(This is the fifth and final of a 5-part series on Detroit Public School League basketball legend, Curtis Jones. Please follow these links to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)
Broken and beaten, Jones turned to his surrogate father, Coach Fred Snowden, upon his release from Northville. Snowden, now the head coach at the University of Arizona, was apparently unsympathetic.
“Sometimes when Curt got off the phone, he would be crying,” his mom told the Free Press. “He wanted to know if (Snowden) cared about what had happened.”
Eventually, the Joneses decided to see if anyone cared about what had happened.
With the assistance of Bloomfield Hills attorney Jerome Quinn, Curtis Jones filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. The lawsuit, filed in 1981 in the State Court of Claims (the branch that handles claims against state agencies), claimed the defendant caused Curtis Jones’ mental breakdown by pushing him into college even though school officials knew he was illiterate. A separate suit against the Detroit School Board, North Idaho Community College, and Snowden was later filed in Wayne County Circuit Court.
The dollar amount for damages in the suit, Quinn said, was determined at what Jones could potentially have earned had he gone straight from high school to professional basketball.
Court of Claims judge James Kallman dismissed the suit against U-M stating that the school’s basketball program is a government function and that U-M could not be sued for conducting it.
The suit was reinstated on June 6, 1983 by the State Court of Appeals which stated: “We do not believe the operation of an essentially self-sustaining, revenue-producing intercollegiate basketball program can be described as an activity ‘undertaken for the common good of all’ (that would entitle the school to immunity).”
Alas, there is not a happy ending to Curtis Jones’ story.
His lawsuit, appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, was eventually dismissed because, the court ruled, governmental immunity protected all parties (U-M, Snowden, and Detroit Public Schools) against damage suits.
“Losing that case was the biggest disappointment of my career,” Quinn told the News. “What happened to Curtis was tragic. I thought it was a modern-day form of slave trade. You take three or four black athletes, stick them out in the middle of this totally white area – not that the people were abusive or anything – but rip them out of their culture completely, totally for the reason of keeping them on ice until you can get them into a major university with some phonied-up grades.”
Jones continued to battle the demons within. He was, at one point, taking Prolixin, Cogentin, and vitamin supplements to help, but when he slipped off his medication (or lapsed into cocaine) his problems would start again.
His mother said she had received phone calls from the police saying her youngest child had taken a taxi thinking he was God and the driver was an agent of the Ku Klux Klan and from a neighbor saying they had found Curtis eating mashed potatoes from a garbage can.
Without a driver’s license, Jones would walk incessantly about the city. Dropping in on playgrounds, hustling youngsters who weren’t familiar with him, showing those who were his trademark moves, and nearly always recreating that shot that had sunk the Doughboys decades before.
“He was really a part of my family,” recalls Lorenzo Neely, a former Detroit Northern and Eastern Michigan University star as well as a neighbor of the Joneses. “I didn’t know how good he actually was. I only had a chance to play backyard ball with him.
“It was great to get a chance to play with him. He used to tell me he was Magic before Magic. We’d be playing and he’d hit me in the face with the ball (because I wasn’t ready for the pass). I was a young man and didn’t know how good he was (in his prime), but even later in life it wasn’t even close. He was head and shoulders above all of us. I’ve heard the stories too. … He’d go down to St. Cecilia’s in the summer with Dave Bing and all of the pros. He was in high school, mind you, and he was head and shoulders above all them, too.”
Jones’ talent was never in question.
“He was just a great player,” remembers Elbert Richmond, the longtime basketball coach at Mackenzie. “If you were open, your hands had better be up, because he’d find you.”
Echoes Mayberry: “He was somebody you definitely had to get used to playing with. But anyone who ever played with Curtis, he made better.”
Perry Watson, current coach at the University of Detroit Mercy and a former opponent of Jones’ while the two were in grade school and high school, agrees: “He was Magic before Magic. He was a coach on the floor. You could just give him the ball and tell him to run the team and he’d do it.
“He never should have gone out to Idaho, out of his environment, feeling inferior, being teased, during the height of LSD. The best thing for Curt would’ve been to have him go straight to the Globetrotters. If Curt could’ve done that and been mentored, he could’ve either been a great Globetrotter or had a chance to be a professional.”
In a turn of irony, coaches Robinson and Williams both spoke of Jones being ahead of his time on the basketball court. And while he didn’t change the game with his play in front of packed ABA and NBA arenas, he did in fact play a part in one of the single-biggest pieces of governance for NCAA sports in the last half of the 20th Century.
The NCAA created academic entrance requirements for incoming freshman (called initially Proposition 48) beginning with the freshman class of 1986 and satisfactory progress standards for all scholarship athletes. It called for students to have a minimum 2.0 grade point average in the core academic classes (language arts, math, science, and social studies) and minimum scores of either 17 on the ACT or 700 on the SAT examinations.
“I can’t help but think the Curtis Jones case was an impetus,” noted David Berst, then director of enforcement for the NCAA.
The PSL as well created rules requiring a minimum grade point average of 2.0 for its student-athletes in 1985.
Said Neely to the Free Press’ Mick McCabe in a 1989 interview: “Curt always tells me to get my education. He tells me he got cheated out of an education and to make sure I get mine.”
Curtis Jones died March 14, 1999, in Mercy Hospital’s psychiatric ward, his body ravaged by pneumonia, toothless, and measuring 6-foot-2 and weighing a mere 128 pounds. There were no traces of illegal drugs or alcohol in his blood which was of tremendous relief to his mother who had long supported Curtis in his battle with cocaine addiction.
He never learned to read or write.