King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Midweek malaise: Marion Jones tells Oprah how she made a "mistake," Randy Moss denies battery charges, Miguel Tejada's tragedy.
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Jan. 17, 2008 | Come on, best football day of the year. With conference championship Sunday just a few days away, the middle part of this week sure did get depressing all of a sudden.
There was Marion Jones on Oprah Winfrey's show Wednesday. The former Olympic champion is headed to prison for six months for lying to federal agents in a drug investigation. She told Oprah, "I want people to understand that, you know, everybody makes mistakes."
This is the thing now. We seem to be moving beyond the non-apology apology and into the era of saying you made a mistake. Michael Vick said it. Jones is saying it. The next person caught dead to rights doing something nefarious will probably say it.
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Jones spent years denying she'd used performance-enhancing drugs. She denied it to federal agents in the BALCO investigation in 2003. She finally admitted late last year that she'd taken the designer steroid THG, known as "the clear," in 2000 and 2001.
Winfrey asked her, "You knew at that time, you knew were lying, right?"
"I made a mistake," Jones said. "I made the choice, at that time, to protect myself, to protect my family."
Jones says she trusted her track coach, Trevor Graham, when he gave her the THG and told her it was flaxseed oil.
That's a mistake. Lying about it for half a decade or more, that's a way of life. I's a pattern of deception. It might even be some kind of pathology. Jones didn't wake up one day and say, "I made a mistake here. I should tell the truth." She ran out of options. She got caught.
"I truly think that a person's character is determined by their admission of their mistakes," she told Winfrey. And it's true that admitting mistakes says a lot of good things about a person's character.
Next page: Lying to the multitudes who love you is not a mistake. Plus: Randy Moss, Miguel Tejada