Friday, July 14 Made Marion By Tom Friend ESPN The Magazine

The man's an ass, an absolute ass. He's an ass for looking straight through his little girl. She used to go see him, when she was 5 and had no skin on her knees, and he'd hand her a quarter, as if that were parenting. She kept going back, of course, back to the Laundromat he owned in Los Angeles, and he'd start asking if she had a boyfriend, because she was 13 now. But she didn't want to talk about that. She wanted to talk about how she'd played Little League with the boys, how she'd turned singles into triples, how the boys' parents would yell to the pitchers, "Hit her between the eyes." She wanted to talk about gymnastics, how she could walk a half-mile on her hands. Or how she was winning 100-yard dashes in high-tops. But he never asked, the dumb ass, because he was whatever he was: bitter at his ex-wife or incapable of opening up or afraid, flat-out afraid, of a child.

	Five gold medals for Marion Jones? It's a possibility.

The last time he sent her a birthday card, she was 8. But she didn't hold that against him, not then, because she thought she could win a foot race and plop a blue ribbon on his desk, and he would dive back in. And pretty soon she was 15, and she'd become the fastest teen-age sprinter in the country, appearing on Good Morning America. And pretty soon she'd taken up basketball and could hang on the rim, scoring 48 points in high school one night. And yet this man still hadn't shown up at a game, or at a race, or at graduation. And pretty soon she'd gone on to the University of North Carolina, where she'd been the starting point guard on the Tar Heels' national championship team as a freshman. He must have read about it because, two years later, she had a tournament game in L.A., and he was in the stands by himself, stoic. But when the game was over, he vanished, never having said hello or goodbye.

She sent him a team photo, and she knows damn well he got it because it was up on his wall when she went back to the Laundromat again, went back for more pain. She was 20 by then, and she had seen his car in the lot that day, and she had pounded on his office door. But he hid from her. He had one of those windows where he could see out but she couldn't see in, and she kept knocking until, finally, his assistant answered. "Is my father here?" she asked. And the assistant said, "He was just a second ago." She thinks he may have been under the desk -- and that was it, that was the end. That was the last time she was going to let this dumb-ass man ignore her, ignore his own flesh and blood, ignore the next great female Olympic athlete in this nation. "His loss," she said to herself. And the thing is, she had something to tell him, something he might have wanted to hear. She had a boyfriend.

The man's an ass, an absolute ass. It's the '99 U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Ore., and this man is walking anywhere he wants to walk, bullying anyone he wants to bully. His wife is about to dust everybody in the 200 meters, and he is going to see it from the infield, no matter what security says. "Sir, the infield's off limits," they tell him. But someone whispers, "That's Marion Jones' husband," and they see all 300 pounds of him, they see the cap pulled low over his eyes, and they back way off.

Now the race is beginning, his wife is in the blocks, and as the starter says, "On your mark," as the spectators hush, this brooding man opens his curious mouth. "Letís ride!" he shouts, and his wife hears him, of course. She smiles, and it's over then. It's over in about 22 seconds. Once again, she is the fastest female on Earth, and it's all because of her sprint from one man (her father, the ass) to another (her husband, the ass).

No one can say where she'd be today if she hadn't stumbled upon the latter, this confusing man named C.J. Hunter. But it doesn't matter, because she's here. She's seven months from the Sydney Olympics and a month into her Nike ad campaign, and she's about to be on the tip of the world's tongue. Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Games and Carl Lewis won four in '84, but 24-year-old Marion Jones is going for a record five in track and field. Some say she's doing it for her father's approval, others say it's ego; she says it's because she lives to win. Whatever the reason, it is going to be the storyline of an Olympic fortnight. They will talk about her long legs and good looks and how she lifts weights an hour every morning and how she may someday play in the WNBA and how five events may exhaust her.

But the five golds are feasible. The 200 meters is her safest event and the 100 shouldn't be a problem, assuming she doesn't stumble out of the blocks. The 4x100 relay is usually an easy win for the Americans, and Jones likes their chances in the 4x400. The one for the thumb, though, the long jump, that's a different story. That's an event she didn't take up until her senior year at Thousand Oaks (Calif.) High, and she's so fast down the runway that her timing isn't like clockwork yet. It's the curse of being a sprinter. Lewis could control his speed, win the long jump in one or two attempts, then concentrate on his sprints. But the 5'10" Jones often needs four to six attempts, and it's a strain, and that's probably why she fell flat on the track with back spasms during the 200 at the World Championships in Seville, Spain, last summer.

In the months following, she lay around her house, healing, watching Judge Judy. And she would've gone nuts if not for her husband, the one everyone said was an ass, the one who would buy her licorice to cheer her up. Fans e-mailed her telling her to bag the long jump, but they huddled up, the two of them, and decided to never give in. It has always been them against the world, ever since they met, ever since he had to choose between her and his job with the UNC track team, ever since her mom lobbied against their wedding.

"We felt like outlaws," she says. But they married anyway, and they live in such a bubble now near Chapel Hill that she has alienated old teammates and coaches and much of the track and field community.

She doesn't care. She knows she probably wouldn't be running today without him, that he filled the void when a father was hiding from her and a mother was hounding her. Before they met, she was a sad, inconsolable woman. In fact, about a month before their first date, she had a tattoo burned onto her left shoulder blade, a tattoo that summed up exactly how she felt about life, a tattoo of the face of tragedy. A tattoo with a big teardrop.

She assumes she would have been "a daddy's girl." George Jones married Marion Kelly on a whim, and he liked his wife's name so much, he named their only child Marion. Big Marion thought it was a stupid idea -- two Marions in one household. She liked the name Christina better. But George got his way. George always got his way.

"Well, Iím glad," Little Marion says. "I am not a Christina. I know some girls named Christina, and that's not me. It would've been more like 'Chris.' " She was all tomboy, although her father wasn't around to see it, having left home when she was 2. "All I know is their divorce was bitter," she says. But it wasn't an issue for Little Marion -- not early on anyway -- because of Ira. Big Marion had married Ira Toler, a retired Navy officer, when Little Marion was 5. And so the girl had a father after all (along with a half-brother, Albert, Big Marion's son from a previous marriage). She would come home from school and Ira would have macaroni and cheese waiting for her, or would take her to tee-ball. Big Marion, a native of Belize, was the one who worked, as a legal secretary, and they adored their stucco home in Palmdale.

But Ira died of a stroke when Little Marion was 12, and she never once saw Big Marion cry. Like her mother, she held it all in too, refusing to visit Ira's open casket during the funeral. She just asked if she could go and play. That was her refuge. At school she started getting into spats, weighed down by so much pent-up sadness. But after school, sheíd get into foot races -- and she'd win them wearing Chuck Taylors and no socks.

By the time she was 15, wearing track shoes, she was a phenom. In April of '91, she broke the national high school record in the 200 meters with a 22.87. A month later, at the California divisional finals, she swept the 100, the 200 and the 400 all in one steamy afternoon. "It was like a Jesse Owens day," says Brian FitzGerald, her coach at Oxnard's Rio Mesa High her freshman and sophomore years. "And a lot of people wanted a piece of her."

Things got ugly then. In June of '91, she traveled to the TAC Nationals at Randalls Island, N.Y., where a future world champion shot-putter named C.J. Hunter was in the stands to see her finish fourth in the 200 and eighth in the 100. It was all good enough for an appearance on Good Morning America, but still not enough for some people. Trainers and sponsors handed Big Marion their cards, saying her daughter was being mishandled, and the track and field community began eating one of its own.

Big Marion found Little Marion a private coach, Elliott Mason, one of Evelyn Ashford's former running partners. But when Jones missed a random drug test required by USA Track and Field -- a drug test she hadn't even known about because of a mail snafu -- she was automatically banned for four years. Her mother hired Johnnie Cochran, pre-O.J. Simpson trial, and he got her reinstated a few months later. But the damage was done, and Little Marion began paying more attention to basketball. She even turned down a chance to attend the Barcelona Olympics as a 16-year-old alternate. "If Marion wasn't No.1, she wasnít going," FitzGerald says.

She preferred hoops, anyway. At 15, she could already dunk a tennis ball. But one game during her junior year, she soared for a layup, was undercut and broke her left wrist. She had time on her hands now, time to think about her nowhere father, and she began rebelling against her mother. Big Marion had become hands-on, always saying, "Youíre lucky you get to run track. I never had this opportunity when I was young." And Mason, her track coach, noticed Little Marion pouting. "Here was one of the greatest young athletes in history," he says. "And her father doesn't want to see her? Are you kidding me?

Unconsciously, when you've got that kind of rejection, there's going to be anger. And the ones who don't necessarily deserve the anger get it."

Big Marion got the anger. Little Marion wanted to get far away from her mother, and she chose Carolina on, of all things, a basketball scholarship. There was just one problem: Big Marion was going to Chapel Hill with her.

She wanted to scream, but she buried herself in basketball instead. At her third UNC practice, she was made the starting point guard, a position she'd never played -- and it had everything to do with her feet. She averaged about six layups a game, on jets alone. "Every loose ball, she got," says former Tar Heels strength coach Jeff Madden. "She'd be 10 yards ahead of everybody when she got the ball and 15 yards ahead when she shot it."

Big Marion attended every game, but Little Marion kept her distance, living in the dorms. Big Marion told people she was in Chapel Hill to keep an eye on her daughter, but others thought it was to live through her. Big Marion even began taking classes herself. Things were icy between them. "Iím stubborn, and she's stubborn," Little Marion says. "I wouldn't call her for a while, so she wouldn't call me because I didnít call her."

Jones red-shirted her junior year to try out for the '96 Games. As a child, she had written "I will be Olympic champion" on her chalkboard, and now she was acting on those words. That was a risk because she had a basketball body now, too much muscle mass. She moved in with Mason in California to train. But soon Sylvia Hatchell, UNC's hoops coach, was asking her to come to Colorado and try out for the World University Games.

"Shouldn't have let her go," Mason says. But she went, and broke her left foot, and then broke it a second time while rehabbing on a North Carolina trampoline, and her life caved in. The Olympics were out, she was laid up in her room, and all she thought about was the Laundromat. She still resented her mother, and wondered if she'd ever run again, and this is when she got the teardrop tattoo.

Which is where C.J. Hunter came in.

She had decided to see her father again, over Thanksgiving of '95, but she needed a ride to the airport. Hunter, just hired as the Tar Heels throws coach, offered a lift, and when her flight was delayed, they played dominos at his apartment. "We just got along so well," she says.

When her father hid from her, under that desk, all she could think of was C.J. "He made me laugh," she says. "And at that point I was very vulnerable. I needed something to take my mind off of . . . you know." They began to date, even though university rules forbade coaches from seeing athletes. He was her first-ever boyfriend, and they snuck to movies in Durham. But Hunter was eventually ordered by track coach Dennis Craddock to either leave Jones or quit his job. So he quit.

"No one knew what she saw in him," says another UNC coach. Hunter was seven years older than Jones, and had just separated from his wife and two young children and, Craddock says, "It looked to people as if he was having a romance as a married man." He would chew a toothpick all day. His first name was Cottrell, but he wouldn't tell anyone what the 'J' stood for -- still won't. In his college days at Penn State, he was unapproachable during competition. "I wouldn't have gotten near him with a 10-foot pole," says his coach with the Lions, Harry Groves. At Chapel Hill, he came off as aloof. "He had the perception of being a mean guy and did nothing to quash it," Craddock says.

Worse, Hunter's estranged wife, Kimberly Kendrick, took him to court for falling behind $13,445.45 in child support payments. Court records from May '97 show that Nike, his sponsor, was ordered to garnish his wages. When Kendrick heard he was dating Jones, she called the UNC athletic department saying the man had ruined her life, saying somebody should warn Marion.

Hatchell eventually took Jones out to lunch, told her Hunter had "baggage." It all offended Marion. She thought Hatchell might be trying to break them up for selfish reasons. She had played the '96-97 season and still had a year of eligibility left. She figured Hatchell didn't want to lose her to some man, some man seven years older with two kids and an angry ex-wife. "C.J. and his wife had problems," Jones says. "But who doesn't when you're going through divorce? It's funny how everyone was concerned about me suddenly. Nobody cared when I was sitting home with a broken foot, depressed. This was the first man I could open up to, the first man I could tell about my father."

Big Marion was out of the loop the whole time, and when Little Marion and C.J. were engaged in '97, she heard the news via town gossip. Little did anyone know, Hunter was helping Jones get her life together. After seeing him finish seventh at the '96 Games, she got the bug to rejoin track and field, and she passed up her last year of hoops. (In fact, Jones and Hunter were so ticked at Hatchell and Craddock, they trained at NC State. "Marion used to be so close to all her teammates," Hatchell says, "but she's just cut all ties.") Hunter found Jones a coach, former Jamaican Olympian Trevor Graham, and he begged Nike to sponsor her. When she won the 100 and the long jump in her comeback event, the '97 nationals in Indianapolis, it was a done deal.

Soon she was an international star, nearly eclipsing Flo-Jo's world records in the 100 and 200. She knew she was big when she sat on a subway in Tokyo and her translator heard passengers quoting her fastest times (10.65 for the 100, 21.62 for the 200). The European press began calling Jones and Hunter "Beauty and the Beast," but it didn't matter. It only mattered what she thought. She was the only one who knew that Hunter's father had bailed on him too, and she and C.J. would sit up at night swapping secrets. She decided she wouldn't invite her father to their wedding -- "I don't think he would have acknowledged he'd gotten the invitation anyway," she says -- but at least Big Marion and C.J. managed to stay civil the day Hunter and Jones tied the knot in '98. "All mothers don't want to lose their daughters, right?" he says. "She doesn't live with us, so I don't care."

And so Little Marion laughs at her tattoo now, the one with the teardrop, because she is her happiest now. "Believe me, C.J. is not an ass," she says, smiling. "Itís just he's not Mr. Outgoing. He's not going to come up and ask how you're doing -- because he probably doesn't care." She brags how she is a stepmom now and how Hunter has moved his ex-wife and two children to Chapel Hill and how the child support claims have been settled. "We get the kids three nights a week," Jones says. "They're adorable."

The couple took up golf, too -- and, true to her rep as the world's best female athlete, Marion sank a 50-foot putt on her first day out and refused to play off the ladies' tees. The WNBA wants her, but for the time being, she and C.J. coach a youth basketball team, a team that has no idea who she is.

Just wait seven months, wait for the attempt at five golds, wait until Nike plasters her everywhere. "Yeah, wait until Sydney," Hunter says. "She's gonna do some amazing things. And all those people who say she can't get five golds are full of it. And we'll remember every one of them. She won't say anything, but I'll damn have something to say."

And he laughs, and she laughs, and when she is asked about her father, the ass, she says, "Him? I'm through with him. I've got C.J. now. Maybe I'm in denial, but I'm comfortable in my denial." Of course, the father is still out there, though he has made himself unavailable, and Marion hopes it stays that way. "If he doesn't talk to me, why should he talk to you?" she says. And when she is asked if George Jones will be watching her in Sydney, she rubs her hamstring, looks straight at C.J. and says, curtly, "Got no way of knowing." But just the other day, a certain poster was still hanging on a certain Laundromat wall. Hers.