San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Jackson-Davis emerged from early scares as ‘walking miracle’
Pair of medical emergencies shaped childhood of Warriors’ rookie big man
The scars wind their way from each ear toward the top of Trayce JacksonDavis’ head, then disappear into his tuft of black hair. They might look like a sleek design, stylish and intentional, but actually they offer a chilling reminder.
Jackson-Davis is 24 now, a promising rookie for the Golden State Warriors, soaring high to swat opponents’ shots or turn teammates’ lobs into dunks. Two decades ago, he was a curious 4-year-old who found a resistance band under his parents’ bed in their suburban Indianapolis home.
He tied the band around one of his toy dinosaurs, attached the rubber cord to the doorknob and tried to pull the band to the bedpost. The cord suddenly came undone, sending one metal handle flying into his forehead.
Trayce’s mom, Karla Jackson, rushed home from work when the babysitter called, to discover a bloody hole above his right eyebrow. They drove to the nearest emergency room, where the CT scan machine was down and a doctor started stitching up the wound — until she realized he had an open skull fracture.
He ended up in seven hours of surgery at a different hospital. Doctors there removed pieces of bone from his brain cavity, Karla Jackson recalled, and put him back together “like a puzzle.” She said they told her the metal struck Trayce with the velocity of a gunshot.
As her son vanished into the operating room, Karla feared for his life.
“He was kind of like a newborn giraffe when he got to us his freshman year. He could barely walk and run and he was kind of goofy, but you could tell he had a good knack for how to play.”
Zach Hahn, Trayce Jackson-Davis’ coach at Center Grove High
“It was devastating,” she said of the ordeal.
Dr. Thomas Luerssen was the pediatric neurosurgeon who operated on young Trayce at Riley Hospital for Children. Luerssen remembered the operation more clinically — describing the injury as a “depressed fracture” — but he acknowledged the significant challenge of not leaving Trayce with a large dent in his forehead.
Hence, the creative and wavy incision Luerssen made above both ears, “elevating the fracture,” in his words.
More than 15 years later, after Luerssen had finished his career in Texas and returned to Indianapolis in retirement, he and his wife were watching an Indiana basketball game one night on television. The camera zoomed in on Jackson-Davis, immediately catching Luerssen’s attention.
“I noticed it when Trayce was playing for IU,” he said. “I looked at him on TV and said, ‘That’s the incision we used to make.’ Then it all came together.”
Beyond cosmetic concerns, a severe frontal lobe injury can lead to personality changes or difficulty concentrating; by Karla’s memory, that’s why Trayce returned for regular testing after his surgery. He emerged without lasting neurological damage.
Less than two years later, when he was 6, another freak accident occurred: Trayce’s best friend accidentally smacked him in the face with a golf club. The impact shattered Trayce’s cheekbone and broke an orbital bone near his eye, leaving him with a titanium screw in place to this day.
As you might imagine, then, his family marvels at the sight of him playing in the NBA, tall and strapping and perfectly healthy.
“He’s a walking miracle, honestly,” said his sister, Arielle Bellian.
The accidents made Trayce timid for much of his childhood, according to his mom. He didn’t play football when he was younger, and he wasn’t especially aggressive on the basketball court until several years after his head surgery, when he became confident he wasn’t at extra risk.
Those long-ago injuries had an even more profound effect on Bellian, who is nine years older than Trayce. She had practically begged her mom for a sibling, so she treated him like her personal teddy bear when they were kids. One family photo shows Arielle cuddling with Trayce in his hospital bed as he recovered from the surgery.
She was a teenager at the time, old enough to understand what happened to her little brother. It shaped her life’s trajectory, inspiring her to become a doctor — first studying the brain and later shifting to anesthesia. She’s now an anesthesiologist at a hospital in Milwaukee.
Bellian’s personal statement on her medical-school application focused on Trayce’s experience and how deeply it affected her.
“I saw my brother in his most dire need,” she said. “I saw how medicine could fix it, and I also saw how it could go wrong. That really shaped me into who I wanted to be.
“I wanted to have more of a hands-on approach to patient care … to be the person who double and triple checks things.”
Jackson-Davis’ family ties to basketball begin with his biological father, onetime NBA All-Star Dale Davis. He played 16 seasons in the league, mostly with Indiana and Portland but also including 36 games with the Warriors in 2004-05.
But the high-level athletic connections run deeper. Ray Jackson — Karla’s longtime husband, who raised Trayce with her (he calls Jackson “Dad”) — played cornerback for Washington State in the 1998 Rose Bowl. Jackson faced future Hall of Famers Tony Gonzalez (Cal) and Charles Woodson (Michigan) in college, then had pro flings with the Rams (preseason), Chiefs (practice roster), Amsterdam of NFL Europe and Indiana of the Arena Football League.
Plus, basketball was Jackson’s first love tracing to his days at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana. Both of his brothers and his sister attended college on hoops scholarships; one brother, Shaun, played professionally in Europe and on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters. Karla Jackson also played basketball in high school, and Dale Davis’ brother Kevin played in college.
“Those were the stories Trayce heard and the pictures and videos he saw,” said Ray Jackson, now the Center Grove police chief in Greenwood, Ind. “Then obviously living in Indiana, it’s the first sport everyone plays. All the cards read, ‘You’re going to be a hooper.’ ”
Trayce soaked in the stories and the lessons. He once joined Dale Davis on the Pistons’ team plane during one of the final two seasons of his career. (Trayce was 5 or 6 at the time.) Later, he watched his sister become a highschool All-American in volleyball and play at Norfolk State and Indianapolis; their younger brother Tayven is now a quarterback at Indiana.
Still, Trayce mostly played basketball because it was fun, as he put it, and showed few early signs of taking the sport seriously. He was so nice, Karla Jackson recalled, he once gave the ball to a kid on the opposing team, much to Ray’s aggravation.
Ray remembered a sixth-grade game in which Trayce missed some free throws and the coach took him out down the stretch. Early the next morning, Trayce woke up Ray and they went outside to work on his free throws. The day after that, when Ray woke up expecting another session, Trayce declined and went back to sleep.
He did not exactly dominate in his youth. Trayce’s middle school featured “A” and “B” teams, and he played on the B team in seventh and eighth grades. Then he grew more than 6 inches in the summer before ninth grade, sprouting all the way to 6-foot-5.
So he started on his high school varsity as a freshman, one year after playing on the eighthgrade B team.
“He was kind of like a newborn giraffe when he got to us his freshman year,” said Zach Hahn, the coach at Center Grove High. “He could barely walk and run and he was kind of goofy, but you could tell he had a good knack for how to play.”
Or, as Trayce said, “I had athletic genes all around me, but it didn’t really click until I was going into my junior year of high school. Until that point, I never thought I could play professionally.”
His ambitions began to grow when he dominated as a junior and senior, then became a fouryear Big Ten standout at nearby Indiana. Along the way, Trayce leaned on his unique access to two dads/professional athletes: regular workouts and feisty oneon-one games with Ray Jackson, plus conversations and occasional visits with Dale Davis at his home in Atlanta.
Trayce appreciated the diversity of their backgrounds: Jackson’s experience bouncing around pro football and the insights Davis shared from his long NBA career.
“I think it helped that Dale and Ray had different perspectives because they played different sports,” Karla said. “It was definitely beneficial to Trayce growing up.”
The dual guidance is reflected in Trayce’s surname. He’s “Trayce Davis” on his birth certificate, but he hyphenated it to “Jackson-Davis” before reaching high school to reflect Ray’s role in raising him. Most friends simply call him “TJD.”
Trayce said he still trades text messages with Dale Davis, who didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. Davis watches Warriors games and offers tips, according to Trayce.
Jackson-Davis nearly turned pro after his sophomore season at Indiana, when he averaged 19.1 points and nine rebounds and earned third-team All-America honors. But a meeting with new Hoosiers coach Mike Woodson, a former NBA player and coach, convinced Jackson-Davis that staying in college would better prepare him for the pros.
“I think playing those two years for (Woodson), and being a focal point in that NBA-style offense … I really benefited from that coming here as a rookie,” he said.
Jackson-Davis has struggled to earn consistent playing time this season, despite a flurry of expanded minutes and productive outings during Draymond Green’s suspension. Jackson-Davis’ time diminished when Green returned Jan. 15, and especially when the Warriors made Green the starting center in their new, small-ball lineup.
But the signs of a bright future for Jackson-Davis are clear. Entering Friday, he had scored in double figures 15 times, matching Portland’s Toumani Camara for the most by any 2023 secondround draft pick. Jackson-Davis posted 17 points and five rebounds in Thursday night’s win over the Lakers.
Among rookies, he began the weekend ranked second in fieldgoal percentage, fifth in blocked shots and is tied for eighth in rebounding. He was one of only four rookies to post consecutive double-doubles, joining the Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, Thunder’s Chet Holmgren and Warriors teammate Brandin Podziemski.
Even so, Jackson-Davis played fewer than 10 minutes in each of Golden State’s final nine games before the All-Star break (he logged 15 on Thursday night). He remains patient, saying, “I’ve just got to wait my turn.”
Head coach Steve Kerr raved about his young center’s ability to protect the rim on defense and roll to the rim on offense. Kerr also peered beyond the numbers in assessing Jackson-Davis’ season, appreciating his grasp of the game’s nuances.
“He’s early on defensive rotations and understands angles as a screen setter,” Kerr said. “That’s something young big guys normally have to learn in the NBA, and he recognized that from his first day. … He’s a really good prospect, I’m excited we have him.”
Jackson-Davis’ family naturally is excited to watch him play in the NBA. They convened in Chicago last month when the Warriors played the Bulls, made the drive to Milwaukee the next day for Golden State’s game against the Bucks and also traveled to see him play in Cleveland, Detroit and Indianapolis.
They’re obviously grateful he weathered those early-life scares. Jackson-Davis joked about “hopefully getting them all out of the way,” but the long-ago accidents still shape Karla’s behavior: She visits San Francisco twice a month to cook for her son and hang with him in his apartment.
“I hold on way too tight,” she said.