(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 20^th 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.

(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.

(This is the third of a 5-part series on Detroit Public School League basketball legend, Curtis Jones. Please follow these links to read Part 1 and Part 2.)

Curtis Jones off the basketball court was an entirely different story.

He was the youngest son in a family of seven. His father, James, was a skilled tradesman for Chrysler who died of lung cancer when Curtis was just 12 in 1961. His mother, Henrietta, was a stay-at-home mother, and his siblings held jobs ranging from engineer to a career Air Force man to artist to dental hygienist. All of which made the revelation of Jones’ illiteracy all the more improbable for his parents to comprehend.

In 1959, Jones was an 11-year-old fourth-grader at Estabrook Elementary School when teachers addressed his sub-standard classroom progress with his parents. The Joneses agreed to psychological testing which yielded mixed results.

The Detroit Free Press reported in a 1983 article that his personality was described as “even-tempered,” “well-mannered,” “obedient,” and “unselfish.” The tests also revealed an IQ of 73 – considerably below average.

“His teachers came to me and said, ‘We think he’d be better in special ed,’ ” his mother told the News’ Girard. “I said all right, because I knew his mind wasn’t on any books. But what did they teach him? I found out later it was sewing and cooking. It was nothing like what we thought he was learning.

“Curt just couldn’t sit down and read. He could hold a conversation with you – oh, he could use those words like it was God’s gift,” his mother added. “But he could not read or write. It wasn’t from any lack of help from other people. My husband and I sat at the table many a night, til all kinds of hours, workin’ with him. The next day he’d get up and do the same thing all over again.”

Beyond the gift of the spoken word, Jones had a talent few had seen on the basketball court and that – as much as anything – led him to the trouble he eventually found himself in.

“(He) was misused because of his talent,” Robinson recalled. “Everybody was out to get him, and wanted him badly, including me. He really couldn’t read or write, or if so, very poorly. All through his earlier life, they just passed him along in school. That’s where the mistake was.”

The Jones family alleged later in a $7.5 million lawsuit those that were out to get him included his high school coach, the late Fred Snowden. Prior to Jones’ senior year at Northwestern, Snowden became an assistant coach at the University of Michigan for Johnny Orr. Snowden, the family’s lawsuit later claimed, was aware of his learning disabilities but promised to get him admitted to U-M if he was able to earn the necessary grades for two years at a junior college – North Idaho Community College in Coeur d’Alene.

(This is the second of a 5-part series on Detroit Public School League basketball legend, Curtis Jones. Please find Part 1 here.)

Curtis Jones on the basketball court was unparalleled.

Standing just 5-foot-9 and tipping the scales a shade below 150 pounds during his high school playing days, Jones was like a water bug on the floor. He danced in, out, and between defenders with ease, creating space where no one saw any; making passes when none believed they were possible.

“I’d heard about Curtis Jones,” remembers former Southwestern star Antoine Joubert, “but he was pretty well through playing by the time I saw him at St. Cecilia’s. Still, he put on a few dribbling clinics for me. He was like the ‘And-1’ players are today. He could do some amazing stuff with the ball.”

He was a second-team All-PSL player his sophomore year and a first-teamer each of his final two seasons.

“What made him so special was his court awareness,” recalls teammate and future Major League first baseman John Mayberry. “He was phenomenal with his peripheral vision. He was one of the first I’d seen use the behind the back and the fancy bounce passes. He was so good and so quick with the ball. He’d dribble right through full court pressure like it was nothing and he always saw everybody. He’d make big shots when you needed them. He did whatever he wanted to do on the basketball court.

“If he would’ve been eligible to get drafted out of high school like the kids do today, he would’ve been a number one pick.”

Echoes Lamont King, a fellow teammate at Northwestern: “He could dodge rain drops, find you with a pass, and not get wet. Curt was the man to me!”

Robert “Smitty” Smith, a Miller High graduate, longtime PSL watcher, and one-time coach of Robert Traylor at Murray-Wright, remembers a quintessential Jones moment: “It was at this all-star game. He had 19 assists and this one pass that I’ll never forget. He put it between his legs, his defender’s legs, and got it to this other guy – in stride – for a lay-up.

“He was, in my opinion, the best player pound-for-pound and inch-for-inch the PSL has ever seen.”

Unfortunately for Jones, the zenith of his basketball career might have been reached during his junior year with that buzzer-beater against Pershing. Not only was it a shot witnessed by a packed house at Osborn High School, but it was also the first high school game televised in Detroit. Because neither U-D Memorial nor Cobo Arena were available for the game, the PSL struck a deal with WKBD-TV, Channel 50 to broadcast the game, better allowing the 5,850 students at the two schools a chance to witness the showdown between top-ranked Northwestern and third-ranked Pershing.

It was, as they say, the stuff of legends.

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.