Youth Movement

They wanted autographs from a runner. Imagine that. Late Sunday afternoon Marion Jones was leaving the track stadium at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, where in four days she had turned potential into reality. As she passed through a chain-link gate, a cluster of children pressed forward, as if mistaking her for some other famous MJ. She laughed at the attention, joyfully affixing her name to each item with a flourish. Sunlight danced off her eyes, framing the lace of the future.

This has been the spring of American track and field's Armageddon, a post-Olympic apocalypse replete with weekly pronouncements of impending death. Most suggested cures for the sport's ills have included buzzwords like "marketing" and "presentation," spawning the likes of the Donovan Bailey-Michael Johnson 150-meter world's fastest human travesty in Toronto on June 1. Then last week the U.S. Track & Field championships brought to Indianapolis a cache of self-defeating controversy, including three drug-testing imbroglios and a simmering fight over the possibility of issuing to injured stars wildcard invitations to the World Championships in Athens in August. Riveting stuff. Call it track for C-SPAN. Yet before the weekend was dead, a remarkable thing had happened: The restorative power of youth rendered the sludge meaningless.

There was the 21-year-old Jones, the former California high school wunderkind who had spent three years as a full-time basketball star at North Carolina while dabbling at track and field. She took out two of the grandes dames of the U.S. over the weekend, beating Gail Devers (symbolically) in the 100 meters and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (actually) in the long jump, to instantly become a threat to win both events in Athens. And there was Maurice Greene, a 22-year-old who shaved almost .2 of a second from his personal best in winning the 100 meters in 9.90, a time that has been surpassed by just two other Americans.

It was Jones who jolted the national meet to life by torching one 100 semifinal heat in 10.92 seconds last Thursday night (only seven U.S. women had run faster), while Devers won her prelim heat in 10.99 and her semifinal in 11.15. The next night Jones won the final in 10.97, despite running into a headwind, shutting down 10 meters short of the finish and cruising across the line. Two-time Olympic gold medalist Devers had pulled out of the final with what her coach, Bobby Kersee, said was a calf injury.

Kersee didn't pull his wife, Jackie, out of Sunday's long jump, which gave Jones the opportunity to deprive the 35-year-old Joyner-Kersee of her eighth consecutive national title. She did so in spectacular style, beating the 1988 Olympic champion by one inch with a jump of 22'9", after Joyner-Kersee had taken the lead on her fifth leap.

In all it was a stunning coming out party for Jones, who had tasted national prominence in years past—she was fourth in the 1992 Olympic trials 200 and fifth in the 100 as a high school junior—but remained largely an enigma, at least as far as track and field went. She started for three seasons as a 5'10" point guard at North Carolina and was a key member of the Tar Heels' 1994 NCAA championship team. In the springs of '94 and '95 she struggled through abbreviated track seasons after basketball; despite making All-America both years, she did not approach her phenomenal high school form.

"I tried to tune out track and field; that was the easiest way to get through it for me," said Jones on Sunday as she walked from the stadium with her boyfriend, Olympic shot-putter C.J. Hunter. "But the love never died. Every time there was a national championship or some other big meet, I'd remember what it was like, and I'd miss being at that level. I was envious. I knew I could be there."

Jones's plan was to redshirt in basketball for the 1995-96 season and focus on qualifying for the '96 Olympics, but a broken foot in August '95 killed that idea. She sat out that basketball season, played all of last season and then began training with Raleigh, N.C.-based coach Trevor Graham, a Jamaican who won a silver medal in the 4 x 400-meter relay at the 1988 Games. Under Graham, Jones has made swift improvement in her running mechanics. She also has lost, according to Graham, "between five and 10 pounds," with a diet stripped of junk food, and in general has adopted the mien of a professional runner during the 13 weeks leading to the nationals. ( Jones graduated from North Carolina in May with a bachelor's degree in communications.)

"She's grown up," says Curtis Frye, the sprint coach at North Carolina. "She's one of those athletes who is just different. I've seen her run 2:10 for 800 meters. I've seen her run 4.6 for a 40 with football players, and then the football players stopped running with her. I've seen her dunk a basketball. She's going to do things in track and field that only a few athletes have ever done."

Greene may do the same. As a senior at F.L. Schlagle High in Kansas City, Kans., in 1993, he won state titles in the 100, 200 and 400. He then spent a year each at Park College in Parkville, Mo., and Kansas City, Kansas Community College. His talent surfaced occasionally, as it did in his upset of Carl Lewis in the 100 at the '95 Texas Relays. Greene ran a wind-aided 9.88 seconds in winning that race. Thereafter, when he signed autographs, Greene would inscribe a large "9.88" next to his name and add a tiny at the bottom, the universal track-nut symbol for a wind-aided time. In search of consistency after his second-round exit at last year's U.S. Olympic Trials, he moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles in September to train under 1972 Olympian John Smith. "I needed to learn," says Greene.