Jones-ing

Okay, so when C opens her internet browser, she has her home page set to Yahoo. Not Google. Her kids, questioning her technology knowledge (and sanity), always ask why she is using the "inferior" Yahoo instead of God-Almighty-Google. C likes to tell them that she has been using Yahoo since before Google was invented. Well, before she became aware of Google. (I think they started going main stream-ish around 2000-2001 to us non-techies). C first got on the internet around 1994, she thinks, even before the internet itself! Well, she wasn't using the "graphics" part of the internet. Remember list servers and bulletin boards all done in text, no pretty HTML? Remember AOL and those discs given out everywhere? My kids have no idea what I am talking about.

Everyone likes Google for their "clean design" and uncluttered home page. That is exactly the opposite of what C wants. She likes the fact that she gets headlines and news on her home page. Yahoo is always adding gadgets and widgets and what-not to try and keep me hip and up to date (you can try Yahoo, oh, you can try). So it was curious to her when she saw in the Yahoo box that lists the top ten searched for items and saw Marion Jones. Clicking on the link brought her to an article that Marion Jones is trying comeback...in the WNBA! (ah, there it is, the tie from Yahoo and Google to women's basketball! It sure took me long enough, didn’t it?)

Yes, the former track and Olympic star that got busted for using steroids and lying about it (and passing bad checks and going to prison) wants to go to a WNBA team. She is 34 and the mother of 3, yet the reports say she is in good shape (I wish I could be after just 2 kids!) and she credits prison for keeping her in shape! Well now, I guess there was something good about prison for her.

She says she wants to join a team partly to get her message out that we should think about our choices before we act. She does have basketball experience. Fourteen years ago. In 1994-5 she was a freshmen and the starting point guard at the University of North Carolina, where they went 33-2 and won the national championship. She was then injured and decided to concentrate on track and field. She will have an uphill battle, as today's women's basketball players have gotten bigger, stronger and faster collectively.

How you feel about Jones playing in the WNBA depends on how you feel about second chances anmd does spending time in prison wipe the slate clean. Here is her quote from the NY Times:

“It’s important for people to know that it’s possible to make a mistake in your life, but it’s what you do after the mistake that people are going to remember you by,” she said. “Are you going to make whatever negatives that happened in your life a positive? Are you going to disappear? That has certainly never been in my horizon. How can I use my experience, my story, to help people and in the process hop on this journey of trying to make a team?”

Hey, maybe the Sacramento Monarchs should grab her…oh wait… they don’t have a place to play, either!

Thoughts, feeling, anyone? Email us.