New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Toasting those we’ve lost
K.C. Jones among the heroes of our youth lost in 2020
This was the winter of 2003 and I was chatting with K.C. Jones about the UConn women surpassing the 60-game winning streak of his San Francisco Dons in the 1950s.
“That lady, Diana Taurasi, I love watching her on TV,” Jones said. “She blows me away. She has a personality on the court. She rebounds. She fancy-passes. She leads the break. But when it’s crunch time, it’s ‘Give me the ball.’
“She plays like Larry Bird.” Jones wasn’t the first or the last to compare Taurasi to Bird. Yet as I walked away from the conversation, a gentle, unstated nudge hit me.
Man, K.C. ought to know. He coached Larry Bird on what many of the game’s aficionados are convinced is the greatest basketball team ever assembled in 1985-86.
Born in Texas, the son of an oil-field worker named after the legendary railroad engineer Casey Jones, K.C. died on Christmas Day at an assisted living facility in Connecticut. He was 88. I knew Jones for better than a decade before the ravages of Alzheimer’s began robbing K.C. of knowing a lifetime of acquaintances like me back.
I met him in May 1997, the day he was introduced as the coach of the New England Blizzard of the old ABL. He had never coached women before, but he had coached in the Hartford
Civic Center many times when the Celtics played there regularly. His hiring was a stunner, yet what was most compelling was the way Jones walked into the setting. Calm. Easy. Friendly. Without a hint of pretension or affectation. K.C., a noted crooner, even had sung “My Way” with ABL co-founder Gary Cavalli.
“I’m telling you Leo Durocher is wrong,” he said that day. “Nice guys don’t finish last.”
Nice should never be mistaken for weak. Jones had 12 NBA championship rings to prove it: eight as a Celtic player, two as head coach of the Celtics and one each as an assistant for the Lakers and Celtics. He won two NCAA titles playing with Bill Russell at San Francisco and is one of eight men ever to win NBA and NCAA titles and an Olympic gold medal.
Alas, nice guys die. We all do eventually. And in a year of COVID-19 when talk of death surrounds us every day, 2020 hit the sports world especially hard.
The year 2016 marked the passing of transcendent figures Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Pat Summitt and Arnold Palmer.
Yet for me, 2020 struck even harder. Maybe it was the shocking death of Kobe Bryant, 41, and his daughter Gianna that hit so unexpectedly in January and left
the sports world in mourning. Maybe it’s the way COVID hit weeks later. Maybe it’s turning 65 and feeling my own mortality.
Or maybe, as a kid who grew up a baseball fanatic, it’s the record seven baseball Hall of Famers passing. Tom Seaver, Al Kaline, Lou Brock, Joe Morgan, Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson and Phil Niekro … along with Don Larsen, Dick Allen, Bob Watson, Tony Fernandez, Jim Wynn, Claudell Washington, Tony Taylor, Mike McCormick, Ron Perranoski, Glenn Beckert, Horace Clarke, Johnny Antonelli and others.
These are giants of so many of our youths. Giants aren’t supposed to limp, hunch over and slowly surrender to the ages.
And then there are the 2020 deaths in other sports. David Stern, Mickey Wright, Willie Wood, Henri Richard, Curly Neal, Tom Dempsey, Bobby Mitchell, Willie Davis, Don Shula, Jerry Sloan, Eddie Sutton, Wes Unseld, Johnny Majors, Kurt Thomas, Lou Henson, Lute Olson, Dale Hawerchuk, Gale
Sayers, Fred Dean, actor Chadwick Boseman, Rafer Johnson, Reche Caldwell, Jim Kiick, Kevin Greene, Diego Maradona, Paul Hornung, Herb Adderley, Jake Scott, David Forney, John Blake, Joe Bugel, Phyllis George, Tarvaris Jackson, Roger Mayweather, Chris Doleman, Pat Dye, Pete Dye, George Perles, Hank Steinbrenner, Fred Akers, Colby Cave, Eddie Shack, Pat Stapleton.
And the ones that hit close to home in New England and Connecticut. Tommy Heinsohn, Travis Roy, John Thompson, Tom Webster, Jack McIlhargey, Seaver and John McNamara. If that ball doesn’t go through Bill Buckner’s legs, the Red Sox manager would have been a Boston world champion in 1986 just like K.C. Jones.
UConn’s Cliff Robinson dead at 53 and Stanley Robinson at 32. Combined, they didn’t live as long as K.C. Jones.
It’s often said in the sports writing business to be careful of meeting your childhood heroes. Some have unpleasant vices. Some are unpleasant. Some are both. I grew up with my ear pinned to the radio listening to Johnny Most call Celtics games. It was a nightly drama of good and evil and the Celtics were always the good guys. Russell, the Jones boys, Havlicek, Satch Sanders — they were all bigger than life.
After the ABL folded, Jones continued as a special assistant to athletic director Pat Meiser at Hartford. He did color commentary for basketball. He
helped with fundraising. He lived in West Hartford. As a columnist at the Hartford Courant, I’d see Meiser at games and she’d ask if I had a chance to say hi to K.C.
He was so approachable. The stories of his selflessness — an “us” guy, not a “me” guy — were true. Understated, subtle, unpretentious, all true. As a coach and a former defensive specialist he understood defined roles. He won 66 games as Bullets coach. With the Celtics, he went to the NBA Finals four times and had seasons of 62, 63, 67, 59 wins, and when he allowed it to drop to 57 he was out. Never won an NBA Coach of the Year award.
“In a sport that defines its champions by the superstars who drive them, Jones never had the selfpromotional skills or egodriven desire to muscle his way onto a pedestal,” Harvey Araton wrote in the New York Times. “He never overcame the news media stereotype of him as some hybrid shepherd/ spokesman for the collective genius he sent onto the floor each night.”
Phil Jackson sent out the best and he became the Dalai Lama.
Jones sent out the best and he was Red Auerbach’s valet and Larry Bird’s clipboard carrier.
Funny how it works. “Red mastered every phase of the game,” Jones said when I called him for the Courant about Auerbach’s passing in 2006. “You’d have to get all the way into his mind to understand him. But he was such a genius, I couldn’t get that far. And I witnessed it all.
“He was sort of a dad to me. The man had a big heart. He hid it behind his arrogance.”
K.C. didn’t try to hide behind anything. Five years after he had left coaching, he said he had been in an ocean without a life preserver in the women’s game. The beauty, unlike the men, was they always gave 100 percent. His one wish was that they got paid better in the WNBA.
Jones told this great story about how they were on the road looking at college prospects and Red brought him up to his hotel room in 1983 in Chicago.
He asked Jones if he was interested in replacing Bill Fitch. K.C. said yes. They would talk again. Well, they were back in Boston the following day, K.C. walks in and a player attendant congratulated him. Another brought over a bottle of champagne. Jones was confused.
One of the attendants grabbed a newspaper. The headline: “Jones New Celtics Coach.” They broke open the champagne. So did the players. All but
Bird had chafed under Fitch’s harsh ways.
This is the year of a pandemic. And it is the year of Black Lives Matter. A tumultuous, sometimes terrifying year when we can only pray that 2021 brings us a cure for COVID and closer to a cure for racism and inequality.
K.C. told this story about an exhibition game in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961 when Auerbach explained to his Black players that they could eat at the hotel, but they had to say they were with the Celtics. Other segregated places wouldn’t serve them.
In mid-afternoon, Bill Russell came off the elevator. Sanders and K.C. were standing there. Russell hadn’t said he was with the team. He didn’t want to separate himself. So the hotel didn’t serve him. The players called Auerbach.
“Red said if we played we can make big news all across the country,” Jones said. “Russ felt it was better if we went home to Boston and don’t give them the game they want.”
Auerbach said OK, and he drove the Black players to the airport.
Six decades later, we can only applaud that noble defiance, the quiet dignity that K.C. Jones lived for 88 years, and pop open a bottle of champagne for the giants of our sports.