RALEIGH, N.C. — If he had played in the modern NBA, in this era of social media and Twitter and YouTube, there would be kids out on the playground right now trying to bank the ball off the glass the way Sam Jones — and very few others — once could.
Larry Bird and George Gervin both followed in the footsteps of the player who was given a nickname endowed with the ultimate respect by his Boston Celtics teammates on their way to 10 championships: “Mr. Clutch.” A North Carolina native and record-setting star at North Carolina College before becoming one of the great players in NBA history and a Naismith Hall of Fame inductee, Jones passed away Thursday night at 88, the Celtics confirmed.
Born in Wilmington and educated at the Laurinburg Institute before coming to what is now North Carolina Central, Jones was named to the NBA’s 25th, 50th and 75th anniversary teams, the latter this year. He dabbled in coaching and did it for one year at NCCU, but became a teacher and spent the past few decades living a happy, golf-filled retirement in Florida. He was always quick with a phone call to current NCCU coach LeVelle Moton in times of both success and struggle, Moton said.
“I just think that speaks volumes to who he was,” Moton said. “He was always calling to support our team, or say, ‘Man, I watched the game last night, tell the kids keep their heads up.’ That meant a lot to our team.”
Jones’ time in Durham was interrupted by a two-year stint in the Army, but he still set school records (since broken) for points, field goals and free throws, averaging 17.8 points per game for Hall of Fame coach John McLendon and was named all-CIAA — as Samuel Jones — in 1954 and 1957.
Overshadowed locally by Lennie Rosenbluth and the Tar Heels’ NCAA title in 1957, legend has it that Celtics mastermind Red Auerbach, when scouting Rosenbluth, was told the better player was just up the road. Rosenbluth went sixth overall to the Philadelphia Warriors. Two picks later, Auerbach found the piece that helped turn his defending champion Celtics into a dynasty.
As Moton put it, Jones was a 6-foot-5 shooting guard before there were 6-5 shooting guards, the kind of player who might not be as versatile as contemporaries like Oscar Robertson or Jerry West, Auerbach once noted, but could take a pass from Bob Cousy or be tipped an offensive rebound by Bill Russell and find a way to conjure the ball off the glass and into the basket, especially when the pressure was at its highest.
Mickey Michaux, the Durham lawyer, longtime legislator and activist, met Jones in college in 1952. The two became lifelong friends, and Michaux not only got to meet and befriend Celtics stars like Russell, Satch Sanders and K.C. Jones but never missed a championship game played in Boston.
An affable person who never knew a stranger, Michaux said, Sam Jones’ greatness was apparent to those watching long before the rest of the world belatedly came to know it.
“There was no question about it,” Michaux said. “All of us who were friends of Sam knew that Sam was a natural athlete with a predilection toward basketball. You put a chess board in front of him, he’d beat you at that. He was that type of individual. When he and I were senior double partners in tennis, we won a tournament here in Durham. We made a vow after we won that tournament never to play doubles together again.”
And golf?
“Oh Lord, yes,” Michaux said. “After basketball and raising his kids, golf became one of his fortes. Being a retired star basketball player, he got invited to all the tournaments.”
In 1969, Jones became the first Black athlete — and 26th athlete overall — inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. Consider, for a moment, that timing: Less than two years earlier, Charlie Scott had become the University of North Carolina’s first Black scholarship athlete. Durham’s segregated public schools were in the process of being integrated that fall. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing.
“There were several folks that were pushing for Sam’s induction into the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame,” Michaux said. “You show me any athlete coming out of North Carolina sporting 10 world championship rings, that type of thing. The pressure got on folks. …
“It was just one of those things you couldn’t avoid. You didn’t even have to have the pressure put on you. Not to recognize an individual at all, and be so late with it, there was some consciousness in somebody’s mind they had to do something.”
When the inductees were announced in June, the Associated Press story that ran in Gastonia and Rocky Mount and elsewhere mentioned his race and the milestone. The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer, in staff stories, did not. It would be another three years before John Baker got in, followed by Buck Leonard in 1973 and Meadowlark Lemon and LeRoy T. Walker in 1975.
Moton, who grew up in the Roxbury section of Boston before moving to Raleigh, first knew of Jones as a Celtics star who stayed close to his roots. In the ‘60s, Jones had arranged for a basketball star from Roxbury to get his grades up at the Laurinburg Institute to get into college. Jimmy Walker eventually graduated from Providence and was the No. 1 pick in the 1967 draft, ahead of Earl “The Pearl” Monroe.
By the time Moton became a high-school star at Enloe, he didn’t know much about NCCU but he knew a lot about Jones. That was the only recruiting pitch needed. Moton signed sight unseen, then asked to see a media guide, because he wanted to break all of Jones’ scoring records. He finished 31 points short of Jones, a number that became a point of friendly contention between the two.
“I knew if I could do that, I could leave a legacy here someday,” Moton said. “I always told Sam, if I hadn’t missed those four or five games when I broke my wrist, broke my tailbone, but those points didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to trump who he was.”
