Marion Jones

A hero to me is someone who not only possesses the characteristics that I am looking for in a hero but more. Some of the characteristics that I would see in a hero are things like them being athletic, honest, hard-working, to show respect to other people, to accomplish things that maybe one day I would like to accomplish, and is a good role model for others. Marion Jones is a person that not only possesses these characteristics, but she has done more. Marion Jones is truly my hero. She shows that she would never give up, and she was accepted by guys as she was growing up. Marion had a hard childhood, her mom and dad divorced when she was very young, and her dad was never around for her life. Her step-father died of a stroke when she eleven years old. Even though Marion had been through all of that, she never stopped trying to reach the goals she had for herself.

When Marion was eight years old, she had graduated from T-ball to Little League. On her team she was the only girl, and was very competitive. The parents of the boys on the other teams would yell and say hit the girl in the face, and all sorts of other things about her since she was the only girl on the team. As soon as that started happening Marion’s parents thought it was time for Marion to do something else. Shortly after that Marion was enrolled in a gymnastics class, and never played baseball in an organized league again. She was also very good at gymnastics, when she saw other people doing back flips, cart wheels, or handstands, she would say to the instructor I want to learn how to do that, and within a week she knew how to do it. She liked gymnastics but knew that wasn’t really what she wanted to do all her life. Her mother and father at her young age, saw her passion for sports and her passion for doing well in everything she tried.

Marion would always want to go out with her brother Albert and his friends. When she was six she could bounce a basketball and would beat all the other girls in her class in running. When she used to go out with her brother and his friends she could beat them in running, and Albert started bragging about his sister saying “you guys are getting beat by my little sister”, even though he knew he was getting beat by her, too. Marion’s brother use to say it was like he had a brother because Marion could dribble a basketball, she use to ride bikes with them, run races with him and his friends, she could also throw a baseball and hit one.

Marion had a capacity for learning a skill or technique; she would practice it until she had mastered it. She never lost those techniques. Her coaches in high school, college, and beyond were very impressed with her confidence. She was a very hard-working person, and that would follow her with any sport she tried, which was a great thing. Another quality that she possessed was focus. Her basketball coach at the University of North Carolina saw this in Marion, and she said that it was very good for having the ability to concentrate exclusively on the job at hand, Marion called it “living the moment”. When Marion played basketball she played as a forward. She excelled in basketball and fulfilled her dream of playing basketball, but she soon figured out that basketball wasn’t what she really wanted to do. She went back to running track around 1997, and this is when she won the 100 at the world championships. She finished that year ranked number one, that year she was also the Track and Field News athlete of the year. She later on the next year took the bronze when she did the 100. She was very young when she competed in the Olympic trials; she was only a junior in high school at the time. She had finished fourth in the 200, she knew she could do better. So she then turned down an invitation to the Barcelona Games, because she was striving to get better.

Marion is defiantly a great athlete, which I admire about her. She knows what she needs to accomplish and she does it, she made sure she had her goals set out for her. When she did have her goals set out for her that people that were too high for her to reach, she wouldn’t care what they thought, she would try to achieve them as best as she could. Sometimes the people would say that she was selfish and things along that line, but really she wasn’t she just had goals she tried to reach. She is my hero because she shows me that even though the public may say things that may bring you down, you should still have confidence, and don’t let what people say get in the way of you reaching your goals. It’s like everything she has tried she has excelled greatly in, and that’s really something that a lot of people would like to achieve, and could look up to her as a great role-model. I really like that she played basketball, and she was very good at it, which gives me someone I could really look up to.