Over my Sunday morning bowl of cereal and cup of coffee, I read a profile in the Detroit Free Press by writer Scott Talley on a man named Willie “Roy” Ogletree (see the story here). Ogletree has been keeping the scorebook for Detroit Cass Tech high school boys basketball games since 1975. Before that, he was a student and manager for the basketball team. He grew up in the Northwestern High School region and has had an up-close look at many of the city’s finest basketball players from the past 50-plus years.
Talley asked for Ogletree’s rundown of the best he’d witnessed and he didn’t hesitate when he said: Northwester High School’s Curtis Jones.
Reading Ogletree’s declaration put me in a reflective mood. I recalled a period of my life from the mid-2000s when I believed I had a book in me (and an audience for it, no less) about the legendary basketball players from the Detroit Public School League. One of the subjects I’d researched and written a chapter about was the aforementioned Curtis Jones.
With a big technology assist by my wife, I was able to dig that chapter out of purgatory and will share an excerpt each day this week.
Curtis Jones: Part 1
Curtis Jones was called by many – including such PSL legends as George Gervin and Spencer Haywood – the greatest player they’d ever seen.
He nailed one of the most legendary shots in the history of the league; his 19-footer with two seconds remaining handed Haywood and his powerful Pershing Doughboys their only loss of the 1967 season and – in the process – lifted Northwestern to its second consecutive PSL title, 63-61.
Will Robinson, the legendary coach of those Pershing teams, told the Detroit News’ Fred Girard in a June 6, 1999 article that, “Curtis wasn’t just a good basketball player – he defined that position of lead guard; I never saw another kid in his class. Not only could he have played in the pros, he’d have been outstanding. Curtis had that type of talent.”
Publicly, all appeared terrific for one of the most prolific scorers and ball handlers in the history of the city.
Personally, Jones was living with a dark secret that would torment him for the rest of his life and eventually may have cost him a chance at the hundreds of thousands of dollars many of his fellow PSL legends eventually found.
The secret: Jones was functionally illiterate. He had an IQ of 73 and it was this inability to read and write beyond a fourth-grade level, along with his tremendous talent on the hardwood, which eventually drove him into a psychiatric hospital.
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