Jackson's journey of triumph, tragedy

BY MIKE POTTER, The Herald-Sun
March 17, 2005 12:45 am
<http://www.herald-sun.com/sports/nccentral>

Greg Jackson already had plenty of successes on his basketball résumé.

The Augusta, Ga., native was the leading scorer in the history of St. Paul's College and has the only retired number hanging in the school's Taylor-Whitehead Gym.

He was an assistant coach under Michael Bernard when N.C. Central won the NCAA Division II championship in 1989.

He was head coach of the Eagles when they made a return trip to the Elite Eight in 1993.

But until Delaware State beat Hampton 55-53 in the championship game of the MEAC Tournament on Saturday in Richmond, Va., the Hornets' 46-year-old coach never had been able to cut down the nets after winning a conference championship -- not even in high school.

His Hornets (19-13) got a mixed blessing out of the championship, as they'll take a No. 16 seed into the first round of the NCAA Tournament, facing ACC champion Duke (25-5), the Austin Regional's top seed, Friday at 7:25 p.m. at the Charlotte Coliseum. It is the Hornets' first trip to the big dance, and no No. 16 seed has ever beaten a No. 1 seed.

"It's been a long time coming, but I finally got there," Jackson said of his first conference tournament title.

He had joked after winning the MEAC that he'd like to play anybody but Duke, yet now he's looking at it much more as an opportunity than a punishment.

"I don't think anybody would like to play Duke," Jackson said. "But if you're going to the dance, you might as well dance with the best person there."

Getting to that dance has been a long journey for Jackson, who turned down at least one offer to play in the ACC to attend a tiny, historically black college.

St. Paul's is the smallest member of the Division II CIAA, with fewer than 700 students, and Lawrenceville, Va., has about 2,000 residents and one stoplight.

"I had a chance to go to Maryland, but I walked into a classroom and saw 300 people in it," the 6-1 Jackson said. "I decided I wanted to go somewhere where I could be a big fish in a small pond."

As a junior for Moses Golatt's Tigers in 1980, Jackson led all NCAA divisions in scoring at 30.5 points per game. He finished his career with 2,249 points, 13th in CIAA history, and was the conference's player of the year as a senior.

"The first thing he wanted to know when he got to Lawrenceville was where the McDonald's was, and we didn't have one," Golatt, now the women's coach at Virginia Union, said of a situation that has since changed. "He didn't even come on an athletic scholarship. The school had institutional aid.

"He was a post player in high school and we didn't need any that size, but I took him anyway and then found out what he could do. He scored a lot of points inside. Then, after he developed an outside shot, he was very hard to stop."

Despite his individual success, Jackson never got to play in a CIAA Tournament. Back in those days, only the top eight teams qualified, and Jackson was a star on teams that couldn't compete with the CIAA powerhouses on a regular basis.

He went to a tryout camp with the New York Knicks, but when the cut came, he went back to St. Paul's as an assistant to try to start a coaching career.

That turned out to be a good decision.

The ties that bind
Late in the 1984-85 season, Jackson and Bernard, an assistant coach at Norfolk State, were scouting a game at the same time and struck up a conversation.

It turned out that Jackson and Bernard, who had played on the 1970 NCAA Division II champions at Kentucky State, both were members of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. That conversation began a friendship, and the two made a pact that whoever got a head coaching job first would hire the other as his top assistant.

That spring, Bernard was hired to take over NCCU, where the only winning season in the previous 17 years had been a 15-14 showing in 1980-81.

As promised, Bernard hired Jackson, and the pair quickly turned things around.

"I knew him from when he had played at St. Paul's," Bernard said. "He was a great player who did most of his scoring inside. He was very clever and creative, and he played with such intelligence that I knew if he could coach the way he played, he was going to be a great coach."

With the head coach as the disciplinarian and defensive guru and Jackson as the offensive wizard, the Eagles went 14-12 in their first season and came within a game of winning the CIAA's Southern Division and an automatic NCAA Tournament berth.

Two seasons later, NCCU got off to a 16-0 start and was ranked No. 1 in NCAA Division II at mid-season. That team went on to finish 26-3, earning an at-large berth in the tournament for just the second time in school history.

The next season, the Eagles went 28-4 and won the NCAA title, then made the tournament field again the following season.

NCCU went 9-19 in 1990-91, and Bernard left to take over a Norfolk State program with Division I aspirations. There wasn't much doubt that Jackson would be the Eagles' next head coach.

"The reasons why I've been able to have the successes I've had have not only been by the grace of God, but because of Mike Bernard," Jackson said. "He taught me how to teach concepts and systems."

In the shadow of (Division I) greatness
Jackson knew he already had a solid background, but coaching just five miles away from a Duke program that had been a fixture in the Final Four and had just won its first NCAA title presented an obvious opportunity.

So he gave Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski a call to ask for some initial advice.

"He's the best basketball coach in the country," Jackson said. "One of the things he told me was, 'Don't ever sacrifice your morals and values to win.' He said to always have dignity in what you do. I've talked to him on numerous occasions, and he's a better person than he is a basketball coach."

From Krzyzewski's standpoint, the admiration is mutual.

"He really is an outstanding coach and a good guy," Krzyzewski said of Jackson. "He's really a student of the game. We had a really nice relationship when he was at Central.

"He's done a fabulous job at Delaware State. Their program, I think they had like five coaches in five years, and then he took over, and I think they had won six games the year before. He's turned it into a winning program, a classy program. His team is very well-prepared. They play good 'D,' take good shots and the kids play hard.

"He has a real good demeanor. I like him a lot. I think he's really a solid guy, and the last few years he's had some amazing personal tragedy in his life that he's had to overcome."

Strength from within
Those tragedies began soon after Jackson took over the NCCU program.

His son, Greg Jr., was just a toddler at the time and was at the start of a long battle with sickle-cell anemia.

Jackson went back to Lawrenceville to sign his first recruit as head coach, a solid physical specimen of a forward named Steve Birchette. The Eagles went 13-13 in Jackson's first season, earning him CIAA coach of the year honors.

However, just days before practice opened the next season, Birchette -- who had long suffered with severe asthma -- was returning to his dorm room after a pickup game when he collapsed and died.

The Eagles dedicated that season to their fallen teammate, went 26-4 and made the NCAA's Elite Eight.

"Steve's death was hard on everybody," said Ron Woodard, Jackson's former top assistant at NCCU who was the Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference coach of the year this season at Claflin University.

"Greg always talked about how many times in life you have to battle adversity and how people are all accountable for their own actions.

"He always taught the kids that you have a personal family and also a basketball family. Greg was great in the community and liked to deal with people, and I think that's been a big part of his success."

Moving up, moving on
Jackson had four 20-win seasons and three NCAA Division II Tournament berths at NCCU. When he left for Delaware State in 2000, he was the first coach since Hall of Famer John McLendon to leave the school without suffering a single losing season.

"I think he understood the players' psyche because he had not only played, but he was a great player," said LeVelle Moton, the best NCCU player of the Jackson era and now head coach at Raleigh's Sanderson High. "He knew when I was in a slump and understood what I was going through.

"One great thing he did for me was when I was inducted into the NCCU Hall of Fame last October, he drove all the way down from Delaware to present me and missed their 'Midnight Madness' opening practice to do it. That meant a lot to me.' "

Jackson said the decision to leave NCCU wasn't easy, but he just couldn't pass up a chance to coach at the Division I level.

"The people at Central have always been great to me," Jackson said. "I love Durham, and I feel like I'll always be an Eagle."

He took a 164-78 record to Delaware State, which had had 14 straight losing seasons when he took the reins.

Although he was turning the Hornets' basketball program in the right direction, he had to deal with another devastating personal tragedy in April of 2001 when his wife, Janice, suddenly collapsed and died of a brain aneurysm.

"The last thing she said to me was, 'If anything happens to my boys, you make sure you take care of them,' " Coach Jackson said. "Then she went out to rake the yard, and she fell. The next thing I knew, there were a doctor and two nurses coming to us -- I think God sent them -- but there was nothing they could do.

"In spite of all I've been through, God has been good to me. But since she died, my whole life has changed. I'd always gone to church, but now I see things differently. We're not just supposed to glorify ourselves on this earth, but we're supposed to help other people along. [Delaware State basketball] was an organization that had been down for many years, but I think it was God's will we were able to win this championship."

Jackson is 76-68 at DSU. The Hornets have posted winning records in three of the past four seasons, and in his five seasons at the helm, Jackson never has had a losing conference mark in the MEAC.

There have been some positive news off the court for Jackson, as well. When his younger son, Justin, was born, the family had his umbilical-cord blood preserved, and it turned out to be a perfect match for his brother.

After the season is over, Greg Jr. will undergo an operation at Duke to treat his sickle-cell anemia using his little brother's blood. It's a high-risk procedure, but if the operation is successful, Jackson said, Greg Jr. will be cured.

For now, though, Jackson's attention is on Duke's basketball team.

"Now he's in the big dance, and what a great platform," Bernard said of Jackson. "Win or lose, he's got a chance to show his skills. The country will get a chance to see what kind of discipline his team has. I hope they play extremely well."