(This is the fourth of a 5-part series on Detroit Public School League basketball legend, Curtis Jones. Please follow these links to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
If you’re trying to hide out for a couple of years and boost your grade point average, attending North Idaho Community College might just be the place to do it. Located in the high country of Idaho near the Washington border, it is seemingly the perfect salve to any troubles you might be experiencing. Unless, of course, you’re one of only seven blacks on campus, in which case there may be other troubles looming.
“We didn’t go to class much,” Jones’ teammate and roommate, the 6-foot-6 Robbie Young, admitted to the Free Press in 1983. “We were in Idaho, we were winning. In some of the classes, if Curtis was sitting beside me, I would show him (answers on) my paper. In other classes, the teachers just passed him.”
Then-North Idaho coach Rolly Williams still remembers Jones as being ahead of his time on the court: “At a time when passing was not such a great skill, he was more impressive with his passing abilities and those of a great ball handler. He looked more to set people up. Oh, he could score when he had to. One playoff game, they backed off and he scored, but the thing with him was he could maneuver so well with the ball; he could get away from just about any defender.”
Williams adds: “There would be times I’d ask my assistant, ‘Did he really do that?’ He had an unbelievable knack to hit the open man with ball.”
Williams also recalls a student-athlete who had an incredibly difficult time with his classes.
“I had him in a class, Intro to Phys Ed,” says Jones’ old coach. “He did not do all that well as a student. (At the time) you had to have 10 hours of 1 point – a D average – to be eligible and that was a struggle for him. He was not a good student.”
Added Young: “There was nothing around there but mountains, and we weren’t into camping. … They were putting us through situations we had never experienced before. When we were playing basketball, everything was fine. But when the game was over, everybody went their separate ways and it was just me and Curt, going back to that little square room.”
Young remembered when he found out Jones’ secret. It was when he was assisting his point guard on a note home to a girlfriend in Detroit.
“He told me he wasn’t good at writing,” Young recalled Jones saying. “I thought he just wanted me to put in some romantic lines. After a while he was more or less telling me what to write. It all came out little by little and he finally just told me.”
Mayberry, who remained in close contact with Jones throughout their lives, said he remembers how big of a struggle attending college in Idaho must have been.
“I was playing basketball back here that winter of his freshman year,” Mayberry remembers. “He came back home on Christmas break and was unhappy. There were just a few brothers out there and most of them were athletes. He felt pretty humiliated. They didn’t know he could only read at the sixth-grade level or whatever it was, but he had nobody to turn to out there. It must have been incredibly lonely for him.”
Despite the trials and tribulations of his freshman year, Jones returned as a sophomore but things quickly unraveled.
After returning from the summer break he was charged with drinking beer in the dormitory and suspended from school for nearly a month. Then, in January 1970, he was repeatedly questioned about a dormitory burglary he says he wasn’t involved in. And by mid-February, his classmates discovered his illiteracy.
“I had missed a test by not being in class,” Jones told the Free Press’ Brenda J. Gilchrist for the 1983 story. “I had to make it up. I had the book and the test and I couldn’t figure out anything. … I asked this girl if she could take the test for me. She said, ‘You mean to tell me you can’t read?’ ”
Jones remembered a crowd gathering around and beginning to tease and taunt him.
Coach Williams told the News other players had told him Jones became involved with drugs over the summer and when he returned for his sophomore year he was acting erratically and rambling in his speech.
“One time, he just deliberately walked right out in front of a car,” the former coach said of an incident that happened shortly after his secret was discovered. Williams noted that school officials at first hospitalized him but eventually jailed him. “He wasn’t locked up because he had done anything wrong, but just to protect him.”
As quickly as he had faked Pershing High’s Granville Cook and drained that 19-footer three years prior, Curtis Jones’ life changed on that February day in 1970. No longer was he the highly sought after athlete, he was now an illiterate man diagnosed with acute schizophrenia who, upon his return to Detroit, spent over a year in the Northville Psychiatric Hospital.