women|sport

photo by Robert Clark

You would understand if Jaconda Jackson wanted to close the book on her past. Almost cheerfully, however, Jackson, who just finished her senior season as a forward on the Fairleigh Dickinson basketball team, chooses instead to open the dozen 300-page notebooks into which she has distilled her remarkable life's story. "The things I read in those books," she says, "I can't help but wonder, Was that really me?"

Jackson was a finalist for the U.S. Basketball Writers' Association Most Courageous Award, which was given last spring to Auburn's Wes Flanigan for his inspirational return to the hardwood from bone cancer. But the story of the 24-year-old Jackson, who spent much of her childhood homeless in Philadelphia, is similarly uplifting. "I've never had a case as extreme as Jaconda's," says Janet Merriweather, a Philadelphia social worker who met Jackson 11 years ago. "Kids might be abandoned for a few days or weeks. But she was on her own for years."

Almost six years, by Jackson's reckoning. She never knew her father, and her mother, a drug and alcohol abuser, wandered in and out of the lives of her seven children, who passed from relative to relative. By her eighth birthday Jaconda had taken to the streets, living in the abandoned houses and tenements of South Philadelphia. "A little before my 13th birthday, me and my brother Kevin found a house that nobody knew about and fixed it up," says Jackson. "It wasn't much, but it was ours. But one day my uncle came over with some friends, and they just ransacked the place. Me and Kevin had had enough. We took some pills. I found a razor and slashed my wrists. When I woke up, I was being rushed to an ambulance."

Shortly after her suicide attempt, Jaconda was sent to a group home. Despite her sketchy academic records--she estimates that she attended about a dozen schools between the ages of eight and 13--Jaconda was placed in the seventh grade. Two years later she entered Philadelphia's Martin Luther King High, where she set the school career scoring record. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Jaconda was courted by Iowa, Penn State and Virginia. Wary of the academic rigors that lay ahead, she chose Fairleigh Dickinson, a smaller Division I school with an affiliation with Edward Williams Junior College, where she spent two years.

After being named the Northeast Conference's Newcomer of the Year in 1993-94, Jackson missed most of the last three seasons because of tears in her left anterior cruciate ligament. "It crushed me," she says. To deal with her pain, she turned to the diaries she has kept faithfully since she was sent to the Philadelphia group home 11 years ago. As Jackson, a communications major who hopes to pursue a journalism career, reread the story of her childhood she had a revelation: "I've already come back," she says.

--Christian Stone