And yet, Bomani Jones seems to be a perfect choice for this year’s Roger Brown Residency in Social Justice, Writing and Sports at UD.
He’ll take on the prestigious assignment beginning today and for the next three days he will speak to various classes on campus, as well as talk to student-athletes and faculty and then culminate his residency with an open-to-the-public and free talk on Wednesday from 5:30-6:30 p.m. in the concert hall at the Roger Glass Center for the Arts.
Jones is the popular sports journalist, writer and podcaster who has had shows on ESPN, HBO and Sirius Satellite Radio and currently hosts “The Right Time with Bomani Jones” podcast.
He’s written on myriad topics in sports, music, culture and politics for Vanity Fair and GQ and has weighed in on various social issues on CNN.
His various media pursuits have come with a solid foundation in academia, as well.
The son of two college professors, he has an undergrad degree in economics from Clark Atlanta University. He got a master’s degree in politics, economics and business at Claremont Graduate University and another master’s in economics from the University of North Carolina.
He served as an adjunct professor at Duke University and at Elon, has given talks at various colleges around the nation and has been a commencement speaker.
That he was chosen from a slate of high-profile candidates for the Residency by a panel of academic types and others from the university and the community struck a real chord with him.
“Honestly I was legitimately honored that they would think of me to do something like this,” he said Saturday from the French Quarter in New Orleans where he was attending a family wedding.
By Sunday evening he planned to be in Dayton, preparing for today’s full slate.
‘I loved being a Dayton Flyer’
The Residency focuses on many themes, especially those of race and social justice, and those issues were encapsulated in the saga of Roger Brown who arguably was the greatest player ever to wear a Flyers’ uniform and certainly the most unfairly targeted.
“Roger and Connie Hawkins were really looked upon as the two best high school players in the country coming out in 1960,” Ted Green, the producer of the documentary, “Undefeated” The Roger Brown Story," said in a special video he made for the UD Residency. “The sky was the limit for (Roger.)”
Back in the 1960-61 basketball season, Brown was the sensation of the Flyers’ freshman team.
Although first-year players weren’t allowed to play varsity then, he became the biggest hoops draw in town.
He starred on the court, was beloved by his teammates and attained hero status in the community, especially in West Dayton, which had seen very few black players previously wear a UD uniform.
But before his freshman year was over, Brown was unjustly pushed out of UD because his name was thinly linked to a gambling scandal that rocked the college game that year.
Before coming to Dayton – when he was teenager on a New York City playground – he had been befriended by a couple of hoops-junkie gamblers, Joe Hacken, and especially former NBA player Jack Molinas, once the pro roommate of UD’s Monk Meineke.
Brown’s only transgressions appear to be that, as a teen, he used Molinas’s car and accepted $200 to introduce Hacken to other playground ball players.
None of those he introduced — nor Brown himself — was ever found to have fixed games, bet on games, or done anything improper.
And Brown was not in contact with Hacken or Molinas once he got to UD.
When his name surfaced in traffic court because he once had been in an accident in Molinas’s car, the NCAA got interested.
Dayton had paid for Brown’s trips back to court – an NCAA infraction – and to quickly curry favor from the sanctioning body UD dropped him from the freshman team and dismissed him from school.
The NCAA and the NBA – which later paid millions for its actions – blackballed Brown and Hawkins for years.
The banishment by UD crushed Brown and rather than return home to Brooklyn he remained in Dayton – for six years – hoping for a reprieve.
“He was devastated,” said Bobby Cochran, who played industrial league ball with Brown here in Dayton afterward. “All he wanted to do was to come back to UD and play ball.”
Brown ended up working at Inland and played on various AAU and industrial league teams that called the Fairgrounds Coliseum home.
That’s where he was befriended by hoops buddies like Cochran, Ike Thornton, and Bing Davis, who’s now a nationally acclaimed artist and a local treasure.
A pair of West Dayton guardian angels, Azariah and Arlena Smith, took him under their wing — they had no children ― and gave him a bedroom in their Shoop Avenue home.
Arlena once told me how Roger, haunted by nightmares, would awaken at night crying: “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t!”
Years later, NBA great Oscar Robertson convinced the Indiana Pacers of the American Basketball Association (ABA) to draft Brown and he went on to become an All Star for them.
After his playing days, he became a respected civic leader in Indianapolis.
He died from liver cancer in 1997 and in 2016 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Just before he died, I interviewed Brown, who had trouble breathing and speaking that day.
I still remember the raspy, almost -embrace he gave the school that had wronged him:
“I loved being a Dayton Flyer...I loved UD…I still do.”
‘A real honor coming here’
That unwavering love – contrasted to the unloving treatment he got from UD in 1961 and the nearly half century of non-recognition he got from the school after that – struck a chord with Dr. Eric Spina when he took over as UD present and talked to people like Bing Davis.
“Picture Mr. Brown, far from home, a young man in a racially segregated town during a period fraught with racial tensions and great towered differentials,” Spina said in that aforementioned Residency video.
“It literally makes your heart ache to consider how alone he must have felt and indeed how alone he must have been. His dreams of a college degree and a pro career – both were dashed.”
With that as a focus, UD contemplated ways to rectify some of the past and finally came up with the perfect answer:
The Roger Brown Residency.
The first recipient was Wil Haygood, who was here in 2019.
His book, Tigerland, was the non-fiction runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize a year earlier and that, along with so much of his other work dealing with social justice issues, made him a perfect candidate to stimulate thought and conversation among students and community members
Although meant to be an annual affair, the residency was interrupted by the COVID pandemic and didn’t resume until last year when Jessica Luther, an author, podcaster and an investigative journalist who has focused on sports and gender violence came to campus.
When candidates were being considered this year Jones was one who especially stood out.
“He has contributed to the conversation about sports and social justice in a variety of outlets from print to broadcast and through his own endeavors as a podcaster, a documentary producer and someone called on by CNN and others to speak on various issues,” said Shannon Miller, Associate Director of News and Internal Communications at UD and one of the Residency panel members.
“He’s a well-rounded individual who provides a lot of thoughtful ideas about our current landscape when it comes to race relations and social justice.”
When he was at Duke, Jones was asked to design a course and came up with “The Black Athlete in America.”
“I looked at six different athletes and used their stories to discuss the role of a black athlete in American society,” he said.
The athletes he used were Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson.
Now comes Roger Brown and his story would fit in with those other six, especially this week, when the residency in his name engages students in many of the concepts he once was denied.
Jones said he’s begun to learn about Brown and the way the university is advancing his legacy.
“It’s very touching to be asked to do something in that vein. It’s just a real honor coming here.”
He’ll remember his second trip to Ohio.
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