jones has maintained that she didn't know she was taking the designer steroid known as "the clear' until well after the Olympics, and she believed Trevor Graham - her coach at the time - was giving her flaxseed oil.
She says her mistake was not stopping to "take a break' before the lies to federal investigators that landed her behind bars.
"It's part of who I am. I think I have really taken and embraced it, and at this point that's all I can do,' Jones said. "I have learned from it. I think I'm a better person because of it.'
Her road back into the public eye began a year ago when she got word that WNBA teams might be interested in her services.
Eight months pregnant at the time, Jones could only laugh at the notion of playing pro basketball. But she talked to her husband about it and realised she still had an unquenched passion to play.
Plus, it would be a way to promote her "Take A Break' platform of thinking before acting - a chance to lead others away from the path that led her astray.
"I have this competitive drive that is kind of hard to kind of channel toward anything else,' said Jones, whose children are now 6, 2, and 10 months.
"I love being a mom, love being a wife but it's just hard to channel that really competitive energy, and so I really missed it. I missed the training, I missed competition and I missed everything related to it.'
Jones still has her sleek, athletic frame although she has run into something new going through the Shock's training camp: she simply isn't used to being a step slow.
It's not her conditioning. Instead, Jones is still trying to regain her basketball instincts. She catches herself thinking before she releases a pass, an extra split-second she can't afford at this level.
"Here, these ladies are all professionals and the coaches have already said they don't have time ... to really teach.'
