Ebbets Field
Spring 2000 feature
Jared Jeffries: Fishing for redemption
IU career offers Gatorade player of the year chance to atone for nightmare state final
By DAVID BULLA
Ebbets Field Editor
BLOOMINGTON, IND. -- Jared Jeffries is an avid fisherman. Jeffries, who stands 6-foot-10, is a rod-and-reel guy. Beware of Jeffries, though, with a fly rod. �When I raise up, I will snap the rod in half,� he says of his attempts at fly- fishing. In basketball Jeffries is a combination fly and rod-and-reel guy.
Jared Jeffries: Gatorade national player of the year
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The first thing you notice about Jeffries, when you sit next to him, is that he is very tall. I am 6-3 and I have to look up to Jared to talk to him. I am not used to this. As a teacher I always felt like I was talking down, in more ways than one. I was also a basketball coach and as a rule basketball has more genetic freaks than the circus, but still most of my players were not taller than me. Perhaps only a half dozen in a decade of coaching were taller -- and none of them was a better player than I was. The best center I ever coached was my height. He plays pro football today. It�s the right sport for a 6-foot-3, 265-pounder. Yet, as I talked to Jared, I had to look up the whole time and had to hold the tape recorder above my head as if he was a talking giraffe.
Jeffries gets his height from his father, Tom Jeffries, who is 6-6. "When I went into the military, I was told the cutoff was 6-5," Tom Jeffries says. "The entrance officer told me, 'Don't stand up straight.' I sort of hunched over throughout my two tours of duty." Jeffries enlisted in the Air Force in 1959 and stayed through 1968. A native of Rolling Fork, Miss. (between Yazoo City and Greenville on U.S. 61 along the Deer River), Jeffries said the Air Force was his ticket out of the South, "but I wouldn't mind living in the Delta today. It's a different place, peaceful, quiet." Jeffries served in the Philippines and Vietnam. "The Vietnamese were loyal, hard-working people. Here I was a great big American in a foreign land. They didn't have to be nice to us."
What is most striking about his son, who was named both the Gatorade national player of the year and Indiana�s Mr. Basketball 2000, is that while from afar he looks extremely lithe and perhaps even gaunt, he is really possesses an imposing physique. Every ounce of his 215-pound body is muscle. If he were an animal, he might be an impala -- all muscle and speed.
Throughout North�s remarkable season, Jeffries impressed me as being able to turn his game up several notches for the appropriate occasion. It�s not that he does not play hard all the time. He does. He just has an acute sense of what is needed. He�s sort of an early 21st-century version of Bill Bradley. Jeffries always has a sense of where he is on the floor. There is something very graceful about his game. He is a large man, but he is not a typical center or power forward. He has small forward written all over him, even if he is not that size. But most of all he is a player. Although I could beat any center whom I coached because they would not guard me as a knocked in one jumper after another, I have no doubt that Jared could play the game that Bill Chambers, the best player in my neighborhood when I was growing up, later a player at UNC and now the coach at Greensboro College, would play when we were teenagers: he gave the opponent 15 points and played to 16, make-it-take-it. Chambers never lost. I think Jared also would keep me from scoring and there�s nothing I could do to stop him. He has me by six inches. He has the right competitive drive too.
�God blessed me with the ability to play both inside and outside,� Jeffries said after he won the Indiana Mr. Basketball award in April. �I can do a lot of things people who are 6-10 can�t normally do.�
Jeffries, who averaged 23.4 points and 10.3 rebounds as a senior, is the consummate team player. He could easily have averaged 30 points a night as a senior because most high school teams could not match up with his size and speed. Put a quick, small man on him and all he had to do was post up. Put a tall, slow man on him and all he had to do was drive past his defender. Yet Jeffries, who scored more than 1,200 points in his Bloomington North career, does not play selfish basketball. He gets his teammates involved. He makes the extra pass as is evidenced by his team-leading 4.3 assists per game. His North teammates knew that he was the best player, the team�s leader, but they also knew he made each of them better and that he did not have to have the ball every second.
�Jared Jeffries can do it all,� Columbus East coach Victor Bush said after Jeffries�
| "I just want to contribute. I want to be all I can be every night and help the team win ballgames. That's my role." -- Jared Jeffries, looking toward his freshman season at Indiana University |
Including North�s Tom McKinney, who knows Jeffries may be a once-in-a-lifetime high school player. �I was lucky to get to coach Jared,� McKinney said. �Most coaches never get the chance to coach such a player. I may never get the chance again. That�s the nature of the coaching business.
"Sometimes I've enjoyed watching Jared more off the floor than on it. He is a great goodwill ambassador for Bloomington High School North. Last week he spoke to a class of third-graders at Broadview Elementary. He likes doing those kinds of things. He likes to tell kids to work hard and have fun.�
McKinney tells an interesting story about the night Jeffries broke the school record for points in a game with 42 against Owen Valley.
�At the end of the third quarter, Jared needed one more basketball to break the school record,� McKinney said. �Now I have to make a decision: leave him in the game, which is a blowout, or take him out and let the young kids play. Now I went to Indiana University and Jared signed in November with IU, but what if he had signed with Duke? Do I let him go back in the game? I�m not sure what the answer to that one might have been.�
One of the many reasons Jeffries chose Indiana over Duke is that fact that McKinney runs a system very similar to that of IU coach Bob Knight. McKinney played one year of freshman ball at Indiana, but that was before Knight arrived on the Bloomington campus three decades ago. McKinney has learned much of the Knight system from the Hoosier head man�s annual coaching clinic and his proximity to the basketball court at IU�s Assembly Hall. North is about a mile from the IU arena.
�I owe a lot to coach McKinney,� Jeffries said. �When I was a freshman, he saw some things he thought I was capable of mentally and physically and helped to nurture those things. He saw the skills I could bring as a guard and a forward, and he really put in a lot of work to help me maximize my guard skills.
"Coach McKinney and coach Knight have many of the same thoughts about how basketball should be played, but they have somewhat different temperaments. Coach Knight is an intense, in-your-face coach. I look forward to playing for him.�
What struck McKinney the most about Jeffries was that he was not just a jock receiving lots of accolades.
�He�s a people person,� McKinney said. �He handles the adulation and the autograph hounds well. The people in the community and his teammates don�t know how much pressure it was being Jared Jeffries this season because he handled the media and public crush so well. He�s a very personable kid. That will help him out at the next level where the media attention is even greater.�
Another striking feature is Jeffries� haircut. My players back at Greensboro Dudley would call his hair style a �TWA" (a teenie-weenie afro). I asked him if he had heard the term and he said that he hadn�t. He was going to check that one out with his father. After the season ended, he chose to have his hair braided. "I grew it out all along with this in mind,� he said. Typical teenager, Jeffries had it cut by the time Gatorade named him national prep player of the year.
The high school senior, who has a cumulative grade-point average of 3.5, has defended Knight over and over again in the Indiana press in the last few months. Jeffries was not about to change his decision to attend IU because of a videotape that showed Knight briefly putting his right hand on the neck of former Indiana guard Neil Reed in a practice in January of 1997.
�Coach Knight is not some bad man as some in the media are trying to portray him to be,� Jeffries said. �Coach Knight likes his players. His job is to get players to reach their potential. Coach Knight demands a lot from his players and basketball is a physical sport. Yes, he wants them to be tough and intense, but he would never do anything to hurt any of them. He loves his players and wants them to be successful. Reed, (Jason) Collier and (Luke) Recker (who all transferred from Indiana) just weren�t tough enough to play at IU.
"I'm not like coach Knight, but my father is. May dad is a military type. He expects certain things. Perfection is not possible, but it's expected. You just got to take what coach says in stride and listen to what he is saying and not how he's saying it. I want to be pushed. A lot of players nowadays don't want to be pushed or don't want to be worked hard, but coach Knight is going to work everybody hard and work everybody to the best of their abilities. Just because you want to work hard and you want to get better in a situation like under coach Knight doesn't make you old school. It makes you a dedicated player. We are going to be successful with coach Knight as our coach. The reason I am going to IU is to play for coach Knight."
With 762 career victories, Knight is the winningest active coach in NCAA basketball. In the history of college ball, only Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp and Hank Iba have won more Division I games than Knight, who has three NCAA championships and 11 Big Ten crowns. Yet he last won a conference title in 1993 and a national championship in �87. Twenty-win seasons are not enough in Bloomington. The pressure to return to the top of the Big Ten and to the Final Four is enormous.
Basketball takes more than one player to achieve success and there�s no guarantee that Jeffries can lead the Hoosiers to a Big Ten title and the Final Four. Yet you don�t need a whole platoon of athletes like you do in football. One or two players can make a difference. When Jeffries declared for Indiana last November, it had a domino effect. A.J. Moye, the best prep player in Georgia, decided to join Jeffries at Indiana. Now several top-rated rising prep seniors in Indiana are also considering IU. Why? It�s because Jared Jeffries will be the center of the program for the next four years. He�s that good. Anybody who saw the dunk against Owen Valley in late January knows what I mean. The jam of jams came with 2:24 left in the half. Jeffries did a wide cut from the right wing as he filled the lane and North guard Scott May threw a pass that appeared headed toward the second deck of the Cougar Den. Somehow Jeffries caught the ball behind the backboard and in one motion rammed it home. The play earned a five-paragraph description in the Bloomington Herald-Times the next day. �That was Grant Hillish,� quipped a middle-aged local businessman on Bloomington�s Indiana Avenue during a snowstorm the following day. Indeed, McKinney was not a popular man when he took Jeffries out of the game in the fourth quarter that night. �Put Jeffries back in the game,� said an 8-years-old boy in the stands. �Put him back in.� Only two minutes were left in the game and Jeffries had been out of the game for five minutes. �Well, folks, that was worth the price of admission right there,� Owen Valley play-by-play man Tony Kale said immediately after the dunk. �Everybody can go home now. I don�t have a vote for Mr. Basketball, but if I did, I�d vote for Jared Jeffries. Twice.�
Nor will anyone who saw Jefffries� third quarter in the sectional final against Bloomington South at Columbus North doubt his ability to lead the Hoosiers into Big Ten contention. Jeffries showed a deft shooting stroke on that snowy Southern Indiana night. His Cougars led 21-12 at the half, but Jeffries had sat most of the first 16 minutes with two fouls. The forward responded by scoring 15 points in the third quarter, including three treys, and finished the night with 34 points, 12 rebounds and three blocked shots. It was one of the two best all-around games of his career -- with his 37 points on 15 of 17 from the field, 11 rebounds, three assists and three blocks against Indianapolis Pike and its outstanding junior guard Chris Thomas matching the sectional final.
It may be true that Jeffries and Knight�s future are inextricably entwined. Knight needed a major recruiting coup like Jeffries as his program had plateaued in the late �90s. If Knight had failed to land Jeffries, the Hoosier coach might have been looking at an early retirement. The Jeffries signing seemed to energize the Indiana coach and his 1999-2000 team surpassed expectation and posted a 20-9 season. The Hoosiers defeated three of the Final Four teams and nearly swept national champion Michigan State. But the late-season allegations by Reed and then by Ricky Calloway in a Texas newspaper account that failed to give Knight the chance to counter with his side has taken its toll on the Hooisers� program. Meanwhile, Jeffries and the Cougars won 25 straight games, climbed to 20th in the nation in the USA Today high school poll and fifth in the Midwest before losing to Marion 62-56 at Conseco Fieldhouse March 25 in Indianapolis in a state final in which Jeffries made only 5-of-17 floor shots. That North, which had the first unbeaten regular season in the history of Bloomington prep basketball, failed to win the state 4-A state title on a night when Jeffries had only 10 points -- 14 below his average -- means he still has something to prove to the world: that the Mr. Basketball award was deserved. And what jersey does Indiana�s top high school player want to wear at IU? �No. 1,� he says and then fishes for a rationale. �It�s not because I have a big ego, but because nobody has ever worn it at Indiana and Kirk Haston has No. 35,� which is what he wore at North. �I haven�t asked coach Knight yet, but I was told that the NCAA has finally legalized the use of that number for the first time this year.�
Jeffries had one small consolation the night of the Marion game: he was named the winner of the Arthur L. Trester Award for mental attitude and sportsmanship. Many Mr. Basketball voters were swayed by Jeffries� personality and academic performance. Runner-up Zach Randolph of Marion outscored Jeffries by 18 points in the title game, but Randolph has not yet qualified academically at Michigan State.
�I think he will fit in well at IU,� Columbus East�s Bush said of Jeffries. �The question when we he was going through the recruiting process was, does he feel comfortable staying in Bloomington. He�s been there all his life. I thought he would go to Duke so he could get out and see a little of the world, but IU is a good all-around choice. It�s a highly respected program and excellent college.
�I think he needs to lift weights or guys will push him around a lot in the Big Ten, but because of his inside and outside skills he should have an immediate impact on the IU program, if not in game one, then in game two.�
Ultimately, Jeffries is staying in Bloomington to play for the Hoosiers because he comes from a tight-knit family. Jeffries, who won 90-of-100 games in a North uniform, said that Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski did a �fantastic job� recruiting him, but that home is where the heart is.
�Coach K was great on the morning of Nov. 1,� Jeffries said. �He was very complimentary of my decision. He knows Coach Knight is a great coach and I will be in good shape here. Coach K wished me luck and thanked me for my interest in Duke.�
Jeffries� father Tom is retired from working a job in the automotive industry in Kokomo. He oversees a family which lives in a house east of Bloomington on Monroe County's border with Brown County. "I stay at home and take the boys to school," said Tom Jeffries, whose driveway sports a sign supporting the Bloomington North Cougars, though the school is 15 miles way. "I also do the cooking. Haven't quite graduated to the laundry yet." Meanwhile, Jared's mother Cecelia works at a General Electric factory in Bloomington and her mother, Lorita Carter, sees all of Jared's games. The father is happy his son will play close to home.
�We can see all of Jared�s games in person and his younger brother is coming along now too,� said Tom Jeffries, who is a long-time Hoosiers� basketball fan. �Jared is the kind of young person who likes to play with kids and he has a strong presence in the community because of that.�
Jeffries� abilities were relayed to Knight through Bloomington Herald-Times sportswriter Andy Graham, who found himself in the middle of the recruiting game.
�I don�t get involved in recruiting because it�s unprofessional,� Graham said. �Still, I get this call from coach Knight early one morning and I tell him what I think the truth is: that Jared is the best player around. Next thing I know Indiana is recruiting him hard. Coach Knight wanted to know about his grades and what kind of person he was, but he wanted to know if he could really play. I said, �Coach, he can play, I mean really play.� �
The whole state of Indiana now knows what Graham has known since Jeffries� sophomore season when the forward moved to the backcourt and single-handedly won a state playoff game after Cougar standout Kueth Duany (now at Syracuse) sustained a torn knee ligament. Furthermore, the dimension of Jeffries� stardom can be measured in an event that occurred after North had beaten Indianapolis Manual 92-41 in early March of this past season. The Manual players were begging reporters for paper and pen because they planned to get the McDonald�s all-America�s autograph. �They can tell their children and grandchildren they had the honor of playing in a high school game against Jared Jeffries,� Redskins� assistant coach Michael Bryant explained.
Jeffries hangs out on a regular basis with current Hoosiers Jeffrey Newton and George Leach. He went to three IU practices a week during the recently completed season. The USA Today all-America also frequents the IU campus for pickup games. He has been working on a daily weight-training program since the end of the season. He knows that he must bulk up. At the Derby Classic in Louisville April 30, the program incorrectly listed Jeffries' weight as 275. "I've started a new diet," Jeffries said with a smile.
Before Jeffries starts at IU, he will have to don jersey No. 1 for the Indiana All-Stars in their annual summer series with the best players from Kentucky. In the various all-star games he play this spring and summer, perhaps Jeffries will respond to the one last question about his game as he nears his college career: whether he has a rod-and-reel or fly attitude toward basketball, often the critical difference between star and superstar. At this point in his career, he seems to be more of a self-conscious, thinking man's player. Not quite a Bill Bradley, Mo Cheeks or Bill Walton. Nonetheless, if David Robinson's game is called soft, than Jeffries' game will certainly get that label. Recruiting sophist Clark Francis has already labelled Jeffries that way. How Jeffries handles the pounding of Purdue, Ohio State, Illinois and Michigan State remains to be seen. Let's just say Conference Indiana is a few notches below the Big Ten.
After the all-star circuit, Jeffries will go fishing for a week with his brother Justin and his parents in northern Canada, "seven hours north of Sault Ste. Marie," Jared notes.
"We fish for walleye and Northern pike. I suspect dad might want to fish with coach Knight some day," Jared adds. Sure, Tom Jeffries would like to fish with Knight, but he has a long-standing policy not to get too close to Jared's coaches. "Familiarity breeds contempt," says Tom Jeffries, who grew up fishing for bass, brim and crappie on the lakes and creeks of the Mississippi Delta. "If I get too close to a coach, I might start expecting something from him. It's not my place. The worst thing a parent can do is to get too close to a coach."
Jared Jeffries knows the big ones get away occasionally. "Once when we were fishing in Minnesota, I landed about a 25-30 pound Northern pike. I got the fish all the way to the boat, but then I lost it as I tried to get it in the boat."
Both fishing and basketball have their moments of bitterness. Jeffries fished in some pretty teeming waters in high school, but he knows college means change. "I just want to contribute," he says of his freshman year at Indiana. "I want to be all I can be every night and help the team win ballgames. That's my role." In a word, Jeffries is unselfish. The lasting moment of his high school career will be the assist to Sean May in the state semifinal win over Jeffersonville. Three Jeffersonville defenders came to Jeffries as the clock wound down in a tied game. Jeffries let his instincts take over: he fed May for the layup and the victory.
Fishing is about finding the right place in the water, the right solar position and the proper water temperature. Basketball is about movement, screening and finding the open man. Jared Jeffries excels at both. With his high school days behind him, he's ready to fish for bigger trophies. Maybe then he can put that dismal March Saturday night in Indianapolis behind him. Maybe, too, Knight, if he survives the latest allegation against him, can put the on-going criticisms of his program to rest. An odd marriage it may be: fly coach and combo player, but the former has always admitted he's looking for both types of fishermen in a basketball ballplayer.
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