“He was just a real good guy. And man, on the court he was one mean son of a gun around the basket! He was a great competitor, but…”
With that, Bockhorn started to laugh: “When it came to free throws, he couldn’t shoot a lick.”
Friday night — two days after the 67-year-old Jackson died after a long battle with cancer — the Flyers topped LaSalle, 66-55, at UD Arena.
Dayton “couldn’t shoot a lick” either from the line, making just 15 of 31 attempts for an anemic 48.4 percent.
“Abysmal,” UD coach Archie Miller called it.
And yet such errant marksmanship would have been a step up for Jackson during his 1970-71 senior season.
“Wait, I got it right here,” said Don Donoher, the Flyers legendary coach as he went through one of the myriad files he keeps on his past teams and players.
“After coming to us from junior college, he shot an even 50 percent from the line his first season. The next year it went down to 43 percent.”
At least that’s what it was when George was actually doing the shooting.
“Back then they didn’t have instant replay,” Tom Crosswhite, Jackson’s muscular front court mate, his roommate and his lifelong pal, recalled with bemusement by phone from his home in Park City, Utah.
”More often than not, when George was fouled by someone, Mick (Donoher) would call time out. Then when we went back onto the court, I’d slip in at the free throw line and shoot George’s free throws.”
Although he didn’t confirm the orchestration, Donoher laughed at the revelation:
“I guess it kinda got around and finally one night one of the refs came by the bench and said, ‘Hey, no more of that! Isn’t this supposed to be a Catholic school?’
“I told him, ‘Not on game night!’”
And game night — especially in the Flyers’ biggest games — was when Jackson was at his best.
“It seemed like the tougher the competition, the more George rose to the top,” Crosswhite said. “I remember he had really big games versus Notre Dame.”
Jackson transferred into UD as a junior from Kilgore Community College in Texas and in his first season with the team, the Flyers beat No. 13 Notre Dame, Louisville, DePaul twice and Xavier twice before losing to Houston in the first round of the NCAA Tournament and finishing 19-8.
The 6-foot-7 Jackson averaged 14.5 rebounds and 12.1 points per game that season.
The following year the 18-9 Flyers — who would lose to Duke in the first round of the NIT at Madison Square Garden — had a huge victory over No. 9 Western Kentucky and a historic win over Cincinnati in a game in which Jackson, quite literally, had a decisive hand.
The Flyers had not won against UC in almost 14 years. They had lost 14 in a row and defeat number 15 was just seconds away at the Armory Fieldhouse when there was a scramble for a loose ball under the Flyers basket.
“We were down by a point, and as guys piled on to grab the ball, I was sure they were going to call a foul on us,” remembered Al Bertke, then a junior guard for the Flyers. “But luckily they called a jump ball.
“Back then there was no possession arrow, you lined up in the circle and jumped. I was standing just inside half court and all the other guys lined up along the circle. It was the weirdest thing. All of them, except George and their guy, jumping were on the left side of the floor.
“The whole right side was open.”
“Coach always taught us, ‘Don’t step into that circle until you are ready and know where to tip it.’ And George was smart enough and savvy enough to make his surveillance. And that’s when he gave me quick eye contact and a slight nod behind him, meaning the right side of the floor.
“When I got the signal, I kind of nodded back. Instantly, we both knew the play.
“The guys on the circle couldn’t move until the ball was tipped, but I could and I was off to a running start when George tipped it perfectly to the right, about where the three-point stripe is now. I got there ahead of Derrick Dickey and just launched the thing. All I saw was Dickeys’ arm pit coming past me. Luckily, I hit the shot and we won (70-69.)
“We all swarmed each other and I remember going to George and saying, ‘I’m happy to be your teammate.’”
That season Jackson again averaged 14.5 rebounds and upped his scooting to 14.3 p.p.g. He was voted the MVP of the season.
But he made a far bigger contribution to UD basketball than that said Donoher.
‘Always his own man’
“For everything he did on the floor, George meant more to UD basketball by just coming to the school,” Donoher said. “At the time he came we had zero black kids on the team, and it had been a bleak history.
“We had gone through Roger Brown and Henry Burlong. We lost Jerry Francis and had the deal with Glinder (Torain) and Rudy (Waterman).”
Brown, possibly the greatest talent ever to wear a UD uniform, was controversially dropped by the university after his freshman season when the NCAA said he had been befriended as a high school kid by a known game fixer.
Burlong played two seasons and was an academic casualty, and Francis played two years and then was gone, too.
Waterman and Torain were part of the Flyers great run to the NCAA Tournament’s championship game in 1967, but afterward they said they felt racially ostracized by the rest of the team.
The issue became an Associated Press national story when Waterman spoke out at a campus function saying the discrimination he felt caused him to no longer give maximum effort on the court.
After that, Donoher almost never played Waterman and Torain — they often sat separately on the bench — even as the Flyers went on to beat Kansas and win the NIT a year later.
Later, Torain left school, went to Europe to play and never has been back in contact with the school.
Waterman and Donoher later reconciled and visited each other several times, but in 1981 — following a marriage break up and a drug problem — Rudy shot himself in a suicide attempt, fell into a coma and soon died.
Donoher visited him in the hospital, attended the funeral and has visited his New Jersey grave since.
“When George came to UD, our name out in West Dayton was mud,” Donoher said. “It took a lot for him to come here, but that opened the door and Donald Smith came and J.D. Grigsby, too. And that led to the Detroit connection (Allen Ellijah, Johnny Davis, Leighton Moulton and Erv Giddings.)
“And then everything finally fell into place for the modern day.”
Grigsby, who like Jackson had played at Roth High and gone to Kilgore, said he asked George about coming to UD:
“He was so uplifting about the experience and that gave me affirmation.”
That’s not to say that Jackson didn’t take some heat when he first came to UD.
“When we beat Western Kentucky, they were highly ranked and really physical,” Crosswhite said. “George and I controlled the boards, and after the game we were really excited and were hugging each other.
“A photo of that made the newspaper the next day, and George said a bunch of buddies he hung around with gave him crap about it. He said he put a stop to it right away.”
Grigsby believes that:
“George was always his own man.”
A Texas steal
Sharon Jackson — George’s wife of 47 years — remembers the first time she laid eyes on him.
She was Sharon Reed then and also a Roth student,
“We were walking up the hallway, and I asked my girlfriend, ‘Who…is…THAT!’” she laughed. “I’m tellin’ you, I was awestruck.
“Eventually we got talking, but I was the one who had to go speak to him first. He was kinda shy, but he had caught me lookin’ at him.”
They were high school sweethearts when he headed off to Kilgore.
Asked if, back then, she had feared some Texas girl might lure him away, she scoffed:
“Are you kidding me! You think I was worried about that!”
They were married by the time he came to UD and had two kids, who, Sharon said, played with the Donoher kids at Flyers games.
Jackson was just the second junior college player Donoher had signed. The first was Crosswhite, who had come a year earlier out of Trinidad State Junior College in Colorado thanks to a clandestine effort.
“I had signed a letter of intent with the Western Athletic Conference to play at New Mexico, but I wanted to go to school closer to home,” said Crosswhite, who grew up in Ohio.
“Dayton was on a really good run and Donoher had kept calling me. I told him I’d sign the national letter of intent with him — it would trump the other one — if he came out there.”
The great Spencer Haywood was Crosswhite’s roommate at Trinidad, and the night before the national signing day their coach had them both locked in the athletic dorm.
“I crawled out the window at midnight, went to Donoher’s room and signed,” Crosswhite laughed. “Spencer did the same thing and signed with Detroit.”
With Jackson, the 6-foot-7 Crosswhite and 6-foot-8 George Janky, UD had a muscle-bound front court that took no guff.
Jackson had elbows that packed the same devastation as a Joe Frazier left hook — he once KO’d a Miami player with one — and Crosswhite was no shrinking violet, either.
That was evident (a season before Jackson joined the team) in a February 1969 game against Morehead State at the Fieldhouse.
“They had a 6-foot-9 guy carved like Superman, and he and George (Janky) were pounding each other, and then I came up and hit a guy and he went down and the place exploded,” Crosswhite said.
Some of the crowd poured out of the stands, and as the scrum intensified, the officials waved an end to the game, and the teams were pushed to their dressing rooms.
Donoher later went to the officials’ room and said order had been restored so they could finish. He said one of the refs was doubled over holding his stomach — he had been punched — and he said that was it.
Donoher said he responded: “Well then, who won?
“He said, ‘You did!’
“And I said, ‘Great, that’s fine with me.’”
A Flyers for life
Friday afternoon Sharon led the way to the basement of her East Dayton home so she could show “the shrine,” as Donoher called it, that trumpeted George’s basketball career.
On the walls were photos from his Roth, Kilgore and UD days. There was also the letter he got from the Milwaukee Bucks when he was drafted in the 14th round in 1971, an invite that later got him cut in camp.
On one shelf were three, large golden trophies, including his White Allen MVP Award.
“He’s actually got boxes more, but I told him, ‘Oh no, they’re not going up in here. You get three, that’s it!’” Sharon laughed.
Most of the stuff on display had some connection to Flyers basketball, which remained dear to George’s heart.
And just as he loved Dayton, the Flyers loved him.
A year ago, when Bockhorn found out that Jackson’s ongoing medical issues had taken a financial toll and left him needing new teeth, he and Crosswhite and a few other guys came up with $10,000 to fix George’s ever-present smile.
Recently, as his cancer spread and George’s condition worsened, he was visited by Donoher — both at home and at Hospice — talked several times on the phone to Crosswhite and spoke with Bertke and other players, too.
George died Wednesday just after 5p.m.
Besides Sharon, he is survived by their three children — daughter Dineah and sons George III and Jermaine — two sisters, Vicki Maddox and Sheila Henderson, six grandchildren and three great grand kids.
The funeral service will be at noon Tuesday at Wayman AME Church at 3317 Hoover Ave, in Dayton. Grigsby, now the Rev. J.D. Grigsby, will help officiate. A viewing for family and friends starts at the church 11 a.m. Burial will be at Woodland Cemetery.
“He was just a good soldier, that guy,” Donoher said quietly.
Three days before Christmas, Donoher visited Jackson who was quite sick and was in the bedroom when the coach arrived.
Donoher told Sharon to let him rest, but George insisted on coming out.
“They ended up talking a long time,” Sharon said with a smile.
George even brought Donoher down the steep basement steps to show him his UD memorabilia.
“I thought, ‘Ooooh boy, we’ll never shut him up today,’” Sharon laughed. “At first he had had some breathing problems, but when he saw Coach, George’s face lit up.
“I’m telling you that visit lit up his day. That’s all he could talk about after that.
“UD basketball just meant so much to him.”
And, in turn, as Donoher noted, George Jackson meant so very much to UD.
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