Traveling Isn’t Against His Rules Real-Life Basketball Jones Aches His Way Through Hoopfest

The shoulder still isn’t right. He can’t run. The ankle is half-strength, if that.

By now, Hoopfest players of every description feel Saturday’s pounding on the streets of Spokane.

Jackie Jones felt that way before the first bounce in this seventh annual 3-on-3 tournament that resumes with a vengeance this morning.

Jones can’t jump much right now, but he rebounds when he has to. He doesn’t shoot a lot, but he usually scores when he hoists one.

“Anything to help the team,” he shrugs.

After his team - Europa Pizzaria and Bakery - won its opener Saturday morning, he talked about playing hurt in a career that has taken him through the mainstream and the backwaters of basketball, from his native Detroit to junior college in Great Bend, Kan., to the University of Oklahoma and on to Spain.

And that’s only the half of it.

Ask him where he makes his home and he says, “Seattle. Kind of.”

It’s easier to track where he’s been. Jones played six months in Venezuela. He was on three CBA teams Rapid City, Yakima and Tri-Cities. He just got back from seven months in Turkey.

“I’ve bounced around because of basketball,” the 6-foot-8, 28-year-old said. “I’m in Seattle two or three months and I leave.

“I never know where I’m going to be.”

Center Court on Spokane Falls Boulevard - playing in front of Bloomsday statues and port-a-potties - is just another stop in a whir of scenery. Yet winning and losing pack the same kick.

Of all the memories in all the places he’s been, Jones hasn’t forgotten last year, in Spokane.

“We took second last year. I remember the shot that beat us. I think the guy shot it from Tri-Cities somewhere. One shot. It was incredible.

“Like I said, this is just friends coming back, having a little fun, coming down from Seattle.”

Jones wound up in Turkey last season after doing what he does at every crossroads - staying close to the phone.

“I just got back from camp in Yakima and a friend called and asked, ‘How’d you like to go to Turkey?’ It was a blessing, just a phone call away.”

Jones hammers out a living doing what virtually everybody else in this event does lovingly for nothing.

“I just got back from Turkey about a month and a half ago,” he said. “It’s becoming one of the powerful basketball countries in Europe. It was my first year there. I had a couple of calls from a couple of different teams, so it looks like I will be going back.”

In Turkey, he bumped into Arizona State’s Isaac Austin, who had a fling with the NBA Utah Jazz, and found out that only a select few make big money.

“One guy - Conrad McRae (a 6-10 ex-Syracuse star out of Brooklyn) - is making $1 million,” Jones said. “I didn’t make that, but for six months I got more than some of the guys in the first division, so I can’t complain. It was maybe three times as much as I made in the CBA.”

It’s enough to get him leaning toward going back.

“If I go back again, they want us in August and you can be gone until May,” he said. “You miss your family. What the future holds, I don’t know, but if I get called to Timbuktu, it doesn’t matter. I just want to play.”

Jones laughs off the notion that opponents in the Action Sportswear Open Division might go after him a little harder, realizing that he’s been around.

“Actually,” he said, “no one knows me here.”

Some do. He was a star for run-and-gun advocate Billy Tubbs at Oklahoma.

“The Sooners,” Jones said. “It was roll the balls out and let’s go. My style.”

A CBA first-round draft choice in ‘91, Jones hasn’t stopped getting hurt since he left Norman, Okla.

“I think I’m getting better,” Jones said. “I just have to stay healthy. Anything’s possible. I don’t give up my dream. My dream is not necessarily to play in the NBA. I just want to play where the competition is.”

He remembers hurting the shoulder going up for a rebound “by myself.” The ankle went out in a summer league game in Seattle “going up for a dunk and a guy ran under me. I got ready to lift off, kicked my foot and it just rolled,” he said.

Jones can only hope that injury won’t stop him. He’s not ready to give up the life of a basketball nomad.

“They just call me up,” he says of the myriad offers he’s taken up over the years. “Half the time I’m not in shape, but I was trying to get in shape and stay in shape (this summer) and I get injured.”

The NBA, he says, is not out of the question, given the right opportunity.

“I think I can play at that level,” Jones said. “They look at me as a power forward-small forward, but I’m known for my outside shooting. Whatever a team needs, I’ll do.

“You need rebounding, I’ll rebound - but I’m also going to shoot my jumper anyway. Whatever. I just get the job done.”

With ex-Whitworth player Kevin Smith, Terry Britt, who played at Central Washington, and Clyde Woullard, Jones overcame the limitations. They’ll be back on Spokane Falls Boulevard this morning as one of the four unbeaten teams in their bracket.

“When he (Britt) called me, I said, ‘Man, you know I can’t play. I’m just standing under the basket, getting the ball and throwing up a little jump hook.’ “I’m walking around with a big old ankle brace. I’ve kind of bounced back from the shoulder, but this is scary. It’s the most pain I’ve been in. I’m not jumping at all. I’m standing, pushing, shoving and shooting.”

With that repertoire, Jones can play Hoopfest for another 30 years.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo