Marion Jones Attempting Comeback as Pro Basketball Player

SAN ANTONIO -- Five months ago, Marion Jones gave birth to her third child, Eva-Marie. Fifteen months ago, Jones was getting out of a Texas prison after a six-month stay for lying to federal investigators. Just over two years ago, she stood before the public and, teary-eyed, admitted to cheating her fans, friends, family, sport and country by using steroids before the 2000 Summer Olympics.

Amazingly, Jones -- who went from the most famous women's track star to the most infamous -- looked on Monday during a three-hour workout of agility drills, weightlifting and playing basketball in a church gym here as if she had never been through whatever discomfort there may be in childbirth, or, more to the point, through what was her own personal hell as a confessor.

"This is a second chance for me," Jones, now 34, told me in explaining her still youthful appearance highlighted by her trademark bright smile.

She was talking at that second about her undertaking to become a professional athlete again, this time as a basketball player, as she revealed to FanHouse and The New York Times. But she could have been talking about her image as well, which she just about decimated with her dishonesty. She was slapped with a two-year suspension from track competition and had little choice but to retire from the sport that made her a millionaire.

"I missed competitiveness," Jones said after I watched her at the Antioch Baptist Church go through one of her thrice-a-week three-hour basketball workouts. "I missed the challenges of participating in sports."

What Jones has embarked on over the past few months, since she decided to resurrect her athletic career, is doubly dangerous and, as such, admirable. Indeed, this will take guts she never had to summon, a fortitude we are still waiting to see from some other notable athletes who've strayed from the boundaries of integrity.

Jones, after all, will be trying to make it in a game she hasn't played in over a dozen years and against the best in the world -- the WNBA -- who play it. To do so she will be forced to revisit her painful past that also resulted in the surrender of her Olympic medals, the lowering of her jersey at her alma mater and what sounded in a court filing like near financial ruin.

"There isn't a day I don't reflect on some of the bad choices I made," Jones said, her blue T-shirt soaked with sweat from individual drills and one-on-one, two-on-two and three-on-three games she'd just gone through. "But I'm not going to crawl up in a corner.

"I know that anytime I'm involved there is going to criticism, skepticism and naysayers. But I know I'm on the right path now. This is just another little bit of the challenge."

Jones may be testament to the adage that the truth sets one free. For ever since she's been telling it, good things have come her way. There is the birth of another child with her husband of two years, former Barbados sprinter Obadele Thompson, now an aspiring writer. There is the vision for a campaign she calls Take a Break, in which she visits school kids and tells them to take a deep breath and give any decision a second look lest it be a wrong one that they may want to lie about as she did.

Then came a phone call from someone in the WNBA last summer, Jones said, who inquired about her interest in playing basketball again. She attended North Carolina on a basketball scholarship and helped lead the women Tar Heels to a national championship as a freshman in 1994. In 2003, she was still so highly thought of as a basketball player that the Phoenix Mercury spent its third-round draft pick on her. That has expired and Jones is a free agent with plans over the next several weeks to showcase herself to interested franchises.

"I was eight months pregnant when the call came," Jones said with a laugh. "That's what I was thinking about."

But she did what she hadn't done before: she took a break and pondered the opportunity with her husband, her family, her friends and her advisers, like her longtime attorney Rich Nichols.

"It was never a question of whether I could do it physically," Jones said. "It was do I want to welcome the scrutiny again in my life. I prayed about it."

And in early September, she made what became the first of her thrice-weekly 90-minute pilgrimages from her Austin home to a gym built in a rough-and-tumble San Antonio neighborhood by former NBA player and coach Avery Johnson. There she works out with Olaf Lange, an assistant with the city's WNBA Silver Stars, and whatever skilled gym rats or pros he can drum up. Monday one of Jones' sparring partners was WNBA veteran and three-time All-Star Marie Ferdinand-Harris, now of the L.A. Sparks, who took off the 2006 season to have her son Cedrick.

"You got any energy left?" Ferdinand-Harris asked Jones as she plopped down to take a swig of water before engaging in a game of three-on-three with four guys who were brought in two hours after Jones had gone through all her other work.

Jones assured that she wasn't winded and joined the fray to close out her three hours. She got banged around. She bent over and grabbed her shorts to catch her breath. She drove past Ferdinand-Harris, and Ferdinand-Harris, a little shorter than the six-foot Jones, dropped a jump shot or two over her. A film crew from producer John Singleton's company filmed it all for one of ESPN's 30 for 30 documentaries.

"I was shocked she was still able to go," Ferdinand-Harris said. "But ... she's an athlete. If anyone can do it [make the WNBA after so long], she can."

Lange agreed.

"With great athletes," Lange said, "I don't dismiss anything. I knew it would be very challenging. At the end of the day, it comes down to instincts of the game. We have to bring that back out."

Lange during one drill yelled at his prized pupil -- "right!" -- as she caught the orange-and-white WNBA basketball, dribbled and stepped once in the direction of his command and then rose and, with a flick of her right hand, shot the ball high from near just beyond the free-throw line. It dropped through the net and immediately Lange screamed "left" as another basketball was bounced to his charge.

Over and over again, Lange issued his orders. And over and over again, Jones obliged. Some of her efforts found their mark; others clanged away. Her quest won't be easy.

The WNBA is suffering financially. Rosters have been trimmed to 11 spots. Sacramento's franchise is up for grabs. There are more talented women basketball players than ever.

I asked Jones if she decided to try to make a living in the WNBA because the league could use her notoriety as new investors appear difficult to find and its longtime superstars like Lisa Leslie move into retirement.

"No," said Jones. "At this point in my life I don't need that. Attention ... I can do without."

Jones said she simply still had a passion to compete, and pro basketball, here and in Europe, can soothe it. Here is hoping she's found her balm.