From now until February 11, Red’s Army will be posting stories about the players behind the Celtics’ 22 retired numbers and that one retired nickname. Stories will be posted in the order that the numbers were retired.
Red Auerbach never saw Sam Jones play in college.
Not very many people did.
Sam Jones went to North Carolina Central College at Durham.
He was an outstanding basketball player at a university three miles from Duke, on North Carolina’s Tobacco Road. He was also black. And that meant he attended an all-black university required by law to compete only against other all-black universities in the still strictly segregated south.