Sports stardom can set course on a rocky road

opinions

March 9, 2017 - 12:00 AM

Josh Jackson, the No. 1 high school basketball recruit in the nation last year, may not have taken his mother’s lessons to heart after deciding to spend a year playing for the KU Jayhawks before cashing in with the pros.

Jackson has had a couple of run-ins with the law — her missteps were in the classroom  — for vandalizing a female student’s car and backing into a parked car without sticking around to take responsibility.

The 6-foot-8 Jackson, as basketball fans know, is terrific on the court and has been a key performer for Kansas. Whether that has anything to do with how Coach Bill Self treated the two incidents is conjecture: Punishment for his first incident was “handled internally” without Jackson being suspended; the second resulted in him being suspended for the first game of the Big 12 tournament, which the Jayhawks, seeded No. 1, probably could win relying on reserves.

Whether any of this is right or wrong would be subjective judgment for someone not in the loop.

An article that appeared in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader last year reported an interesting aside, as well as some things about Allen Community College that we found distressing.

His mother, Apples Jones, also was a standout basketball player in Detroit. “… while she had more than enough on-court talent to earn a Division I scholarship, she hadn’t applied herself in the classroom and didn’t have the grades …,” wrote Ben Roberts, of the Herald-Leader sports department.

That’s how she ended up at ACC. This is where the story gets sticky. “… the situation was pretty much the same,” Roberts reported. “Jones excelled on the basketball court while coasting through her academic work  — doing just enough to get by but not applying herself to any great degree.”

Jones “had a rude awakening” when she went to the University of Texas-El Paso following two years in Iola.

Jones “rarely went to class, assuming she would get by like she had in the past.” Imagine the impact when she failed most of her first-semester classes. Meanwhile, she was having a great year on the court, averaging 15.1 points and 6.7 rebounds. She played the second semester on probation, on the way to earning all-conference honors.

Even though doing better academically the second semester, her grades weren’t good enough for a senior year of basketball. The Navy beckoned her to come be a parachute rigger. So did love: She became pregnant within a year and left the service.

 

WHILE JOSH Jackson may have stumbled a couple of times at KU, from all indications Jones learned from her mistakes.

During his recruitment, which began long before he graduated high school, Jones was near at hand.

 She told Roberts: “Every parents wants the best for their kids. But you have to get in there. You have to ask the hard questions. You have to be wary of other people. You have to be skeptical all the time.”

 

THE POINT: Jackson, like so many other talented young players — in any sport — has been bathed with adulation since the first hint of his extraordinary basketball talent, often given advantage of which friends and other students could only dream.

Such sports stars are elevated to a pedestal and, when they’re as fine a player as Jackson, the adulation becomes hero worship. Adults live vicariously through the players and are willing to make most any concession to befriend them, and help decide a college destination.

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