The Sam Jones Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Thursday, October 11th,
2007
You were born on June 24th, 1933, in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Please
tell me a little about your childhood, and some of the things that led you
to the basketball court.
Laurinburg
is a very small town – much smaller than Wilmington, which is where many
people seem to think I was born and raised. Wilmington had a big, big
school. Laurinburg didn’t have anything like that. It was a very small
town, and my childhood in Laurinburg was very typical in many respects. All
of the boys that I knew played basketball, baseball and football. We
weren’t focused on one sport, we played them all. That’s just the way it
was back then.
It’s interesting, because at that time as a young boy, I was fortunate to have what you would call mentors – these were boys that were a little bit older than me, and these were boys that I looked up to as role models. There were four of them in total, and three of these four mentors went on to college – and I’m proud to say that all three of them graduated from college. They were very important people in my life. They were born way before myself and my friends were born, and they all played sports – in fact, they were the ones that got us involved. I’m guessing now, but these young men were five, six, or seven years older than we were, and I can tell you right now that we never got into trouble. I think that says something about the influence that they had on us.
When they went on to college and left us behind, I remember them coming back and telling us stories about meeting people from different places in the United States – places I thought I’d never visit, of course – and that was something that really stayed with me as I grew up. I would sit there and listen to their stories with my eyes wide open, and they would talk about cities that seemed to exist in another world. I learned that they’d all gotten scholarships to go to college, so they didn’t have to pay, and that was something else that really stuck with me. I knew that if I wanted to go to college, then someone was going to have to give me a scholarship. So I guess you could say that these mentors were truly instrumental in leading me to the basketball court.
You went to high school at Laurinburg Institute – as did jazz legend Dizzy
Gillespie and future Boston Celtic Charlie Scott. What were your high
school years like at Laurinburg?
Yes,
I went to high school at Laurinburg Institute, which was a co-ed school.
The coach’s name was Dr. Frank McDuffie, Jr., and he was the coach of
football, basketball, baseball and track. Since we were a very, very small
school, we had to play several sports. My sports were basketball and
baseball, but he made me play three years of football at quarterback, which
I didn’t want to play [laughs]. Somehow I made it through, and after
graduation I was one of the most highly recruited basketball players in the
State of North Carolina. He never did make a football player out of me –
there weren’t a lot of offers to go off and play quarterback [laughs].
By the way, you’re correct – the great Dizzy Gillespie also went to Laurinburg, but that was before my time. Charlie Scott also went there years later, so there was a lot of history for such a small school. I’m proud to say that I was a part of that history.
You played collegiate basketball at North Carolina Central, a small NAIA
school. What led you to attend school at this university, and what was it
like to go back years later as the head basketball coach?
Back
in those days blacks couldn’t go to the white schools, at least not in North
Carolina. There were a lot of white schools that recruited me, but they
were simply too far away – either up north or way out west. I thought it
was funny in a way; recruiting was much different then than it is today, and
some of these schools contacted me even though I’d never heard of them. I
guess they had heard about me from someone who had seen me play, or from
someone who had told someone about me. Anyway, I ended up staying close to
home and going to what is now known as North Carolina Central University in
Durham, North Carolina.
I was recruited by head coach John McClendon, who became one of the first African-American coaches to break into professional basketball when he coached the Cleveland Pipers. He was quite a man. He traveled the world promoting the game of basketball. He learned basketball from Dr. James Naismith as an undergraduate at Kansas, and he was the first coach in history to win three consecutive national titles. He did that by leading Tennessee State to the 1957, 1958 and 1959 NAIA national championships. For many years he scouted opposing teams for the United States, as the US prepared to play basketball in the Olympic Games. He’s also in the NAIA Hall of Fame – I think he was inducted sometime in the 1970s. He was a great man, so it was an honor to play for him and an honor to return to the school in the same capacity as head basketball coach.
You mentioned John McClendon – in what ways was he like the legendary Red
Auerbach, and in what ways was he different?
I
enjoyed my time with Coach McClendon because he gave you a lot of leeway.
You had a lot of liberty to create something in his offense. But he was
also a little bit of a dictator like Red was with the Celtics. They both
stressed discipline and fundamentals and that's still important today.
You graduated from college in four years, which is the exception rather than
the rule today. And if not for basketball, you wanted to become a teacher.
I
love education. I love teaching. I was also interested in medicine – if
there had been scholarships for black kids to go to medical school back
then, and if I had qualified, I'd have done that over pro ball. But there
just wasn’t any money for me to go that route.