Remembering Jerry Jones: Louisville basketball assistant coach was as loyal as they come

Scott Davenport didn't understand it.

Why was he, a walk-on freshman back in 1975, the one who got to ride shotgun in coach Jerry Jones' car during the Louisville men's basketball JV team's trip to Bowling Green for a game against Western Kentucky?

"I immediately thought, 'They just don't want to be brown-nosing the coach,'" Davenport said of his teammates. "I seized the opportunity. I didn't want to be a coach's pet; but I wanted to learn."

The first thing he learned was that, back then, Jones liked to smoke his pipe while driving — even during the winter, when everyone had their windows up. The Merrillville, Indiana, native had it rolling, Davenport said, before the car reached Interstate 65.

The second thing he learned: Jones was a basketball encyclopedia.

That's how he came to be Jones' co-pilot for two years and, eventually, the son he never had. And the longtime Bellarmine head coach wouldn't trade their conversations for anything.

"You couldn't put a price on that," Davenport said.

Jones, a member of the late Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum's staff from 1973-2001, died Monday at age 89 after spending his final months in hospice care. He was preceded in death by his wife of 54 years, Beverly, and is survived by three daughters: Nancy, Kathy and Sherry.

He and Crum took U of L to new heights — winning national championships in 1980 and 1986 and reaching the Final Four five times — while having 13 players selected in the first round of the NBA draft. They did so by establishing a culture that served as the blueprint for the university's rallying cry, "Louisville first, Cardinals forever."

"All he did," Davenport said, "was whatever helped the program."

Some of those who knew Jones described him to The Courier Journal in ways that people often describe Davenport. He radiated enthusiasm; he rarely said a bad word about anybody; he knew the X's and O's and how to adapt them in a pinch. But, of all the things Davenport said Jones taught him, loyalty was the most important.

That's why Jones turned down multiple offers to be the head coach at Pepperdine and stuck around here as Crum's right-hand man; because the head coach, as Jones said at his funeral last May, "treated you like you were an equal."

Together, they made one hell of a team, which meant more to Jones than striking out on his own.

"He cared so much about others," Davenport said. "It was never, ever about him."

Lancaster Gordon saw the full extent of Jones' loyalty on March 27, 1982, at the Final Four in New Orleans.

Hours before Louisville tipped off against Georgetown, Gordon finished his pregame meal and got on an elevator at the team's hotel with a man he didn't know. The man looked at him and said, "I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan. We killed all of your people."

It wasn't Gordon's first brush with racism but rattled him nonetheless. And not long after the incident, once word of it got out through the daughter of a ticket office staffer who was on the elevator with Gordon, there was Jones knocking on his hotel room's door to address a difficult subject head-on.

"I respected him for that a whole lot," Gordon said. "He was always someone who had my back."

"He was always encouraging to the players," added former U of L athletics director Bill Olsen, who was a member of Crum's staff with Jones. "If coach Crum was having difficulty getting a player to respond to something he was trying to get across to them, Jerry would come in behind him and tap the player on the back."

But he was also, as Davenport put it, a "fireball" who would track you down if you didn't show up to class and let you hear about it. To that point, Gordon recounted Jones' most common turn of phrase when he deviated from Crum's "Cool Hand Luke" demeanor to hold someone accountable.

"If you got coach Jones really, really mad," Gordon said, "he would say, 'coach Crum, you may put up with it, but I'm not putting up with it. You may tolerate it, but I'm not tolerating it.'"

Kenny Payne constantly stopped by Jones' office as a freshman during the 1985-86 season and asked, "What do I need to do to get on the court? What do I need to do to be the best player I can be?"

"He couldn't get his work done, because I was harassing him all the time," said Payne, now in his second year as Louisville's head coach, during his radio show Monday night.

Jones tolerated it, then turned it into a teaching moment.

Eventually, Payne said, he asked Jones to list the answers to his questions on a piece of paper. The coach wrote down, "Rome was not built in a day" and handed it back to him.

"That, probably, out of all the things a coach has given me, is one of the most profound," Payne said. "You can have the want-to, you can have the talent, but you've got to let it materialize. You've got to let nature take its course, for you to grow as a person and as a player, for it all to come together."

When it all came together for Jones and Crum, the Cards were a family — down to little things like Jones' wife making sure every player received a cake on their birthday.

And when he got to cut loose, Jones assumed the role of a fun uncle.

He dared Gordon to eat octopus on a stick to no avail when the team traveled to Japan during the 1981-82 season. He debated endless theories with players as to who shot J.R. Ewing on "Dallas." He raced the team's longtime trainer, the late Jerry May, at Arlington National Cemetery because both of them had one leg longer than the other.

"I don't even know who won," Gordon said, "because everybody was laughing so hard."

That rapport was one of the things Crum cited while speaking to The Courier Journal in 2011, for a story about Jones coming out of retirement to impart the high-post offense to the Jeffersonville High School girls basketball team, to explain why his friend was "one of those guys who was meant to be a coach."

"He poured so much into me," Payne said. "(I've) got nothing but love for him and his family."

One sign of someone's loyalty is how beneficiaries pay it forward.

That's what Davenport did when Jones' wife died in 2010 after a bout with leukemia.

Davenport knew that, when winter arrived and Jones' golf outings become less frequent, his mentor would have a lot more time on his hands. He worried how Jones would fare with the love of his life no longer present.

So he called Jones one day and asked him to be a coach emeritus — "to coach the coaches" — at Bellarmine.

Jones took the role seriously. He attended most of the Knights' practices and, more often than not, reported to Davenport's office four hours before tipoff on game days. And when each of the team's starters was introduced, they'd walk over to Jones, who was seated on press row, and deliver a fist bump.

It's a scene Davenport won't soon forget, much like Jones' last words to him — a quiet, mumbled callback to the emphatic way he greeted him over the phone: "Good morning."

Reach Louisville men's basketball reporter Brooks Holton at bholton@gannett.com and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville basketball coach Jerry Jones honored by former players