NFL drafts are sprawling beasts with tentacles spreading to and fro, past and future, hither and yon, so that a strand of one loud story might reach back even to a $25,000 pro tennis challenger event on a clay court in Raleigh, N.C., in May 1979 — because of course it might.
On one side of that court that Tuesday was a daydream of an athlete and a gentleman, John Lucas II, who had played both basketball and tennis sublimely at Maryland, who had become the No. 1 pick by Houston in the 1976 NBA draft and who would become an NBA coach, these days as an assistant with those Rockets. He would reach No. 579 in the world in tennis in late 1979, and he stepped on the Raleigh clay just one month removed from a third NBA season of excellent scoring totals (16.1 points per game) and whopping assist totals (9.3 per game), this time for a Golden State team that went 38-44 and missed the playoffs in an unforgiving Pacific Division that included those 1979 champions, the Seattle SuperSonics.
His presence did cause a bit of a din, even as one could imagine the clamor such a venture might cause nowadays. He hailed from nearby Durham, had played basketball and tennis since third grade — nine months a year for the former, three for the latter — and had played in World Team Tennis in its first iteration.
“I could never play it enough to be as good a player as I wanted to be,” Lucas said in a telephone interview.
On the other side of that court was merely a fantastic tennis player, Gordon Jones, who had gone to Yorktown High in Arlington and then to Florida State for three years and then Flagler, where he would win the NAIA national singles title and reach Flagler’s hall of fame, all well before becoming a lawyer these days in Jacksonville, Fla. He already had reached No. 322 in the world in early 1978, and he already had become one of the talented legions who have stormed the planet through time scrounging for elusive rankings points that could usher them into top-level tour events. For one thing, he had lost a taut Wimbledon qualifying match in 1978 to the invisible serve of Aussie Dale Collings, 6-3, 9-8, back when Wimbledon tiebreak sets wound up 9-8.
“I’m a big, tall guy, big serve, liked to serve-and-volley,” Jones said, before noting the frightening passing shots of today and saying, “I look at these matches and go, ‘Gosh, I don’t know if I could win a point!’ ”
Lucas was 24 and Jones 23, with Lucas and wife DeEdgra the parents of a newborn daughter Tarvia, who would become an excellent figure skater, and later two sons, John III and Jai, who would take their basketball skills and roam the earth (including six NBA clubs for John III). Only by 1994 would Jones become a parent, eventually of three college athletes — boy, girl, boy — the third of whom would grow up to be Mac Jones, the former Alabama quarterback reigning as a topic du jour amid the ceaseless yakking around the country’s favorite of all topics, the NFL Draft.
Here were two men navigating one of those ever-mysterious clay courts, who would go on to navigate the tricky art of being athletes raising athletes. Lucas handled that by supplying the sons a challenge — “You have got to always protect the name of ‘Lucas’ on the basketball court or the tennis court” — and a reminder: “I never took it home, and I always used to tell my kids the whole time, ‘Know the difference. As a parent, I love you unconditionally. As a basketball coach, when I’m in the gym, it’s my coaching personality. It’s not your Dad.’”
And, goodness, Jones would bring to parenting one of the most edifying backgrounds going, if one dares be observant. He coached youths as a tennis pro. Those youths would bring along — oh, no, please don’t — tennis parents.
“I think one of the benefits of having been a tennis pro,” said the father of a college soccer player (Will), a college tennis player (Sarah Jane) and a college football player (Mac), “is I saw the manifestation of tennis parents reflected in the students that I taught.” He infused that in his collaborations with two accomplished lawyers and mothers, Katherine, the mother of Will, and Holly, the mother of Sarah Jane and Mac.
One day, he essentially fired an employer, a mother whose despotism kept marring the process.
Another day, later on — he still gets choked up about that day.
His daughter was 14 or 15, and her focus in a particular match did not qualify as ideal, and Gordon felt something bubbling within that he had strove to keep from bubbling.
“It was the first time I felt like I felt mad,” he said, and so, “It made her upset.”
They began to drive home, and as he recollects that, he apologizes briefly for halting to cry and recalls saying, “‘Sarah, I apologize for getting mad at you.’” He said, “Play tennis because you love it and recognize that if, if you ever quit, I’m going to be an appreciative father because this gave me this great father-daughter time.” He had “realized in my own mind I was starting to put my expectations of what I wanted to do on her,” and that, “She needed a father more than she needed a coach.”
So as the designated handler of on-field or on-court matters, Gordon let the children blossom with their own wills as primary guides, and that included Mac, that proverbial youngest who gained from sparring with the elders.
“Mac is a kid who if you stole the ball from him in basketball,” his father said, “he would go down and tackle you [to get it back].” Of lacrosse, Gordon said of Mac: “He thought it was the greatest game. ‘If they steal the ball from you, you can chase ’em down the field clubbing them!’ ”
Dad’s philosophy included not obsessing on the final scores of games involving children — some kids simply develop faster than others, for one thing — and allowing time for technical development if his children wanted technical development. That included throwing camps for Mac, and wherever one might peg him in this draft with so much pegging going on especially about him, those must have been quite some throwing camps.
So, said Gordon Jones, “He’ll run you down, and he’s got some good technical skills.”
If many men walk around with athletic misgivings from their youths, Mr. Jones walks around with light ones, including a wish common among tennis players of that era when Americans tended to see the Australian Open as somewhere in the suburbs of Mars: I wish I’d tried qualifying at the Australian Open. He’s a man with stories. His friendship with an Iranian player during the hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981 lent him a different and invaluable light during that episode, and he still relishes the human bridge of sport. There’s that time he beat Yannick Noah in a qualifying match in Bogota, Colombia, and that time a Colombian man gave Jones a decent pile of American cash for his equipment in those Neanderthal equipment days, funding Jones’s whole rankings-chasing excursion through South America.
There’s that time he played the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft under the lights in Raleigh.
“What I remember about the match, he was a great athlete and had a very traditional [and left-handed] stroke,” Jones said. “For some reason I just started drop-shotting and lobbing him,” given Lucas’s “unfamiliarity with playing on clay.” Then: “I remember just doing that over and over again. It was very strange. … I kind of didn’t really know how to play him. I think I just did it and it worked a couple of times, and, ‘I’m just going to keep doing this until it stops working.’ ” Lucas, with what Jones described as a “super” hard-court game, joined the generations of Americans to struggle with proper footing on clay.
“It was awful for me,” Lucas said, “because I was an athlete playing tennis. I was not going to hit a lot of groundstrokes on that clay court. After the sixth or seventh point, I was lost, because these guys were able to work a point better than I was.”
The world does feature its males who will chafe and growl at getting lobbed and drop-shotted, but over there on the other side was not one of those.
“I remember him being a good-looking, physical player and incredibly calm and nice about losing that match,” Jones said. “It wasn’t like he was a poor sport, whining or anything.”
He would fall, 6-1, 6-1, and then, with things always rough out there, Jones would lose a gnarly, 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 match to Brazilian Roger Guedes, and then Lucas would reach the doubles semifinals. And then they would go on in life, one of them to a front-row seat for that ceaseless clamor about a football draft.
“Really?” Lucas said of that this week, soon adding, “Tell Gordon Jones I wish the very best for his son, and tell him to make us athletes’ dads proud.”
