The first time I saw Marion Jones was on television but I still embraced her. Embraced her like a favorite sister. She was competing for a national championship. But it wasn't on a track crushing her competition. She was a freshman point guard for the North Carolina Tar Heels women's basketball team. I remember the Louisiana Tech game when she was forced to sit in the first half with foul trouble. I remember the Tar Heels crumpling under the weight and brute force of the Lady Techsters. I remember her coming back into the game and watching as her entire team took a deep breath because Ms. Jones was back and in full effect.

She scored only two points that game, but like the best of the best NBA point guards, she wouldn't allow scoring to define her performance. Jones innately knew how to do the The Little Things that are so key to winning; grabbing every loose ball, breaking the press by herself, getting the rock to her teammates in the right spots that meant baskets. Jones led the comeback and the young Heels vanquished La. Tech and Jones flashed that toothy grin to end all grins and held up the NCAA trophy.

The first time the black community en masse saw Marion Jones we embraced her because she represented us - the entire Diaspora.

We knew Jones was ahead of her time because we are just seeing women act like her today. She was extremely confident but extremely cute about it; pert without being overbearing. Yet she had a sexy allure to her - it was when she didn't smile that it showed. When she readied for a race you could see those eyes in a magazine.... Just Do It.

She was beautiful and graceful on the track. She didn't so much as power down her lane as she left other runners in her wake, she flew. It was like a snapshot had been taken of her first full stride and then a hidden conveyor belt took over and pulled her down the track in that still frame. She seemed like she could run any distance. One stride and the conveyor belt might just pull her 26 miles. It already pulled her down the long jump runway to a 23' leap in high school, eight years before her appearance in the Sydney Olympics.

In 1996 Ms. Jones was expected to drape herself in the American flag - over and over and over again. But she broke a bone in her foot while training and missed Atlanta. While rehabbing that foot she later broke the bone again - training on a trampoline.

Did that fleeting moment that smacked Marion with mortality plant a seed in her head that would grow into a dense, thick weed a few years later?

Around that time she met her future husband --- and future Judas, C.J. Hunter.

Two years later a Miles-inspired Elvin Jones drumbeat of Jones' name began anew; this time for her track and field accomplishments. We all waited and expected to hear something but not this loud, not this strong.

Bam! The best long jump of the year.

Boom-clack! Jones wins the 100 and 200 meter races plus the long jump at the US Championships.

Cymbal shot with bass drum backbeat! Jones becomes the first US woman to be ranked number one in the world in those same three events.

And finally. Roll, trill ----- Ka-Clack!! She begins an unprecedented run through the world's best competition, not losing a track event for 10 months.

She arrived. She was Nike women everywhere. She had that skyscraper-size billboard on a Madison Avenue building type-A star power. The smile, the feminine beauty, the grace. Marion Jones made it cool to be all those things and be married in love.

At the moment of what she told us would be her greatest feat to date, winning four gold medals at the World Track and Field Championships in Spain, that mortality thing happened again. She sprained her back during the long jump competition and pulled out of the event. She openly bit her lip in front of the world's cameras. I remember her tears, not many, just enough to further endear us to her. But this was 11 months before Sydney and a few months before Nike planned to make Marion Jones the female Michael Jordan.

Now, she tells us that this was the time she began the clandestine trips to the labs of the Bay Area Cooperative, to Victor Conte, and to steroids and "the clear," the undetectable to urinalysis designer performance enhancer that had that underground athlete cred like a once-local band about to Rolling Stone blow up.

For male athletes the clear was a continuum of their already roided-up regimen; a shot in the hind parts supplemented by the undetectable cocktail. For women like Jones and Kelli White, another US sprinter who was looking for that boost into the upper echelon of her sport, Conte had to approach them like a drug dealer. He had to juxtapose it against the violence of self-injecting a drug used more by freakishly behemoths like the testosterone-filled world of bodybuilding. Conte had to make the pull of this illicit substance a soft sell. It's not like you have to jam a needle in your butt and bruise it and barely be able to sit for awhile.

'It's just two drops under your tongue, baby.'

All that time she was putting down poses for us, making us love her in any way each of us chose, all that time she was in the process of transcending the world of athletics and transcending the world of the US black community and was becoming property of the nation and the globe ------- Marion Jones was using.

Jones wasn't the little girl prodigy anymore. She couldn't get away with just the toothy grin and her melliferous, lilting voice, and the twinkle in her eyes. She was going on 24 and knowing this was the Olympics in which she needed to fulfill all her promise, and all the promises she made to us. The world had to be closing in on her. For Jones this was put up time. Put up and the world would be her oyster for the remainder of her life. Fall off and she might just become the greatest failure in the history of women's sports.

'It's just two drops under your tongue, baby.'

Like a common self-medicating dope fiend she was using. She had an addict for a husband - by 1999 she had to know - in Hunter. Maybe, like the lovers they were, they used together. Maybe he went off and did his deca, nandrolone cycle; a shot in the hind parts muscle - ahhhhhh... AH! While Jones did her thing. Then they went off and trained.

Maybe not.

But she did win five medals at the Sydney Games, including winning the 100-meter finals by the second-largest margin of victory ever in women's track and field, a whopping .37 seconds over Ekaterini Thanou of Greece. The Nike commercials aired and Jones was a hit. Though she failed to win five gold medals, five medals, in and of themselves, were enough to catapult her into the rarified air of the pantheon of Olympic athletes.

'It's just two drops under your tongue, baby.'

But a month later, when confronted with the clear by investigators into Hunter's steroid use, she - and Hunter - lied.

When Conte was arrested and questioned by investigators after the BALCO raid in 2003, Conte named Jones as one of the athletes who took the clear. Jones was the biggest catch on the list that Conte provided. He didn't name Barry Bonds. Conte claims to this day that he never gave Bonds any illicit drugs. However, each athlete he has named has been found out to have used steroids and/or the clear.

But in May of 2004, Jones in a powerful press conference speech denied ever using a performance-enhancing drug and swore she would sue the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) if they acted to ban her from competing in the 2004 Olympics in Greece. The world that winced at her involvement with Hunter was again proud of her strong stance and her willingness to fight WADA by any means necessary.

I know I was proud. I know I believed in every word that came from Marion Jones' mouth that day. It wasn't like I had a flood of fond memories that dropped a glaze and haze over my eyes. My belief was due to Marion Jones the - at the tine - present-day woman standing up against the male-dominated WADA and the rest of the sporting world and saying emphatically, No! I am not going to stand by idly while you attempt to ruin my life; while you attempt to put me on display because I have the biggest name in track and field.

That's why I believed ------ the lie.

She didn't win any medals in Greece. In fact, she failed badly. She said it was due to the off the track pressures she faced and the time they took that didn't allow her to train well enough to compete at her best.

I believed that lie, too.

That same year Jones, who divorced Hunter, became intimately involved with Tim Montgomery. For the first time, I winced. Montgomery was named in the BALCO investigation and in a few months retired from the sport a disgrace because he, like Jones' previous partner, Hunter, lied. But in the meantime there was an ABC "20/20? special on Marion Jones. It was about her new life, the house that would be her sanctuary was being built, and she proudly showed her interviewer and the nation her new life - and life that included a baby. I remember it well.

She had just settled a $25 million lawsuit with Conte for defaming her and tarnishing her reputation to the point where she could no longer earn wages as an endorser or an athlete. I went from wincing to near tears of respect for the woman, she wanted to raise this child and regain her track and field form, and unheard of feat if she could pull it off.

I cheered wildly when she won the 100 meters at the 2006 US Championships. I didn't mind that she bowed out of the 200-meters because she said she was too tired from the 100. But I became afraid when her "A" test came up positive for EPO.

'It's just some blood cells; it's natural, baby.'

When the "B" test returned a negative result and Jones was cleared, the world was fine once again.

But that was a year ago that now seems so far away it feels like another era. I feel like I was a teenager then because my hopes for Marion Jones rose and fell so many times. I feel like, just from her, I learned so much about the system that builds athletes into stars and drops them off the face of the Earth at the drop of an accusation.

Now, everything I thought I knew is shaken. Yesterday Marion Jones admitted using the clear for two years, from 1999 to 2001. Even if she cooperates with investigators she might go to jail for lying way back when.

She says the reason she lied is because she panicked.

I don't believe Marion Jones anymore.