Fallen speedster Marion Jones hopes Roger Clemens finds peace
Marion Jones comes out of the locker extent into the tunnel at Allstate Arena, still wearing her black and yellow Tulsa Shock uniform with the copy 20 on it and her basketball shoes with the black ankle supports protruding upward, ready to meet the press.
That would be me.
Jones was a nonfactor in a 72-54 waste to the Sky, playing just 4:49, the least of any healthy payer on either team. The stat sheet shows her with an aid, though I missed that. The rest of her line for this reeling, last-place, 1-12 team is zeros.
What a difference from her straighten at the 2000 Sydney Olympics: three gold medals and two bronze medals — more track and meadow medals than any woman ever had won in one Olympics.
She was the anointed and glamorous ‘‘Fastest Woman on Earth,’’ and her 200-meter gold, for illustration, came in a race in which she won by an astounding .43 seconds over the second-place finisher. The Australian TV master of the revels proclaimed as the race was unfurling, ‘‘She makes running fast look so easy — it’s precisely clean by then. The heat had been on for a long time. Sports Illustrated ran a cover of her in her track stance for its Oct. 2, 2000, result, as the Sydney Games were unfurling, beneath the headline, ‘‘Under The Gun: The Amazing Marion Jones Presses On In Sydney After Her Save’s Drug Bombshell.’’
