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Profile of Former Celtic Sam Jones
Former NBA Great Sam Jones, Bouncing Along
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post
Staff Writer
Friday, December
4, 1998; Page C1
They have a name
for venerable
sports figures
like Sam Jones. "Old school." As in not
from this planet of chartered jets,
DirectTV and seven-foot centers who double
as rappers. As in not from the new school
of coach-chokers, trash-talkers and
multimillionaire practice-balker.
Sam Jones, the former National Basketball
Association great who has lived in Silver
Spring for nearly three decades, is old
school all the way. All "Temptations" and
teamwork. One shot of whiskey his entire
life. Never missed a practice. Shoe
contract? What shoe contract? Wore canvas
sneakers, something called Beta Bullets.
Let not his bank account but his bank shot
do the talking. Hell, he practically
invented the bank shot.
Sam Jones represents the last smidgen of
humility in his profession, a profession
that now breeds talented rascals who taunt
you as they brush past your shorts gliding
to the hoop.
And now the talented rascals are out of
work indefinitely because there is no
basketball season because the NBA's owners
have locked them out because the owners and
the rascals can't agree on how to split $2
billion in annual revenues, among other
things. But you can't find a fan anywhere
who is shedding a tear for either side
because this is the War of the Absurdly
Rich.
So here we are on Day 158 of the NBA
lockout. A new session of labor
negotiations this week produced nothing.
And the league's commissioner says it is
more likely than not that the season is
kaput.
Sam Jones is at home, lounging in his
redwood California contemporary with the
cathedral ceilings and the wood-burning
stove. He is not pining for the start of
the NBA season. He is pining for a better
golf game, hoping he can shoot under 80
sometime soon. He is trying to score
tickets to the van Gogh exhibition.
Often, he is working in his garden ("a
Japanese motif"). He beams when looking out
over his one-acre sprawl and seeing the
Japanese maples and Chinese elms and
Colorado blue spruces he planted in 1970,
the year after he turned in his No. 24
Boston Celtics jersey and moved his family
into the new home he built.
At 65, Sam Jones is very approachable – not
like some of the big stars today. He is a
legend in our midst, someone you can
actually touch. You might see him eating at
the neighborhood Boston Market. He'll shake
your hand. You might see him at a
Montgomery County public school (or, at
least your kid might). Jones is a
substitute teacher, most often at
Gaithersburg Middle School. And though he
still looks like an athlete – trim and all
of 6 feet 4 inches and change – Jones
doesn't like to hype his past. The kids,
however, usually find out.
"One girl said to me, 'Mr. Jones, you lied
to me. You said you weren't a ballplayer.'
I said, 'No, I didn't lie to you. If I was
a ballplayer, I'd be on strike. I'm a
teacher.' "
When the Celtics drafted Jones in 1957 out
of North Carolina Central, he was
demoralized. The Celtics were coming off a
championship season and 11 veterans were
returning. How was he supposed to crack
that lineup? No one among the Celtics brass
had even seen him play. They had drafted
him on a recommendation.
West Charlotte High School offered him a
job to teach and coach its basketball team.
If only he could negotiate another $500 out
of the school, Jones figured, he could make
a nice middle-class living ($5,500 a year
back then) and forgo rolling the dice with
the Celtics.
"The guy said, 'We'd like to give it to
you, Sam, but we don't have it,' " Jones
recalls.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Jones played 12 years in the NBA and his
Celtics teams won 10 championships. His
peers dubbed him "Mr. Clutch," for the
icy-cool way he sank buckets in big games
as if he were flipping pennies into a
public fountain. He was an all-star five
times, retired with 11 Celtics records, was
inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1983 and
was named in 1996 one of the 50 greatest
players ever.
"Sam was one of the great shooters of all
time," says Red Auerbach, Jones's coach and
now vice chairman of the Celtics
organization. "But he was team-oriented.
All he wanted to do was win. ... The great
athletes, they played for pride."
And now?
"Some kids get the big contracts and say,
'That's it. I've got it. Can't play. I got
a hangnail now.' "
After leaving the sport as a player, Jones
did some coaching and scouting at the
college and pro levels and was once
athletic director for the D.C. public
schools league known as the Interhigh. But
now you have to drag him to a pro game. He
has a lifetime pass to any arena in the
nation – courtesy of the NBA – but it's a
privilege he rarely uses.
"I don't think basketball is made to be
one-on-one," Jones says. "And there is too
much one-on-one. ... Players now, they go
into this league and have no idea how the
game is played. They think they do."
Some of them also don't show the proper
consideration for their elders.
One of the NBA's young guns had the gall to
tell Jones: "It's been so long since you
played, they shot with a square ball."
But Jones ain't mad at the kid.
"I call it maturity," he says, or lack
thereof. "We didn't have players coming
into the league at 18, 19, 20 years old. We
respected the vets. We bided our time, but
with the idea that one day we would be
taking their places."
Jones never made more than $55,000 a year
when he was playing, yet put five kids
through college. That's chump change,
walking-around money for some of today's
stars. The average NBA salary is $2.6
million.
But Jones doesn't begrudge guys making the
millions he never saw.
"I don't think we thought of basketball as
a career," he says. "I never saw a
professional basketball game until I played
in one. When I came along there were only
eight teams and 96 players."
Today: 29 teams and 348 full-time jobs for
guys who can hoop.
"Everybody at that time had a degree from
college. We could go out in the working
world. ... But hell, everything was also
cheap. You could get 4 percent mortgages.
You could get Mercedes back then for
$3,000."
Everything was cheap, but not that cheap.
Players had an appreciation for the value
of money.
Hence, the famous Jones pancake story:
The Celtics arrived in Syracuse at 2 a.m.
for a game the following night. Famished,
Jones and teammates Bill Russell and K.C.
Jones headed to the nearest diner.
The trio ordered pancakes, but Sam Jones's
stack came out first. In comes Red
Auerbach, the squat, cigar-chomping Mickey
Rooney of a coach who had his rules. One of
Red's rules was no pancakes. Red was quirky
that way.
"Whatcha eating?" Auerbach asked Jones.
"Pancakes," Jones replied to the obvious.
"Well, that'll be $10."
"Okay, take the $10," Jones said, as he was
really hungry.
"No, $10 a bite."
Well, Jones couldn't afford such a high
tariff for pancakes, so he sent them back.
"It was a dumb rule," Auerbach says today,
"but I did a lot of dumb things. It was
just the times, you know. I always felt
pancakes were heavy and you would not be
able to run good."
Just the times. Now, all-stars skip a
mandatory media session and gladly pay the
league-imposed $10,000 fine so they can
have a quiet afternoon off to play golf.
What's $10,000 to a guy hauling down $10
million a year?
Just the times.
In Jones's day, players would walk from
their hotel to the arena for games and
catch taxis to the airport to go home.
"Sometimes cabs didn't want to pick you
up," Jones recalls.
Cabs wouldn't pick up pro players?
"We were black pro players."
Now, the league is 80 percent black and
players don't have to catch cabs anywhere.
Chartered buses drive them to practice a
block away. Chartered buses pull right up
to the runway so players can board their
teams' private planes.
Just the times.
You might expect Sam Jones to be more
nostalgic about all of this, less tolerant
of the excesses of the modern athlete, less
sympathetic to the hard line the players
are drawing in their current impasse with
owners, more understanding of the damage
the lockout is doing to the game's appeal
with fans.
But Jones is full of surprises.
"Listen, the players don't owe the fans
anything," he says. "Listen, the players
aren't striking. The players want to play.
The owners locked them out."
Spoken like a card-carrying union member.
Message to the players: It's nice to have
the great Sam Jones on your side, even
though he isn't really one of you.
"I am on the side of the players. I'm a
player."
As for marginal players securing enormous
multi-million-dollar contracts because they
can perform one skill adequately, Jones
says dismissively: "If the owners want to
pay them, who cares about greatness? Oh,
no, I don't have any problem with it."
Hanging-Out Money
The players could certainly use the
credibility of Sam Jones. Their fight with
the owners is going badly. They are taking
a whupping in the media. The public at
large is giving their sport the ho-hum. In
a recent poll, 60 percent of those surveyed
said they are "not at all" interested in
following pro basketball. Public relations
experts the players are not. It didn't help
that they held their big solidarity meeting
in Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the
world. It doesn't help that they have
trotted out some ridiculous analogies to
rally the troops – like San Antonio Spurs
center David Robinson's suggestion that
players should stand up for the union like
civil rights heroes who fought being
relegated to the back of the bus.
But of all the screw-ups, the one that hurt
the most was Kenny Anderson's
self-immolation in the New York Times, as
he sought to explain – with his
accountant's help – what it's like to be a
28-year-old point guard without a steady
check. He was due to collect his entire
$5.8 million salary on July 1, the day the
owners declared a lockout.
So now, here he is, a member of Sam Jones's
old team, with a mortgage in New York, a
$150,000-a-year rental house in Beverly
Hills, $7,200 in monthly child support
payments, $175,000 a year in legal and
accounting fees, an agent who gets a 4
percent cut, his own marketing company with
a payroll. Whew! And, oh yeah, he needs
$10,000 a month in "hanging-out money,"
Anderson told the Times. And, oh yeah,
there's an eight-car fleet whose insurance
and maintenance cost about $75,000
annually.
So what's an out-of-work multimillionaire
point guard to do?
"I was thinking about selling one of my
cars," Anderson told the Times, joking, of
course. "I don't need all of them. You
know, just get rid of the Mercedes."
As pitchmen for their cause, the players
are bunglers. It's not that Anderson's a
bad guy. He bought and distributed
Thanksgiving turkeys in the Queens
neighborhood where he grew up.
But ...
"You're not dealing with corporately savvy
people," says Dana London, who runs
Transition Teams, a nonprofit education and
support program for athletes based in
Silver Spring. "These people are
conditioned to be athletes."
You would think the players would be
barnstorming the country like the Harlem
Globetrotters, playing charity games in
little cubbyholes that have never seen a
pro player. You would think the players
would organize a free sneaker giveaway for
underprivileged kids, act like steelworkers
even if they're not.
"I think some of the players are doing
things," says Ron Mercer, another young
Boston Celtics guard. "I try to do a lot of
community work."
But that imagery isn't resonating in
fandom.
"You have to understand the environment,"
says Rick Kaplan, president of
Fourteen-Fifty Media, a sports PR firm
based in the New York area. "People love to
hate the rich. The interesting thing about
NBA players is that they've always been
taken care of. ... So they're disconnected.
They really haven't been responsible for
their own fate. When's the last time many
of these guys have had to take a financial
stand, a social-political stand? Which is
what this really is."
Plenty Going On
Sam Jones is on the sidelines watching. The
young players don't call him for advice.
"These current players, they've got their
own agenda. So, no, I don't talk to any of
them, unless they ask."
Jones isn't offended. He's got plenty going
on. In April, he's flying to Istanbul with
his wife of 41 years, Gladys. He wants to
pick up some Oriental rugs. He has 10
grandkids, whose pictures form a shrine in
his living room. He enjoys looking at them.
But he's got to find some more room for his
collection of signed Ernie Barnes paintings
and Norman Rockwell prints.
Everyday he takes his vitamin E. It's a
good life. Not a flashy life. An old-school
life.
"Tomorrow," says Jones, "I'll cut my
grass."
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