Caldwell Jones obit

Caldwell Jones, Shot-Blocking Basketball Star, Dies at 64

He was not on the list.


Caldwell Jones, a beanpole of a center and power forward who blocked more than 2,200 shots in his 17-year pro career and played in three National Basketball Association finals with the Philadelphia 76ers, died on Sunday in Stockbridge, Ga. He was 64.

His wife, Vanessa, confirmed the death. She said he was at a driving range near their home when he had a heart attack.

Lithe and quick at 6 feet 11 and 217 pounds, Jones was best known as a rebounder and a shot blocker, but he had ball skills as well. With a smooth, slithery move to the basket, a fluid hook shot and a reliable short-range jumper, he shot better than 47 percent for his career, and he was even asked on occasion to bring the ball upcourt.

Early in his career, he played three seasons for four teams in the old American Basketball Association and averaged almost 16 points per game, but when he joined the 76ers of the N.B.A. in 1976, he was no longer depended on to score. Over the next six seasons, he was a frontcourt defensive specialist playing alongside powerhouse offensive stars like Julius Erving, George McGinnis and Darryl Dawkins.

His size and speed gave him rare versatility on defense: Sometimes his duty was to guard a big man in the middle like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and sometimes it was to shadow a scorer in perpetual motion like Larry Bird.

As a Sixer, Jones was twice named to the all-N.B.A. defensive team. He was a crucial cog on a squad that reached the championship finals in 1977 — they lost in six games to a Portland Trail Blazers team led by Bill Walton — and in 1980 and 1982, losing six-game series both times to Abdul-Jabbar’s Los Angeles Lakers.

Caldwell Jones Jr. was born on Aug. 4, 1950, in McGehee, Ark., where his parents, Caldwell Sr. and Cecelia Jones, were cotton farmers. They had a girl and seven boys, four of whom — Charles, Wilbert and Major, in addition to Caldwell — played in the N.B.A.

From 1969 to 1973, Jones attended Albany State College (now Albany State University) in Georgia, where he and his brothers commandeered a whole chapter of school basketball history. Six of the Jones brothers played center for Albany State — from 1961 to 1979 one Jones or another was the big man in the middle — and Oliver Jones went on to become the head coach of the team for 28 years, retiring in 2000.

In his rookie year in the A.B.A., playing for the San Diego Conquistadors (where his coach was Wilt Chamberlain), Caldwell Jones led the league in blocked shots. The franchise subsequently went out of business, but before the two leagues merged in 1976, Jones also played for the San Diego Sails, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis.

In the N.B.A., after six years with the 76ers, he was sent to the Houston Rockets, where his brother Major was a teammate. He later played for the Chicago Bulls during Michael Jordan’s rookie year, spent four seasons with the Trail Blazers and retired in 1990 after a year with the San Antonio Spurs, helping to school their young center David Robinson in the ways of pro ball.

For his career, Jones scored more than 10,000 points, grabbed more than 10,000 rebounds and averaged 1.8 blocks per game over nearly 1,300 games.

In 1992, Jones married Vanessa Dorton, a school administrator whom he had met in Portland. In addition to her, he is survived by five brothers, Clint, Oliver, Charles, Wilbert and Major; and five daughters, Tanasha Polk and Jasmine, Zori, Maya and Leah Jones.

Jones was widely respected among players and sportswriters as a genial, thoughtful and witty presence off the court and a self-sacrificing one on it. After the Sixers had lost for a second time in the championship finals to the Lakers, the team sent Jones and a first-round draft pick to Houston as compensation for their signing of the free-agent center Moses Malone. It was bad luck for Jones: Malone led the team to a championship in 1983, sweeping the Lakers in the finals.

Months later, however, in recognition of Jones’s contribution to the team, the 76ers coach, Billy Cunningham, offered Jones his own championship ring. Jones turned him down.

“He epitomized a team player,” Cunningham said, after Jones’s death, to the Philadelphia sportswriter Gordie Jones (no relation) on the website CSNPhilly.com. “If we won, he would have been the happiest guy in the locker room. And that’s not just a statement, like you hear things, nice things, being said about somebody who is deceased. That’s fact.”