A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes

Marion Jones: Equity through Infamy

92 MARION JONES Equity through Infamy —ROBERTA J. NEWMAN AND JOEL NATHAN ROSEN INTRODUCTION Unlike how it is with other African-American female athletes, there is no shortage of material when it comes to erstwhile track and field star Marion Jones.Newspaper and academic articles,books,both for children and adults, blogs, documentaries, and her many appearances on daytime and nighttime television all chronicle Marion Jones’s life and athletic prowess to one degree or another. They span her childhood, from her abandonment by her biological father through her adolescent tomboy tendencies that would become, according to her, the training ground for her development into a worldclass athlete who just happened to be a woman, and an African-American woman, at that. Where once her story was one to be celebrated, however, the majority of more recent Jones-related material that seems to have exploded in the wake of her very public fall from grace reads less as a story of an athletic phenomenon with Horatio Alger overtones than as a disquieting tale of a woman foolishly caught up in a dragnet brought about by the lure of fame and celebrity. In this regard,there has been very little of Jones’s life either on or off the track that has been left unexamined.Few seem to look beyond uncritical biography and conjecture into what is by every measure a very real human drama made all the more significant by its sociopolitical underpinnings. Indeed, more so than any of her many medals or her remarkable statistical accomplishments —or really most any other measurement by which an athlete’s prowess can be accurately gauged—it is her foibles that stand poised to be her legacy. But in truth, what the story of her rise and fall and perhaps even the more recent attempt at rehabilitating her image demonstrates,more than any of the other factors, is that it is the coalescence of race and sex and expectation that serve as the most important pieces of the puzzle that is Marion Jones. Jones’s fall was indeed dramatic and wholly public,which made it seem all the more real and all the more personal. For a while at least, she belonged to us. She was ours, sport’s version of a dream girl. Perhaps it was her milliondollar smile that captivated us all—that and her ability to get from one spot Marion Jones: Equity through Infamy 93 to the next faster than anyone else.She was golden,and she was beautiful,but she also crossed the one line in sport that remains sacrosanct—and she got caught.“Yes, I took a performance-enhancing drug, and I can’t go back and undo any of it,” she wrote in her 2010 autobiography.1 From that point on, there have been reassessments on top of reassessments of her life,her motivations , and ultimately her place in the larger sporting narrative. Her story may be an all-too-familiar account of an athlete who has achieved fame only to free-fall into disgrace,with one major exception: she is a woman. In a culture whose approach and attitudes towards women athletes have typically been at best begrudging and at worst dismissive if not downright hostile, why is it that this woman’s story, which is less tragic than it is sobering, demonstrates such resilience, so long after she demonstrably let us down, as her fans and admirers suggest? That a woman who so publicly projected such confidence and was capable of such unprecedented physical accomplishments, with such ease and such poise could so seemingly easily give it all away may strike at the heart of this saga, but only because it underscores so much of the ancillary discussions relative to sport today.Adding by extension the omnipresence of race—more specifically color—to this mix, alongside the vagaries of gender, always a hotly contested topic within sporting circles, makes this a truly American tale, if only because it hits all the highs and lows that we have come to expect in American narratives of the sort: outsider makes good, outsider exposed, outsider forced to plead for absolution before ultimately being shoved back into the shadows, where the outsiders tend to congregate—well out of view. And yet the trajectory of this particular narrative, with all of its public twists and turns, its private anguish, and its undeniable prurience, in a sense leaves Jones’s story poised to be one of the...