Suns: Mom’s influence shows in
Josh Jackson knew his place when he joined the Suns for their summer workouts. He was a rookie. A prized rookie, perhaps even a future star, but a rookie nonetheless.
So he didn’t speak up as often as he normally does. He didn’t critique his teammates. He was trying, he said, “just to be another guy on the team.”
Then he was pulled aside by coach Earl Watson.
“Earl told me, ‘Be yourself,’” Jackson said. “Come in, work hard and challenge these other guys.’ ”
It might be unusual, a head coach telling a rookie to get after more experienced players. But Watson sees something special in Jackson.
“Leadership has no age,” Watson said. “That’s in sport or life. Josh Jackson is a natural leader. He brings something that we do not have and that’s some vocal intensity and an edge with his type of play. Guys are capable of playing at a high level, but Josh is just at another level with the intensity he brings. We don’t want that to be hidden. We want to embrace all of that because it would impact our team in the right direction.”
During a scrimmage Tuesday night at Northern Arizona University, Marquese Chriss made a move to his left around Tyson Chandler. Chandler bumped him and, as the whistle blew for a foul, Chriss tried to shoot with his normal release. The ball hit the side of the rim and bounced away.
Jackson, sitting on the scorer’s table, raised his voice.
“Use your left hand,” he yelled at Chriss. “Go up with your left.”
Mom would have been proud.
Leading with words, actions
Whose influence was most important in Jackson’s development as a player, the intensity, the willingness to speak up, the competitiveness? That’s all Apples Jones, his mother.
Clarence Jones, who died in 2014, was Jackson’s step-dad.
Apples Jones was a standout player at Detroit King High, good enough to be in the school’s hall of fame. She played at UTEP, earned recognition on All-Armed Forces teams while serving in the Navy and later had a tryout for the WNBA. She chose not to pursue a professional basketball career because she thought it would take too much time away from raising Josh.
“My mom was cold back in the day,” Jackson said. “She’s still got little news clips of hers back from high school and college, scoring 50 or 60. She was kind of like myself, a player who did it all.”
There was no question Jackson would be a basketball player. Jones gave him a ball on the way home from the hospital after his birth and he was already playing in a Pee-Wee league when he was 3 years old.
Jones taught her son how to dribble and shoot, how to get in the correct stance on defense and how to watch the subtle movements of a player’s body to know what he’s going to do with the ball.
One thing that came naturally to Jackson was his competitiveness. It’s built into the family’s DNA.
“We all hate to lose,” Jones said. “Josh always had that competitive spirit. He would challenge himself all the time. We had a hoop in the backyard and he’d be out there all day. My neighbors would complain at night, yelling, ‘Can you put that ball up?’ ”
When on the rare occasion things didn’t go well for Jackson, when he lost a game or was dominated by an opponent, he’d break down crying. Which was fine with Jones.
“It made it much easier because when he was frustrated he would listen,” she said.
Mom and son played one-on-one all the time - until Jackson finally beat Jones when he was almost 15 years old. That was the last time they played.
Still, Jones never stopped mentoring her son. Not when Jackson was a McDonald’s High School All-American in 2016. Not when he was the Big 12 Freshman of the Year at Kansas. Not even when the Suns made him the fourth overall pick of the NBA draft in June.
“Look at how many years I spent teaching him,” Jones said. “He knows I’m not going to quit.”